I regretted being a mother

“I grew up a bit alone. I come from a family where children were never a priority, which I believe happened to my entire generation. I’ve always heard that children are primarily a nuisance.

When I was waiting for my first bus, I prepared myself for everything they said to me. I started learning a lot about childbirth, breastfeeding and eventually fell in love with everything that motherhood entails. I always heard that children were a problem, but I mentally prepared myself and accepted the idea that my baby would change my life. I felt totally ready to become a mother.

I am a journalist and, even though I was working at the time, I decided to leave everything to devote myself 100% to my family. I built my life around motherhood. My husband had a good job, so we could live on his salary alone. We wanted our children to grow up with a mother present.

The first year met all my expectations. I really enjoyed my newborn son and this first milestone; I felt like I was made for this. The problem is that children change and the challenges are different at each stage. Motherhood surprises you, just like me.E

In an instant, this baby became a child who asked me questions, who questioned me and who had his own identity. My son was now talking and throwing tantrums. It was no longer as simple as nursing him and calming him down. He was now a child with his own needs and emotions, a child who needed to be raised and set limits.

Everything I thought I loved, everything I gave up my career for, I stopped loving as much. I no longer played with dolls, I now had a real child. A child of flesh and blood. “What do I do with all this? thought.

Around this time, my husband lost his job, so I had to reinvent myself. I decided to specialize in breastfeeding, but at that moment it felt like the world was falling apart on me. Because I don’t think being a mom is hard, but being one, and at the same time having to accomplish everything else, is.

They always show us this typical, self-sufficient mother who goes to leave her child in the garden, then works and also has friends and family who love her. Everything is organized, everything is perfect. But it doesn’t really exist, because If you succeed on one side, you will inevitably fail on the other. It makes you feel guilty all the time.

I collapsed. I felt like I couldn’t handle motherhood and that there was no going back. I looked at my boy and even though I loved him with all my heart, it made me crazy and I didn’t want to have him with me anymore. And even though I knew this horrible feeling was there, I felt so guilty that I blocked it. I didn’t allow myself to feel it, let alone talk about it with anyone. I was majoring in breastfeeding and was fascinated by all things parenting. How did Marly, who had even left her career to become a mother, no longer want to be one?

I refused to go to therapy for a long time, but at some point this feeling came over me and I decided to go to a psychoanalyst. I remember vividly the day these words came out of me that I never thought I would say: ‘I regret being a mother. Saying it out loud was very, very painful.

Through therapy – a privilege few Chileans enjoy – I began to realize that it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy motherhood, but that there was something inside me that I needed to fix. How was I going to take care of a child if no one had taken care of me growing up? My subconscious kept thinking that children were a burden, an obstacle, because that’s what I’ve experienced and heard my whole life. I couldn’t help but feel that way, because that’s how I had been taught.

We children love our parents and it’s hard to say that maybe they were wrong, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love you, but rather that they did everything they could with the tools they had at their disposal at that time. There are things they did wonderfully that need to be repeated, and others they didn’t do. Honoring education and honoring our ancestors is also that: improving and not repeating their models.

I had to learn to understand childhood from another place and understand that although your children prevent you from doing certain things, they are compatible with many others. And while you won’t be able to accomplish everything, a balance can be achieved.

I also understood that my son was a human being different from me, a human being who was not a doll that I was going to hold in my arms, but a person with his own path, and that my task was to guide and accompany him. him. I had centered my identity as a mother around breastfeeding and once that passed, I felt empty. I had to understand that being a mother is much more than that.

When I realized what motherhood really entailed, I started studying a degree in children’s mental health. I learned and was very surprised, so I decided to put it all – along with the tools I had received in therapy – into a book. This is how he was born Bad boy, an invitation to get up without a backpack and without bosses. An invitation to connect with your child and heal your own wounds. Because you are not a bad mother and your son is not a bad child. Putting all of this information and everything I was feeling into words was healing and therapeutic, because I had never expressed it before.

For anyone who feels identified with this story, I can only tell you that yes, it is difficult, and even more so in a world that gives us few tools, but you won’t always feel that way. Don’t label yourself. Don’t put on this backpack of “I’m the one who regretted being a mother”, because having had this feeling does not define you and will never define you. Our children are not babies, nor are they capricious children or rebellious adolescents. Our children are beings in transformation, beings that we do not yet fully know.