Woman Breaks Taboo as She Admits ‘Loathing’ Being a Mother – After Spending £100,000 to Have a Baby
(Link): Woman breaks taboo as she admits ‘loathing’ being a mum – after spending £100,000 to have a baby
Excerpts:
by Alice Mann
For almost a decade I’d dreamed of this, I thought, gazing into the cot with tears pouring down my face. For so long, all I wanted was to be a mother, to make my partner a father. Now my dream had come true. And it was a nightmare.
After a serious relationship had ended when I was 35, I’d worried I’d never meet anyone else and never have my own children. I did everything to make it happen. At 36, I froze my eggs; at 40, still single, I tried to conceive on my own with donor sperm.
Then I met someone when I was least expecting to, and we tried together, enduring IVF, a natural pregnancy and a miscarriage before deciding to go down the route of finding an egg donor. When, at 44, on my eighth cycle of IVF, and my first using a donor egg, I finally got pregnant, and stayed pregnant, I didn’t dare to believe my luck.
But after a relatively straightforward birth — a planned C-section, based on my age and the size of the baby — our son was here.
When they placed him on my chest, I didn’t feel that rush of love people talk about. I mostly felt disbelief that after so long, here he was … ‘He’s so perfect,’ I whispered, in awe.
But four weeks later I was struggling to remember that feeling. Because what I felt as I stared at this screaming baby, the baby I’d wanted so, so much, the baby that I’d invested so many years of my life, and so much money — I guess around £100,000 all told, but I stopped counting after I hit £50,000 — in making a reality, wasn’t awe. It was resignation, resentment, horror and abject misery.
‘There is not one part of this that I’m enjoying,’ I sobbed.
And then I’d feel racked with guilt. Guilty for having these unnatural, unmotherly feelings. …
… I spent years resenting the complaints about the trials of motherhood from — to my mind — ungrateful women. Didn’t they know how lucky they were? Didn’t they know that I’d give anything to be in their place? Didn’t they realise what a luxury it was to be able to complain of sleepless nights, and not having a moment to themselves?
I would have given anything to be in that position.
And so it was during those early weeks that the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ ran on a loop inside my head.
With the benefit of hindsight, and more sleep, I can rationalise those early feelings. I don’t think I had post-natal depression, a condition which affects one in ten women, but I do think that the perfect storm of lack of sleep, hormones and recovering from major abdominal surgery compounded the fact that nothing can prepare you for the seismic shock that is having a tiny baby.
… I didn’t allow myself to think about what life with a baby might actually look like.
… I could never have predicted how utterly miserable the early stage would make me feel. …
…[After we had the baby] I was mourning the relatively carefree, spontaneous existence we’d traded to become slaves to this demanding master who never seemed happy — and never gave us a day off.
There were times I thought I hated him. Although really I hated the situation and, more than anything, I hated myself.
How did I hate myself? Let me count the ways. I hated myself because I had wanted this, so I had no one to blame but me.
I hated myself because after years of searching I’d found a wonderful man and now I’d ruined our relationship. Forget intimate and leisurely candlelit dinners, we couldn’t even eat a meal at the same time because someone had to hold the baby.
…I hated myself for being the only mother in existence ever to feel this way. (I wasn’t, as I later found out when I confided in friends, but at the time I felt that no one had ever felt the way I did.) And I hated myself for being so ungrateful.
Since 2014, when I was in the vanguard of women freezing their eggs for ‘social’ rather than medical reasons, I’d been documenting my experiences in the world of fertility on my anonymous blog, eggedon blog.com.
…I knew how it felt to revel in the good news — ‘she was the same age as me and she got pregnant!’; ‘she’d done ten cycles of IVF and finally it worked!’ — while simultaneously feeling that sharp and shameful ache of jealousy and resentment that it wasn’t me.
….So having finally won my own personal game of fertility snakes and ladders, the realisation that it was a hollow, unwanted victory felt as though I were betraying all of them as well.
But, according to chartered psychologist and parenting specialist Catherine Hallissey (catherinehallissey.com), the way I was feeling wasn’t as unusual as you might think.
‘It’s difficult to talk about how common this reaction to the culture shock of motherhood is as it’s so taboo to admit that things aren’t how you thought they’d be,’ she says.
However, she believes that the combination of chronic sleep deprivation and the loss of identity felt by many career women when they have had a child contribute to many new mothers feeling this way.
‘I really feel that what is at the heart of it is the lack of support new mothers feel in the absence of the parenting village our mothers, and especially our grandmothers, had,’ she says.
Add to that ‘the binary thinking that creates the idea that being a good mother means loving every second of the experience, and you deny women the complexity and range of human emotions that’s inherent in being a parent, resulting in guilt and shame’.
…Because I have always hated that narrative, that idea that you never really know love, tiredness, or whatever emotion until you become a parent. That suggestion that, without a child, you are a fraction of the person you could be . . . And so I bristled silently on behalf of the woman I was before I became pregnant, and all the women like me.
I’m sure this fetishisation and deification of motherhood, which has always made me uncomfortable, contributed to the guilt I felt about my feelings in those dark, early weeks.
Related:
(Link): 30 Mothers Who Regret Giving Birth Share Why
(Link): Mother Sold Her Six Year Old Daughter to Pervert for Sex In Exchange for Shoes and Cash
(Link): UK Court Says Widower Can Use Late Wife’s Frozen Embryo for Surrogate
(Link): “I Regret Having Children” – Various Mothers Interviewed (via NY Post)
(Link): Parents Who Regret Having Children Speak Honestly About Why It Was A Huge Mistake
(Link): Sorry, but being a mother is not the most important job in the world, by Catherine Deveny
(Link): I’m in My 40s, Child-Free and Happy. Why Won’t Anyone Believe Me? By Glynnis MacNicol
(Link): Why is the Childfree Singleton a Curiosity? by V. Blackburn
(Link): Why We Thought Marriage Made Us Healthier, and Why We Were Wrong by Bella DePaulo
(Link): Is The Church Failing Childless Women? by Diane Paddison
(Link): Idiot Author Thinks Childless and Childfree Should Pay Higher Taxes to Subsidize Parents
(Link): Motherhood Is Not A Woman’s Most Important Job by J. Wright
(Link): Women Are Having Fewer Babies Because They Have More Choices by Jill Filipovic
(Link): Family as “The” Backbone of Society? – It’s Not In The Bible
(Link): Mother’s Day Ain’t A Happy Holiday For Some
(Link): Bearden: Staying childless right decision for many women
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