One month after welcoming her third child, Monica Murphy, a content creator in Vancouver, Canada, started to feel like she should be doing more. Never mind that Murphy was still recovering from a C-section, or that she has three kids under the age of 4 — and two of them are nursing.
"My mom came by to help out this morning and she could tell I was stressed… I’ve been feeling the pressure to get back to doing all the things now that I’m 4 weeks postpartum,” Murphy, 31, captioned a now-viral Instagram post.
She then shared her to-do list, which included, “maintaining a clean home,” “eating a nutritious diet,” “making time for my husband” and “tandem breastfeeding.” Oh, and don’t forget Christmas is around the corner!
“How on earth can one person do it all?” Murphy asked.
Answer: They can’t.
“Of course, I know that, I just needed my mom to remind me,” Murphy tells TODAY.com.
In her post, Murphy shared parting words of wisdom from her mother, Nancy Mccurrach, that were captured on the family's doorbell camera.
“They’re never gonna remember if they had a clean house,” Mccurrach says to Murphy as she's leaving. “They’re gonna remember how much you love them and hang out with them, ok?”
Murphy tells TODAY.com that she “broke down” crying after Mccurrach pulled out of the driveway.
“I really needed to hear that,” she says. “And I decided to share it because I knew other moms need to hear it, too.”
Murphy was right.
“My mom would just nag I’m lazy and how am I supposed to leave my house a mess. So I’m just easing my anxiety with gentle words from other people’s mothers. As I’ve been doing my whole life. Clean house was above happy children,” one person commented.
Added another, “The way I would’ve just bawled if she said that to me.
Mccurrach, who raised four kids, knows what she's talking about. Murphy can't recall if the countertops in her childhood home were cluttered or if there were piles of laundry on the floor.
"All I remember is all the fun activities we did, and how loved I felt," she says.