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Carmen loves her 10 year-old son, but if she could turn back the clock she says she would never have become a mum.
“Motherhood has taken my health, my time, my money, my strength, and my body,” she says. “The price is too high, and the cost is forever.”
The teacher, in her 40s, is part of a hidden community of women who regret becoming mothers.
This regret is rarely voiced out loud. The women who contacted me would only talk about how they feel on the condition of anonymity, for fear of harsh judgement and because their families don’t know.
Carmen tentatively put her regret into words on a general parenting forum a few years ago and says while some people were empathetic, others reacted as if she was “a monster”.
The extreme pressure and sacrifice that motherhood can involve is put under the spotlight in the film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which is up for an Oscar tomorrow night.
Actress Rose Byrne gives a visceral portrayal of a burnt out mother who feels alone in her struggle to meet the needs of her daughter and hold up the scaffolding of family life.
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Rose Byrne plays Linda, a mum unravelling under stress while trying to care for her chronically ill daughter
Carmen can identify with the themes of the film. “Motherhood is an endless job that you do even when you don’t want to, because a little person depends on you,” she says. “It feels like a trap you can’t escape.”
She is unflinchingly frank about how “devastating” she finds being a mother. But there is a palpable brightness in her voice when I ask about her son, Teo, whose name we have changed.
“Teo has nothing to do with my regret, he’s a fantastic, adorable boy and I love him fiercely,” Carmen says. “I’d give my life for him without a doubt. He’s kind, easy-going, and a brilliant student.”
Psychotherapist Anna Mathur says “often when women feel safe enough to talk about maternal regret what comes up isn’t a lack of love, but a sense of isolation, exhaustion, or lost identity.”
For Carmen, a self-described perfectionist, it’s the responsibility to raise “a good citizen, a good and happy person” she finds heavy to shoulder.
Carmen promised herself Teo would never feel like she did growing up. She comes from a poor and dysfunctional background, “where violence was the primary language” and she never felt loved.
At first, being a mother was “a joy”, she says. Teo was a good sleeper and she enjoyed the days spent caring for her baby son while on maternity leave.
But things changed when her son began to display serious developmental delays and “every simple moment turned into observation and concern,” says Carmen.
“I felt so guilty,” she says, “and I worried that his life would become a fight.”
Ultimately Teo was not diagnosed with the conditions Carmen feared and is now doing well, but she says the stress and constant worry caused her to develop an autoimmune disease.
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To connect maternal regret with unloving and neglectful parenting is a careless assumption, according to Israeli sociologist Orna Donath, author of Regretting Motherhood: A Study.
Donath interviewed 23 mothers, each of whom emphasised the difference between their feelings of regretting motherhood and how they felt towards their
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