“I Regret Having Children”

by Ms Anon.

Though very few will admit it because it’s socially a taboo to do so (hence my anonymity), but having children is not one of the best things about my life.

I know that motherhood is supposed to be one of the pinnacles of a woman’s life, but I am yet to meet that one woman who seems happier after having children.

Many will tell me they are happy, or that they don’t regret their choices, and that may be true. But happier than before they had kids? I don’t think so.

From the outside looking in, they don’t seem so to me. Even my friends who struggled with infertility are battling to find joy after having kids.

As a mother myself, I can tell you that it is true what they say — now that I have them, I can’t imagine my world without them, and if they are ever to be taken away from me, it would be the end of my life as far as I’m concerned.

However, if they had never been born, I wouldn’t have known the difference, and I would have had at least as happy a life without them, and probably more.

I have come to believe strongly that having children is one of the worst mistakes that a woman can make with her life.

No matter how educated or financially successful she is, it puts her in a position of abject vulnerability and dependency on her children’s father.

If you’re lucky and wise enough to make a mature selection of a life partner, then that man will really turn out to be everything you hoped and dreamed he would be. But if you end up being one of the 40-50% of partnered couples who eventually split, nothing can shield you from the unmitigated horror and soul-crushing stress of having to surrender your children part-time to a man who is unkind, or careless with your children’s safety.

Or one that brings questionable people into his home and around your children.

My ex-husband lost our 3-year-old at an amusement park and only found her when a total stranger found her wandering around alone and brought her to the visitor’s center.

Our baby got a second-degree sunburn because he didn’t think he needed to put sunscreen on her on a cloudy day.

In the emergency room with the baby, the doctor considered filing a report against him with child protective services.

But as she learned, until and unless my ex-husband does something to permanently maim or kill one of the children, there is literally nothing anyone can legally do about it.

I still have to hand my kids over to him every other weekend, and say a little prayer that they come back to me in one piece.

And if your ex-husband is the type that now brings someone into his home and around your children whom you find unsavory in some way, too bad.

Unless you can prove they are harming your child in some way, there is nothing you can do to change it, and that burden of proof is mighty heavy I assure you.

Your children will just have to be subjected for half of their lives to people whose influence you find unpleasant, and you will just have to hope that your prayers are enough to set them on the right course in life.

And if, like the majority of women, you earn less money than your partner did, then nothing compares to the joy of having to depend financially on a man who left you for another woman when you were six months pregnant with his third child, unemployed because you were a stay-at-home mom, and unemployable because you were pregnant.

Having to grovel to that same man for every penny you get to feed your children is the surest way to grind your self-esteem even further into the dirt.

And then of course, as a single mother, you are invisible to any prospective future partners; devalued and discarded by society and blamed for all of its ills.

You are dismissed as bitter, damaged goods with too much baggage by men who blame you for being wary after all of the experiences outlined above, and passed over in favor of younger women who will smile and nod and laugh at everything they say and look pretty on their arm.

So could I, for one, have had a happier life without my children?

If I had never had them, the answer is a resounding “Hell yes!”

Perhaps that is what regret looks like.