‘I don’t think it was worth it.” Tammy is a mother who wishes she hadn’t been. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids. But it comes at a huge cost; mentally, emotionally and physically.” Writing anonymously on feminist website the Vagenda, Tammy says: “My body was ruined, I had to have surgeries later in life to repair what was done to me by forcing an almost 9lb child through my body. And worse yet, it seems as though expressing this honestly makes me a monster … It seems as though your entire self becomes nothing more than a functional enabler for your kids’ success.”
So why do women regret having children? “Motherhood is no longer an all-encompassing role for women now, it can be a secondary role, or you don’t have to choose it,” says Toni Morrison in Andrea O’Reilly’s Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. But, she adds, “It was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me.” For Morrison, and countless others, “the children’s demands on me were things that nobody ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humour. To deliver something that somebody could use. And they were not interested in all the things that other people were interested in, like what I was wearing or if I were sensual. If you listen to [your children], somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity and all sorts of things, and deliver a better self, one that you like.”
Across cultures and continents, society projects this ideal of motherhood, placing a premium on why mothering matters so much, with a list of things mums must not do: smoke, have casual sex, work instead of taking maternity leave. The biggest taboo, however, is when a mother says that she regrets becoming one at all. Which is why the debate around viral hashtag #regrettingmotherhood has become so intense in recent weeks.
