Scratching beneath the surface of motherhood regret

Posted

Women who voice maternal ambivalence are still routinely scorned by society, writes Samantha Selinger-Morris. But experts say the outrage distracts from the real problem: that women are still expected to shoulder the bulk of caring work.

Sociologists rarely make headlines, let alone inspire people to craft the Twitter equivalent of a Molotov cocktail. But that was before researcher Orna Donath interviewed 23 Israeli women about why they regretted becoming mothers.

Ms Donath's study was published last year, but only recently became a viral sensation after outrage over its findings ricocheted across Germany.

Maternal ambivalence, local experts say, is particularly taboo in Germany, which has the lowest birth rate in the world, and a culture that expects women to sacrifice career aspirations for motherhood.

Women in Germany, for instance, who take less than a year's maternity leave in order to return to work, are frequently branded "Rabenmutters" (raven mothers) — happy to dump their kids at child care in order to chase personal achievement.

Hence why Ms Donath's study unleashed heated reactions from all sides. One author wrote a novel, Die Muttergluck-Luge (The Mother-bliss Lie), while popular columnist Harald Martenstein wrote that if "motherhood regretters" communicate their feelings to their children, they are committing a form of child abuse, even if they tell them they love them.

But in Australia, not only has there been a distinct lack of outrage at Ms Donath's study — not one local article, at the time of writing, featuring a horrified voice — but a muted response more along the lines of, "Well, d'uh".

Perhaps this is because the concept of maternal ambivalence in Australia is not quite as taboo; a 2015 study found that three-quarters of women interviewed who were deliberately child-free were pleased with their choice, once they passed childbearing age, because of the freedom it gave them.

'Motherhood regret has been around forever'

"I actually had a lot of people who came to me and said, 'My mother left, in the '70s, or in the '60s, so it's not uncommon," Sydney author Eleanor Limprecht said of the people who reacted to her 2013 book, What Was Left, about a mother who, struggling with motherhood, leaves her daughter for a period.

"[Others told me] 'My mother went away for a while, or left altogether, or she was in an institution, and it was never talked about, I found out about it later in life.' [Motherhood regret has] been around … forever."

She's not kidding.

Ann Landers, for decades one of the most popular American syndicated newspaper advice columnists, asked her readers in 1975: "If you had to do it over again, would you have children?"

Seventy per cent of her 10,000 respondents answered 'No'.

In her 2007 book, No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not To Have Children, French psychotherapist and mother of two Corinne Maier wrote that, some days, "I'm sorry to say I really regret it and I'm not afraid to say it".

And five years later, Sarah*, a Melbourne mother of three, told Daily Life writer Sonja Ebbels that "if she had her time over again, she wouldn't have had children".

People assume women don't love their kids

But while the decades have rolled on, the response to such admissions has not changed. Landers, her readers, and Ms Maier were all blasted in the media for being "selfish".

Sarah's admission, made in front of a group of mothers, was met with downcast eyes, and whispers of shocked disapproval.

"She felt so bad, not for necessarily having said it, but for how she was perceived … as a hideous person," Ebbels, who was also a friend of Sarah's, said.

It was a similarly harsh judgment that first inspired Limprecht to write her novel.

She recalls lying in bed in a Sydney hospital shortly after her daughter was born in 2007, and learning that a woman in Melbourne had left her newborn baby outside a hospital.

Then-prime minister John Howard had responded by saying: "How could you abandon a little baby?"

"I remember lying there in hospital with this baby, I fractured my tailbone [during childbirth] as well, and she wasn't nursing, and I felt so alone," Limprecht said.

"My husband wasn't there, because they wouldn't let him spend the night, [and I thought] 'How could [Howard] know what anyone's going through? What anyone's thinking? Perhaps it's actually better for her child if she does leave it.'"

The problem, say many Australians — including all of the people I interviewed and countless commentators on social media — is that people assume that women who reject motherhood do not love their children.

But a closer examination exposes this falsehood.

Sarah went on to have another child, her fourth.

"She adores her children," Ebbels said.

"[Sarah's comment] was very much time-related. Her life was so chaotic, and she wasn't coping, and it became all about the kids, because they were completely suffocating and all consuming … In hindsight, it was everything."

Sarah's husband had been away a lot, all three children were under five at the time, and sick, and her house was in the middle of being renovated.

And most of the women who responded to Ms Donath's question — "If you could go back in time, with the knowledge and experience you have today, would you be a mother?" — stressed that they loved their children, but hated "the maternal experience".

As Achinoam, a married mother of two in her 30s, put it, she regretted motherhood because of her overwhelming sense of loss of self and loss of freedom.

And this, says Australian sociologist Joan Garvan, exposes one of the biggest problems with the furore over Ms Donath's study.

'The social system needs to change, not women'

The moral outrage, Dr Garvan says, "obscures the real problem" — that women need better social services to support them long after they become mothers, to relieve the pressure that is routinely placed on them, by the government and broader society, to shoulder the bulk of caring for their children.

"The social system is what needs to change, not women," Dr Garvan, whose 2010 PhD thesis explored maternal ambivalence in contemporary Australia, said.

"They need flexible workplaces, good childcare, schools to change."

Even the gendered naming of some governmental services, she added, sent the message to women that their children were their responsibility alone.

The Victorian Government, for instance, refers to the broad range of health services provided to new families as Maternal and Child Health Services. In NSW, it is Child and Family Health Services.

"How many fathers regret having children? Probably thousands … But because society relies so much on women to do all that [caring] work, it sort of turns the spotlight on them, and then we [women] turn it on ourselves, and think, 'We must do all this stuff'," Dr Garvan said.

Or, as Atalya, a 45-year-old mother of three teenagers, told Ms Donath: "It [motherhood] hangs over all the time, lies down my soul."

It is a sentiment that will likely be familiar to any Australian mother who has been on deadline, had to race out of work to pick up a sick child from school, knock out dinner and a zany hat for a child, and then listen to how "lucky" she is that her husband or partner "helps" with the children.

Such pressure, says Dr Garvan, is partly what leads mothers to health crises like post-natal depression and suicide. One in seven mothers in Australia now experience the former; the latter is the leading cause of mothers dying within a year of birth in Australia.

So where to from here?

Limprecht hopes that, in the wake of the Donath scandal, the conversation around women who voice parental regret will incorporate more empathy.

"You should be able to say, 'It's harder than I thought it would be', without [people hearing], 'I don't want my children'," she said.

Indeed, there are signs that the conversation might already be shifting.

As journalist Vanessa Croll recently wrote in The Daily Telegraph about having grown up with an ambivalent parent: "I am grateful for the life I have, but as an adult I still experience a deep-set sense of loss — a loss of something I never truly had."

Topics: children, parenting, women, womens-health, social-sciences, australia, germany