‘Honest Mom’ Libby Ward is far from perfect. Her million-plus followers are okay with that | Canada Voices

Each month, generations reporter Ann Hui takes readers along to hang out with fascinating Canadians – regular people and celebrities, teens to seniors – joining them in their favourite pastime for up-close and candid conversations.

Libby Ward wants to get one thing clear: She’s not trying to be perfect. She’s not even trying to be particularly good.

We’re seated at a pottery studio in Hamilton, Ont. We’re supposed to be making coffee mugs, but the clay Ms. Ward has been working on for the past half-hour has expanded to the width of a dessert plate.

She takes a break to assess her work, taking in the vessel – more mat than mug – before her.

“I’m just enjoying the process of doing,” she says finally. “I kind of like that I suck at it.”

It’s all very on-brand for the 37-year-old Ms. Ward. Online, the mother of two is known as the “honest mom,” where she’s amassed some million-plus followers on social media for sharing openly about the challenges of parenting, and the impact that motherhood has had on her mental health.

On TikTok and Instagram, she’s known for sharing, bare-faced and with her hair pulled up in a signature messy bun, her full range of experience as a mother – yes, the feelings of joy and delight, but also the constant sense of overwhelm and exhaustion, and the instances where those feelings spill over into anger or resentment. Her book, Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself, is set to be released by Crown Publishing next month.

“There’s this unspoken belief out there that if you admit that something is hard, it must mean that you don’t love it – that if you don’t love the act of caregiving all the time, you don’t love your children,” she said. “I want moms to know that it feels hard because it is hard, not because there’s something wrong with them.”

The career Ms. Ward has built would have seemed unfathomable to her as a young child. Her childhood in Hamilton was a tumultuous one. Her own mother struggled, as a single mom, to parent two kids, hold down a job and put food on the table. Ms. Ward writes in her book about the frequent moves and unpaid bills – about her mother’s abusive boyfriends, and about struggling with a constant sense of insecurity.

Fast-forward to decades later, and Ms. Ward was set to become a mother herself. She was pregnant, living with her husband in a small town in Haldimand County, and working as an educational assistant. She had also become deeply involved with her local church, finding in that community the sense of safety and belonging that she didn’t have as a child.

But once her daughter was born, that same community seemed to present to her impossible expectations.

“I was surrounded by mothers who loved motherhood,” she said. “By women who only spoke of the positives of motherhood. Women who had lots of children, who stayed home with their children, and loved staying home with their children.”

She, on the other hand, was struggling. “I had this sense of, Why is nobody being honest? Why is no one in my real life saying ‘I’m struggling’?”

She started her TikTok account in 2020, around the outset of the pandemic. At first, hers were cheeky videos, poking fun at the messiness of her living room, and the large amounts of Kraft Dinner she was feeding her family. But soon, she found herself sharing about her deeper struggles – about the mental burden of anticipating the needs of everyone in her family. About her feeling of burnout. About her struggles with postpartum depression and ADHD.

Her posts quickly went viral. Today, she has over 1.1 million followers on TikTok, and another 700,000 on Instagram.

In her book, she also describes at length how becoming a mom further tested her relationship with her own mother. Their relationship, she said, was – still is – complicated.

Becoming a parent forced her to revisit her own childhood, she said. It forced her to investigate the many ways her own childhood needs went unmet, and the ways in which she felt she wasn’t protected as a child.

“I didn’t know,” she said, “that I would grieve the childhood I didn’t have over and over and over again.”

She’s still trying to understand how her childhood traumas are now bubbling up in her own parenting. She described an early moment with her then-newborn daughter. “I was thinking about how much I loved her, and wanted to protect her,” she said. “In that exact moment – as I was giving my child what she needed – I also had this other part of my brain going, ‘Wait, no one ever did that for me.’”

As she sat in the pottery studio, the book was still a few weeks from release, and the nerves were setting in. The experiences Ms. Ward shares, particularly around her relationship with her mom, are deeply personal. It feels scary and vulnerable, she said, to share with the world.

This studio, she said, is where she goes when she wants to turn her mind off, to stop worrying about being “perfect.” She’s here about once a month, sometimes by herself, other times with her now 11-year-old daughter.

She looked at her mug again, and declared that it was no longer a mug. The idea of making a handle for it, she said, seemed overwhelming. Instead, it was a pot. She’d put berries in it, or candies for the kids.

Has she ever made anything here at the pottery studio that she’s particularly proud of? She shrugged, and shook her head no. But again, that’s the whole point.

Ultimately, she said, sharing her stories is all about showing that parents – and especially moms – are real, imperfect people, with real needs.

“I want moms to know that they’re not alone and that they have the ability to change their experience with motherhood,” she said.

“I want moms to know that they have the ability to be a whole person.”