One of the most annoying things about being a mother of older children is hearing mothers of younger children complain about all the things “no one” warned them about. This is annoying for several reasons. 

It’s annoying because most of the time, older mothers did warn them, but the warnings went unnoticed. It’s annoying because it implies that older mothers willingly betrayed younger mothers, or worse, that older mothers might not have been intelligent or brave enough to notice the issues to start with. Most of all, it’s annoying because as an older mother, you might well have done the same thing when you were a younger mother, hence it’s debatable whether you have the right to be annoyed with anyone other than yourself.

“Many daughters,” wrote Adrienne Rich, “live in rage at their mothers for having accepted, too readily and passively, ‘whatever comes’”. I was reminded of this when, in a recent episode of her podcast, Lily Allen claimed that her own mother “kind of gaslit me into thinking it was, you know, easy”. Ironically, even the shock of motherhood can become something for which one blames mothers. Yet complaining about motherhood is not new. It might not literally be your own mother who did this (like Allen’s, mine didn’t). Even so, the voices have always been out there. 

It is easy to blame earlier maternal passivity, or female complicity in the idealisation of motherhood, for the fact that half a century after the publication of books such as  Of Woman Born, maternal labour remains undervalued and unaccounted for in so many of our social and economic institutions. Motherhood, argued Rich, is far more difficult than it has to be, but changing this remains hard in a culture that remains so resistant to acknowledging mutual dependency. It would be wonderful if all that was needed was the breaking of some great taboo on discussing what motherhood is “really” like, but I doubt that this is the case. What we are up against is something far more challenging, not to mention depressing: lots of people know already — they just don’t necessarily care, at least not unless they are in the thick of it themselves. 

Maternal complaint is one thing (and for the record, I think we should keep complaining). In recent times, however, there has been a rise in the number of articles in which parents, especially mothers, admit to regretting having children, or even to disliking their own. This ups the ante somewhat. The admission tends to be treated as brave, a way of sharing an agonising, unspoken truth, and finding support in others who feel the same way (according to a 2021 survey, one in twelve parents do). 

I’ve read these pieces with an increasing sense of discomfort. The language is often extreme (“everything that made my life what it was has been burnt to ash” says one mother). The parents will insist they love their children, and even that there is little in terms of structural disadvantage or social injustice that makes them feel this way. They just thought parenthood would be one way and … it isn’t. It’s not for them and now they don’t have any way out.

There is a point at which distress at the impact motherhood has had on your life seems to drift into a kind of buyer’s remorse

I am sure this must be a terrible way to feel. Nonetheless, there’s a part of me that thinks “does this have to be said? Do you have to frame it this way?” There is a point at which distress at the impact motherhood has had on your life seems to drift into a kind of buyer’s remorse, which, however powerfully felt, might benefit from something other than straight validation. You can insist the feeling isn’t personal — it’s not the child, it’s you — but how could you (or more to the point, your child) ever be sure? Motherhood is not an identity — one that suits some people more than others — but a relationship. If you are going to cut out the socio-political element and claim that is irrelevant to your sadness, you still have another individual in the mix. 

In one piece for the Irish Independent, a mother describes deciding her unhappiness with her first child was perhaps down to a “personality clash”. Eva, the mother in Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, reaches a similar conclusion, and is indeed more satisfied with her second child; in this real-life example, there is only more disappointment. Here, the judgement on the children themselves is obvious. Children do not need to be explicitly told that they are regretted — or that if they are, it is not their fault —- for them to notice the sentiment. Why wouldn’t they then conclude that if only they’d been different, their parent would feel better? Isn’t it in some sense true? Maybe the ideal, non-disruptive child does exist — it’s just not yours or mine. 

One of the strange things about motherhood is that it both disempowers the individual — your freedom is suddenly vastly limited — and grants you an inordinate amount of power over another person. Whether you desire it or not (and who desires it?), you have the capacity to ruin a life. People who do not want you to talk about the disempowerment will, to be sure, weaponise the potential harm you could do. Even so, that does not mean that the way in which you address your loss of power cannot be harmful. The Irish Independent describes sites where “parents talk about ‘really hating’ their teenagers, ‘looking forward to the day their kids move out’ and leaving their husband to deal with them as they ‘just can’t stand being around them’”. This goes beyond stressed parents letting off steam. If you hate your children, you need genuine support, not the validation of shared rants. 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that feelings can be controlled by a sheer act of will. When my eldest children were very small, a relative once said to me “only boring people find babies boring”. This is one of the most enraging things anyone has ever said to me (I was, at that stage, going out of my mind with boredom). I am not recommending some collective drive to find babies more interesting or to never find teenagers irritating. Nonetheless, I fear that viewing parenthood as a terrible mistake, far from offering a form of relief, creates a long-term psychological trap. 

Telling people your children have ruined your life ranks an imaginary life you will never live above the relationships you have now. There are things you should know before having children — and perhaps, if we listened more, we’d all know them — but there are some things that will remain unknowable. Can’t we focus on the truths we have, and the realities we can change?