‘What if I regret having kids?‘ It’s something Lucy pondered a lot before agreeing to have one child with her partner, Mark, who desperately wanted them. She figured it would be quite hard at times having a child – but much easier having a partner who essentially wanted to be the main caregiver. What could go wrong?
Welcome to our series, The Motherhood Diaries – a safe space for you to share your experiences, advice, hopes and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences. We’re looking at everything from fertility, trying to conceive, pregnancy, the fourth trimester, newborns, toddlers, children’s mental health and teenagers, fertility issues and everything in between!
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Growing up, Lucy would daydream about her house, her husband, the places they’d travel, her career – but never kids. They just weren’t something that called to her. She wondered if that might change, but during her twenties she became even more positive that she would remain childfree.
But then she met Mark.
Lucy was 30 and Mark was 42 and they quite slowly but surely fell in love.
“We were crazy about each other,” says Lucy. “We had so much in common – the same sense of humour and we just loved spending time together. We would laugh so much my face hurt constantly.”
There was just one wrinkle – Mark wanted kids, and quite desperately so.
“Mark adored kids,” says Lucy. “He had two younger siblings and both of them already had two kids each. We spent so much time at their houses because he just loved spending time with them.”
Everything else in their relationship was so perfect. Lucy could see how devoted Mark was to his nieces and nephews. She started to wonder (with the help of him often subtly prodding her) if it mightn’t be so bad if they had a child together. It certainly looks like he’d do a lot of the heavy lifting.
“The deal sort of became that if Mark wanted kids so badly, he really had to take the lead on it and own it,” says Lucy. “He said he was more than willing to be the primary care giver. We both earned about the same amount of money, so I would take parental leave for a few months to have the kid and recover and then he would take the rest.”
They agreed on having one child.
“We talked through my rules – like, I would never want to take them to weekend sports practice,” she says. “That’s my nightmare. He said he’d love to do that. I had a few other absolute hard lines – they were all things he wanted to do instead, so it seemed like it could all work out well.”
Except then, something very unexpected happened.
“Somehow I got pregnant basically as soon as I went off contraception – which I hadn’t been expecting,” says Lucy. “I was 34 and had been on the pill since I was 15, so I thought it would take ages to adjust off it!”
And then came a bigger surprise. “At the 12-week ultrasound, they found two of them,” says Lucy. “We were having twins. I was… shocked.”
Lucy says she walked around in a daze for the first few hours afterwards. Mark had been ecstatic at the news – he’d wanted two kids, but they’d compromised on the one. It was a dream result for him. Lucy however, was in shock.
“I barely remember finding out the news and the hours after it,” she says. “I went numb. Mark went back to work and I ended up driving over to Mum’s. She thought I’d lost the baby because I was sort of mute. Then I wound up crying for hours. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of twins – even though, as Mum pointed out, they totally run in our family.”
Lucy was terrified about how she’d cope – what the pregnancy would be like and how she’d deal with suddenly having not one, but two kids to deal with.
“And I was right,” she says. “It definitely wasn’t easy. In the end it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be though. I thought I might be one of those people who doesn’t feel any connection with them, but I was surprised how in love I was with them from the very start. I hated being pregnant, but I enjoyed being a mum much more than I thought I would.”
Unfortunately, the same couldn’t exactly be said for Mark.
“I turned 35 while I was pregnant and Mark had his 47th birthday a few weeks later,” she says. “It felt like his midlife crisis immediately turned up. He was out so often, out on the weekends, out on weeknights, hungover half the time. I was pissed off because I had no energy to do anything, and he was just out having fun. He said it was his last hurrah before knuckling down.”
But then the babies were born and the very next night, Mark was out having “celebration drinks” with all his friends.
“I was learning how to f**king breastfeed and take care of two tiny babies and was just beside myself most of the time, but cool, he went out for beers,” she says. “He said, again, it was one last hurrah.”
And that time it did seem like the last big night out. Mark was home, helping with the babies for two weeks, reveling in finally being a dad, and then he returned to work.
“Thankfully my mum moved in with us when he went back to work,” says Lucy. “I just knew that I wouldn’t cope on my own with the two of them all day, every day.”
Gradually Lucy got into a rhythm. “I kind of surprised myself in the end of how good I was at it – I was a lot more maternal than I thought I could be,” she says.
In the end it was decided they’d keep going with what they were doing – she’d extend her parental leave to six months and Mark would stay at work. As the six months ended, she extended it out again for another three.
After nine-months leave she went back to work on a parttime basis.
“My old self kind of kicked back in when I went back to work,” she says. “It was nice, quickly going back to who I was.”
But things were deteriorating at home.
“I felt like my main home relationship was with Mum,” she says. “We were the two people working out our schedules, how everything was working and how to juggle these children. Mark was just doing his own thing. He’d say he was doing something and he’d just skip it and go out with his mates. We’d be in constant screaming fights. He was the exact opposite to how he said he was going to be. It’s like he really wanted kids and then that box was ticked and he didn’t actually want to see it through.”
When the twins were two years old, they made the decision to split.
“The twins and I moved in with Mum,” she says. “I’m so lucky I have her, because she was much more like their other parent than Mark was. In that sense, it didn’t feel like a lot changed. It was so f**king embarrassing though. He was about to turn 50 and he was behaving like a 21-year-old.”
Despite having been the one who pushed for kids, who had said to Lucy that if they had children that he would be their primary caregiver, Mark refused to have the twins any more than for just two nights every fortnight.
The kids are now at school, but Lucy still feels livid about the whole situation.
“He barely has the kids every other weekend now,” she says. “There’s always an excuse.”
Lucy says she absolutely loves her twins to pieces, but… she often thinks about the other life that she dreamed of growing up.
“I don’t want to be another one of those people who says, ‘I love my kids, but..’ But the truth is I do often feel angry about it and grieve the life I thought I was going to have,” she says. “Last year Mum and I went to Rarotonga with the kids for my 40th and that was cool, but honestly, it’s not the kind of travel I envisaged or how I’d ever imagined my 40th would be.”
They’re extremely complicated feelings, says Lucy. She loves her kids, but not always her life.
“Would I do it again? Probably not, if I’m entirely honest,” she says. “I love those girls and I tell them and show them how much I love them every minute of the day. I don’t talk about what an embarrassment their dad is, but I work damn hard to make up for his absence in their life. I don’t want to ever take my choices – or his – out on them. They are loved.”
But, she still fantasizes about what an alternative life would look like.
“I don’t know what the future looks like,” she says. “I hope to find love again – proper love with a proper adult this time. I thought Mark was so grown up because he was so much older but, ha! I don’t know if that’s going to happen anytime soon though, because dating a 40-something woman with two young kids who lives with her mum isn’t something that many people are keen to take on!”
Lucy says she often lies awake at night worrying about it all – worrying about money, worrying about what might happen if something ever happened to her mum, worrying that she’ll never meet the right guy, worrying that she might meet the man of her dreams but he might not be willing to take on someone with kids (ironic) or maybe he might have multiple children of his own, just further complicating her life.
“I hate how we are towards women who say they don’t want kids,” she says. “It’s like we’re less-than, or there’s something wrong with us. Like we’re these crazy witches who hate kids. We’re not. Often we love kids, we just don’t feel that biological urge ever to reproduce. That’s not my measure of success. Having children when you didn’t actually want kids is very very complicated. I love them so deeply and take such good care of them, but I could so easily have lived another life and been very happy. I don’t wish that they weren’t here – the world is such a better place for having them in it. Having them in these circumstances just wasn’t what I signed on for and now I see that. You have to really want kids if you are going to have them, because stuff happens – divorce happens, people get sick, partners die. I wish I’d thought that through. But I’m also glad my kids are here. It’s hard.”
