Four months after my son was born I would make a call to social services. 'I wish to give my son up for adoption' I told the call handler. The response was:
‘Was my son safe and well?’
‘Had I harmed my son?’
‘Had I had thoughts of harming my son?’
‘What had prompted my call?’
My response: 'I don't deserve to keep him. I am not a good mother. I know that there are women who long for a child. I did not and do not possess that longing. He deserves better. The love of proper mother.'
20 years on I still remember that call almost word for word. I remember the feeling of relief to say the words out loud. I remember the way the phone felt in my hand and against my ear as my body convulsed in response to my admissions of failure. I also remember the all-consuming feeling of fear that followed when the call receiver told me that a social worker would attend my home in a couple of days’ time; and they did, on mass, a team of social workers along with an occupational therapist. During what I now realise was an intervention, the primary concern of these professionals appeared to be whether I had thoughts of harming my son. 'No,' I told them almost reflexively and perhaps with hindsight not honestly. But I did, I told them, frequently have thoughts of harming myself; thoughts that arose from a sense of failure, guilt, shame, and self-loathing. It was agreed that day that I was probably suffering from post-natal-depression, a diagnosis that I should have confirmed by my doctor and remedied with medication. In addition, I was prescribed a course of parenting classes and occupational therapy, along with a social workers 'support'. In essence, I could be taught out of my ambivalence. Of course, some 20 years hence, I realise that I had, in fact, invited into my world another level of panopticism, that of experts, keen to shape me into a 'good' mother.
Despite being young, uneducated , and naïve, I clearly (from this recollection) possessed a strong sense of what constituted a good or bad mother, and further still, I had internalised that narrative, the extent to which I perceived myself as having ‘failed’ for not feeling & performing motherhood correctly. Upon my admission of maternal ambivalence, I experienced a paternalistic and disciplinary response, by which professional experts sought to 'fix' me. This reaction sought only to further embed my belief that I was in some way defective or deviant in my own embodied, ambivalent experience. Lastly, I saw the professional experts as an authority to which I must comply and accepted as truth the things they told me about myself and about the right and wrong ways to parent. I forwent my autonomy and I brought into the narrative that I was somehow maladjusted, but that a fix was possible if I adhered to their prescription.
I did everything I was asked to by the professionals that helped me for the next two years before having my second child. I later grew my family to a third child. I loved all three of my children and still do - though today I get to love them quite differently because I have made peace with the fact that I regret motherhood. I'm grateful they exist. I love them. I hope that I have done my very best to be a 'good mother', but it has been a 'job' I have felt enormous resentment and regret over. Watching your children grow is beautiful - profound even. Doing it alone, isolated, exploited, unwaged, invisibilised, undervalued, unsupported...is loathsome. I have spent 20 years longing to switch off - to have a break - to hand the job over to someone else...but that was never an option, or at least it never felt like it to me.
After 20 years I am beginning to have moments of 'me-time'. I'm able to have a few hours with my phone off, not fearful of disaster or simply being ever present to meet thier needs.
I wish maternal regret and ambivalence was discussed more openly so that we could educate women and girls about the other side of motherhood. I wish it was discussed so that we could start to break down ideologies of 'good' and 'bad' mothers - in favour of motherhood as CARE not devotion.
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