Trigger Warning: Fertility and parenthood. This article talks candidly about being a parent. If you would like to have kids but, for any reason, are struggling or unable to have them you may find aspects triggering. Please take care of yourself first.
The internet has been ablaze this week with opinions on singer Chappel Roan‘s recent comments about her friend’s experience of parenthood.’ As a parent myself, I’ve found myself drawn into this conversation not because I’m outraged, but because I think we’re missing something important in how we talk about parenthood.
If somehow you’ve missed it, Roan spoke to Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast and said:
“All of my friends who have kids are in hell … I actually don’t know anyone who is like, happy and has children at this age. I have literally not met anyone who is happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”
It hasn’t gone down well. On one side of the uproar are parents who feel affronted, offended, hurt by her comments. On the other are parents who feel she’s just calling it as she sees it, and that she’s actually not wrong.
I don’t know Chappel Roan or any of her friends personally, so far be it from me to pass comment on the accuracy of her statement. I’m also not going to cry out that this is an outrage to parents everywhere or concede that indeed parenting young children is hell. What I would like to suggest is that, aside from being thoughtless toward people who have kids and those who desperately want but can’t have them, Roan’s comments are a vast oversimplification of parenting from someone who is choosing not to have kids.
I don’t say this as a critique to her – how could she possibly know just how complicated parenthood is, when it comes as a shock to almost every new parent out there?
I spent my whole life dreaming of becoming a mother, and when I finally had my first baby at 28 (just a year older than Chappel Roan is), it knocked me sideways. I’ve written about it here. I was expecting sleepless nights and diapers, but I wasn’t expecting the inner battle that I felt at every moment, and that’s down to two concepts that MOST parents have never heard of. Ever.
1. Matrescence
Just as adolescence is the process of transitioning from child to adult, matrescence is the process of transitioning to motherhood. In her bestselling book “Matrescence: on Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood,” Lucy Jones makes the case that outside of adolescence, there is no transformation as dramatic in a human’s life. She cites studies that prove changes in the maternal brain fundamentally “alter the neural basis of the self.”
We know about adolescence. We spend years explaining to pre-teens all about the changes their bodies are about to go through. Not a single antenatal class I attended gave me any insight into what motherhood was about to do to my body and brain (beyond the labor itself). If I had been adequately prepared for matrescence, the way I was puberty, I firmly believe I could have avoided the shock and depression that slammed right into my aching, tired, overstimulated body and brain.
The equivalent experience for Dads is called “patrescence.”
2. Ambivalence
Now, again, I don’t know Chappel Roan’s mom friends back in Missouri, so I can’t say for sure these two concepts are the only reason they might be in hell. Every circumstance is different – from surprise pregnancies to cost of living nightmares to abusive relationships. Maybe they, like so many Millennial and Gen Z parents, lack the village we’ve all been told it takes to raise children. But I can say, quite confidently, that no matter how real “being in hell” often is in parenthood, it’s seldom the whole picture. Declaring it the be all and end all of the experience is an unfair simplification that, if the outrage Roan’s comments have sparked are anything to go by, has made parents all around the world feel even less seen than we already do.
We’re parenting in an age in which social media makes us feel we have to fall into one of two camps: everything in parenthood is glorious or everything in parenthood is horrific. The truth is so much more nuanced than that. It is often both all at once. Ambivalence.
A Season
What’s more, even if somehow, miraculously, you did have complete insight into another person’s existence – despite not being able to see what happens behind closed doors, or in the minds of others – it’s a mistake to base judgment of the entire parenting experience on just the first three years. I have several friends who are choosing not to have kids because they see others (myself included) struggling in the early years.
It may feel like it at the time, but having kids is not signing up for a lifetime of chapped nipples and sacrificed social lives. Kids grow and parenthood changes and evolves with them. As sure as day follows night, Roan’s friends who are navigating new parenthood at the moment will, at some point, turn around and find they’re no longer the parents of babies. With that comes a whole wave of new emotions, but one I feel confident in saying they will be able to navigate. How do I know? Because NOTHING stretches what you are capable of more than parenthood. Whatever limits I thought I had pre-kids of my capacities to love, grieve, show up, carry on, etc., are blown out of the water daily.
In all honesty, I’m a big supporter of people like Chappel Roan being self-aware enough to know they don’t want kids. Raising humans involves a level of self-sacrifice that you shouldn’t enter into lightly. Far too many people sleepwalk into parenthood because it’s just what people do. The planet is overrun with people messed up from being raised by parents who just should not have had kids. I’m here for the people who recognize this is not the path for them.
That said, if you choose not to have kids, you don’t get to pass judgment on what those who do have them are experiencing. Why? Because you can’t possibly see the full picture.
You are not alone
So many of us parents are raising ourselves alongside our kids. We’re learning on the job. We don’t have the intergenerational support system parents had even a generation ago. We need to be held. For those of us who have or who are transitioning into parenthood, it’s okay to find it hard and it’s okay to find it wonderful, and it’s okay and more normal than you might think, to find it hard and wonderful in equal measure.
And if you are in hell, really, truly suffering, reach out and get help. You may feel you have to do it all alone but you don’t, and you’ll be surprised how many parents feel exactly how you do. Here in the UK we have organizations like PANDAS for parents struggling, in the US there are things like The National Parent Helpline.
From one parent to another – you are not alone. And it’s okay to feel like this is hard. It is, but it won’t be forever.
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