Mum says she wishes she never had children as 'life was better without them'

[toothfairy73]

I have just seen this headline in a Newspaper. A anonymous mum has written this letter stating the above.

apple.news/A7zR8oawtR6OFxqP2tijb6g

What are your thoughts? I'm sure we have all had moments where we miss our old lives. It sounds like it is written by someone deeply unhappy and in need of some support. AIBU to think this is someone who is desperate for a bit of time alone and some support?What do you think?

I have 3 (17, 14, 9) and my husband has 3 (14, 11, 8) we have none together. My youngest has NON verbal asd. My oldest has Asperger. It was a lot more difficult and sad when I lived with my abusive ex. My husband thinks the same of his own situation. Having the 6 children has some challenges, granted, but it is a breeze compared to having 2 or 3 with an abusive alcoholic arsehole (my ex). The mother of my step children is also abusive, and has sadly decided to live with an abusive man (not yet physically abusive, but by the sounds of it ramping up to be).
Where we live 50/50 is the default, but two of mine live with us full time, and the two oldest stepchildren also live here rather a lot more.
I do not regret having children as such, but I do regret not choosing a better man to have them with. I also wish my financial situation had been better before having kids, and this bit I do tell them!
Luckily we now live back in Scandinavia where the support for single parents to re-educate + the support for SN children is fantastic.
I now also have my parents close by and they are amazing.
Had I still lived in the UK (where I lived until my youngest was 2) my life would have been a ridiculous struggle.

People just don't think before doing things. They just do them because that's what everyone does. Nobody should have kids unless they feel they would die without them.
I didn't enjoy motherhood one little bit. I live my now adult son but given my time again I'd not have had any.
I'm convinced most men don't want kids and they are the reason for most divorces. The sheer work and boredom of bringing them up.

I love my kid and don’t regret her but definitely morn the feeling of sitting on an airplane with no responsibilities. I just used to be free. However I now try and think that I can take her on holidays etc. Your life doesn’t end.

Nobody should have kids unless they feel they would die without them.

I really, really don't think this is a healthy attitude. People who feel that way, that their lives are worthless without children, lay an enormous burden on their children to make it all worthwhile. That should not be the duty of any child. A child deserves a parent who is strong and resilient and committed enough not to make them feel a burden. But they also deserve to know that they don't owe any parenting back, that their parent is a whole and competent adult and that they, the children, are free to fly because their parent also has their own life. They deserve to know that they can be a bit shitty or days can go wrong without it causing the parent the horrendous disappointment of "but this was the thing supposed to give meaning to my life". Giving meaning to somebody else's life is a horrendous responsibility and nobody should be saddled with that.

People just don't think before doing things. They just do them because that's what everyone does. Nobody should have kids unless they feel they would die without them.

You do realise that the reason men have such strong sex drives and we get strong urges to have children is the reason the species carries on right? Hardly anyone is making a 100% factual and objective decision to have children.

I'm convinced most men don't want kids and they are the reason for most divorces. The sheer work and boredom of bringing them up.

I think this might in part depend on the culture. I come from a country with very good support for parents, where fathers are expected to take a very active part in parenting from day one (and this is not a totally recent thing either), and where they would expect to take an active part even after a divorce. The culture is also more geared towards children, it's easier to take children places, total strangers tend to be more tolerant and positive towards them, much of ordinary social interaction between adults is family friendly.

All the men I know there who have children have actively wanted them. The ones who have split up with their partners have still remained active parents. A man who just walked away from his child and didn't remain hands-on would be socially ostracised.

@BubblyBarbara You do realise that the reason men have such strong sex drives and we get strong urges to have children is the reason the species carries on right? Hardly anyone is making a 100% factual and objective decision to have children

Yet people who remain childfree manage to make a 100% factual, objective decision not to have children, despite strong urges at times. My husband and I both have high sex drives but have managed never to have a single pregnancy scare in 15 years.

People need to get a grip and start making better decisions and not mindlessly reproducing and blaming it on their “urges”!

Which culture is that @corythatwas ?

People just don't think before doing things. They just do them because that's what everyone does.

When I had dc1, I had no idea what entail a being a mother. I had no family members with young children. My friends didn’t have kids themselves. All I had to go by was Society was telling me.
And it was telling me that I could have it all. That you could sleep train your baby (that was the height of Gina Ford in the UK). That we had equality between men and women and fathers nowdays were involved (hollow laugh).
It didn’t talk about the risk of death or injury during labour, except in passing as something exceptional. It vaguely talked about PND (ante natal classes) but I only learnt about it when I was feeling crap after dc1 was born.
It didn’t talk about being made redundant when I was pregnant etc...

It’s easy to say you need to think about it. I actually don’t think anyone realise how hard it can be until you have a child yourself.
The intensity of the feelings and the overprotectiveness. The risk of disappearing as a person and how hard it can be find who you are again behind being mum. It’s not just issues with the lack of help or hard it is when you know something is wrong and doctors etc... tell you there is nothing wrong with your dc (and they were wrong so you have to fight to be heard).
And then yes you have the feeling of joy and happiness, feeling complete etc... that have all been mentioned on this thread too.

But knowing which way you will swing? How the heck do you know that?!?

Arethereanyleftatall, I suspect she is also in Scandinavia. Deadbeat dads are frowned upon. Immigrants and refugees have to have parenting courses here: how to parent the Nordic way. The dads especially. Most of them love it

You do realise that the reason men have such strong sex drives and we get strong urges to have children is the reason the species carries on right? Hardly anyone is making a 100% factual and objective decision to have children.

I do think that some people, in the absence of a definite feeling either way, do make an intellectual decision to have children because they feel they’d be missing out if they didn’t.

Other animals don’t experience a conscious desire to have offspring in the way humans do. They are simply programmed to behave in a way that ensures it happens. The conscious desire is largely a result of cultural conditioning.

When I was ttc in the 90s I had a very rose tinted view of motherhood and family life. I believed motherhood would make me uniquely happy and fulfilled in a way nothing else could. I never read or heard anything to counteract this view. I never did have children, but at least I now know that motherhood isn’t necessarily what I believed it would be.

@BewilderedDoughnut, I’m not sure why childless people are more likely to have taken a factual decision.
Apart from the fact that they know what they are getting into (the same as before) whereas Someone becoming a parent has much less of an idea.

After all you can’t have a trial at becoming a parent. You are or you arent.

It is indeed Scandinavia, arethereanyleftatall. Family still remembers how shocked my grandfather was when he visited is émigré brother in the UK in 1939 and found he went to the pub after work instead of rushing home to be with his children. The whole "but you don't want to have children at weddings because it would cramp the style of the adults" just isn't a thing there- the assumption is that children go where adults go (and eventually fall asleep under the table) and that adults like having them around.

What’s the Scandinavian attitude to childfree by choice people?

Being childfree is also a fairly culturally accepted choice in Scandinavia, from what I gather from my friends without children. The pm in one country lamented the fall in reproduction last New Years speech, and people were pissed off at her meddling with what is a personal choice.
Mind you, we have the whole set of village characters here too, so some disagreement is happening of course.
My DB never wanted kids, and many of his friends do not have children (around 40). Of people I know it seems to be 50/50 choice vs circumstance if they do not have kids.

When I was growing up and in my 20s I just assumed that I’d settle down with someone and have kids. It was what happens to you, right? But as time went on and I didn’t meet The One, I hit a point in my early 30s where my career suddenly took off. I put a couple of years of hard work into that and then went through phases: work plateau -> dating; job promotion -> stop dating. Reached a point where it’s probably too late now biologically (by the natural odds anyway) and tbh it became clear to me several years ago that I actively didn’t want children anyway. So finding Mr Right has become a far less pressing ambition (and my career is still the main focus of my efforts anyway tbh).

It’s probably no coincidence that my change in attitude has come at the same time as my sister has been grappling with parenthood. She doesn’t regret it at all, as far as I know, but my word, it’s hard. Her husband veers into cocklodger territory so she’s bringing in the household money too. My other sibling wanted a child and struggled with fertility issues but has also said in the last few years that they are now actually glad they didn’t have children because they see the reality. They could adopt but have chosen not to go down that path because they’ve realised that kids are not for them. I’m glad for my parents that they have become grandparents because it brings so much to their lives but I’m bloody glad it wasn’t me who had to ‘provide’ the grandkids for them!

It makes me laugh when people talk about what they imagine the lives of child free people to be; makes it sound like an 80s pop video, all that jetsetting off to tropical islands and drinking margaritas on the sand with our Huge Disposable Income etc etc. And the subtext (sometimes overtly stated!) that we’re fundamentally deeply selfish people - as though having a maternal instinct is essentially selfless martyrdom, when in fact the desire to have a child is also fundamentally a selfish desire. As though that’s a bad thing, pursuing your own selfish desires. Women have had so little chance to be deeply selfish in their lives, until the last three or four generations; and even when we now do, we get constantly lectured and judged by society (men/patriarchy) about what we ‘should’ be doing with our lives. Fuck that. Hell yes I am going to be a Very Selfish Woman and just do what I want with my life.

I think society puts a lot of pressure on to women to have dc. It can be a hard current to swim against.

Not that all personally responsibility is removed, and if regret is felt then unfortunately it’s tough shit, you still have to do your best. My DN seemingly wanted hers as a fashion Instagram accessory and is massively struggling to understand she isn’t no.1 anymore, but is stepping up.

I do think we could do more to teach people the actual realities of having dc, everyone I know has been smacked in the face with it completely after their first.

It is a gruelling relentless job and should be treated like one, and only taken in by those who know what is waiting and still desperately want dc.

I don’t personally regret mine, but I wanted them desperately. I think caring for my disabled brother meant I vaguely knew what to expect (never ‘off duty’, 100% responsible for someone’s needs) so it wasn’t so much a shock to the system.

@gabsdot45

I’m in a similar position to you, I adore after discovering that I was infertile. My DH and I have two DDs of 11 and 8.

This thread has been thought provoking. It’s very hard to admit having regrets after fighting so hard to adopt our DDs. Life can be very hard sometimes, especially as DD1 has attachment issues and SEN, and has been violent towards me in the past, thankfully less so now.

Would I have made the same decisions if I knew before what I know now? I don’t know. But we both really wanted to have DC, so we probably would have done so.

But both my DH and I have wondered whether we would have adopted DD2 if we’d realised how hard it would be for DD1 to cope with having a sibling. They are birth sisters but she’s found it really hard to deal with, particularly since DD2 is NT and has no difficulty making friends and has always been invited to parties and play dates, whereas she’s always struggled. (Lockdown has been harder on DD2 for this reason.)

Hopefully, they’ll get on better when they’re older and they’ll be able to look out for each other.

But at the end of the day, regrets are a waste of time. We have two DDs, who we both love, and that’s the life that we chose for ourselves. Unlike our DDs, who didn’t choose to be born to parents who couldn’t look after them and be placed in another family. (I do feel angry sometimes that their birth parents didn’t make different choices. But that’s another thread.)

I regret them. One has ASD so it's a constant struggle & I can't work due to the constant therapies and really miss my career. I am jealous of seeing friends and family being able to freely spend money. I've been interrupted twice while writing the first sentence of this reply. Noone invites us anywhere because our DS is difficult in social situations.

I miss travelling freely with DH, now it's mind numbingly boring beach trips where I just shift my responsibility to a different view.

My house is covered in plastic crap toys and is ALWAYS a mess & I've no mum friend's because the mums here are all 10-15 years younger than me and know nothing else so can't relate.

No, going back I'd not have them. I got suckered in by everyone telling me how wonderful and life completing they are. I should have listened to my instinct which was screaming don't do it!!!

I don’t regret my children at all, I love them so much. But I think there are a lot of lies told to women about ‘having it all’. The pressure I have felt since having them to: be a perfect mum; have an amazing social life; have an amazing career; own the perfect home and myriad other crap has been absolutely unbearable. I have a constant headache switching from worry to worry. But at the same time I am very grateful for them and I think life is always like that. You get one thing, and have less time for other areas of your life.

I think that in my case it helps that I was forty years old when DD1 was placed with us at age 1. I had plenty of time beforehand to do a lot of exciting things, like work on projects in Africa and with Central Asian women for example. My DH and I had seven years on our own and did a fair amount of travelling.

We also have done some fun things with our DDs, and it's now becoming less of a chore looking after them, as they're not constantly looking for attention from us.

It really does get easier when they pass the toddler and preschool stage.

I have a 3 year old and he's really good fun. I do miss waking up at 10am at weekends and watching Netflix all day but that's about the height of it.

I think you can love your children, give them the best childhood possible and still regret becoming a mother.

Even women who regret it, still mostly love and want the best for their kids. If they didn't, they'd walk away wouldn't they. Or abandon their children at the council ss offices.

I have a theory that women who enjoy motherhood the most are slightly oblivious types...I think women who struggle are usually fairly analytical and can see how objectively crap parenthood is.

*Two is infinitely harder than one, particularly as it is my youngest that has ASD. I often think if I just had oldest dc it wouldn't have been so bad. My life would be almost back to normal now. We'd be able to go on bike rides together, walks, holidays, days out. All of these are virtually impossible or frustratingly difficult for my youngest dc.

So actually my oldest dc is missing out on life experiences because of my choices too.*

I only have one because of the possibility of special needs which we only found out about while I was pregnant with dc1.

Also, it turns out I find motherhard quite difficult so don't have an urge to have another one anyway. I don't regret my child at all but there is no doubt there are pros and cons to motherhood and I think it's a good thing that young people are made aware that it's not the be all and end all of life.

I love having dd. My shameful confession is that I had a baby to assuage my loneliness and it worked, to the extent that it made me lazy about seeking out a partner after splitting with her father (he was horrible to me so it was also a case of once bitten, twice shy).

I'm very conscious that dd is not here to serve my needs and we have discussed it quite explicitly. She was fretting about both parents are fairly solitary without her around, so I said that's our choice, and it's up to us to make the effort to engage more socially, not up to her to meet our needs. I absolutely want her to spread her wings rather than stick to my side. But I confess, during her childhood, there's has been this flicker of relief that I'm not alone.