'I was told I was selfish and shouldn't have had kids.' Why we need to stop gaslighting mums.

Recently I saw a post on Instagram by my favourite poet Kate Baer. I love Kate’s poetry. She writes about motherhood and womanhood, and the everyday brutality and beauty of life. 

The first tile of the Instagram post was an image of a DM she’d received from someone she called Greg. Greg had written to Kate to tell her to stop moaning about motherhood, and said if she didn’t want children, she shouldn’t have had them, declaring parenthood is fun, and she should learn to enjoy it.

Kate’s response was perfect. 

She turned Greg’s words into an erasure poem that explored the profound truth of the simultaneous depth of love she feels for her children and the persistent loss of self that is the motherhood experience for so many. 

Watch: Be a good mum with Laura Byrne. Post continues below. 

A few days before I saw Kate’s post, I’d seen an Instagram video from content creator and mum, Claire Warren. It’s called ‘If we gaslit everyone the way we gaslight mums’. It features a bunch of different characters (all played by Claire) having conversations about the good and bad parts of various life tasks - driving, starting a business and working. The driver/business owner/worker tells a story about how they’re frustrated/stressed/tired, and the person listening shuts down any negativity straight away, gaslighting them, and saying something to the effect of ‘well, if you didn’t want to deal with traffic/work really hard/be busy, you should never have driven/started a business/got a job’. 

Oh goodness, did I feel seen.

Recently someone close to me asked how I was, and when I said I was exhausted (because I was looking after a house full of sick family members) they responded by telling me that I should’ve had my children when I was younger, then I wouldn’t be so tired.  

Another time I expressed frustration to a friend about how every time I clean the house it feels like within an hour the kids have messed it up again. They replied by telling me that this is what kids do and I either needed to clean it up again myself or ‘get over it’. 

And when I was pregnant with my second child a very casual acquaintance asked how my pregnancy was going and I explained that I really didn’t enjoy being pregnant (but my baby was much longed for), and they told me that I should feel lucky that I could have children and stop complaining.  

Oh, and I can’t count the number of times I have written honest pieces about pregnancy and motherhood and the impact on my body, lifestyle, career, marriage and friendships, to be met with a plethora of comments saying ‘me too, I have had this too’, but also a litany of comments calling me selfish, and spoiled and whinging, and I shouldn’t have had kids if I didn’t want these things to happen.  

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And recently I was talking with a friend who has a longed-for toddler. This friend had a long, expensive, painful, and arduous road to pregnancy and motherhood. Having her daughter was the joy of her life. She told me she’s struggling, she’s worn out, she is missing her job, her body is still affected from a difficult birth, and sometimes she feels really frustrated with her daughter. 

I told her this was all completely normal, that I had felt all this too, and she burst into sobbing tears of relief. She’d recently shared these raw feelings with another friend who had responded with ‘well you really wanted this’, and she’d felt guilt and shame that she was struggling with something she had so desperately desired.

Psychology Today defines gaslighting as “an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves”. 

Hmm. Sound familiar.

You see, I do feel incredibly lucky to have children. I love being their mother. I tell my kids daily (hourly on the weekends) how much I love and adore them. They know that they are the gifts of my life, that the best thing I’ve ever done is to become their Mum, that I would not give them up for the world.

And.

Motherhood is the hardest thing I have ever done. It is constant and relentless. It exhausts me in a way I’ve never known before. It devastates me and scares me and destroys me. At different points it has taken my time, my body, my money, my career, and my ambition, it has challenged my relationship to breaking point, it has challenged my sense of self so intensely that I had to start from scratch and rebuild it all again. 

And. 

I would do all of that again in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat. 

Writer Cate Gilpin with her son. Image: Supplied.

But denying the truth of motherhood is a denial of my whole existence, motherhood impacts every corner of my life, every second of every day is infused with my role as a mother. 

Something can be a blessing and still be hard, someone can be the love of your life and still annoy you. We seem to understand this in every other context, but we will not tolerate these complex feelings in mothers. 

I believe this is because when mothers share these truths; they reveal the inequality in the way we live. The lack of support, the loss of community, the high cost of living, the unpaid labour, the constant juggling–nobody wants to hear about it, they blame mothers and call it an individual failing rather than a societal one.

I live in a very equal household. My partner is literally my partner, we are partners in our life together, with child-rearing and money and housework. But it was still my body that grew our children and fed them. It was my body they clung to sleeping in the carrier for months on end, it was my body that produced pregnancy hormones and created the smells they bonded with deeply. And because of all this bodily change, and because my husband earns more money than me, it was me that stayed home with the children for the first many months. Also, in my household, my husband has a chronic illness which means when he has a flare-up he is not as available to the children as I am. And because of this our children still view me as the default parent.  

This is in many ways a blessing, of course it is. But it is also a burden. And I want to be allowed to say that without being shamed and shut down.

And even in this equal partnership I still experience the system of gendered structural inequality that we swim in. Where the pressure on women and mothers to look, behave and conform is embedded within me, and if I don’t or can’t conform, I’m widely judged to be flawed and broken.

 This doesn’t even scratch the surface of what life is like for women who are in deeply unequal relationships, or solo mothers, where it’s not just an unequal system they live in, but an unequal day-to-day life.

I understand this article won’t solve this issue, and I also understand that some people will gaslight me for writing this, I’m learning quickly to never read the comments. 

I hope though that this article will help this conversation grow. Motherhood is exquisite suffering. It is loving our children deeply while being incredibly frustrated by them, being terrified for them and knowing we must let them go, and it is juggling tens of daily tasks both big and small, and putting ourselves last over and over and over again. 

So rather than shutting these conversations down, let’s commune in this, 'truth-tell' the beauty and the pain, and let’s support mothers, and hopefully make it just a little easier for mothers in the future.

Feature Image: Supplied.