"Mothers who regret having children are speaking up like never before"

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"what we’re learning about regretful mothers upends binary thinking that women who regret having children must be neglectful or substandard parents: it’s motherhood these women regret, not the children. Dutton expressed love for her offspring (“I would cut off my arm if either needed it”); it was maternal strictures she bristled against (“I felt oppressed by my constant responsibility for them”). In Today’s Parent, Augustine Brown called her children “the best things I have ever done” and assured readers she wasn’t “a monster” before expressing conflicted feelings: “What I’m struggling with is that it feels like their amazing life comes at the expense of my own,” she wrote, expressing remorse for “this life I wanted so badly and now find myself trapped in.”

Feeling trapped or suffocated is a common theme in Donath’s work; mothers felt “as if the metaphorical umbilical cord binding them to their children were in fact wrapped around their neck.” Many women said they felt pressured to have children. So did German novelist Sarah Fischer, author of Die Mutterglück-Lüge (The Myth of Mothering Joy: Regretting Motherhood—Why I’d Rather Have Become a Father), published in 2016, who writes she knew she’d made a mistake “when the contractions started.”

The premise that motherhood is not a one-size-fits-all role shouldn’t come as a surprise in 2018, given the rise of the “childless by choice” movement or an international decline in birth rates. Still, it’s received as an affront to the “sanctity” of motherhood and the entrenched belief that the maternal instinct is innate and unconditional—despite ample historical evidence to the contrary."

http://www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers/

FB:" There’s an inherent paradox, Donath points out: Women are told they instinctively possess the tools to mother well while constantly being told how to conduct relationships with their children to be “good women” and “good mothers.” And that has come to mean child before all, as seen when author Ayelet Waldman famously received hate mail after stating in the New York Times in 2005 that she loved her husband more than her children; she parlayed the outrage into a 2012 book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. The belief that women are uniquely equipped to parent also marginalizes fathers: author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto was publicly shamed when she revealed she preferred not to be a full-time parent in her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning. Now a non-custodial mother to two young sons, she has reported being “threatened with death and sexual violence by strangers.”"