It was coming up to Christmas 2015 when a query popped up on Victoria Elder’s home computer screen. It was from the question-and-answer site Quora, to which she had only recently subscribed. She didn’t know much about Quora at the time, except that it was a place where users posted questions others would do their best to answer, such as “Who’s the yellow suit guy in Gangnam Style?” or “If the Earth were a cube, how would gravity be different?” She found the site intriguing and informative. That afternoon, the question was: “What is it like to regret having children?”

Being a practical person and very forthright, Elder, who works for a mortgage company in Lafayette, Louisiana, sat down to write. She was 47, and as the mother of a 17-year-old she thought perhaps she had some wisdom to impart.

“This is just my story – I can’t speak for other people,” Elder began. Unlike the person who had posted the question, she used her real name. “I planned my pregnancy and thought I desperately wanted a baby. Desperate enough that I married the first man who was interested in having a child with me, knowing, in the back of my mind, that I was making a bad decision but thinking I was strong enough to do this.”

Not that she didn’t intensely love and care for her daughter. That’s the important distinction to make, she tells me

Within two years of their daughter’s birth, Elder’s husband, she says, had become increasingly absent, then left, before disappearing altogether in 2008. She had had to struggle to keep on top of things, both logistically and financially, but that hadn’t really been the problem. “It went deeper.” The day her daughter was born, the exact moment the tiny baby was placed in her arms, “I felt like, and still feel like, I made a mistake.”

Not that she didn’t intensely love and care for her daughter. That’s the important distinction to make, she tells me when we first speak. It was the fact of becoming a mother. “The sanctity of motherhood,” she explained in her original Quora post, “is certainly a subject that could use a dose of reality. I felt terrible about what I was feeling and thought there was something wrong with me.”

It seemed like an acceptable enough thing to admit to on a semi-anonymous online platform. The reaction implied otherwise. “Commit to psychotherapy,” read one of the 600 comments. “Sort out your insecurities and guilt and self-centred, self-indulgent feelings, and get on with the job of parenting.”

“Take it from the child of an anxious, self-centred, narcissistic, psychopathic mother and a selfish, abusive and ultimately absent father,” another contributor posted. “Your daughter may seem unaffected by your bad choices, but trust me, she’s been affected.”

“People don’t want to hear that mothers don’t want to be mothers,” Elder says. “I think it screws with the stereotype.”

Alongside the outrage, however, came a huge swell of relief. “This is a very intense, brave answer,” applauded one woman. “Anyone who says they loved being a parent,” wrote another mother, “is a liar or on drugs.” A father pitched in: his life had turned into that of “a machine”.

If you could go back in time, I ask Elder, would you honestly decide against having children? “Definitely,” she says. Her daughter, Morgane, is now 18. I ask if Morgane would be willing to speak to me, to give her side of the story. “Sure,” Elder says. “Try tomorrow afternoon,” and she gives me Morgane’s number.

I hadn’t expected Elder or her daughter to be willing to speak to me. Regretting having had your children is not a topic of conversation one strikes up in the playground, or maybe anywhere at all. Society presumes that women, especially, feel elated about becoming parents. Social media has magnified this: taut, post-baby bodies on Instagram; mother-and-child selfies used as profile pictures on Facebook; motherhood has become an alternative identity rather than a rite of passage. Plenty of people rail against the commodification of parenthood, or the difficulty of achieving a work-life balance. Many loathe the modern rebranding of motherhood, yet few openly regret having become parents.

But they will talk about it on anonymous forums. A Mumsnet thread – subject heading “*deep breath* I regret having children”– is ongoing. “I have photos of us all as a family when they were five and three, and I look as though I am suicidal, and I felt it too,” goes one entry. Another reads: “I had no idea it would be this shit.”

There’s a Facebook group, I Regret Having Children, illustrated with a picture of a woman with the word “GUILTY” written across her forehead. “This page is here to let all the mothers and fathers know that regretting having a kid(s) is not abnormal and shouldn’t be a taboo subject,” reads the text below. When you scroll down, there’s a memo warning against “soliciting regretful parents for adoption”, and reassuring users that there should be “no shaming of women or men for their non-euphoric feelings”. The group has 5,800 followers. The talk is of parenting plus depression, debt, extreme stress; it is of not being able to relate to your children.

One father posts: “I have an almost five-year-old girl. She is amazing. I spent her first four years regretting having her. Seeing all my single friends, or married friends without children, made me jealous. It’s like I died and lost my previous life. I entered a new life with much less joy, sex, sleep, FUN… I do wish people would talk about it more openly. Thank you, REAL people who are true to their feelings. I believe most parents suffer but they stay quiet with a fake smile.”

Offline, a few writers are addressing the subject, too. Corinne Maier is a French psychoanalyst, a mother and the author of a bestselling book, No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not To Be A Mother. When it came out in 2008, the book featured on every French talkshow, in every bookshop, on everyone’s bookshelf. Parents came forward to debate the idea, and Maier referred to the wave of people being newly open about regretting parenthood as “a movement”. The BBC included Maier in a 2016 list of the 100 most inspirational and influential women in the world. I email Maier to request an interview, and settle down with a copy of her book.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Corinne Maier, author of No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not To Be A Mother. Photograph: Magali Delporte

Maier’s writing is funny, in a typically deadpan, French nihilist way. But it’s clear why some people have found her book jarring: on page one, in bold, is a quote from the novelist Michel Houellebecq: “The child is a sort of vicious, innately cruel dwarf.” Chapter titles include: Kids Are The Death Knell Of The Couple; Your Kid Will Always Disappoint You; Wanting To Reproduce Yourself At Any Cost Is The Pinnacle Of Banality. A few days later, Maier asks me to email her my questions because her English isn’t good enough for a conversation; she reminds me that she’s written 19 other books, several of them also bestsellers, about other, far more interesting subjects (a Lacanian interpretation of the life of de Gaulle, for one). She is very bored with talking about kids.

While I wait for her to get back to me, I speak some more with Victoria Elder. “In my teens, I babysat a lot of my cousins. I did not want to be a parent at all,” she says. “Then, suddenly, in my late 20s, it just came out of nowhere, this urge to have a child. It was a total shock to me.” The pregnancy was great. Labour was torture, lasting three days, and ended only after Elder was induced. Then, “It was the weirdest experience. When she was placed in my hands for the first time, it was, ‘Oh, no. What have I done? This was a huge mistake.’”

“I didn’t know what to do with her. I wanted to breastfeed and I couldn’t make that happen.” She says the regret wasn’t helped by postnatal depression, but nor did it disappear when the depression lifted. She tried to stay optimistic. “I hoped the feeling would go away.” It didn’t.

It wasn’t the child. “I love my daughter and have referred to her as my magnum opus,” Elder wrote in the Quora post. “If anything were to happen to her, I would be inconsolable. For ever. My mistake was not because I don’t love her or because I don’t want her or because there is something wrong with her. It is not her fault by any stretch of the imagination that I shouldn’t be a parent. And because she is pretty damned awesome, what it feels like more often than anything else is guilt. Not because I failed as a parent, but because I don’t want to be a parent.”

Elder’s Quora response was syndicated on Fatherly, a popular American parenting site. Fortunately, she says, though the article was published under her real name, she wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter; she’d not imagined her piece would kick up so much controversy and was glad she didn’t have to deal with it firsthand. This was in January last year. Two months later, another mother, this time in Germany, went public with her own regrets.

I didn’t want children but I agreed to try, because I love my husband, and because I thought I would never get pregnant

The title of Sarah Fischer’s book, loosely translated from the German, is The Happy Mother Lie: And Why I Would Have Preferred To Be A Father. Fischer is the mother of Emma, now three, and the book is dedicated to her. Like Elder, she had a successful career, as a photographer and award-winning author with a special interest in Mongolia. Unlike Elder, she was in her late 30s when she conceived and is still married; she and her husband Alexander met a year before she got pregnant.

“My husband really wanted to get married and have children and have this small family life. I didn’t, but I agreed to try, because I love him, and because, at 38, I thought I would never get pregnant,” she tells me. Fischer was adopted and had spent many of her adult years trying to find her biological parents: “I had a therapist who said to me, when I was 37, ‘Only if you have your own child will the searching and yearning end.’ So that was a factor. And I thought I was prepared, because Alexander and I had discussed how being parents would play out. My friends had warned me that all mothers end up in the traditional role, no matter what. I thought I could avoid that. How naive.”

“The first time I regretted having a child? When the contractions started,” Fischer says. She felt a sudden burst of anxiety: what if she and her husband weren’t able to stick to their plan? “We’d agreed before the birth that we’d both keep working and look after the child 50:50, and not slide into the traditional role models: father works and earns the salary, and mother stays at home.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarah Fischer with Emma, three. Photograph: Frank Bauer/The Guardian

“I’d never failed at anything before,” she says. “I’d travelled to 180 countries. I’d almost died of dehydration in a jungle in Madagascar. I’d been on a sailing boat in the Indian ocean that had been attacked by pirates. I’d almost died from food poisoning in Turkmenistan.” So she felt she could handle motherhood. “What happened over the next few years I couldn’t have imagined in my worst nightmares. I felt like I was in a plot in a crime book, where the woman is being suffocated by motherhood.”

Fischer says she found herself forced to have endless baby conversations with other mothers. She watched friends drop their previous interests and careers for “baking bread or setting up mummy blogs or making jam”. When Emma was four months old, she was offered a freelance job that involved a lot of foreign travel. The reaction from friends was discouraging. “Is any job really more important than being a mother? Don’t you have a husband?” people asked. “A mother suffers when she is away from her children, and it’s a crucial time for a child, developmentally. You ought to be there.” (“How, then, do fathers cope with missing these crucial stages?” Fischer grumbles. “Besides, I’m broke.”) “Well, it’s your own fault,” her husband told her. “It was your decision.”

If you want to put yourself off having children, read Fischer’s book. “The reality of motherhood,” she writes, “is incontinence, boredom, weight gain, saggy breasts, depression, the end of romance, lack of sleep, dumbing down, career downturn, loss of sex drive, poverty, exhaustion and lack of fulfilment.”

Fathers, she says, inhabit a strange dual role: a man is either the praised-for-changing-even-one-nappy parent; or he’s the never-good-enough-parent, as even the most modern, hands-on, equal-opportunities dad struggles to compete with the saintly image of motherhood. Put yourself in his shoes, she says, and “you fall in love with an independent career woman who turns into a cook-clean-bake mummy; or suddenly only wants to talk about the children; or becomes depressive; or ignores you.” Whereas, she says, “when a mother is born, the person she used to be is left by the wayside”.

“I had never believed that such a thing would happen,” Fischer says. “Why would I change my personality? But women who become mothers are forced into the mother role, whereas men are still bankers, carpenters, doctors. Everything remains the same, but with a nice bonus.”

What with meagre paternity-leave allowances and the pay gap, society forces it on you, Fischer argues. It is still the man who is more likely to go straight back to work. But your daughter is only three years old, I say: won’t things get easier as Emma gets a little older? “Well, if our family politics in Germany improve, then yes. And if society’s attitude gets more open-minded. My problem is not my daughter. She is the easiest, most relaxed, easygoing child in the world. My message to mothers out there is: you are allowed to think such a thing as regretting motherhood and loving your child.”

The other mothers at the kindergarten were not enthusiastic about Fischer’s book. “They stopped talking to me, wouldn’t even look at me. They wouldn’t say hello when I dropped my daughter off at birthday parties. Probably a third of the parents where I live hated me. I had a very difficult time. People threatened me online, as if I was stating that every mother is living a lie. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I thought about moving country. If it weren’t for the 80 emails I was getting a day, from women saying thank you…” She interrupts herself, crossly: “We are living in 2017 – why shouldn’t you have an opinion?”

Fischer’s book was prompted by a study carried out by Israeli sociologist Orna Donath, described by the newspaper Haaretz as “the face of the non-parenting movement”. Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis comprised interviews with 23 anonymous Israeli women sharing their regrets about having children, and the extreme social pressure they felt, whether or not they were cut out for motherhood. “I’m not alone!” Fischer remembers thinking.

It was the breaking of a taboo: ‘How can you be so ungrateful when there are people who can’t have children?’

Not only Fischer. “We bloggers got on to it immediately,” says Jessika Rose, a mother of two from Berlin. Across the German-speaking world, the hashtag #regrettingmotherhood trended, and Donath’s study became a bestselling book. The backlash began. A leading columnist, Harald Martenstein, wrote that “motherhood regretters” who confronted their children with their negative feelings about being a parent were committing child abuse.

“It was a huge debate,” Rose says, “the breaking of a taboo. People were saying, ‘How can you admit to this?’ ‘How can you be so ungrateful for a choice you yourself made – when there are people who can’t have children?’” Rose married her husband when they were both in their early 20s, and they are still together. “I was really obsessed with having children and my husband was like a lot of men: ‘Let’s not do it now – let’s grow up a bit first.’ But I convinced him because he saw how painful it was for me not to have children. And then I couldn’t conceive. I was 23 when I started IVF.” Finally, “after two years of trying”, she became pregnant, and gave birth to a girl.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jessika Rose with her daughters. Photograph: Thorsten Futh/The Guardian

What happened next? “I had a very romantic notion of being a mother: that I’d love going to the playground, that I would be always loving and understanding.” Rose pauses, then groans. “I hate playgrounds. I find it extremely boring to stand there and watch the child on a swing and the helicopter mothers making sure their kids don’t fall off.”

A customer-relations manager who is passionate about her job, Rose realised too late some essential truths about herself. “I am an extremely independent person and parenting is lonely. I find it very tiring. I am extremely impatient. I want to live at my own pace. Coming home from work late at night, the children still awake and hyper, or wanting to cuddle. The volume of noise, the children fighting – I had never thought about it. Nobody tells you.” Her theory is that older generations of mothers have repressed all their negative parenting experiences “just to survive”.

How did her husband take this? It had been she who’d insisted on having the children that were now driving her crazy. “I am really grateful to him. We’ve talked a lot about it and he understands how I feel. He’s sliding into the mother role. My job is super-important to me. For him the children are the priority. He’d rather be home more and earn less.”

***

Andrew G Marshall is a British relationship therapist and author of many books. He says he has never had a client tell him outright that they regretted having children. “It is the biggest taboo. The sheer terror is what parents tell me about. The internet has created this child-worship, where anything beyond obsessive motherhood is bad motherhood. But it’s perfectly acceptable to be an individual, to ask ‘What’s my life’s meaning?’ and not feel it can only be your children.”

He dislikes the “cult of motherhood”, which, he says, has come so much to the fore in the last decade. “Originally it was God that was going to save us from ourselves, then it was love, and now it’s children. It’s the product of the divorce era. Up until then, we could believe that falling in love means happily ever after. Now we’ve tested the love-is-for-ever myth and found a replacement: that a child is going to love us for ever, make us feel happy, secure and successful.” When, after the birth of a child, these elated states of being don’t come to pass, it could create feelings of unmentionable regret.

Corinne Maier sends me a long, precise email. She agrees that it’s taken for granted that children make their parents’ lives complete. It’s her job as a writer, she says, to fight the “It’s obvious…” ideas such as, “It’s obvious that my child is the most important thing. I have never said that I do not like motherhood at all; it is just that I sometimes regret having children. That’s enough to trigger a worldwide controversy. A thing a woman cannot say, apparently.” She sees a mismatch between the increased freedom that women enjoy and what she sees as the increased pressure on them to be “good” mothers.

Have her own children read her book? They’re both adults now. “My daughter has, my son hasn’t.” How did it go? “I think it is good for a child to know that her/his mother does not belong to him, that she has her own life and desire, that her world is not limited to her child. It gives the child the freedom to build his own personality.”

A few days later, I speak to Elder’s daughter, Morgane. How did she feel about her mother’s post? “It was actually very public,” she says. “There were a bunch of people calling her a liar and a horrible mum, which really made me upset, because I know what she’s really like. Now I would probably just look at them and laugh, because my mum is great. She’s always been there.”

Her mother had shown her what she had wanted to write for Quora long before she sent it. Besides, they’d talked about Elder’s regret in the past, and Morgane had understood: she knows her mother loves her. Would Morgane advise women to tell their children if they regretted having them? “I feel that telling them would be the best option. It’s not because you don’t love them. Children can get on your nerves and they really just think about themselves. I never felt unwanted by my mum. At all.”

Morgane doesn’t want children herself. “I think I’d be a really horrible mum. I am very narcissistic; I only think about myself.” Her priorities lie elsewhere: getting into a good university and making money to start a business. “Most of my friends don’t want children.” She seems pretty sure about her own feelings – but then, so was her mother at her age.

How can anyone know whether they’ll be a good parent, whether they’ll love it or hate it, or both? All the mothers I talked to had planned their pregnancies, and yet every one of them was full of regret – a feeling they had never anticipated.

If you lived your life again, I ask Victoria Elder, and didn’t have children, where would you be now?

“OK,” she replies. “Say I never got pregnant. I would love to have gone back to college much sooner than I did. And because of a change in my financial responsibilities and the fact that I would have been single, I could have actually finished my degree and gone for my masters. I would get a job curating at a gallery or art museum.

“I don’t know that I would get married, but I had met my current husband before I met my first husband. So maybe I see him on campus and say, ‘Hi’, and we do get married. We don’t have children, so we can afford to travel. We have chickens and goats in the back yard and the rest of our menagerie of cats and dogs in the house.” But for one thing, it’s not a million miles from the way she lives now.

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