This is so important, stories like this need to be told. The cultural insistence we have that parenthood is some kind of magical bonding that happens every time without exception does real harm to both parents and children, as you can see from some of these stories:
My father recently told me he never wanted kids, but my mother wanted them. She thought he would love us when we were born.
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I didn’t realize that a maternal instinct is not universal. You know how you see parents in the delivery room and they are crying tears of joy? I felt nothing. […] My boys are well cared for and I am always here for them, but it feels very unnatural and fake and unenjoyable. It is a bit like a retail job you don’t like where you put on a fake persona and slog through it the best you can. I don’t get to leave this job, though.
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I also thought I wouldn’t mind missing out on all the partying and holidays because I would have the ultimate gift, a child.
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I always said I would never have children. I hate kids..I do. I am just not that type of nurturing person. I was always very careful to make sure protection was in use (condoms, birth control) but I am that .1% and apparently very fertile. I do not have that natural motherly instinct that all women seem to have, you know..that one that kicks in the moment they know they’re pregnant. I have to work really hard at it and it’s exhausting. I miss my solitude and being able to “check out” of reality from time to time.
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Because kids aren’t the life completer we believe they are.
Are there people for whom having children completes their lives? No doubt. Are there parents for whom the downsides like sleeplessness and loss of personal time are outweighed by the love and joy they feel? Of course. Are there people who change their minds about wanting kids once they have them? Sure. But that’s not true for everyone. It doesn’t happen every time, it’s never guaranteed, and the consequences are grievous when people who don’t want children have them anyway trusting that they will love the child and be happy.
We need to dispel the starry-eyed myths around pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage and create more realistic expectations. Parenthood is too important a choice for people not to go into it with their eyes open.
“It doesn’t happen every time, it’s never guaranteed, and the consequences are grievous when people who don’t want children have them anyway trusting that they will love the child and be happy.”
There’s a book on this topic that was groundbreaking when it came out, called Regretting Motherhood: A Study by Dr. Orna Donath. The backlash was insane. This is a topic that simply wasn’t discussed, and as the book became more famous (was translated into multiple languages, received a lot of public attention), the responses also became more incendiary. I had the utter honor and pleasure of studying with Orna - she read us some of the death threats she received, in her calm and measured manner, using them to further show just how deeply society expects motherhood of women.
I haven’t read the book myself, but knowing Orna, and having read some of her other work, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
I listened to Dr. Donath’s study and it does an excellent job of talking about the spectrum of people who regret from people who just had their first child a few months ago and people who are literal grandmothers and still regret having been someone’s mom.
Some of the things that feel the most heartbreaking to me or the women who said that they did it just because they thought that’s what they had to do next. They didn’t think about it they didn’t process it as having psychological consequences on anyone involved, they just looked at each other and we’re like okay I guess we’ve been married long enough now probably time to start on the child portion of the show. So some of them had just been following a societal script so closely and thought they were doing the thing that everyone said would make them happy and successful and then they got there and hated it. I ache for them thinking what could have been different if they sad and thought about what it could really entail and what it could mean.
I recommended the book to my very close friend who is being lightly coated in baby propaganda from her and her boyfriend’s families. She and I are both people who have never wanted to have a never intend to have children and we both found the book very grounding and helpful and validating. Dr. Donath herself is not anyone’s mother and so some people accused her of having kind of an agenda but in a way I felt like it made her and outside Observer to the social phenomenon of the things expected of motherhood and it was nice as a person who is and wishes to always remain childless that she had the same kind of scientific interest in the topic that I did.
But like so so many other things in the end it’s just so validating and such a relief to hear that there are other people who feel the same way about things that you do, especially when that is contrary to the way that we have all been prescribed to feel.
(via rogerdelgado)
