Stylelikeu is a mother-daughter duo that has quietly been making a series of docu-style video portraits called “What’s Underneath” to cultivate self-acceptance for several years now. The video series depicts participants answering intimate questions on camera while slowly removing layers of their clothes to illustrate that true style is not about what a person wears, but about how comfortable they feel in their own skin. And their latest video — featuring Girls actress Jemima Kirke — is hitting home with young moms everywhere.
In it, Kirke opens up about deep-rooted insecurities and fears she’s harbored for years, but the most poignant two minutes come when she discusses the hardships of becoming a mother. Around the 5:30 mark in the video, Kirke is asked about an insecurities she’s overcome — or is still trying to overcome — and her answer is authentically vulnerable.
“I’m very insecure about my capabilities in a lot of areas ― one of them being parenting,” says Kirke. “I think everyone says no one’s ready to have a baby. I was not ready to have a baby, and I really was not thinking about what I was doing. And I was doing it almost in the same way as getting a haircut or getting a tattoo.”
Kirke and her husband Michael Mosberg were married in 2009 after meeting while she was in rehab. Soon after, they began their family. But that’s when a lot of new insecurities started taking shape for the young actress.
Kirke continues:
“To a lot of people, it looked like I was getting my life together. The guilt hit me the second she came out of me … that I was her mother. I realized, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I just do? I just released a suffering person, you know? And they’re just gonna give me a baby.'”
It’s at this point that Kirke gets visibly teary-eyed, and her voice cracks as she then says something that no doubt every new mom ever has thought: “They should really like, have more of a screening for people at the hospital before they give the baby to you.”
Kirke also talks about how hard it was to have a baby at the age of 24 when she had no idea what she was getting into, and opens up about raising a child as a young mom:
“I was still going through my 20s with her as a toddler. And there was something that felt unfair about that to her ’cause I wasn’t ready to stay home every night. And I didn’t have the patience because I still had a lot of self-centeredness. When you have a baby, you’re limited to what you’re able to do with your life. I trapped myself in a way that made me comfortable.”
Kirke expresses the bewildering difficulties of becoming a new mom with honesty and doesn’t sugarcoat her own experiences; which is beyond refreshing. Too often, new moms give in to social pressures and gush about the magical joys of having a child while not placing enough weight on the irrevocable loss of self that happens. And by openly discussing the insecurities she has as a parent, Kirke amplifies one of the most common threads that weave us moms together universally: the fear and guilt of not being good enough for our own children.
When in truth, the very act of striving to do right by our kids every single day is what makes us, by definition, good enough.