The Mothers Who Regret Their Children

New York Magazine earlier this year published an article featuring women who say they regret having children. The lead sets the stage: “Sooner or later, everyone has to decide whether to give up lazy weekends, disposable income, and overall peace of mind to have a baby instead.” What follows are three stories of young mothers who look back on their pre-baby lives with longing and conclude that motherhood itself is the source of their unhappiness. 

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One regretful mother, a 34-year-old former nonprofit executive from Rhode Island, mourns the loss of her professional identity and the satisfaction of “solving big problems,” contrasting that work with the “tiny” decisions of motherhood. “I’m giving them the best life I can,” she said. “But thinking about life without them, I’d be happier overall.”

In every generation, a handful of people step into public roles that leave an enduring mark on history. A larger, fortunate few will have the privilege of working on something they find personally meaningful or fulfilling. Their legacy will likely not last beyond their lifetimes, and when they retire, other people will step into those roles. The work will continue, with or without them. 

But for most of us, the greatest impact we will ever have on the world will come not through public achievement, but through the formation of the children entrusted to our care: how we educate them, shape their characters, nurture their souls, and form their consciences in the small, daily, seemingly mundane tasks of family life. 

These “tiny” decisions are, in fact, monumentally consequential in the life and destiny of every child, and the impact echoes far beyond a quarterly financial statement or performance evaluation. No one else can fill this role. 

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As Leane VanderPutten, the author of the blog Finer Femininity, put it, “We can change the world within our own families. We do not need heroic deeds, exceptional intelligence or extraordinary talents. Every day, our daily duties, our interactions with our family, our living out the faith in the small ordinary things, will be the thread that weaves the beautiful rug that future generations will be walking upon and building upon.”

The Rhode Island mom also described to New York Magazine how motherhood reshaped her sense of self: “Before motherhood, I was a perfectionist and an overachiever. Afterward, I struggled to regulate my emotions and my kids’.”

No other calling exposes our weaknesses and shortcomings as clearly as motherhood. When we are tempted to say, “I used to be organized, patient, or even-tempered before I had children,” the uncomfortable truth is that we were likely never as strong in those areas as we believed ourselves to be. More often, these were qualities we aspired to or claimed, but never truly owned. It is just that nothing ever really put us to the test or challenged those assertions.

This is not to shame mothers who fall short of their expectations. We all do. The uncovering of our weaknesses should not cause us to despair, because it shows us where we need to grow. Character rarely develops in easy circumstances. Motherhood is a refining fire, where self-deception becomes difficult and grace becomes necessary. It is a daily invitation to confront our sin, die to self, and “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”

Of course, other vocations can expose weakness as well. But few do so with the same intimacy, relentlessness, and inescapability as motherhood. The child’s needs persist independent of our readiness, mood, or sense of competence. 

The second woman profiled in New York Magazine shared a similar lament. She said her “freedom and identity went down the toilet” after giving birth and described turning down a job offer to avoid uprooting her daughter’s life. This, she explains, left her feeling angry and resentful. “This is my life now. I don’t have the freedom to work at any hour, for as many hours as I want, to come home, to just exist. I feel so angry and alone,” she explained. “It’s like my future is over now, with nowhere else to go, while my daughter’s is about to begin. It’s an ugly feeling.” 

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What she mourns is not actually the loss of a future but the loss of the freedom to orient her life entirely around her own preferences and professional goals. Hers is a failure of imagination. C. S. Lewis would probably say that the problem is not that her desires are too strong, but that they are too weak: “We are half-hearted creatures,” he writes in The Weight of Glory, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

This regretful mother wants to settle for smaller satisfactions because she cannot imagine, or does not trust, the greater joy that is right in front of her. Irish actress Jessie Buckley’s Oscar acceptance speech earlier this year offers a striking contrast. Standing at the height of professional success, she celebrated the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart” while telling her husband that she wants to have 20,000 more babies with him. She did not deny her art or diminish her career, but she refused to treat either as the final measure of her worth. The regretful mother looks at motherhood and sees the end of possibility; Buckley looks at it and discovers a depth of meaning she did not know existed. 

Buckley’s experience mirrors that of most mothers, who, according to the Institute for Family Studies, are more likely to have a sense of purpose in their lives. Among women ages 25 to 55, 28 percent of married mothers strongly agree that their lives have a clear sense of purpose. This compares to just 14 percent of married women without children. 

The third profile featured in New York Magazine is the most disturbing. A 27‑year‑old North Carolina mother of a one‑year‑old describes dissatisfaction with her postpartum body and an inability to bond with her developmentally delayed son. She attributes this, at least in part, to her own history: she was placed for adoption three days after birth and never bonded with her biological parents. She concludes by admitting that she feels nothing for her child and is planning to abandon her family, leaving her husband to raise their son alone.

The tragedy here is not simply that this woman is struggling — many mothers do. It is that she appears poised to recreate in her child’s life the very loss that defines her own life.

My church is home to many young families, and scarcely a month passes without the joy of a new birth or a baptism. During worship, I will sometimes notice a young mother in a nearby pew, cradling her infant close. As the child gazes into his mother’s face, there is a look of perfect trust and unguarded, unselfconscious adoration — a love so pure, instinctive, and tender that it often brings me to tears. It feels like witnessing something sacred.

And that is because it is. The bond between a mother and her baby is sacred and designed to be so by our Creator. We are made for attachment, for dependence, for love that precedes achievement and persists despite imperfection. 

We live in a time when young, educated women are more connected than ever, yet more profoundly lonely. They are promised fulfillment through autonomy, pleasure, and professional success, and then left bewildered when these things fail to satisfy. Still, they are dissatisfied when they are asked to relinquish this life for something that promises a deeper joy than any they have known. 

A life ordered entirely around the self is presented as the highest good. But it is, in truth, an adolescent fantasy, one we are meant to outgrow. Yet this vision of “the good life” is relentlessly sold, while the sacrificial love motherhood requires is recast as naïve, oppressive, or tragic — something to be postponed indefinitely, if not rejected outright. But a life that refuses sacrifice cannot sustain meaning. 

What is framed as a loss is often the very ground on which love deepens and purpose is formed. Motherhood does not diminish a woman’s life by asking her to surrender certain goods; it elevates it by inviting her to desire greater ones. What is marketed as liberation too often leaves women emptier than before, while the love that costs us something remains the surest source of meaning we have.

Melissa Henson is the senior policy advisor for media and culture at Concerned Women for America.

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