I Never Wanted to Be a Mother — This Is the Moment I Changed My Mind

As I sit here watching my four-year-old daughter color, weaving her purple crayon inside the lines as carefully as she can, I feel a deep and unwavering love. It’s a love I don’t think I could ever describe in words.

I laugh in spite of myself.

I never wanted to be a mother, and yet, here I am: mothering. Me, of all people, cultivating a mother-daughter relationship I never once dreamt about having when I was a kid. Teaching, molding, listening, scolding, protecting, loving, and cherishing my daughter in a way I never thought I was capable of doing.

This is how I got here.

I grew up in what seemed to me like a fairly average, middle-class household. I had two brothers and a mother and father who, for better or worse, raised us together, despite the myriad ups and downs they endured throughout their marriage. My mother was hit with a severe bout of postpartum depression after my twin brother and I were born. Back in the seventies, doctors lacked both compassion and knowledge when it came to postpartum depression. My mother was given medication that didn’t work and ended up in a mental hospital where shock treatment was deemed the only “logical” fix. When she emerged a few months later, she wasn’t the same, and I don’t think she ever fully recovered. She’s been battling depression ever since, as well as a host of other physical ailments that seemed to come like dominoes after that hospital stay: tiredness, fatigue, joint pain, anxiety, arthritis, and fibromyalgia.

As a young kid, I didn’t know any of this. I just assumed my mother was a certain way, that I was another, and that the two never really mixed. We had little in common from the get-go. She told me that when I came wiggling out of her womb after my twin brother, she screamed with glee because she had finally gotten her daughter, the daughter she had always wanted.

The problem: I was a daughter, sure. But I wasn’t the daughter my mother had envisioned.

Growing up, my mother dreamt of a daughter with whom she would bond instantly. That bond would continue to grow throughout their lives. They would go shopping together, share secrets, and talk about boys. She’d braid this daughter’s hair, show her how to put on makeup, and discuss cheerleading routines while they painted each other’s nails. Someday, that daughter would get married to some handsome guy and have children of her own.

There was my mother’s vision of a daughter, and then there was me. I fit into none of the boxes she dreamed I would. I ripped off dresses and pulled bows from my hair. I hated shopping. I liked wearing boys’ clothes. I kept secrets. I only pretended to like boys. I played basketball, soccer, and football. I thought cheerleading was lame. I thought painting my nails was boring. I came out as a lesbian and married a woman. In other words, I crushed all of my mother’s hopes for me.

Every. Single. One.

Despite our differences — which felt more like polar oppositions — I know my mother and I could have still forged a better relationship than we did, if only we had taken the time to accept and understand each other as we were. But we chose not to, and I never learned the value of a strong mother-daughter relationship. I also never developed the slightest interest in having a child of my own.

I watched curiously (and with a touch of envy) as women I knew spent one-on-one time with their mothers and, in turn, expressed their desire for similar connections with their own daughters someday. As we grew older and my friends talked more and more frequently about having children, I could never share in their enthusiasm. The label “mother” didn’t compute; it had no place, it seemed to me, in my identity. Motherhood seemed foreign, complicated, messy, altogether too much to handle.

I searched every bone of my body down to the marrow for the urge to get pregnant, to carry a baby, to birth her, to raise her, and it just wasn’t there.

But then, in early 2011, two years after I married my wife, she began to explore options for getting pregnant. The thing about being in a same-sex couple is that you have to consciously make the decision whether or not to have kids. There are no surprises: You either go for it it or you don’t. As we were looking into the process, I was lukewarm about it. I know, I know: Being lukewarm about having children is a flaming red flag, and a sign that maybe you shouldn’t. But my wife wanted to carry the baby, which meant I didn’t have to, and I figured I’d wait and see how things played out.

Naïve? Oh, yeah. Selfish? Of course. Asinine? You bet. I was acting as a bystander to a monumental step in our lives. But at the time, I gave the impression that I was 100 percent ready and willing, because I kept trying to convince myself that I was. On some level, I wanted to have a bigger family. And my wife was getting older — her body was running out of time. I had told her I was ready, so I tried my best to act like it.

To say that the shit hit the fan when my wife finally announced she was pregnant in October 2011 would be a severely overstated understatement. I went full-on into a nervous breakdown, with anxiety so intense I went consecutive nights without sleeping. I realized that not only was I indifferent about being a mother — I was afraid of it. Questions I didn’t even know I had about my ability to parent came pouring out of me with the intensity of a sudden summer rain.

What do I know about raising a child?

What if it’s a girl? I don’t know the first thing about raising a little girl. I don’t like girly things.

I don’t even have my own shit together — how can I be responsible for someone else’s life?

What if I’m a horrible, no good, very bad parent?

I don’t know the first thing about being a mother.

I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready.

I was scared out of my mind for so many reasons, some rational, some not. But the old cliché that “the wheels were already in motion” held true. I had two choices: I could suck it up and give this child everything I had, or I could...

Scratch that. That was the only choice. Once I realized that, I made this choice without another thought: I woke up one morning and chose to disregard everything I had ever thought I knew about motherhood — that it wasn’t for me, that I couldn’t do it — and vowed to be the best parent I could possibly be to my child. Like I said, I never wanted to be a mother. But the truth is that I just didn’t know if I could. More than anything else, I was afraid I’d be a horrible mother — afraid I couldn’t give my child the loving relationship I didn’t have with my own mother when I was growing up.

My daughter pulls on my arm and says, “Color with me, Mama.” That’s what she calls me, Mama. My ears tingle every time she says it. Me, a mama. Her Mama. I get down on the carpet and spread out. I start coloring a picture, and every once in a while, I look up just to get a glance at this beautiful being before me.

What I’ve come to learn is that I actually am a pretty good mother. My daughter is healthy, happy, polite, and all those other awesome things we parents try so desperately to to help our children be. She’s not perfect — I’m not saying that. But I’m not expecting that. If I’ve learned anything from my mother, it’s that boxes belong in the trash. My daughter is free to be whomever she wants to be. I don’t expect her to be tomboyish like me, and good thing, too, because she isn’t. She’s the most pink- and purple-loving, dress-wearing, doll-loving girl I’ve ever known.

I joke with my mother and say, “Maggie’s the daughter you never had.” She laughs and says, “You’re right.” We have an understanding now, my own mother and I. We realize things we both could have done differently. I know she loves me, and these days she tells me that often. I love her, too. But our connection only goes so deep. Still, I keep a voicemail from her on my phone. It’s almost a year old. In it, my mother tells me that she thinks I am an amazing mother, with one small caveat: That’s something she never expected.

I never expected it, either. But here I am. In love with being a mother. In love with the daughter I never knew I wanted, and am so grateful I have.

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