There is a question many women ask themselves in silence, sometimes for years: do I want to be a mother? Not whether they will be able to, or when the right moment might be. The deeper doubt, the uncomfortable one: whether what they feel is their own wish, or what is expected of them.
If you are at that point, let me say the first thing plainly: doubting does not mean you do not want it. And it does not mean you do want it and are making excuses for yourself. Doubt is information, not a verdict. I want to help you listen to what yours is telling you.
Wanting and doubting at the same time is not a contradiction
Culturally we have learned that the wish to become a mother should arrive as a certainty: clear, steady, without cracks. So when it arrives some other way — in waves, mixed with fear, changing in intensity depending on the month or the conversation — it is easy to read that as a sign that it is not real.
It is not. Ambivalence is not the opposite of desire. They are two movements that live side by side, not two positions to choose between. The psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks describes it as a push forward and a pull back at once, and explains that feeling both is part of the process, not a fault in it. You can hear her in her talk on the transition to motherhood, and if the idea interests you I go into it in the article on matrescence.
What usually hurts is not the ambivalence. It is the demand not to have any.
Telling your own wish apart from the pressure around it
Almost nobody decides about motherhood in a vacuum. Around you there is a family that asks, friends who are moving ahead, comments about your age, a partner with their own timetable, and a cultural backdrop that still treats motherhood as a woman’s natural destiny rather than one of her possibilities. All of that gets inside and disguises itself as your own voice.
Telling one from the other is real emotional work, and there is a simple place to start: notice how you feel afterwards. When you think about having a child for yourself, what usually appears is a mix of vertigo and excitement. It is uncomfortable, but it pulls you forward. When you think about having one to meet an expectation, what appears is closer to the relief of getting something off your back, or guilt for not having done it already. And that pulls downwards. It is not infallible, but it is a good starting point.
And there is one question that helps more than turning the decision over and over: if nobody were ever going to find out what you decided, what would you want? The answer that arrives before you reason it out usually says a great deal.
The questions that more thinking will not answer
“Will I be able to?” “What if I regret it?” “What if I do it badly?” “What if I wait too long?” These questions have something in common: they are not resolved by more analysis. Asking your mind to guarantee the future is asking for something it cannot give, and the attempt ends in a loop. I go into these particular fears in more detail in the article on the fears of motherhood and fatherhood.
That does not mean simply resigning yourself to uncertainty. It means changing the question. Instead of “am I sure?”, which almost never has an answer, it helps more to ask:
- What exactly am I afraid of? Not “being a mother”, but which specific part of it.
- Does that fear speak about motherhood, or about my situation right now — my relationship, my work, my health, my family history?
- What would I need to have settled for the doubt to turn down in volume?
When fear becomes specific, it stops being fog and turns into something you can work with. Very often what people discover is that what frightens them is not motherhood, but going through it in their present circumstances. And that is extremely useful information, because circumstances can be looked at.
When the doubt lives inside a relationship
It is common for two people not to arrive at this point with the same wish, or the same urgency. And it is common for the conversation to turn into a negotiation, with figures and deadlines, when what is at stake is not negotiated the way a holiday is.
What usually unblocks it is to stop arguing about the conclusion and start telling each other the process: what each of you imagines, what you fear, what excites you, what you would need. Not to convince the other person, but to stop deciding alone inside the same house.
And it deserves saying clearly: one of you giving in out of exhaustion is not an agreement, and it usually comes back later.
When doubt stops being doubt and starts to hurt
Asking yourself the question for a while is healthy. There are signs, though, that it has stopped being a reflection and become a weight:
- The subject is in your head almost every day and moves in no direction.
- You avoid conversations, plans or people so you do not have to talk about it.
- You find it hard to sleep, or you notice anxiety when you think about it.
- You have started deciding out of exhaustion rather than conviction.
- You feel there is a “right” answer, and that yours would make you a bad person.
If you recognise yourself in several of these, you do not need to be in crisis to ask for help. Looking after your mental health at this stage does not require things to be going badly. A space to think out loud, where nobody has a stake in your answer, changes a great deal.
What you can do while you decide
You do not need the decision made to start feeling better about it.
- Give it a place and a time. Thinking about it constantly is not thinking about it better. Setting aside a specific slot keeps it from flooding everything.
- Write it down. Not to reach a conclusion, but to see what appears. Writing tidies things a little on its own.
- Separate the urgent from the important. If there is a real time factor, looking at it head on with concrete information is less frightening than vagueness.
- Do not decide on the worst days. Desire changes shape with tiredness, and a bad week is a poor adviser.
- Surround yourself with people who ask questions rather than people who give opinions.
You do not have to work this out alone
The wish to become a mother is not a switch that goes on or off: it is a process, and it can be supported. In the sessions that is exactly what we work on — telling your own voice apart from the ones outside, naming the specific fears, holding the ambivalence without it hurting you — with no predetermined direction. Not towards yes, not towards no.
If you want to know how I work with this stage, you can read about the wish to become a mother. And if you have already taken the step and the wait is getting long, trying to conceive has challenges of its own, which I also write about. If you have practical questions about how the online sessions work, they are answered in the frequently asked questions. And when you are ready to start, write to me.
