Maternal Regret: Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections

By Demeter Press

This collection considers how maternal regret, as it is conveyed in remorse, resentment, dissatisfaction, and disappointment, troubles the assumptions and mandates of normative motherhood and how it is explored and critiqued in creative non-fiction, film, literature, and social media. Maternal regret is also examined in relation to the estrangement of mother and child and the remorse and grief felt by both mothers and children caused by the abandonment of mother or child. Finally, the collection explores how regret opens the space for maternal erudition, enlightenment, and evolution; and makes possible maternal empowerment. The book is organized by way of these three sections: the first “Resistances” examines how maternal regret as conveyed in remorse, disillusionment, and resentment counters and corrects normative motherhood, the second, “Renunciations” looks at how regret is experienced in mother-child abandonment, and the third, “Reflections” explores how regret may be an opportunity for maternal knowledge and power. Overall, the collection serves to debunk and destroy the final taboo of normative motherhood that of maternal regret.. Mothers voicing regret, as journalist Kingston writes, “signals a large groundswell of maternal reckoning, [one that] has been compared to the #MeToo campaign.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772583977

Book preview

Maternal Regret

Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections

Edited by Andrea O’Reilly

Maternal Regret

Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections

Edited by Andrea O’Reilly

Copyright © 2022 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Maternal regret : resistances, renunciations, and reflections / edited by Andrea O’Reilly.

Names: O’Reilly, Andrea, 1961- editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20210363592 | ISBN 9781772583793 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Regret. | LCSH: Mothers. | LCSH: Motherhood. | LCSH: Mothers—Psychology. | LCSH: Motherhood—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC HQ759 .M38 2022 | DDC 155.6/463—dc23

Contents

Introduction

Maternal Regret: Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections

Andrea O’Reilly

Section I

Resistances

the alarm

Tracy Royce

1.

Out of Bounds: Maternal Regret and the Reframing of Normative Motherhood

Andrea O’Reilly

2.

I Know I Am Not Supposed to Say These Things. It Is Very Not Maternal of Me: Confessional Rhetoric of Maternal Resentment

Lorin Basden Arnold

3.

Reimagining What Might Have Been: A Comparative Analysis of Abortion and Maternal Regret

Alesha E. Doan and J. Shoshanna Ehrlich

4.

Shocking Readers and Shaking Taboos: Maternal Body and Affects in Itō Hiromi’s Work

Juliana Buriticá Alzate

5.

It’s Not Enough for Me: Maternal Regret in HBO’s Big Little Lies

Rachel Williamson

6.

Yes, My First and Only: Dealing with Assumptions of Regret about Family Size

Karla Knutson

Section II

Renunciations

7.

The Children Leave: Maternal Abandonment in Two Alice Munro Stories

Laurie Kruk

8.

Love and Longing Buried under Silence and Strife

Jane Turo

9.

My Mother’s Story

Kanchan Tripathi

Section III

Reflections

Her Response (To Frost’s Question)

Victoria Bailey

10.

Pernicious Narratives of Maternal Regret: Adoption and Disability Chronicles That Coarsen and Corrupt Their Readers

Martha Satz

11.

Time Machine

Jessica Jennrich

12.

From Mourning to Greeting: The Predicament and Possibilities of Maternal Regret

BettyAnn Martin and Michelann Parr

13.

Minjinaweziwin: Anishinaabeg Women’s Teachings on Maternal Regret

Renee E. Mazinegiizhigoo-kwe Bedard

14.

(How) Can We Speak of This? Opening into the Dark Spaces of Maternal Regret, Choice, and the Unknowable

May Friedman and Jacqui Gingras

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Maternal Regret: Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections

Andrea O’Reilly

Sarah Treleaven’s Marie Claire magazine article Inside the Growing Movement of Women Who Wish They’d Never Had Kids opens with this assertion: It’s unthinkable and it’s definitely unspeak-able, but women all over the world are coming forward to say it: I regret having children. Although maternal regret remains, in Kingston’s words, a huge taboo, she argues that a growing number of mothers are confessing that they wish they never had children. The movement began, Treleaven argues, in 2008 with the publication of Corinne Maier’s No Kids: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children, and it gained momen-tum in 2013, with the publication of Isabella Dutton’s article ‘The Mother Who Says Having These Two Children Is the Biggest Regret of Her Life" in the Daily Mail. The author, who was fifty-seven with two adult children when she wrote the article, states that when her first born son was five-days old, a realization hit me like a physical blow: having a child had been the biggest mistake of my life (Dutton). She writes that she would have been happier not having children, that she felt oppressed by [her] constant responsibility for them, and that she hated the idea of motherhood. She describes her children as parasitical: Both my children would continue to take from me and [give] nothing meaningful back in return. She did everything a good mother is supposed to and is confident that her children would agree that they always felt secure and loved. Dutton concludes by saying: I would cut off my right arm if my children needed it … and that, maybe is the paradox. I am a conscientious and caring parent—yet perhaps I would have resented my children less had I not been.

However, by 2018, writers such as Dutton and Maier were no longer regarded, in the words of Kingston, as freakish outliers; parental regret or the last parenting taboo as it is dubbed in the media is now being covered by everyone. Indeed, today the controversial topic of maternal regret is now being discussed in chat rooms across the Inter-net as well as in various Facebook communities, including the nine-thousand-member Facebook group called I Regret Having Children as well as a Facebook community founded by Canadian mother Lauren Byrne with 2,600 members. However, most mothers who admit to maternal regret do so in private and in closed social media forums or in anonymity. All the mothers interviewed for the Marie Claire article requested anonymity because they were deeply concerned about both stigma and the potential impact of their statements on their children (Treleaven). Mothers who do publicly convey maternal regret are regarded as de facto bad mothers and are deemed unnatural and abusive. One reader of Dutton’s column called her an utterly mis-erable, cold-hearted and selfish woman (Dutton) and Orna Donath who authored a book on maternal regret has been savaged for her research. One critic suggested she be burned alive (Kingston). Society’s decisive discomfort with regretful mothers, Treleaven argues, gets at a larger discomfort with women overall—that we won’t do our fundamental jobs. More pointedly, Kingston contends that maternal regret is an affront to the sanctity of motherhood and the entrenched belief that maternal instinct is innate and unconditional. Indeed, maternal regret is an affront to patriarchal motherhood precisely because it dislodges its bedrock mandates of essentialization, naturalization, and idealization—the assumptions that women desire motherhood, that maternal ability is innate to all mothers, and that mothers find purpose and joy in mothering.

To date, there has been only one scholarly book published on the topic of maternal regret: Donath’s 2017 book Regretting Motherhood: A Study. Donath’s book is based on interviews with Israeli women and seeks to make room for the unspoken topic of maternal regret (xvii). Donath argues that when maternal regret or ambivalence is considered, the discussion is limited to the early years of mothering when women transition to motherhood. This approach suggests that any maternal ambivalence or regret experienced by mothers is temporary and will recede as mothers adjust to motherhood. There has been little discussion on the experiences of mothers with older children and certainly none that focuses on maternal regret in mothers’ retrospective accounts of raising children. Indeed, as Donath remarks, It seems that even in feminist theorization about the topic, there is no room for re-evaluation let alone regret (xv). Whereas Donath’s book is a study of mothers who regret motherhood, this book seeks to enrich, enlarge, and expand upon Donath’s study by looking at the larger concept of maternal regret across diverse themes, perspectives, and genres. This collection considers how maternal regret—as it is conveyed in remorse, resentment, dissatisfaction, and disappointment—troubles the assumptions and mandates of normative motherhood and how it is explored and critiqued in creative nonfiction, film, literature, and social media. In this collection, maternal regret is also examined in relation to the estrangement of mother and child and the remorse and grief felt by both mothers and children caused by the abandonment of mother or child. Finally, the collection explores how regret opens the space for maternal erudition, enlightenment, and evolution as well as makes possible maternal empowerment. The book is organized in three sections. The first, Resistances, examines how maternal regret as conveyed in remorse, disillusionment, and resentment counters and corrects normative motherhood. The second. Renunciations, looks at how regret is experienced in mother-child abandonment, and the third, Reflections, explores how regret may be an opportunity for maternal knowledge and power.

In the opening chapter of the first section, ‘Out of Bounds’: Maternal Regret and the Reframing of Normative Motherhood, I explore how the emergence of the topic of maternal regret has given rise to a reframing of contemporary mothering to offer a formidable critique of, and corrective to, normative motherhood. It first examines how maternal regret exposes the normative scripts and the oppressive conditions of patriarchal motherhood and then goes on to consider how maternal regret subverts and disrupts normative motherhood and how maternal regret debunks the dictates of patriarchal motherhood and enacts authentic mothering. Finally, the chapter examines how maternal regret defies and disrupts the mandate of compulsory motherhood.

Lorin Basden Arnold’s chapter ‘I Know I Am Not Supposed to Say These Things. It Is Very Not Maternal of Me’: Confessional Rhetoric of Maternal Resentment examines the ways in which mothers discuss maternal resentment in online venues as well as the ramifications of that rhetorical frame. She argues that through the seven prominent themes that are present in this maternal resentment discourse, we can see confessional rhetoric that provides both an admission of transgression as well as a vehicle for redemption. Her analysis supports our understanding of how mothers position their transgressive behaviours and how that discourse may function for mothers as both rhetors and readers.

In their chapter ‘Reimagining What Might Have Been’: A Com-parative Analysis of Abortion and Maternal Regret, Alesha E. Doan and J. Shoshanna Ehrlich engage in a comparative study of abortion and maternal regret narratives. They begin by situating these narratives in a brief history, tracing the origins of each. Using content analysis, they compare publicly available regret narratives from the antiabortion website Silent No More Awareness Campaign and from the Facebook group I Regret Having Children. Twenty-four subthemes emerged from the motherhood regret narratives and nineteen from the abortion regret ones. These subthemes coalesced into two broad themes: diminished wellbeing and loss. Across both sets of narratives, women express a longing for a reimagined life, unburdened by their reproductive decision. In the conclusion, they argue that although the antiabortion movement has weaponized abortion regret narratives for political gain, the reproductive rights movement has missed an opportunity to use maternal regret narratives to combat hegemonic ideals of motherhood and to challenge the essentialized construction of patriarchal mother-hood.

Ideals of motherly love as natural do not fit the actual lived exper-iences of motherhood. That is to say, motherhood as an institution, as a gender expectation, and as a norm and role do not fit the variety of experiences of motherhood. In her chapter Shocking Readers and Shaking Taboos: Maternal Body and Affects in Itō Hiromi’s Work, Juliana Buriticá Alzate argues that a large number of Japanese authors, including Itō herself, have written texts that resist these ideals. The chapter first presents an overview of the representations of motherhood in Japanese literature as a background to Itō’s work and then introduces a selection of Ito’s works that can be considered attempts to free more maternal bodies. It concludes by discussing the ways in which Itō’s work has shaped current understandings of mothering from a feminist perspective.

In "‘It’s Not Enough for Me’: Maternal Regret in HBO’s Big Little Lies, Rachel Williamson analyses the show’s representation of mothers who may initially appear to have it all" but who, in reality, experience maternity as a source of shameful disappointment and regret. Although the characters’ experiences of regret vary, it is not by accident that many of the show’s mothers can be seen grappling with this cultural taboo, thus suggesting it is perhaps a far more common experience than its almost total absence in representational form and discourse would otherwise imply. However, although the appearance of these dissatisfied, unhappy mothers is potentially transgressive and startling, the chapter argues that the show is simultaneously unable to fully escape the ideologies of intensive mothering and neoliberalism, which prop up idealized maternity and render maternal regret abject and unspeakable. As such, although maternal regret is, to some extent, normalized by Big Little Lies, it is also paradoxically positioned as the purview of the so-called bad mother, thereby highlighting just how controversial and challenging maternal regret remains to longstanding, conventional understandings of maternity.

The final chapter of the section, ‘Yes, My First and Only’: Dealing with Assumptions of Regret about Family Size by Karla Knutson, argues that mothers who choose to have only one child, or who appear to have chosen only one child, are viewed by a pronatalist American culture as selfish. Knutson suggests that the rhetoric surrounding only children and their mothers employs the spectre of maternal regret as a threat, leading mothers who may not desire more than one child to believe that this family structure is somehow harmful to their child, to them, and to their family. The chapter analyzes how this pronatalist threat of potential regret is expressed in studies of the mothers of only children, of family size, and of maternal regret. It also suggests strategies for resisting this damaging rhetoric by refuting stereotypes of only children and their mothers by employing the frameworks of matricentric feminism and feminist parenting.

The second section of the book, Renunciations, opens with Laurie Kruk’s chapter The Children Leave: Maternal Abandonment in Two Alice Munro Stories’ In each story, the mature mother faces estrange-ment from, and abandonment by an adult child, a daughter, and a son. As each mother struggles to adjust, Kruk argues that she has to confront the spectre of the bad mother in herself and regrets how her parenting career has turned out. Motherhood is, thus, deidealized, as ambivalence takes its place. In these two disturbing stories, Kruk argues, Munro disrupts the daughter-centric voice of much contemp-orary feminist criticism and invites us to witness the mother’s trauma from her children’s abandonment.

The estrangement of mother and child is likewise a theme in Jane Turo’s creative nonfiction piece Love and Longing Buried under Silence and Strife. The chapter is a recollection written under a weight of grief and longing for the child whom this mother lovingly brought up in a foreign culture that prioritized different values and interactions. In this patriarchal culture, the mother was left without moral support. Even as she was loved, her husband failed to support her efforts to control her powerfully feisty daughter. Her in-laws slandered her, and family frictions shattered their early bliss. Holding her mother responsible for the conflicts in her upbringing, the mother remains separated from her beloved daughter, even as she appears to have succeeded in her mother’s western culture.

The final chapter of the section, My Mother’s Story by Kanchan Tripathi, tells the story of her mother—an Indian woman, immigrant, (former) wife, singer, person living with disability, and survivor of domestic violence—and the loss of a child, who is on a path to self-enlightenment. The author aims to tell her mother’s experience of maternal regret as her daughter—the child her mother regrets having. The stories told in this creative nonfiction piece are a collection and recollection of memories, past journal entries, voice messages, and conversations between the author, her sister, mother, and family.

Martha Satz’s chapter, Pernicious Narratives of Maternal Regret: Adoption and Disability Chronicles That Coarsen and Corrupt Their Readers, opens the third section, Reflections. The chapter considers two works, one a work of fiction and the other a memoir, which explore both maternal regret and more sweeping philosophical issues. Both works explore the lives of children whom the mother deems unaccept-able and whose nurturing threatens the wellbeing of other healthy children within the family. Their portrayal raises the spectre of some children’s problem being so intransigent that they are beyond the hope of remediation and, in fact, suggests that they not merit the ethical claims of other human beings. Satz boldly argues that these narratives are philosophically harmful to their readers, coarsening their moral thinking.

Jessica Jennrich’s creative nonfiction chapter, Time Machine, finds the author pondering the question of what advice she might have given her twenty-year-old self one winter night as she plays a game with her children. During which, the author revisits the violence of the twenty-year marriage she had finally ended and ponders its effects on her children. In this chapter, Jennrich ruminates on regret and in doing so takes the reader on a jagged tour of the silent brutality that made up much of her life.

In From Mourning to Greeting: The Predicament and Possibilities of Maternal Regret, BettyAnn Martin and Michelann Parr explore the threshold between experience and research as they explore regret. Throughout their exploration, they understand regret as the inner work of memory, as unmet societal and cultural expectations that linger in our minds, as well as a space for healing and resonance. In the end, they invite mothers of the world to join them in their quest to under-stand regret as a dwelling place of introspection and mourning, a place of greeting, and a threshold to meet possibility with empathy for others, for children, for mothers, and for themselves

In Anishinaabeg cultural traditions, as Renee E. Mazinegiizhigoo-kwe Bedard explains in her chapter, Minjinaweziwin: Anishinaabeg Women’s Teachings on Maternal Regret, maternal regret is considered a natural part of Anishinaabeg life. The chapter shares Anishinaabeg teachings on the origin and contexts of maternal regret through an Anishinaabeg women’s centered paradigm. The chapter examines the Anishinaabemowin term minjinaweziwin as an intellectual anchor for understanding Anishinaabe-kwewag (Anishinaabeg women) ethics, philosophies, and cosmological teachings about the complex nature of maternal regret within the lives of women. It also explores how Anishinaabeg beliefs of maternal regret are recognized as a natural state of being and as a site of both Indigenous women’s agency and self-governance. The chapter offers a traditional sacred story as the origin of the knowledge the author carries and how she contextualizes that sacred knowledge as instructions related to the ways Anishinaabeg women view, embody and utilize the embedded teachings to navigate contemporary maternal realities. The chapter concludes with a poem by the author to convey her own positionality on maternal regret as an Anishinaabe-kwe (Anishinaabe woman).

The section’s final chapter ‘(How) Can We Speak of This?’ Opening into the Dark Spaces of Maternal Regret, Choice, and the Unknowable by May Friedman and Jacqui Gingras, asks what choices would they make if we were not worried about risk and accountability. How do these questions fit into a broader politic of gendered, raced, classed, and heteronormative expectations? Put differently, why do we do what we do and how do we know what we know as mothers, scholars, and queer ciswomen, and how do these truths factor into discussions of maternal regret? Through dialogue, and collective auto/biography, the authors call to each other with an ethic of care while considering the epi-stemology of choice: What decisions have led them to live as mothers in the present day, and what complications and considerations have brought them to be the specific mothers they have come to be? As mother-scholars from working-class roots, they seek to interrogate the complexities of both maternity and regret, leaning into the messiness of their varying subject positions, and they consider the intersectional implications of their lived experiences through queerness, racialization, class, and beyond. In the context of an iterative reflexive script, the chapter aims to foreground both their individual experiences and the complicated truths that live in the space between their words as they come together to expose this hidden and painful terrain.

In its resistances, renunciations, and reflections, this collection explores maternal regret beyond the regret of motherhood to show how it may be both a critique of the assumptions and expectations of normative motherhood as well as a lament when mothering does not go as planned. And perhaps paradoxically, regret—as it bespeaks resentment and rage and marks mourning and loss—also makes possible maternal enlightenment and empowerment. In this, maternal regret moves beyond regretting motherhood to new and transformative possibilities for living and learning from the longings and losses of mothering.

Works Cited

Donath, O. Regretting Motherhood: A Study. North Atlantic, 2017.

Dutton, Isabella. The Mother Who Says Having These Two Children Is the Biggest Regret of Her Life. Daily Mail, 2013, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2303588/The-mother-says-having-children-biggest-regret-life.html. Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.

Kingston, A. I Regret Having Children Maclean’s, 2018, www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers. Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.

Treleaven, S. Inside the Growing Movement of Women Who Wish They’d Never Had Kids. Marie Claire, 2016. www.marieclaire.com/culture/a22189/i-regret-having-kids. Accessed 14 Apr. 2022.

Section I

Resistances

the alarm

Tracy Royce

we had this long

snaky-shaped house

kitchen on one end

and bedrooms on the other

all my mother’s domain

while father was out

valedictorian with a free ride at Temple

long before Roe v. Wade

she always said they would’ve married anyway

she continued to write

until she got lost somewhere

between the bedroom and the kitchen

father liked grapefruit for breakfast

serrated spoon in hand

he’d rend the tender flesh

and my childish laughter filled the room

when he spit seeds like a machine gunner

(guess who picked them up)

mother worked while we ate

always in motion

laundry basket balanced

against one well-padded hip

she set the oven timer—

a chrome dial mounted just inches away

from where father wrestled with his breakfast—

then whisked her crisp sheets off to the bedroom

when the timer sounded

noxious, piercing

I watched as my father

who could have silenced the alarm without rising

an easy arm’s length between us and peace

instead did nothing

but continue his vigorous breakfast dissection

and at the other end of the house

once again mother dropped everything

and navigated a new course

back to the kitchen

I never laughed at his seed spitting again

An earlier version of the alarm appeared in Affilia 2009, volume 24, issue 1, pages 97-98.

Chapter 1

Out of Bounds: Maternal Regret and the Reframing of Normative Motherhood

Andrea O’Reilly

Central to patriarchal motherhood are the beliefs that all women want to become mothers, that mothering comes naturally to all women, and that women experience mothering as fulfilling and gratifying. I have termed these assumptions essentialization, naturalization, and idealization. In patriarchal motherhood, it is assumed (and expected) that all women want to be mothers (essentialization), that maternal ability and motherlove are innate to all mothers (naturalization), and that all mothers find joy and purpose in motherhood (idealization) (O’Reilly, Matricentric Feminism). Over the last few years, these dictates of normative motherhood have been countered and challenged by the emergence of what has been termed the last parenting taboo (Kingston)—that is, maternal regret (Kingston). From recent magazine articles to scholarly works, such as Regretting Motherhood: A Study (Donath), mothers are challenging an explosive taboo and pushing the boundaries of accepted maternal response; and reframing motherhood in the process (Kingston). Indeed, as author Lionel Shriver commented in reference to her acclaimed 2003 novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, in which maternal regret is a central theme: While we may have taken the lid off sex, it is still out of bounds to say that you do not like your own kids, that the sacrifices they have demanded of you are unbearable, or perish the thought, you wish you never had them. Or as journalist Sarah Treleaven notes: Despite the fact that we have officially entered the age of oversharing—documenting anything and everything on social media from children’s births to family deaths—there are still things women are not supposed to feel, and certainly not to openly discuss. Regretting motherhood is the biggest to date.

Building on Shriver’s and Kingston’s words, this chapter will explore how the emergence of the out-of-bounds topic of maternal regret has given rise to a reframing of contemporary mothering to offer a formidable critique of, and corrective to, normative motherhood. The chapter first examines how maternal regret exposes the normative scripts and the oppressive conditions of patriarchal condition. It goes on to consider how maternal regret subverts and disrupts normative motherhood and how maternal regret debunks the dictates of patri-archal motherhood and enacts authentic mothering. Finally, the chapter examines how maternal regret defies and disrupts the mandate of compulsory motherhood.

Maternal Regret as Critique of Normative Motherhood

In Regretting Motherhood: A Study, which is still the only scholarly work on the topic of maternal regret, Donath describes the purpose of her book as to make room for this unspoken topic (xvii). She argues that when maternal regret or ambivalence is considered, the discussion is limited to the early years of mothering when women transition to motherhood. This approach suggests that any maternal ambivalence or regret experienced by mothers is temporary and will recede as mothers adjust to motherhood. There has been little discussion, however, on the experiences of mothers with older children and certainly none that focuses on maternal regret in mothers’ retrospective accounts of raising children. Indeed, as Donath remarks, It seems that even in feminist theorization about the topic, there is no room for re-evaluation let alone regret (xv). The purpose of this section is to consider what we discover and learn about patriarchal motherhood when we make room for the unspoken topic of maternal regret.

I Did It Automatically: Maternal Regret and the Normative Dictate of Essentialization

Donath argues that the reproductive potential of women obligates them to become mothers; she argues that women "are passively ruled by a fatalist command