What words do you think of when you describe ‘motherhood’?

Exhilarating and enchanting? Endless and exhausting? Do you tell your child-free friends it is rewarding or tell them it’s mind-numbing?

But nearly all of us say it is hard. It’s a well-worn cliché isn’t it?

Motherhood the hardest job in the world.

We’ve heard it from the mouths of world leaders, read it in advertising slogans, we say it ourselves on a near daily basis.

Even Victoria Beckham weighed in earlier this year saying, “I’m not going to lie about it, I’m tired… I’m basically just like any woman who’s working and has lots of children – it’s tough.”

In fact if you type in “being a mother is …. ” to Google the first offering it gives you is “hard.”

It is a statement ingrained in what we expect from becoming a mum- its going to be hard.

But is it? Really?

I think Google is deceiving us. Or, perhaps we are deliberately deceiving ourselves, buying into a myth to make things a little bit easier.

We wear it like talisman. This burden of motherhood. This badge of honour.

We spend hours complaining about it on Facebook. We regale our fellow comrades in the trenches with tales of how ‘hard’ our week has been. A game of baby-vomit-and-sleepless-nights one-upmanship.

You think your night was bad well I can trump it with a nappy explosion AND a toddler with croup.

Oh really? How about twins with gastro, a husband away and a deadline at work that can’t be missed?

Take that.

Our Facebook feeds are filled with motherhood tinged in grey. A woe-to-me-nothing-is-tougher-than-this attitude.

But why?

Is it that we are afraid that we can’t live up to the expectations that parenting experts, social media and the concept of the perfect mum has painted for us. Do we undermine and over-exaggerate what it’s like in the fear that our reality will be exposed? The fear that we might be found out it actually isn’t that bad.

Are we worried we will be perceived as slacking off?

Comedian Bill Burr’s take on motherhood isn’t hard was deemed offensive by some and funny by many. What’s your take on it? (Post continues after video.)