'The reasons for regretting motherhood vary as much as the women themselves.'
Regretting motherhood is a dark secret many women hide. But pretending it doesn’t happen, or passing judgment when it does, are insidious ways of diminishing the truth about women’s lives. So many of us already know that being a mother might not be easy. But it’s also generally accepted that parenthood is worth it. Women who don’t want to be mothers are often pelted with opinions about how much they will regret missing out.
Women are often reluctant to reveal such thoughts, but even when they do, we rarely take them at their word. It’s as if we simply cannot fathom that these sentiments could be true. Instead, we hear their regret and replace it with ambivalence, with the idea that the temporary difficulties of motherhood may feel like a hardship, but that still, nothing compares to it. So many times, I have witnessed how this interpretation erases the fact that these mothers are saying something else.
Some women come to terms with their regret many years later. “If I look back today, I let life lead me along and did not set the rules and the path,” says Nina, a mother of two children in their 40s. “[A life without children looks like] a fantasy of freedom, of being responsible only for myself.” For some, like Erika, the mother of four grown children, an absentee partner exacerbated an already difficult situation. “I never had one easy day raising these children—I got lost in other people’s needs. My husband didn’t contribute anything to the family, aside from his paycheck. He was like air,” she says. “I wish it had been different. And then maybe you and I would not be talking [about regretting motherhood] today.
What a devastating thing for a child to hear, that her mother regrets having her, people say when they learn about these interviews. Indeed, many of the mothers who participated in my study said that there is a reasonable chance that their daughters and sons know and feel that they live in a home where motherhood is not fully embraced by the ones who brought them into this world, even if their needs—shelter, nutrition, clothing, care, and attentiveness to their well-being—are satisfied.
Publicly talking about regretting motherhood might create more of these brave connections. It might allow women to be seen fully, as they are, without abolishing who they were, what they wish to be, and what they insist on remembering. “In principle, I always think and tell myself that when my daughter is old enough, I’ll talk about it with her,” Maya says. “She might have children and everything could be fine. But I know that my greatest failure would be if she had children and felt like me.
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