I’m trying to think how I would feel if my mum told me this. Honestly, I would just be sad for her, not for myself. She was a great mum and seemed loving, so there would be no down side for me. But if she had been unhappy all this time I would be sad for her.
It’s sort of a little like that for my Granny. Though she did really love my mum and her siblings, I think she always felt she had them too young. She could have done so much (she could have been an architect!), but was pressured into marriage at 20. My mum knows how she feels; it’s pretty obvious as Granny constantly reminds everyone to just wait with having children, you can have them when you’re thirty.
So I don’t really feel all that bad for her children. It’s not ideal, but she is allowed to show her feelings too. Bottling them up and not showing her children how she really feels is what she has done all this time to avoid hurting them. Well, I think they’ll be fine knowing the truth.
Also, I don’t think she is a psychopath or sociopath. I think if she was she’d have found a way of hurting them seriously, or killing them even. She seems to have dutifully tried. Feeling a surge of panic at having left the baby at the shop is quite specific to people acting as the primary carer of a child, not an otherwise normal reaction. Since she is describing that she didn’t have those particular feelings, it doesn’t seem like a separate abnormal thing. She just didn’t experience the emotions many people describe as being part of parenthood.
The best part is when people say ‘…Well I don’t agree but I respect her for her honesty!’
Uh, everyone should be honest. Respecting someone for honesty is like saying “I’m proud of you for not going to jail”
You’re not supposed to goto jail…
This is all about infamy and attention, nothing more.
I have to admit some of armchair diagnosing is puzzling to me. Borderline personality disorder? That writing does NOT portray a woman with widely fluctuating emotions or impulsivity. And people with borderline PD often have too much empathy, as opposed to not enough. Not saying she can’t be borderline, but there’s no evidence of it.
And just because a person has problems with empathy does not make them a sociopath. She could be schizoid or have something like Asperger’s…or she could just have low oxytocin levels and be otherwise normal.
I know people think they are being more compassionate than judgmental by pinning her with a mental illness diagnosis. But reaching for the most extreme, stigmatizing label on the shelf (sociopath? for real?) doesn’t seem helpful at all to me.
To begin with, the sheer number of people who walk out on their kids.
I don’t agree with her or anything, but I’ve seen lots of cases where one partner really wants kids and makes the kid their life focus, when the other steps back from that. Think along the lines of a stereotypical 1950s high powered career dad, or an older father on his third marriage whose young trophy wife wants a kid.
I think it opens a discussion and is a reasonable thing to share, buts she should have written it under a pseudonym so that the children don’t know who wrote it.
I don’t think she’s as special as she thinks she is. I’m sure a lot of women (and men) regret having children, but they don’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops.
My biggest problem with the whole thing is that she has to get digs in at working moms. She basically says, “Look at me. I don’t even like these kids but I gave up everything to raise them myself. So even though I don’t love my kids, I’m still a better mother than you!” Well, she can kiss my ass because I’m not buying that having an emotionally detached mother who spends the whole day with you (while regretting your existence) is better than sending your kids to daycare. Maybe if she’d sent them to daycare, they would have gotten some much-needed affection and she wouldn’t be such a resentful, miserable wretch.
I do agree that it sounds nothing like borderline personality disorder. I think a lot of people use borderline PD as a catch all for any sort of really crazy behavior in relationships without understanding the actual criteria for diagnosis.
True, nobody here is actually able to officially diagnose her, but I see no harm in speculating about reasons that someone would act this way. I do feel that there is a good chance that something pathological is going on. You don’t have to love someone to have empathy when they are in potential danger.
Despite the stereotype that all sociopaths are totally evil people who inevitably commit crimes, some of them have the intelligence to realize that doing something deviant could get them in trouble and it will make their life easier to just go through the motions of acting like everyone else. Statistically, it’s almost certain that all of us have known sociopaths without ever suspecting something was wrong with them because they were able to pretend well enough. It’s quite possible that the only reason this lady never intentionally harmed her children is because she recognized that allowing them to die could cause trouble for her.
I get to complain all I want about my kids and your kids. You can only complain about your kids and other people’s kids, but not mine. That’s how it works, the rant in question falls within those rules.
I’ve thought about this article overnight because I couldn’t figure out why I disliked it so much. I realized that my disapproval wasn’t coming from her lack of feelings, but from her claiming that despite these lack of feelings she’s still a good mother.
I’m with yellowval on this. There is no way she can have so little empathy for her kids and still be a good mother. That claim reeks of self-serving bullshit.
Actually, I think she somehow misunderstands what it is to love someone. She says that she didn’t tell her kids she loved them because she didn’t. Later she says she would give a limb for her disabled daughter, that she would do anything for her. Sounds like she does love her. I think she just wasn’t happy in her role, and that she didn’t feel all those things a mother should feel, but that she did come to love them. That might’ve shown, and combined with her efforts might’ve meant a perfectly ok childhood.
Her big misunderstanding is, of course, that it is somehow a wonderful thing to stay home to be a mother when you hate it. If anything it is an entirely unnatural model, and has always seemed awfully cruel to me.
Why is he not a stellar father, despite pulling his weight around the house, loving his children, wanting nothing more than for them to do well, doing everything he could do to be a good parent and provide a safe, comfortable nurturing home?
I didn’t read her entire confession, but in principle I’d say that posting it is fine if done totally anonymously and without photos. What must her children think upon reading something like this?
On the other hand, if the children are completely grown up AND she’s already discussed this with them (but why would anyone do that) AND gotten their permission to use their pictures on the internet, then I suppose it would be ok.
But I cannot imagine the rationale for telling your children something like this.
A father describing the lack of emotion he felt when he left his child outside a bakery or when the child was nearly strangled to death, would be called a sociopath pretty quickly.
If you believe little anecdotes like that are not enough to at least suggest, to hint, on a message board that someone is a psychopath, then you simply don’t know a thing about psychopathy.
“Several people” in this thread are trying to bring gender politics into this thread, as they do in every thread they participate in. They are failing.
Leaving the kid at the store probably crosses some kind of line, especially if she wasn’t stricken with panic when she realized it had happened though.
But then there’s also the over-hyped “bonding” thing that so many people in this thread are talking about. When my daughter was born, my only feelings about her were that I’d worked really hard to get her here, and I wasn’t about to let anything hurt her now. As time went by she was cute and vulnerable and I cuddled her and cared for her and all that… but there was a breakthrough moment at 15 months when we were sitting in the garden and looking right into each other’s eyes, and she started pointing to my facial features as I named them. It was the first time that I saw… hmmm… any “there” there in her. The first time that she reacted to me as a human being or something. For me, that was our big bonding moment. Fifteen months into it.
Everybody’s different and an immediate, overwhelming feeling of lllloooooooooooove doesn’t always happen.
I didn’t have the overwhelming “love at first sight” thing when my daughter was born either. I don’t believe in love at first sight for anyone. I immediately thought she was cute and precious and I loved her as soon as I got to know her, but I didn’t feel a magical bond the second I saw her.
But if I’d ever at any point realized I accidentally left her or any other baby in a dangerous situation, I would have freaked out.
No, it’s not about male vs. female roles. It’s about a person doing everything they’re supposed to do as a parent, and then being called “less than stellar” because of the way the feel about it.
Taking the article at face value (which may not be the best choice, given the source) I have to say that I mainly feel sorry for the lady.
It seems very strongly to me that she had this “emotional ideal” of what motherhood was all about: butterflies in the stomach, big hazy photo-filters, gooshy smooth jazz music in the background, and an overwhelming posessive sense of looooooooove.
She’s also got a fairly strong image of herself as not having those attributes - maybe she sees herself as unemotional, maybe she considers it part of her need for personal autonomy and privacy, but she looks at the “motherhood” picture in her mind, and says “nope, that isn’t me” and (pardon the expression) throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Instead of taking time (or therapy) to realize that everyone is different, and not everyone is emotionally clingy and demonstrative, and that most people can still be good parents (leaving gender aside here) within their own specific warmth/coolness emotional scale - she just decides that she CAN’T be a good mother because she doesn’t match that gooshy overwrought sterotyped image.
If you look at what she actually does - she seems to have cared for them, she says multiple times that she loves and wants them to succeed, and she’s even now caring for her adult disabled daughter (and wishes that she had MS instead of her daughter). That seems fairly loving and mother-like to me.
I just think she’s boxed herself into this lifelong unhappiness by being so dramatically black-and-white about what it takes emotionally to be a “mother” and flagellating herself constantly about not meeting that ideal.
I didn’t find the article particularly shocking or even terribly interesting. She does admit – several times — that she loves her children.
I don’t know why but I couldn’t help but notice that the mother’s body language. In nearly every photo of her, she seems to be covering and/or protecting her genitals with her hand. Is there some subconscious meaning? I dunno. Seems odd, that’s all.
