I’m a mother of four. My children are my greatest joys in life, and I cannot imagine a world without them. It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, though. One of my children is autistic, and two have ADHD. I spent much of motherhood living below the poverty line, suffered a traumatic divorce after eighteen years of marriage, and am now a single mom of children ages 7–17 who live with me exclusively. I consider any struggles related to my motherhood more than worth it to bring these four irreplaceable, unrepeatable children into the world.
When I finally read the much-discussed piece from The Cut “I Regret Having Children,” which shares the experiences of three women, I expected my reaction to be indignation. After all, how can someone look at her children and regret their existence? But as I read their experiences, I realized that they had been profoundly failed by a society that sees child-rearing not as a normal phase of adulthood but as an opt-in only choice. Given that secular (and even some religious) culture understands being a mother as a step in one’s quest for self-fulfillment, it is consistent that these women would view any limitations to their freedom that accompany motherhood as wholly negative. While this broken understanding of human freedom certainly plays a part in their experiences, that’s a conversation for another day.
The three women who shared their stories in The Cut described a sense of shock at how brutally difficult motherhood is. They felt tricked by sunny stereotypes of parenting—only to find a reality of exhaustion, overwhelming mental and emotional demands, loss of identity, and a sense of crippling loneliness. And as the piece notes, they are not alone. Many women think that they were sold a story that motherhood would be magical and fulfilling but end up feeling unprepared for the challenges and lacking the support they need to thrive.
What should be validated in these women’s experiences is that the infant and toddler years can be relentlessly difficult and exhausting. Sleep deprivation is used as a torture method for a reason: It decimates your mental health. I remember being three months postpartum with my autistic child, who couldn’t sleep more than forty-five minutes at a time. An older mom who noticed the dark circles under my eyes as she washed her hands next to me in the office bathroom said, “They start sleeping better around six months.” I remember thinking, “If I have to wait three more months for a night of sleep, I’ll never make it.” I fully believed that the sleep deprivation would kill me. Unreasonable? Perhaps. But it seemed very, very real and, honestly, devastating in the moment.
Many women think that they were sold a story that motherhood would be magical and fulfilling but end up feeling unprepared for the challenges and lacking the support they need to thrive.
The limitations of my experience and my exhaustion-impaired judgment kept me from grasping that the newborn preventing me from getting a single sleep cycle would one day sleep—often until noon on the weekends. Now he is a teenager whose wit, humor, kindness, and curiosity delight the whole family. I could not comprehend something like my evening last night, when I’d pick him up from rehearsal for the spring musical and acquiesce to his request for a 10:30 p.m. meal at Waffle House. I couldn’t have imagined that we would sit at a sticky table and discuss world politics, plans for the future, and Timothée Chalamet’s recent misguided dig at opera and ballet. How can you understand the process of seeing a tiny baby grow to become a conversation partner making you laugh over late-night hashbrowns until you experience it?
The women in the article have only very young children (either one child or two). They have not yet understood that those time- and energy-intensive stages of infancy and toddlerhood, well, end! Admittedly, the teen years have their own challenges, but at least you can nap or go to the gym (or the bathroom) to revel in being alone for a minute. You will travel again, have hobbies, visit friends, and recommit to the demands of a successful career. The present phase is just that—a phase, and your life really and truly is not over. But in the extremely vulnerable seasons of early motherhood, it can certainly seem that way.
In the trenches of toddlerhood, women often experience the most profound loneliness of their lives. They find themselves burnt out and feeling like a failure for not loving every minute of motherhood when, after all, they chose this. With readily available contraception and abortion, not only are there ways to prevent or terminate pregnancies, these methods are cultural norms. In such a culture, motherhood is no longer part of the normal progression in adulthood for most women but a lifestyle one chooses, like becoming a pet owner or going to law school or getting really into yoga. And just as the presence of a cry room decreases parishioners’ tolerance for babbling toddlers in Mass (“Can’t they just go to the cry room where they won’t bother anyone?”), people have less patience with mothers and less interest in supporting them when motherhood is merely a lifestyle choice: “She chose to have that baby, after all. Good luck to her, but why should the rest of us be inconvenienced because she wanted that experience of motherhood?”
This leaves mothers without the community support they need to thrive, including the transmission of basic skills involved in motherhood. I can attest from personal experience that learning to breastfeed, for instance, having never seen a woman breastfeed before is challenging to say the least. When young women are isolated, have no one they can call to tap out for a much-needed nap, and have no familiarity with caring for children before being sent home with a newborn in a car seat, is it any surprise that they find the learning curve of early motherhood to be harrowing?
How can we shift from a perspective that sees motherhood as a personal choice that shouldn’t inconvenience anyone to a normal but tender human stage of life that requires intentional support from the rest of us?
Motherhood is not like studying for an advanced degree or training for a marathon—aspirations chosen for individual fulfillment that are accompanied by personal sacrifices. Motherhood is not a lifestyle: It is the means by which new humans are created, and only through women becoming mothers is society possible. Motherhood, then, is a group project that affects all of us. We are all indebted to and dependent on mothers. God’s design for the human experience requires a season of particular vulnerability for women who should be both supported and protected so they and their new children can thrive in it.
So instead of reviling these women who regret becoming mothers, how can we help mothers in their invaluable vocation? How can we cultivate a society that values care not only for children but for the women raising them? How can we shift from a perspective that sees motherhood as a personal choice that shouldn’t inconvenience anyone to a normal but tender human stage of life that requires intentional support from the rest of us?
God designed women to be mothers, either biologically or spiritually. But he didn’t design mothers to thrive in isolation or overwhelm, separated from the rest of society. We must model valuing motherhood as a gift, not by dismissing the difficulties it entails but because bringing life into the world and caring for children is an invitation to experience more fully what it means to be a human being. The best thing we, as Christians, can do to combat the anti-motherhood rhetoric is to love and care for mothers so profoundly that the world takes notice.