In the summer of 2022 I put out an advert on my weekly newsletter asking if there were any women who regretted their choice to become a mother. It was a subject I’d long been fascinated by, in no small part down to my own decision not to have children at the age of 36. I thought I would get a couple of responses at most. I was unprepared for what followed.
Within days I was besieged with emails from women who, though not prepared to talk on the record (to disclose their identity), wanted to share their experiences all the same.
There were the women whose marriages had, at best, frayed and, at worst, broken down after having children. There were the women who felt overwhelmed but unable to tell anyone. There were the women who felt angry at being sold a dream of doting parenthood, and the women who felt they had sacrificed their bodies, their careers and, in many cases, their identities. “It feels like a trap,” one woman wrote. “A trap that I can’t get out of.”
Motherhood, it seemed, was a complicated bag: an experience whose lows were supposed to be compensated for by its highs. The problem was, no one, not society, not the media and not the mothers themselves, wanted to talk about it.
“I almost don’t want to say this…” so many began their messages, before embarking on long, detailed monologues about the hardship of motherhood. “I can’t tell my family or my husband,” one woman wrote. “It would just seem so ungrateful.”
Dissing motherhood it appeared, was the ultimate transgression – a betrayal not only to the sanctity of motherhood, all the women who can’t have children (“I feel so bad admitting this when so many women struggle to have a family” was a common refrain) but mainly a betrayal to the very thing these women loved more than anything in the world: their children. And so, as so many explained, it’s complicated. It screws with your mind. It wrangles your heart. The best course of action therefore is denial to both self and society.
But it’s down to these women, speaking openly about their own experiences that means other women can make the best choice for themselves. Or, at the very least, walk into motherhood knowing that often there is a bargain to be made.
I tried to get pregnant from the ages of 33 to 36. It didn’t happen. In the breaks between trying I asked around what motherhood was really like. I was lucky. Close friends and peers confided, almost conspiratorially, that it could be very hard, often terrifying and sometimes lonely. Yes, the love compensated for all of that (though of course, not for all women) and so you had to be entirely sure you wanted it.
In the end, after much soul-searching, my husband and I decided it was not for us, and turned our back on the IVF treatment we were about to embark on.
Though I asked many of these women to speak on the record, when it came down to it it just felt too exposing for most. In the end there was only one woman who agreed to speak without anonymity and with complete candour. Her name was Gill. She was a business coach from Essex who spoke with such clear sighted eloquence, it was obvious she had spent a lifetime reflecting on her decision to be a mother.
“I have a severely autistic son called James,” her email began. “I adore him and tell anyone who will listen that I wouldn’t change a thing about him. On some levels that’s true. On others it’s a big fat lie.” Gill is in her fifties, and was able to look back on a life severely compromised by becoming a mother. Though the love for her son was clearly evident when we spoke, so too was the sacrifice, the pain and the crushing disappointment.
But she also raised the crux of why motherhood is so impossible to talk candidly about. “Without question my son has ruined my life,” she told me. “But he has also enriched it beyond compare. The two sentiments can live side by side.”
The response to her story was incredible, as women from across the world commended her for articulating something they had never been able to do. She has managed to communicate the single idea that to feel anger, disappointment and regret can live alongside the unquestionable love and incommensurate joy that becoming a mother brings.
Because the truth is this, if you have money, a rock solid relationship, a body that obediently snaps back into shape and a career that welcomes you back with open arms after time out, motherhood is, no doubt, all the things the movies tell you it is.
But, if you don’t, motherhood can look quite different indeed. And that is surely a story worth sharing too.
Farrah Storr is the head of writer partnerships for Substack Europe and writes Things Worth Knowing
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