“I am a bad mother.”

This thought popped into my brain sometime in early 2025, and I was surprised to find it there. I was even more surprised to find it felt like the truth.

Now, I am aware that this is not an original idea. I am aware that many women fear they are bad mothers.

Apparently, though, I didn’t expect myself to be one of them.

I’m not sure why. 

Maybe I’m not in the habit of feeling like I’m bad at the things I choose to do. I’m not sure that is true though. I have often felt like I’m very bad at being a human being. But perhaps that isn’t something I choose to do.

I did choose to be a mother. Willingly. Consciously. Intentionally. After many years of thought.

And now we were four years in (if you count before she was birthed, which I do) and I found I believed I was bad at it.

I stumbled over the concept for a little while, and then my natural obsession with questioning everything caught up with my feelings, and I asked why?

Why did I feel like I was a bad mother?

What would make me feel like I was a good mother?

Well, there were some concrete and annoying things. Like I value emotional control, and my child was the one place where I found myself losing my temper. I barely knew I had a temper up until this point in my life, but here we are.

Some months later, I read a thing that basically said if you are a girl who grew up with the belief that you had to be a good girl and not inconvenience other people with your feelings, and now you’re a mom and you find yourself losing your temper with your children, it might be because you never learned how to set healthy boundaries with people and now this toddler has no concept of boundaries so they will keep pushing and pushing until they hit your rage boundary.

It was worded a lot more elegantly than that, but that was the general message. And it stayed with me.

I don’t actually see myself as a people-pleaser, more of a people-avoider, but I acknowledge that I have at times tried to please in order to avoid.

With my child, it wasn’t actually so much about pleasing her as it was a mix of two things, one probably healthy and one probably not.

I hate watching people treat children like they’re not fully human just because they’re children. Like they matter less, somehow. And I hated feeling that way as a child.

Which is probably where the unhealthy side comes in. I felt like I didn’t matter as a child. I often still feel that. 

I mean, I matter to myself, very much. But I don’t expect myself to matter to other people.

Which meant that every time my child wanted something unharmful, even if it inconvenienced me, I was inclined to say yes. 

This doesn’t mean I gave my child everything she wanted. It means I felt like “Because I’m not in the mood or I don’t want to,” was not a good enough reason to say no to something she clearly did want and was in the mood for.

Why are my moods and desires more important than hers, just because she happens to be smaller and wields less power?

I would not make an excellent dictator.

But here’s the thing: because she is smaller and wields less power is exactly why I must sometimes tell her no based on nothing except that I don’t want to.

I am not a saint. If I continually say yes when I want to say no, resentment builds.

It is not good for a person who is larger and wields more power to build up resentment towards a person who is smaller and wields less power.

It will come out.

And the smaller person will suffer.

Which is what the larger person will say she was trying to avoid.

And the truth is that it’s much less painful and damaging for a child to be told a clean and clear no than it is for that same child to feel like mama is mad at me and I don’t know why.

So there’s that. That’s one reason why I felt like I was a bad mother. 

A valid reason, in my opinion. Not a justifiable thing to keep doing once I realized I was doing it. So I’ve been practicing saying no before I’m angry.

The other reason, the main reason, actually, was that I wasn’t enjoying it.

I love my child.

I was exhausted by mothering.

I relished the time I had away from her – which at that point was one day a week.

A good mother, I felt, would like being around her child. Would like taking care of her child. 

I’ve tended to be a little judgemental of mothers who give birth to children and then hand them off to caretakers for their entire childhood. I had a child because I actually want to have a child, I said. I don’t want someone else to be her primary caretaker.

True. Still true. Didn’t change the fact that mothering was my least favorite part of my life.

Well, part of this was due to the aforementioned boundary issues. 

The other part was I was trying to run and grow a business where the service we provide, especially the part of it that I do, was extremely mentally taxing. There is little filling in the blanks in my work anymore. There is a lot of analysis and figuring things out. And I am really good at focusing on one thing at a time. Context-switching, quickly and efficiently, not so much.

Mothering a three-year-old while trying to analyze the financials of a business requires a lot of context switching. I hated it.

But I loved my work. I enjoyed my work more than I enjoyed mothering. I was better at my work.

Therefore, my brain concluded, I was bad at being a mother.

Perhaps the correct way to deal with this would have been to become a better mother. Be more patient. If my work was interfering with taking care of my child, stop working. Etc.

Instead, I asked myself, what would have to change for me to enjoy being with this child?

The answers were things like:

I don’t have to be a dictator, but neither does she. I can say no just because I don’t want to sometimes. It’s okay if I feel selfish. It is better that I feel selfish than that I feel resentful of her.

More childcare. More days when she’s being taken care of by someone I trust and I can just focus on my work, so when she comes home and it’s my turn to take care of her, I have more space to focus on her.

Sometimes I think from the outside I look more like a bad mom than I did a year ago. I say no more often to things I could say yes to, just because I don’t want to. I spend more time away from her.

I’m still not sure if I could feel myself worthy of being called a good mother. 

“I am a bad mother,” doesn’t feel true anymore.

“I am a good mother,” feels a little questionable.

I’m just a me mother. And I like it again.