Boy Mom Blues (and Hopes and Screams and Love)
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I didn’t know that loving someone this much could feel like running a marathon with no shoes, holding a live grenade, while also trying to make dinosaur noises on command. Welcome to boy mom life in 2025.
It’s loud. It’s wild. It’s so sticky.
It’s beautiful. It’s exhausting.
And some days I’m just hoping I’m doing enough.
The Myth of the “Easy Boy”
You know that old trope? “Boys are easier.”
I’d like to respectfully disagree—with a 47-minute voice memo of my son arguing with himself about which superhero has better abs, followed by a high-speed chase through my living room with a spaghetti-covered tricycle and a Nerf gun.
I’m raising a boy in a world where masculinity is still so loaded, so messy, so often confused with silence or stoicism or anger. And I don’t want that for him. I want him soft and strong. Wild and kind. Curious and grounded. But it’s not easy to carve out space for that in this world—or in a preschool classroom, or at the park, or even in my own tired brain.
Tiny Tornado, Big Feelings
Raising a boy right now means staying present while he learns to navigate big emotions in a society that tells him not to have any. It means explaining why it’s okay to cry but not okay to hit. Why his voice matters but yelling doesn’t. It means I have to regulate myself even when I’m on two hours of sleep and he just wiped peanut butter on the dog again.
It means I’m teaching consent and compassion and vulnerability before kindergarten. Because no one else might.
And it’s hard. God, it’s hard.
The Exhaustion Is Physical and Existential
There are the sleepless nights, yes. The messes. The tantrums. The battles over pants. But the real tiredness is emotional. It's the weight of knowing that the way I show up for him—today, and tomorrow, and the day after—might be shaping the man he’ll become.
There’s pressure in that. There’s fear. But also hope.
Because I’m doing my best. Even if it doesn’t always look like enough.
What I Hope He Knows
I hope he knows that his loudness is a gift.
That softness is not weakness.
That his body is his. That no means no.
That I see him—not just the chaos, not just the noise—but him.
I hope he remembers the stories I made up at bedtime, even when I was too tired to finish my sentence. I hope he remembers the dance parties in the kitchen. The deep breaths. The apologies. The “I’m trying.”
Because I am. I’m trying so hard.
And I think—I hope—it’s enough.
To every other boy mom out there who’s covered in bruises and stickers and probably some kind of yogurt: I see you. We’re not perfect. But we’re raising boys who just might grow into good, kind, whole humans. And that’s something.
So here’s to the chaos. The joy. The impossible balance.
And to all of us, just doing our best.
💙