“We were at the podiatrist a few weeks ago and this nice elderly lady sat next to us and tried talking to my daughter, but all my daughter did was scream. It was awful and made me hate my life…She is such a miserable child. I wish I could go back in time.”

“I am 40 this year and my daughter is 2. Just thinking that if things go as planned she will be in the college at 20 and I will be 60. I don’t even know I can live that long now I am constantly tired and exhausted.”

“I am sick of her screaming. She’s dealing with separation anxiety now so whenever we leave her in her play pen to play herself it’s instant screaming, the grating, raspy kind and it’s driving me up a wall. I was never a baby person but I got told the typical lie of “oh you’ll love your own.” Yeah. Right.”

It’s the biggest taboo in the world, even in the most liberal of cultures. Mothers who regret motherhood. We hate this thought so much that moms who speak online about regretting having children, from anonymous accounts, still feel the need to add disclaimers like “I love my kids but…” We just can’t accept that women who birth children can regret it, not just momentarily but permanently, and would opt out of parenthood if given a chance. You’re a monster, not a mother, if you say you show even an ounce of anything but motherly, saintly love to a screaming toddler.

The number of women who post online about regretting motherhood and wishing they had never had children tells a different story from what a patriarchal society wants us to believe. The numerous Reddit threads featuring mothers speaking their truth should be indication enough that maternal regret is not rare. An entire subreddit dedicated to regretful parents features post after post from parents, both mothers and fathers, who yearn for the lives they had before parenthood. This is one among many.

The judgement of social media

 

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The recent Lindsay Clancy trial brought a social media trend that was instantly termed disturbing and cringe. The “Same, Lindsay” trend was meant to give visibility to mothers who don’t always love being mothers. Instead, it became a trend of women throwing water on babies and acting for the camera. Which, of course, invited outrage from men with zero experience in the matter. What should have started a conversation about the not-so-rosy realities of motherhood became another reason to police women who may already be crumbling under a mountain of expectations.

Forced motherhood in Indian families

Ask any newly married woman in India about her plans for children, and you’ll mostly be met with awkward shyness or a polite dismissal. Ask her husband or her in-laws, and you’ll mostly hear a decision that has been made for her. “Within a year”, “Bas do-teen saal mein kar lenge”, “As soon as I’m financially secure”, etc. All are considered legitimate and hardly ever questioned. What is not seen as valid is a married woman who doesn’t want to be a mother. It’s almost unheard of.

 

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Forced motherhood is a non-stop process in Indian families. You might produce a perfectly healthy child, but you must have more till you give birth to a boy. Even if that means multiple difficult pregnancies, repeated trauma of childbirth, and a woman who didn’t want to be a mother at all forced to care for infant after infant.

It’s not just a rural phenomenon; forced motherhood is highly prevalent in urban India and especially in high-income households or generationally wealthy families. The mother’s opinion, or even her doctor’s, doesn’t matter when it comes to izzat and virasat.

It’s not always postpartum depression

Sometimes, it’s just plain regret. When women who have adult children say they regret becoming mothers and miss the life they could’ve had, we can’t call it postpartum depression just to make ourselves feel more comfortable. The world has to face the reality that motherhood, like every other decision in life, can be regretted. It can even be hated.

What does a mom do with her regret?

No one at home is listening to her. The average Indian father dismisses any suggestion of his wife suffering because the bigger suffering is always his. ‘Kitna kaam karta hai office mein, dhakke khaata hai, traffic mein phasta hai roz, so stressful, phasa liya aadmi ko, ab toh chhod bhi nahi sakta. Bechara.’ The woman stuck at home with an infant is the demanding villain in his story, draining the life out of him to live in comfort herself. All she has to do is care for the child and the home while he toils in the boiling hot sun outside.

When a stay-at-home mother is repeatedly gaslit into thinking she has it easy, any thoughts of regret are pushed down, like a shameful secret she mustn’t let out. So what does she do with her regret? Whether parents want to believe it or not, children always know whether they were wanted or not, because they are easy targets for all that pent-up resentment.

Read this excerpt from a Reddit post:

“As their oldest child, aka the one who had to be parent #3 a lot of the time, I always questioned why they even had kids, since they seemed so unhappy doing the things that having kids requires?? At some point, I concluded that they had kids just to have them, as they probably felt pressure from everyone else, and somehow expected that life would be magical and work out after that. I don’t think they really thought about it beyond that.

Anyway, now they’re a bitter couple in their early 50s to 3 kids who constantly disappoint them and owe them everything because they birthed us and suffered with us for years.”

The easier regret

The falling fertility rate in India and across the world should surprise no one. And if it does surprise you, blame your disconnect with reality. Because the fact is that when people say “it takes a village”, no one follows it up with how to find that village. Forget people taking turns to mind the baby; most women are often left to their own devices once the novelty wears off. The ones who do get a village are often surrounded by judgement and instruction rather than support.

Now that more and more women are talking about the unsaid realities of motherhood, many others are choosing to not go down that road and stay childfree. Desires can change with age, but perhaps not having children is the easier regret to live with.

More from All About Eve

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