The Feeling Nobody Talks About: Ambivalence and Motherhood
By Melissa L. Paul, LCSW | MLP Therapy Group
There is a question I hear underneath almost every conversation I have with new mothers, and sometimes with women still deciding whether to become one at all. It doesn't always get said out loud. But it's there.
Am I supposed to feel this way?
The answer, almost always, is yes.
A recent piece in The Cut captured this feeling honestly. Andrea González-Ramírez describes years of cycling between wanting children and dreading the reality of them, paralyzed by too much information and not enough permission to simply not know yet. It struck a nerve because so many women recognize themselves in it.
The Problem With Black and White Thinking About Motherhood
We have a cultural script for how women are supposed to feel about having children. You either want them or you don't. You're either ready or you're not. You either love every moment or something is wrong with you.
That script is not just unhelpful. It's actively harmful.
The truth is that ambivalence is not a sign that you made the wrong choice, that you're a bad mother, or that you don't love your child. Ambivalence is a completely normal, healthy, and honest response to one of the biggest identity shifts a human being can go through.
Expecting certainty from yourself about motherhood is like expecting to have no complicated feelings about any other enormous, life-altering, irreversible decision. We don't hold any other part of life to that standard. Why do we hold this one to it?
You Know Your Old Life. You Don't Know Your Baby Yet.
One of the things I say to clients who are sitting with guilt about their ambivalence is this: of course you're grieving. You knew your old life. You understood it. You'd built something in it that felt like yours.
Your baby is still a stranger.
That is not a cruel thing to say. It's an honest one. The love can be there - real and fierce and overwhelming - and the disorientation can be there too. Both things are true at the same time. You can love someone completely and still be adjusting to a life you don't fully recognize yet.
That adjustment takes time. More time than anyone tells you, and more grace than most mothers give themselves.
Parenting Is a Job. We Don't Love Every Part of Every Job.
Here's a reframe I find useful: parenting is a full time job. And we don't love all elements of every job.
You can be deeply committed to your work, good at it, proud of it, and still find parts of it tedious, exhausting, or genuinely hard. Nobody expects a surgeon to love the paperwork. Nobody expects a teacher to love standardized testing. And yet we expect mothers to love every feeding, every sleepless night, every moment of the early days when everything is hard and nothing is familiar.
That expectation is unfair. And carrying it quietly, alone, is one of the things that turns normal ambivalence into shame.
All Mothers Carry Ambivalence
I want to be clear about something: ambivalence about motherhood is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that you are paying attention.
The mothers who say they have never once doubted, never once grieved, never once wished for a moment of their old life back - I am not sure I believe them. Or perhaps they found a way to not look too closely.
The women I sit with who are doing the hardest, most honest work of early motherhood are almost always the ones willing to hold both things at once. The love and the loss. The joy and the exhaustion. The gratitude and the grief. That is not weakness. That is emotional honesty. And it is the starting point for something real.
What Therapy Actually Offers
Therapy is not a place to arrive at the right answer about motherhood. It is not a place where someone tells you how you should feel or whether you made the right choice. It is a place to slow down enough to actually hear yourself.
The gains and losses of becoming a parent are real and they are meaningful You deserve a space to name them without being rushed to resolution, without someone reminding you to be grateful, without the pressure to perform certainty you don't feel.
That space, where you can sit with the complicated feelings and figure out what they actually mean for you is where something shifts. Not because the ambivalence disappears. But because it stops being something to be ashamed of and starts being something you can work with.
If You're on the Fence, or Already Over It and Still Unsure
Whether you are still deciding whether to become a mother, navigating pregnancy with more questions than answers, or already holding a baby and wondering why nobody told you it would feel like this - you are not alone and you are not broken.
The feelings you are having are not a verdict on your love. They are not a prediction of the mother you will be. They are just feelings, moving through a person going through something enormous.
You are allowed to not have it figured out yet.
MLP Therapy Group works with women navigating motherhood, identity, and the complicated feelings that come with both. We offer therapy in Brooklyn and virtually throughout New York and New Jersey. If any of this resonated, we would love to talk.
Melissa L. Paul, LCSW is the founder of MLP Therapy Group in Brooklyn, NY, specializing in couples therapy, relationship counseling, and therapy for women.