Struggling with Mixed Feelings About Motherhood? A Peek Into Maternal Ambivalence
Motherhood is often romanticized as a journey of pure joy, unconditional love, and endless fulfillment. But for many moms, there’s a hidden side to parenting—the feelings that don’t always match the picture-perfect narrative.
In her upcoming book, Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood on sale today, psychotherapist, social worker and mother of three, Margo Lowy, PhD, delves into the often-unspoken, complex emotions that accompany the experience of mothering.
Lowy explores what it means to embrace the full spectrum of feelings that come with raising children—from the deep love and pride to the exhaustion, frustration, and moments of doubt. Through her own personal journey and extensive research, she challenges the societal pressures that demand mothers to be selfless, constantly joyful, and always in control.
In this excerpt, Lowy invites us to confront maternal ambivalence and redefine what it means to be a mother in all its beautiful, messy contradictions.
Being a mom is so difficult some days. We are pulled in so many different directions by our children, and we are supposed to be caring, selfless, and remain an adult all the time, even when it becomes too much. How do we make room to acknowledge and talk about maternal ambivalence, a forbidden and silenced but daily part of our mothering?
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Making sense of these contradictions in order to live with them in a peaceful and productive way may be the greatest challenge of all. As a mother of three, I’ve struggled—and still do—with my mothering. While my children are all things to me—the wonder, love, and accomplishment of my life—they also test me continually as I tread the awe, joy, and heartbreak of being a mother and its continual twists and turns. On that score, I’m not so different from any other mother.
I suppose my difference creeps in in the way that I have dealt with my experience of mothering and its combination of awe, joy, and heartbreak. It hasn’t been easy, and why would it be? I have been driven to spend years of my life trying to find ways to make sense of mothering and the mother’s feelings of ambivalence. I have pondered its contradictions and mystery while questioning the status quo and the wider social commentary.
It seems to me that most people, both men and women, feel entitled to freely comment on the sacred feelings that a woman experiences as a mother, often leaving her with deep, unsettling feelings that may be hidden in the shadows or feel shameful.
Ironically, this research and work on mothering began with a foray into infertility and the heartache that a woman usually feels when she is unable to conceive. My belief that these feelings are too important to ignore, too fragile to be denied, also segued into a desire to shine a light on the desperation that many mothers feel.
Both infertility and mothering, in their own way, provoke a sense of failure or lacking, a yearning, and many negative feelings that go unspoken. Both hold an element of taboo. That’s the fascination for me: the jumbling, contradictory flow of life.
This raises another matter, which is that this is not a book about whether or not to have children, despite the fact that maternal ambivalence is sometimes understood in these terms.
To this point, I strongly believe that most women who decide not to have a child do not come to their decision lightly; more often than not, it arrives after a great deal of soul-searching. These women merit exactly the same respect as those who decide that they wish to rear a child; they don’t justify derision or voicelessness.
Across all cultures in this world, there is a universal truth, which is that motherhood defines womanhood in some way, whether we have children or not. We are judged for the ways in which we raise our children and judged when we choose not to raise them.
Men and fathers, too, experience the conflict of parenthood and that dialogue, and while much different than it was even a half century ago, it still has much progress to make. My focus in this book, however, is the intersection of womanhood and motherhood—the relationship that springs into being after birth and exists long after a child has left the nest.
Every mother has her moments when troubling feelings, including those of desperation, anger, loneliness, exhaustion, and despair, surface despite attempts to keep them down where she thinks that they belong. I think these moments have been disregarded or cloaked in denial.
It’s time to air and name them, and in doing so, redefine the image of a mother as either a demon or an angel into one where she is an ordinary human being—one who, despite having these feelings, does still love her child deeply and, in fact, within these troubling feelings, discovers that her love is strengthened and fueled in the soundest way possible because these feelings are genuine and real.
Ambivalence is the human capacity to acknowledge, own, and engage with many contradictory feelings, without dismissing the difficult ones. An indication of a healthy mindset is an acceptance that this dynamic is part of life, that challenges will crop up from time to time, and that the individual is prepared to work with them and not to dismiss or repress any of them. While the idea of ambivalence certainly throws many curveballs, let’s welcome it: it’s the unsung hero(ine) of mothering.
Margo Lowy, PhD, is a psychotherapist specializing in mothering. She is the author of MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood (Post Hill Press) and holds a doctorate from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she researched maternal ambivalence. She is the mother of three children and lives with her husband in New York City.
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