I need you to hold two things at the same time, because the world has never been good at that.
The first thing: I loved my children with everything I had. Not in the abstract, distant way. In the wake-up-at-3am, hold-them-while-they-cry, give-up-your-Saturday, drive-eight-hours, never-stop-worrying way. The kind of love that restructures your entire nervous system around another person’s wellbeing. That love was real. It was the most real thing I’ve ever felt.
The second thing: I spent forty years wondering who I would have been if I hadn’t become a mother at 27.
Both of those things are true. And for most of my life, I wasn’t allowed to say the second one out loud.
The feeling nobody names
Psychologists call it maternal ambivalence — the coexistence of loving and difficult feelings that all parents, but particularly mothers, experience toward their children and their role as caregivers.
Research published in Sex Roles examining 499 mothers found that the dominant “good mother” discourse prescribes that mothers be devoted, loving, and enjoying of caregiving at all times. That expectation makes it nearly impossible for mothers to navigate their negative and ambivalent feelings without self-judgment and shame. The study found that unmanageable maternal ambivalence was directly associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety, and that these effects were mediated by increased shame.
In other words: it’s not the ambivalence that harms you. It’s the inability to express it. The shame of feeling something you’ve been told you’re not supposed to feel.
I spent decades in that shame. Smiling at school pick-ups while something unnamed sat in my chest. Saying “I wouldn’t change a thing” at dinner parties while a quieter voice inside said: wouldn’t you, though?
The self that got set aside
Qualitative research on maternal ambivalence found that women who experienced these feelings reported a loss of independence, relationships, and confidence when they became mothers. Taken together, these losses felt like a loss of self. The researchers described it as a process where the pre-mothering identity — the person who had interests, ambitions, autonomy, and a relationship with herself — was gradually subsumed by the role.
That’s what happened to me. Not violently. Not overnight. But steadily, over years, like a tide that comes in so slowly you don’t notice until you’re underwater.
I had been someone before I became a mother. I had interests I was pursuing, questions I was asking, a sense of direction that was mine. And then I had children, and the direction became theirs. Not because anyone forced me. Not because I was unhappy. But because the role of motherhood, at least in the era and culture I lived in, didn’t leave room for both.
You couldn’t be a devoted mother and also be a person with unresolved ambitions. You had to choose. Or more accurately, you had to pretend you’d already chosen, and that the choice was easy, and that you never looked back.
I looked back. Every day. Quietly. Guiltily. For forty years.
The foreclosure problem
Developmental psychologist James Marcia described a concept called identity foreclosure — committing to a role or identity without first exploring alternatives.
Research examining identity statuses found that foreclosure is associated with high self-worth on the surface but also with rigidity, closed-mindedness, and difficulty adapting when life circumstances change. Individuals who foreclosed on an identity early — who committed without exploring — appeared stable and confident from the outside. But the commitments didn’t always reflect their personal desires or beliefs, which could lead to internal conflicts later in life.
That’s what early parenthood did for me. It foreclosed my identity before I’d finished exploring it. I became “mother” before I’d finished becoming “me.” And because the role came with so much love, so much meaning, so much social approval, I didn’t have the language to say that something was also missing.
The research notes that when disequilibrium occurs in the lives of people in foreclosure — when something disrupts the identity they adopted without question — the effects can be especially devastating. Because the identity was never truly examined, it can’t be flexibly adapted. It can only be defended or mourned.
At 73, I’m mourning. Not my children. Never my children. But the exploration I never did. The person I might have been if I’d had ten more years before the role arrived.
What I’m not saying
I need to be very clear about what this is and what it isn’t.
This is not regret about having children. This is not a wish that they didn’t exist. If someone handed me a time machine, I would make the same choice — not because it was perfect, but because they are the best thing in my life and I cannot imagine a version of myself that doesn’t include them.
But I can imagine a version of myself that also included the other things. The career I set aside. The travel I postponed until it was too late. The creative work I started in my twenties and quietly abandoned in my thirties because there wasn’t enough of me to go around.
The grief isn’t about them. It’s about me. The version of me that existed in possibility and never made it into reality.
Why it took until 73
Because the culture doesn’t allow this conversation.
Mothers who express ambivalence about motherhood are treated as defective. Ungrateful. Dangerous. The “good mother” mythology demands complete, uncomplicated devotion. Any deviation from that is read as a failure of love rather than a complexity of identity.
So I performed wholeness for four decades. I said “my kids are my everything” and meant it — while also knowing that “everything” had come at a cost that I was never permitted to name.
At 73, the children are grown. The performance is no longer required. And the silence has become more painful than the shame of speaking.
What I want younger parents to hear
You can love your children completely and still grieve the parts of yourself that motherhood or fatherhood displaced. Those two feelings are not in conflict. They coexist, messily, in the same heart, in the same afternoon, sometimes in the same breath.
The research on maternal ambivalence found that over time, women who acknowledged their ambivalent feelings experienced a reemergence of self. They didn’t stop being mothers. They started also being themselves again. The researchers described it as a process of reconnection — not choosing between the self and the role, but finding a way to hold both.
I wish I’d done that earlier. I wish someone had told me at 30 that feeling two things at once wasn’t betrayal. That missing the person I was before didn’t mean I loved the people I’d created any less.
Nobody told me. So I’m telling you.
You are allowed to be a parent and a person. You are allowed to love your children and mourn your unlived lives. You are allowed to say “this is the best thing I’ve ever done” and “this cost me something I can never get back” in the same sentence.
Because both are true. And the sooner you say them out loud, the sooner you stop performing a wholeness you don’t feel and start living the complicated, beautiful, heartbreaking reality of a life that contains more than one story.
I’m 73 and I’m finally telling mine.
