'Like a trap you can't escape': The women who regret being mothers

[IwantToRetire]

I'm not going to post any extracts from the article as better to read the whole content.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgkvge4rkmo

It really depends, doesn't it? Some women struggle with serious mental health conditions that mean the stresses of having children are too much. Or they may have children with serious health conditions or disabilities that make life feel unbearable. I can understand women in those situations feeling like they wish they'd never had kids, because they just can't cope.

For the average woman with healthy children, though, I would have thought it would be quite rare to have serious regret, or to want to walk away.

I do think that expecting women to work a full-time job and carry the almost full-time stress of being a mother (because let's face it, even with great husbands women generally shoulder more of the practical and emotional load) is a lot, and could burn many women out.

I think society needs to get to a place where raising children is considered to have (monetary) value to society, and people are actually properly remunerated for parenting well - although I'm sure figuring out how to judge 'well' might be quite involved!

But in that case, only one parent would have to work in order to be financially 'okay', and mothers could go back to work and leave the father to be the main parent, or stay at home themselves if they wished. There would also need to be protections for the parent if a couple splits up, of course, to help them re-skill and get back into the workforce when they wish to.

As it is however, having children is very much an emotional and financial burden and hindrance for which there is very little social reward. Which is probably why so many people are choosing not to have children now.

I’ve also jus realised that when I was in the trenches I used to hate people telling me it gets better!

I am not the mother I thought I would be. I remember being furious and angry so much of the time. Turns out I hate craft, not even the mess, I just find craft boring! And a lot of playing with small children is dull and frustrating.

The career thing is interesting, because I would never want to just stay at home with children, even if it made things easier. I went back to work after 6 months and 8 months each time, mostly for financial reasons, but I loved it (was ashamed to admit that). I worked full time for most of the time, although had a couple of years part time. Even if it was financially evened out I think mothers would be more likely to give up careers, because of the assumption of maternal instincts.

I definitely struggled at work when they were small, but it was somewhere I felt in control. Now I struggle with my career as my dd goes to a specialist provision l, which is 10 miles away with no transport. So I have to pick her her a few times a week in middle of afternoon. When she was out of school for 18 months I was lucky my employer allowed me to wfh. 75% of mothers with SEND children and of leaving work because of the needs of their children.

Yes, most definitely. Having to work full time, run a household and look after children is a very tough call. I think many women would actually like to step down to P/T work or even give it up entirely for the first few years. But can't.
You don't realise how all consuming having a child is until it happens; nor how much you really don't want to put a very small baby or child into day care; you want to be there yourself. Having too many competing demands or responsibilities can really ruin your enjoyment of all of them.

I very much wanted to out my dc in childcare! I felt guilty about it, felt an awful woman for wanting to return to work. But honestly childcare was so much better for them than me. I did not enjoy small children, not just the sleep deprivation and the tantrums. But the playing, the craft, the play parks (god I hated play parks), the role play etc. It was all so dull to me. And then felt awful as you are supposed to love it.

I like work, with my spreadsheets and adult conversation 😂.

But the playing, the craft, the play parks (god I hated play parks), the role play etc. It was all so dull to me. And then felt awful as you are supposed to love it.

Haha yeah I hate this stuff too! When my eldest turned 4 she started crafting without needing help - we have all the stationary stuff in low drawers and she's allowed any paper or card from the recycling box - she just makes a thing and then I say well done and it keeps her entertained.

She was the clingiest, most anxious and sleepless little thing for years. If DH so much as sneezed or a fox yelped in the garden she'd be inconsolably crying. As a baby her naps were exactly (to the minute) 9 minutes long and she'd wake up screaming. It was just so, so, so hard. Someone upthread mentioned dc being peeled off her for nursery drop offs - my dd was the same and I had to get dh to drop her off because I just couldn't bear it. We had to co sleep with her as her little hands would grasp out in her sleep and if a human wasn't clutched she'd wake up screaming. Zero interest in teddies or dummies or comforters...

She's a delight now!

Nobody can ever fully know beforehand, though. You cannot 'inform' yourself of something so deeply unknowable. There is almost no way of knowing how things will unfold. Much is luck. We can make a rough guess, but nobody can know how their pregnancy, birth, post natal expwriences will be, how easy/hard/healthy their baby/child will be, what cicrumstances will play out with work, partner, health, etc.

Roughly speaking, many motgrrs feel some kind of regret, at some points, and despair, and boredom, because parenting can be indescribably hard work, but generally most consider this is outweighed by joy, love, hilarity, companionship, etc. And the positives tend to increase as children grow older, which is why older women are often both trying to help younger women by pointing this out and recounting their own experiences. Sometimes circs are very very hard, though, for sure. All sorts of things can happen. And then we try ro do the best we can and hopefully women are supportrd and helped when yhey need it

Everybody's life is different, though. We can't account for curveballs. That goes for almost any decision, of course.

I'm curious about this idea of society being "honest' about it. There is no conspiracy. It's hard. Really fucking hard sometimes, often the hardest thing women do. It usually gets easier. And most consider it worth it.

"I'm curious about this idea of society being "honest' about it. There is no conspiracy. It's hard. Really fucking hard sometimes, often the hardest thing women do. It usually gets easier. And most consider it worth it."

Well, there is a big taboo about saying you don't like it, so I don't think we can rely on what people say. Is that not a type of conspiracy? The demand for women's silence about their suffering in case it upsets others.

And so many women are shocked by how having children is so all consuming, it can disappear you and they didn't see it coming.

Then there is the bit about what type of creatures we are. Anthropologists say we have brains geared for shared parenting, yet many of us do it with little help, in isolation and are judged on living up to that. This is why it takes us to the edge of our tolerance and beyond, yet we must stay silent and continue for years like this, ideally with a chippy voice and a smile.

The nuclear family model is an ideology we are living inside, but are made to believe is the norm (often through ignorance).

there is a big taboo about saying you don't like it

Depending on how it's said, I really disagree. Sure maybe not "I wish I never had my dc" but it's not taboo to say "I'm finding my toddler unbearable". There's literally a new thread with almost that exact title every day. Remember the cutted up pear?

It's almost more embarrassing/awkward to say "Well I find my toddlers really easy and parenting is an unmitigated joy, it's just about having a good routine" - one (justifiably) gets tomatoes thrown at you if you say stuff like that on here. Not that I ever have, because mine just don't seem to need sleep haha

Edit to add - not just toddlers, there's also an "it's a nightmare parenting teens" thread very regularly

This is what I feel conflicted about.
I recognise the truth of what you are saying, on a psychological and mythological level, about the centrality of the mother-child bond.
But it conflicts with my feminist political beliefs.

Why should mothers have the risk of this burden of entrapment, when fathers don't have that? Why should society judge men and women by different standards?
How can the psychology and the politics be reconciled?

I dont know there's much about motherhood its really 'taboo' to discuss now. We are a pretty open society. This forum is a very good example.

Yes, we talk about it on here, anonymously. But did you notice that the women interviewed for the BBC article that the OP posted to start this thread - all refused to be named because of the fear of repercussions.

Sometimes the whole thing reminds me of the TWAW thing in that you can be villified and canceled for speaking out.

Hey to all the high needs baby mums appearing! My first was like this - literally could not put her down, give her to anyone else, do anything that wasn't directly interacting with her without her screaming. Slept in 40 minute intervals for over a year. I swear by the end of week two of her life I was just utterly bewildered by the level of her need. I remember saying to my partner "but, but, but I CAN'T just not sleep!" almost indignantly, like I could submit a complaint to the manufacturer. Turns out I could, and did, for years.

Strangely, I still absolutely loved being a mum, possibly because it WAS so extreme - our bond was intense and all consuming and transformational, all things I have craved in various forms throughout my life. But oh my GOD it was hard. Torpedoed my relationship too, because he was so obviously hating it while doing far less of the actual graft (not really his fault, she absolutely wouldn't tolerate him and I couldn't stand hearing her scream for me), and I ended up feeling his dissatisfaction and his needs were just additional demands I didn't have any bandwidth for.

Second baby was an absolute revelation that I hadn't been crazy or weak or failing. She wasn't all easy (had a lot of trouble with breastfeeding) but... she'd sleep for hours together at night, not needing to be touching me. She'd let other people hold her. She'd lie on her tummy and later sit on the floor and play by herself. I could LEAVE THE ROOM. And I suddenly realised this is what most mothers got and was just "wow". We had not been on the same playing field AT ALL.

I think part of the problems of feminism (I am a feminist by the way) is that it has focussed on 'women can do everything that men can!" and pays less attention to "there are some things that only women can do". Bearing children is a uniquely female experience (which is not the same as a universal female experience). And women, en bloc, are different to men en bloc. We are much less often violent, for one thing. Much more collaborative.

Even feminism was created within patriarchy, and bears its hallmarks, i.e. the presupposition that what men did (politics, war, industry, academia, art) and had (physical dominance, sexual freedom) was inherently valuable and desirable and women should have access to it, which implicitly supported the patriarchal assumption that what women did (childbearing, care-giving, community-building, crafting, story-telling and oral history transmission) and had (endurance, longevity, freedom from overriding sexual instincts) was weak, valueless, trivial.

A new feminism would lean into our sex-specific strengths I think. Not be afraid to call out the predominantly male behaviours which have led this world into the shithole it is in and look to predominantly female needs and strategies to repair it. Whilst STILL recognising that sex-based traits (not sex itself) are on a bell curve, and men can be nurturing and collaborative, and women can be aggressive and risk-taking, and to allow for that in the system by enabling choice. But not by refusing to recognise that in general, there are strengths to women that men overall do not have, and risks to men that women overall do not present.

Basically a feminism for women, for the first time, as opposed to striving after the right to play with the men's toys on the men's field by the men's rules. Feminism should start with the question "what kind of world works for women?", not "how do we enable women to function in the world built to serve men?".

To my mind the politics bit is idealism. How one would like things to be in an imagined, perfect world. 'Equality' arguments seek to flatten out differences between people and groups of people, and even deny them to an extent.

That there are differences between male and female, and by extension men and women is often rejected. This leads to false expectations and unrealistic targets in my view....and one of them is that mothers are just the same as fathers and each have the same instincts, priorities, inclinations etc

Of course, individuals may buck the average or the norm...but the underlying tendencies remain. I actually think this is why so many who call themselves feminists seem to be so supportive of the idea that some men are actually women. They think ( or pretend to believe) that being a woman is a matter of personality or character, rather than a biological reality.

I think the answer to that, though, should be to judge fathers just as harshly, not judge mothers less.

Really though, it's biology at that point - babies come from us, are part of us, are almost an extension of ourselves for some time after birth when they are wholly dependent on us, biologically speaking.

We can peel away, and I suppose in ancient times we would've handed our baby off to another nursing mother or an elder to get a break and share the load, but mothers and babies are undeniably a natural pairing. It makes sense that it feels wrong to sever that connection. Whereas fathers...well, they don't even need to be present when the baby is born. There's no intrinsic connection there.

Good post!

This is spot on! Time and time again, I see women wrongly thinking that 'feminism' and 'empowerment' is women aping mens' bad behaviour and lowering ourselves to their standards, instead of expecting men to rise to meet feminist standards.

See: Ladettes, women consuming porn, women going to strip clubs, etc.

Yes, I had my first child at 19 years of age, and shortly after became a single parent...it was tough, very tough......but then i met the person who is now my husband and had two more children - in very different circumstances. A lot more support and far better set of material conditions, and so far more security. It was all far more enjoyable

I think my dc wanted me more because I tried harder to understand them. It’s still the case with my dd and her dad. Like I was furious and tired and strung out, but I was also trying, reading, finding out how to do things. He would try one way and if it didn’t work, get cross and blame her (or me).

He still seems to see her preferring me as some magic, instead of it being that I am the person who champions her, who tries to understand, who made myself an expert in autism and her autism. I threw all the parenting rules out the window and didn’t care what I was supposed to do. That’s why she prefers me, not some magical bond.

I failed to breastfeed both of mine too. I genuinely felt claustrophobic feeding my son, I would get this awful, panicky feeling. With dd it was because of medication I was on.

I have said a number of times to other women that I don’t love being a mother and that I’d be happier without children. Usually they think I am joking or exaggerating for effect. I’m not.

There is stuff on Facebook about this article and not a chance I’d comment there in my name. Partly so my children never see (although the young people don’t do Facebook!) but also the judgment from friends and family.

I thought this was a brilliant book. Good on the ambiguity of it all - the joy, the rage, the boredom, the way your brain feels like it’s unhinging some days.

Maybe you'll look back in years to come when you've come out the other side - with a different perspective. You'll still be a mother and will still have children, but maybe you'll be able to appreciate it more when the demands have eased and they have left home.You may even find you really enjoy being a grandparent.

@Shortshriftandlethal
You may even find you really enjoy being a grandparent.

Yes, that is why being a mother is worth it, even if it is crap. Because being a grandmother is wonderful!

Look, is there any chance we could avoid facetious comments on this thread? They aren’t helpful when posters are pouring their hearts out.

Isn't that to assume that your children, in their turn, want or even can have children? Having children so that you can enjoy a grandparenthood that may or may not happen seems to carry a fairly big risk of a) disappointment for you and b) undue pressure on your children.

I agree about the centrality of the mother-child bond, but that doesn't mean a) that mothers should not have a lot of support or b) that the impact of fatherlessness should be undestimated.

'Why should mothers have the risk of this burden of entrapment, when fathers don't have that? Why should society judge men and women by different standards?' Society should not. If sections of our society refuse to judge men who abandon their children, then that has to change. Fathers should be 'entrapped' in the sense that men who father children need to face up to their responsibilities.