What Are Your Thoughts About Motherhood?

I don’t know about you but I find all these ‘I find motherhood unfulfilling‘ stories in glossy women’s magazines so annoying. The latest is in this week’s Grazia and is a first person account from a woman saying she feels ambivalent about motherhood after having a baby. Aside from the fact that she seems to have gone into it with the strange idea that, “We are expected to find becoming a parent so fulfilling that we don’t need anything else in our lives to make us happy’, she also makes a huge sweeping statement in her piece that “all over the internet on blogs and message boards women are posting that motherhood feels like a prison sentence”.  I don’t know what she’s been reading but I have yet to see an abundance of these kinds of posts. Yes, motherhood is overwhelming, tiring and can make you feel as if you’re losing your self,  and I agree you shouldn’t have a child to “complete’ yourself. BUT I don’t feel that women are pushed into motherhood with the idea it will make them whole. And I don’t feel motherhood is a divided gang where on one side you have the uber mothers and on the other the ones who regret it.  I also don’t feel (like this writer) that society tells me that to be a “good mother” I have to put my personal and individual needs aside for my child. My experience of motherhood has been we are all in this together. It’s been good, it’s been bad, and at times it’s certainly been ugly but having children for me was a choice. One that I willingly chose and it hasn’t stopped me being who I was before I had kids, or from working or from having fun and it hasn’t changed me radically (though it has made me infinitely more patient). Plus as anyone who knows me will tell you, it certainly hasn’t stopped me from complaining about the more tedious aspects of bringing up kids, which is why I don’t feel that the idea of motherhood is a lie like this woman does. But tell me what do you think? Did you go into motherhood thinking it was going to be perfect and that you’d feel 100% fulfilled? Is this writer right about the pressure to be a mum? Let me know.