Books About Moms Who Regret Having Children

I’ll start with one of the lighter reads on this list. In No Kids, Maier, a mother of two, opens the book with a bang, writing that being a parent means giving up everything for your kids. “Is it worth it?” she asks us, her enthralled readers. The implication is that no, it is not. And in fact, if she had to do it all over again, she’s not so sure she would. What follows from this introduction are “40 good reasons not to have children.”

While the absent mother in this novel isn’t the main protagonist, she does cast a shadow over the titular Olga, who struggles to find love after being abandoned by her mother as a young child. Olga and her brother were raised by their grandmother when their mother ran off to support a militant political cause. Now, years later, as Olga is finally allowing herself to get close to someone, her mother comes rushing back into her life. How will their familial reckoning play out?

In this memoir, the acclaimed poet and civil rights activist writes of one of the most troubled relationships from her past: the one she had with her mother. When the marriage between Angelou’s parents began to crumble, her mother sent her and her brother to live with their grandmother. Angelou was only 3 at the time, and she grappled with feelings of abandonment for the next decade before they finally reunited. In Mom & Me & Mom, she writes powerfully about the process of healing that had to occur between them before they were able to find themselves in a place of mutual love and respect.

Shifting the focus to the absent mother, the titular protagonist of Patsy chooses her own happiness over that of her daughter when she moves to New York, leaving her daughter behind in Jamaica. In addition to providing a window into the difficult life of an undocumented immigrant, this book is an exploration of the ways in which motherhood and selfhood are often at odds with each other.

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Barbara Almond, explores the topic of maternal ambivalence as it relates to ideas around ideal motherhood, reproductive fears, guilt, and more. She then goes on to illuminate how these feelings of ambivalence can impact the relationship between mother and child, and provides insight into what ambivalent mothers can do as they grapple with an unattainable ideal.

Sliding back into fiction, in Navarro’s novel, a woman’s son is abducted. But even as things begin to unravel for her, she also begins to wonder whether she even wanted him in the first place. Meanwhile, the desperate woman who stole the child is finding that motherhood is not everything she imagined it would be, and in fact, her life is upended by it. The book bounces back and forth between these two perspectives, providing a fascinating and not-often-explored aspect of motherhood.

Shriver’s book — which was eventually adapted into a film starring Tilda Swinton — was shocking when it came out. In it, a reluctant mother struggles to bond with her son, and this struggle leads her to lash out at him verbally, and once, physically. When her son perpetrates a school massacre and she is sued for parental negligence, she is forced to grapple with their history and with how much she is or is not culpable.

In this novel, a stay-at-home mom struggles to settle into her new life. Looking to her past is no help. The two models of motherhood she’s lived with are diametrically opposed. Her grandmother was a sharecropper who abandoned her children to save herself. Her mother, meanwhile, gave up everything to focus on her kids. As our protagonist looks for her own place in all of this, she finds herself engaging in small acts of abandonment, which lead her to wonder what the future holds.

When I read this book six years ago, I immediately connected to the narrator, a harried working mom who continues to feel unappreciated, even after suffering a heart attack. And then? She runs away. This was a fast-paced, gratifying read that really leaned into the runaway mom fantasy many of us have when we’re feeling our most ambivalent.

Using photographs interspersed with interviews, photographer, Diana Karklin, presents a complicated view of why and how women can simultaneously love their children while feeling deep regret. These women acknowledge how the role of mother is an oppressive one, one that subsumes them, stealing away their sense of selfhood. Chapters are divided into meditations on anger, fear, isolation, exhaustion, guilt, resignation, and acceptance.

Finally, I’ll end with a book that is literally titled Regretting Motherhood. This one contains the results of a study about women’s choices around motherhood and that “unspoken taboo” around maternal ambivalence and regret. Donath, a sociologist, spent years interviewing women from a variety of socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds in order to uncover the varying sources of pressure and conflicting feelings women feel around mothering.