Alyssa Gibson’s Reviews > Regretting Motherhood > Status Update

“The reluctance to have children is not rooted in the thought that it would be hard to take care of them. It’s plain reluctance.”

“Although a child and new love had been born, something else within the new mothers I heard from had passed away. And the experience was made harder, because the women were -on some level- underneath their joy in their babies, quietly in mourning for some part of their earlier selves”

Hindsight is really a double edged sword here. Obviously you can’t go back. But the amount of people lamenting that they chose the wrong partner or can’t cope with the workload isn’t exactly something you can know beforehand

I think if you’re in the middle of it and yearning for your previous life because of being tired or not having free time etc, that’s understandable and I wouldn’t consider that regretting motherhood as a whole. I think the regret stems from an innate sense of wrongness or doing this to appease others. It does have to be your choice to some degree, otherwise it’s disastrous.

This is a very niche group to do a sample on and I think that really impacts my view of their regret. I think their culture and religious beliefs places more pressure on women to have children that leads to more regret, but if you’re in a culture that grants women agency then I think there would be far less regret.

“Because without women’s unpaid labor as mothers and homemakers, the system would fall apart. While stressing that this system is natural, and therefore eternal, that it makes the world a better places, and that it benefits women themselves as well as their children.”

“Today I am in my mid-thirties, and I still do not hear my biological clock tick. Neither my body nor my psyche are telling me that my time has come, but only society. And society does it permanently. And increasingly louder.”

Mother - “A moral figure who not only pays her debt to nature by creating life, but also one who protects and fosters it”