The mothers who regret having kids: ‘I wished I were holding a cat and not a baby’

Originally published in The Guardian

Tanya was never sure about having kids.

She told friends and family she wasn’t convinced she wanted to be a mother, that she didn’t feel a zest for children. In response, people assured her she’d be overcome with love for her own children, and warned that she would deeply regret missing out on motherhood.

There was “a lot of comfort, and probably unintentional gaslighting”, says the Alberta-based 37-year-old, now a mother of two children under five.

Tanya, who requested to withhold her surname for privacy reasons, decided to have a baby in part because she knew her husband wouldn’t be fulfilled without experiencing fatherhood. She hoped that all those assurances would be correct, and that she would snap happily into mother mode.

But that is not what happened.

“As soon as I got pregnant I was like: ‘Oh God, I don’t want to be pregnant,’” says Tanya, whose second child was unplanned. “But I kept believing: ‘I’ll have the baby and then I’ll be fine.’” After giving birth to her first child, she experienced postpartum depression. “I haven’t reached a point where it’s been fine,” she says.

Transitioning into motherhood, Tanya felt a measure of what she calls “identity erasure”: the loss of her past self and all she had prioritized and enjoyed, such as making music and teaching yoga. But the issue was more fundamental than that. She simply did not want to be a mom.

This story originally appeared in The Guardian, December 2024. To read the full story, click here.