Regretting Motherhood: The Mothers Who Wish They Hadn't, and Why They Can't Say So

“A woman is only complete once she has children.”

“A marriage without children will never be stable.”

“One day you will definitely regret not having kids.”

Almost every woman of childbearing age has heard some version of these lines. When we talk about “becoming a mother,” it is always bundled with fulfillment, satisfaction and pride; tension, ambivalence and regret are brushed aside — and “I regret becoming a mother” is practically heresy.

But regret is ordinary. People regret their field of study, their marriage, the city they moved to. Why should motherhood be the one decision exempt from regret? And is it really true that a considerable number of women regret having children?

That is exactly the question the Israeli sociologist Orna Donath answers in Regretting Motherhood. She conducted in-depth interviews with 23 women who regret becoming mothers, and put an experience wrapped in silence into public language for the first time. The mothers in this book are not figures from a perfect myth; they are flesh-and-blood faces that struggle and second-guess.

One thing needs saying up front: the book is not designed to frighten anyone away from marriage or children. Its purpose is to give women a little more room to maneuver when they choose — because we can only make choices we will not regret when we know, in full, what we are choosing.

Two Stories That Tie Women to Motherhood

Donath begins by dismantling the two most representative logics of binding.

The first: “women are born to be mothers.” The argument is biological — the body can bear children, therefore it should. Whatever a woman achieves elsewhere, if she has no child she collects sympathetic looks: what a shame, she never had a baby.

The second: “motherhood is a free choice, so no complaining.” Since most women become mothers “voluntarily,” any hardship afterwards is their own responsibility, and regret amounts to going back on their own decision.

Each story has its own political and social background, and neither holds up. Donath’s interviews give a negative answer: in reality, a considerable share of women still walk the road of reproduction because of social constraint.

The pressure comes from several directions. The closing in from outside: relatives, friends and colleagues never ask “do you plan to have children?” — only “when?” As if children were a certainty and timing the only variable. A woman who dares to say “I don’t want kids” faces commentary rather than support; couples who choose to stay childfree are whispered about behind their backs — is something wrong with them? Most women do not have the courage to be that “different,” so they trade a child for an easier life.

Pressure from a partner: “he will love me more once we have a child,” “without a child we would divorce,” “I became a mother to fulfill his wish” — the child becomes collateral for a marriage’s stability.

Drifting into “unconscious” reproduction: not that these women stumbled into parenthood in a fog, but that before giving birth they never thought through what a child would mean. They followed the pace of the majority, treating a baby as one more item on the list of things you do when you reach a certain age.

Becoming a mother, in other words, is not always the result of an active pursuit. And once womanhood and motherhood are fused together as natural, something else is fused on as well — how to be a “good mother.”

The Good-Mother Exam No One Can Pass

Giving birth makes a woman a mother only in the biological sense. Society expects far more of the role: tenderly and thoughtfully manage the child’s meals and daily life, supervise schoolwork and after-school classes, raise the child into a useful member of society — or be stabbed in the back with the verdict “she doesn’t deserve to be a mother.”

And the expectations keep escalating: be back in shape within a few months of giving birth, or you are letting yourself go; keep hold of career and family at once, or you are not independent. The harshest clause of all: after enduring everything above, a mother must still toil without a word of complaint. She is expected to center her child, to possess endless patience, to sacrifice her time and keep improving herself — to become, in the end, a supermom.

A template for the good mother means an outline of the bad one: the flustered new mother, the mother who did not breastfeed, the mother who voices her helplessness and pain in public — they are speedily labeled “not trying hard enough,” “not loving enough,” “not strong enough,” and subjected to stricter inspection.

The French philosopher Charles Fourier wrote that where there is oppression, there is hypocrisy. Donath’s interviews bear him out — many mothers describe their interactions with their children with words like “performing,” “putting on a show,” “faking.” One mother, whose child is grown, says that when her child proposes coming home to see her, she answers warmly — “Wonderful, I can’t wait to see you” — while feeling nothing of the kind inside: the mahjong game and the hair appointment she had booked are gone, and there is a house to tidy and a meal to cook. However inconvenient, the performance must be joyful, because “what a mother should feel and how she should act” has been written in advance. Answer “don’t come, I have other plans,” and you have declared that your child does not matter to you.

So many mothers swallow their confusion and frustration and play the good mother earnestly, at the price of giving away large parts of themselves: the chic little handbag becomes a big backpack stuffed with bottles and diapers; the selfies in the phone’s photo roll become a record of the child’s growth; conversation shrinks from the wide world to the child’s small affairs. And when they notice these changes and feel the loss, a voice inside immediately corrects them: “You are not allowed to grieve. You are a good mother. You chose all of this.”

But can’t a good mother grieve? Few people realize this: love for one’s child and satisfaction in raising them are normal — and, at the very same time, so are anxiety, pain and regret. Forcing women to deny negative feelings is precisely one of the things that intensifies them.

Regret: The Word No One Is Allowed to Say

Of all negative feelings, the most forbidden is not anxiety and not depression — it is regret. Regret implies that some past choice was wrong. You may regret not having children; you may regret not being a good enough mother. But say that you regret becoming a mother, and you have exiled yourself from the world.

In every interview Donath asks the sharp question: “If you could go back to the past with the knowledge and experience you have today, would you become a mother?” Most of her interviewees answer: “No.”

Here a line must be drawn against postpartum depression. It is a good thing that we know more about postpartum depression — it has made the dark feelings around childbirth visible. But the side effect is that every negative feeling gets conveniently filed under “hormones; it will pass.” Donath thought so too at first, until she heard the stories of interviewees of different ages: some had children already in middle school; some were grandmothers. A grandmother looking back on half a lifetime and still regretting it can no longer be explained by postpartum depression.

What they say is:

“I had so many plans for my future, and the child’s arrival disrupted all of them.”

“Raising a child is never easy, and that has nothing to do with money.”

“Since having a child I can barely feel free. I am trapped in the identity of mother.”

What is lost is not only professional possibility but the possibilities of living — development, hobbies, leisure, set aside one by one by duty. More crucially, having a child is not a one-time decision and a one-time hardship; it is a decision for life. Mothers are forever saying “once you’re in university I’ll stop worrying,” “once you have a job I’ll stop worrying” — but the truth is that a mother never really stops worrying. The child grows up and leaves, and she stays at the starting point, worrying twenty-four hours a day, all year round. At the moment of becoming a mother, few have truly thought through the fact that the term of this responsibility is a lifetime.

And the most important distinction of all: regretting motherhood is not the same as not loving your children. More than one interviewee says: “I regret being a mother, but my regret has nothing to do with my child.” It sounds contradictory — aren’t having a child and being a mother the same thing? Precisely not. Giving birth is an act; being a mother is a situation scripted by society. What these mothers regret is not that this child was born, but that having a child unconsciously altered — even pre-emptively sacrificed — their own lives.

When Regret Is Said Out Loud: The Pile-On of 2013

In April 2013, a British mother published an article about her regret after having children. It was an act of considerable courage, and what it earned her was several thousand hostile comments: “Why would you say something so terrible in public?” “What a vile, cold and selfish woman!”

Society will not tolerate the regretting mother, because the mainstream narrative insists the problem must lie with the mother herself — she is unhealthy, pathological, and must be corrected back into the shape society expects. In a climate like this, women can confide in no one, and the truth has to be wrapped in a joke: “Sometimes I just want to stuff the kid back inside.” — and if challenged, there is a way back: “Kidding. Didn’t you hear the joke?”

But is silence really a good choice? Donath presses on: if we pretend regret does not exist, who pays the price? The mothers digesting their pain alone — suffering with no one to tell torments them harder. The girls who are not yet mothers — they may hurry into motherhood before understanding what it means. And everyone with their ears covered — when a long silence finally becomes an outburst, graver problems will surface.

Conversely, letting mothers step down from the pedestal, accepting their darker thoughts, and building a more lifelike image of motherhood actually helps women embrace the identity and live the years that follow well. To avoid a question is to understand it less, let alone change anything. Only when “regretting motherhood” can be discussed openly will more people be able to make choices they do not regret.

Conclusion: Giving the Choice Back to Women

Once more, for the record: this book does not encourage childlessness, and it does not belittle those who look forward to being mothers. It simply shows, from another angle, the emotional journey a woman may undergo after becoming a mother — so that every woman making this enormous life choice can do so informed, autonomous and free of regret.

At the end of the book Donath writes a passage worth sharing with everyone:

“We women need to take the world into our own hands rather than drift with the current. We women need to be in charge of our bodies and our lives, and of our own thoughts, feelings and imagination.”

If you care about the situations and the costs inside intimate relationships, read this alongside our relationship reading list. And for how social expectation closes in on a woman step by step, our review of The Bell Jar is the literary mirror.