Last weekend the temperature was nudging 25 degrees but, yet again, I was stuck in the car for hours on end.
My sons, aged 20 and 19, needed a lift to a tennis tournament; my eldest daughter, who is 17, had to be dropped at her Saturday job in a coffee shop, and the other, who’s 16, wanted to go to her friend’s house.Â
It took all morning to taxi each of them – in tourist-season traffic – to various points on the outskirts of our Lake District village. I was hot, bored and cross. Meanwhile, my husband Tim had left early to play a round of golf.
When I was finally back home, I had chores to do – menu planning for the week ahead, a tidy-round of the children’s rooms, subs to pay for cricket, kit sorting for a camping trip…
Instead of getting stuck into the day’s tasks, I sat at the kitchen table in quiet despair. Not for the first time, I found myself staring with clear, angry eyes at a very uncomfortable fact: I hate being a mother.
The anonymous writer says she hasn’t been a cruel or absent mother but has been consistent in her parenting
At the age of 55, I have begun to realise just how short life is. You take stock at this mid-point. Regrets begin to crystallise and you can’t just automatically push them away.
It’s only now that I can fully articulate to myself quite how unhappy I am, but the truth is, I’ve had niggles of doubt for at least the past decade. I feel it most at times like this when my whole life is subsumed by their needs yet again.
I find myself daydreaming about what kind of life I could have created for myself if I had never had children. Would I have soared to great career heights? Perhaps written a novel? Or left my husband for someone more exciting?
I’ve never said this to him, by the way – any of it. I feel quite guilty for even thinking it. Whenever I half‑admit my regret to other mums, hoping for some sisterly support or even agreement, they close it down before I’ve expressed even a fraction of what I really feel.
It’s a topic I can’t broach with my sisters either. How can I tell them, when one is devastated by her childlessness and the other wishes she could have had more than her only child? I don’t think they’d believe me, if I told them the truth that I am jealous of them.
I must spell out that I’m not a cruel or absent mother. I’ve been consistent in my parenting and, I promise, other people would never know I feel this way. I do the school runs, oversee homework, proactively hire tutors when needed, and I’ve attended every sports day and school play. PTAs have been a consistent feature in my diary, too.
I am sure I come across in public as more helicoptering Tiger Mother than bored Wine Mum. I have put aside my career to be there for my children, and I like to think that my parenting strategy has largely worked. And yet, I’m now more convinced than ever that it was not the right strategy for me.
The truth is, I feel a constant, bubbling resentment at all the sacrifices I have made for them. I think I absorbed the idea that this was what mothers did – but at what cost to the women?
My children have certainly enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, partly because I have always been here for them, but also because of my husband’s successful construction company.
I might sound, and feel, furious with myself for the way my life has worked out, but that doesn’t mean I’m a grumpy mum. I was always the first into the pool with them; I embraced the rock-climbing phase, and even learned to play the guitar with my eldest when he decided he wanted to be in a band. I’ve never said no to a sleepover, even when it meant ferrying other people’s children halfway around the Lake District.
But all of it utterly consumed my 30s and 40s. And here I am, today, desperately unhappy with my lot.
Again, you might think I sound heartless. This assessment of my life – the knowledge that I made a mistake by having children – sounds very cold and clinical. And yet, that’s not me either. The real me is carefree, impulsive, sexually alive. She loves music, and dancing and staying out late – and she is a woman I carefully put away a long time ago.
The writer says she didn’t ever dream of becoming a mother – when other women looked longingly at babies, she found them dull and scarily fragile
In my 20s, living in Edinburgh and working as a hair stylist, my all-girls flat was ‘party central’. Not once did I dream of becoming a mother. Where other women looked longingly at babies, I found them dull and scarily fragile. I had no idea how to hold a newborn and no desire to learn.
I met Tim in my mid-20s when he was in his early 30s, and we went off exploring those corners of the world that fed my bohemian tendencies. We watched the sun set on Indian beaches, hiked the Peruvian Andes to Machu Picchu, embraced beach life in Thailand and chilled out in Bali.
Often on these trips I felt at one, not just with myself but with the entire cosmos. I was complete.
Then, alas, life took off down a conventional path and I felt powerless to stop it. We got married in my early 30s and agreed we’d settle in the UK for ‘a bit’. But when Tim’s father died suddenly, he took over the family construction firm. Loyalty to his mother, my own middle-class upbringing in Cheshire, an inability to defy what was expected of me – all of it meant I did what all the other girls did and ‘settled down’.
As if overnight my wanderlust was cut off – and then, at 34, I discovered I was pregnant. This was it: my new life. Travel instantly changed. For the last two decades I have returned from our well-planned and not-at-all-spontaneous family holidays just as pale and harassed as when I arrived.
For the early years of motherhood, we’d usually hire a villa in Spain or France (it was easier that way), and it was me, of course, who shopped for and then cooked the lunches others would break off from pool-time to consume. It was me who would clean up while they lingered lazily at the table. Holidays haven’t been about my needs or desires for a long time.
Motherhood does a number on you, I’ll admit that. In the early years those maternal, feel-good hormones can get you through even the most tedious of days surrounded by toddlers. To be honest, I felt like one of the lucky ones. I didn’t suffer postnatal depression, my babies weren’t colicky and the terrible twos were perfectly do-able.
Then, shortly after our youngest daughter started school, I realised in a panic, my youth – my best years –was long over. At home, I felt like the four walls were closing in on me. I’d suppressed the real me so effectively, had become so dull to myself and everyone else, that fellow mums were staggered to discover how different my 20s had been.
‘You?’ said one incredulously when I told her about the adventures I’d experienced travelling throughout South-East Asia and South America. ‘But you’re such a home bird.’
For reasons I would later chew over endlessly, that really stung. I felt frustrated and angry when I realised just how much I’d changed; how much of myself I had given away to my children.
Whoever she thought I was, it really isn’t who I am.
Meanwhile, Tim’s business was doing very well and, for my 40th birthday, he surprised me with the gift of a tumbledown place in the south of France. Perhaps he sensed my need for the sun and that feeling of otherness away from the mundanity of home. He was right: over the years it has been my haven.
Indeed, desperate to shake up my life, a decade ago, I suggested to him that we move there permanently and give French living a go. Tim is incredibly easy-going and he agreed we could make it work, with him commuting back and forth to the UK when he needed to for business.
The children were still little – ten, nine, seven and six – and, for once I thought their needs might coincide with mine. I could spread my wings again and their lives would be enriched by life in a different, more laid-back culture.
At first la belle vie was perfect – we ate suppers outside, had the sea almost on our doorstep, and the constant sunshine even reinvigorated our sex life. I loved wandering around the local market, where sometimes I’d catch men glancing at me and be taken back to a time when that kind of attention was routine.
It wasn’t that I wanted another man; I simply wanted not to be just a mother. In all, I adored our new life.
However, our youngest just didn’t settle. I encouraged all the children to approach the first year as an adventure, explaining that they would find the French language and new schoolmates a challenge, but it would be a fun one. But while the other three threw themselves into it, Iris wouldn’t. She hated school, refused to speak in class and didn’t make any friends.
After meetings with her teacher, we transferred her to an international school where she was taught in English. It meant an hour-round commute twice a day for me, but I didn’t mind because I was so desperate for France to work for all of us.
Yet she was still unhappy. We spent three years trying to settle her, to no avail. I worried she was becoming properly withdrawn, and ultimately knew we had to put her first. And so we moved back to the Lake District.
Yes, it was best for her – but, deep down, I was bitterly disappointed for myself, and resented what felt to me like a lack of effort. Why couldn’t she have just slotted in? A little voice whispered in my head that if I didn’t have any children, I’d still be living on the Med and enjoying the life I’d dreamed of.
That little voice still hasn’t gone away. Some days, I find myself counting down the years until they leave home and I get my freedom back.
We have kept the house on in France, so when Iris goes to university, I hope that Tim and I can up sticks. There will be bedrooms for the children when they come to visit, but I don’t think they’ll want to re-locate permanently, even if they could. And I have already decided that I will not be a doting, constantly available, grandmother.
There is almost a decade between Tim and me. The age gap didn’t seem much when we first married, but as we’ve got older, it has become more pronounced. He is looking forward to retiring in the next few years, but I’m still in my prime.
I do love my children – let me make that absolutely clear. I’m very proud of the people they are growing into, and I appreciate the irony in the gentle advice I offer them now as they approach adulthood: don’t settle down too soon and make the same mistake I did.
Thankfully, this summer we’ll be back in France, where I can once again be me. It’s as though I revert to my younger self when I open our terrace doors and step out into the Mediterranean sunshine. Barefoot, in shorts, happy to allow that twentysomething girl I used to be her magical moments again.
Yes, I’ll get the life I truly want in the end, but I can’t help feeling regret at the 20-year detour it took in the middle.
Names have been changed.
