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There is something I have never felt comfortable saying out loud.
I never wanted to be a mother.
I knew that long before I ever became one. When I was younger and told friends as much, they thought I was joking. They told me I would change my mind. I didn’t. In university, I started getting serious with my first boyfriend. He told me he couldn’t have children, delivering the news as though he were disappointing me. I remember letting him believe that. Not because it was true, but because admitting I didn’t want children at all felt like something that would make him think less of me. So I stayed quiet.
And eventually, I followed the path most people follow without particularly questioning it. You meet someone. You marry. You have children. My husband and I did the same. Years later, when I brought it up, he looked at me and said, “Then why did we?” Neither of us had a satisfying answer. We did what we thought we were supposed to do, and we did not stop to ask whether we actually wanted to.
When I became pregnant, I wasn’t excited. There was no overwhelming sense of anticipation, no emotional moment when everything shifted. I knew then what I had always known.
After she was born, I loved her. That was never in question. But the role itself never felt natural. I took care of her. I kept her fed and safe and attended to. I did everything I was supposed to do, and I did it willingly, because she was mine and I loved her. But I am not a hugger. I was the one who, when she came to me with some minor injury, would ask, “Are you bleeding?” She would say no. I would say, “Then you’re fine.” I avoided field trips when I could. I didn’t photograph every occasion. I didn’t get emotional when she started school or left for university. Those moments never felt like losses. They felt like things moving forward, as they ought to.
When she has been ill or needed looking after, I have done it. But I will not pretend it doesn’t exhaust me in a way that other things don’t. Being needed in that particular way has always felt like work. I don’t think that makes me monstrous. I think it makes me honest.
I have never been one of those people who goes soft at the sight of a baby. I don’t feel the pull to hold them or coo over them. I can acknowledge that a baby exists, offer my congratulations, and move along quite contentedly. It is not that I wish them any ill. I simply don’t feel the need to perform an enthusiasm I don’t have. When we were attending church, I quietly asked not to be put in the nursery. It seemed the honest thing to do for everyone involved.
What I have come to understand, over time, is that loving your child and wanting motherhood are not the same thing. They are quite separate. I love my daughter. That has never been in question. But I did not want the role, and no amount of time or tenderness has changed that fundamental truth.
What I do want, and what I find I am beginning to have, is something that feels less like motherhood and more like friendship. She came home recently to vote. We drove across town together, talking about the candidates, what we liked, what we didn’t. No drama, no weight. Just easy conversation between two people who happen to know each other rather well. That is the relationship I was always hoping we would find our way to. One where she knows she can bring me her troubles if she truly needs to, but where most of the time we simply enjoy each other’s company without the machinery of mother and child getting in the way.
I never wanted to be a mum. That has always been true, and it remains true now.
But I find I quite like the person my daughter has become. And I think she might feel the same about me.
— Kate
I did not notice him at first. We had been in the same loose circle for months, a friend of a friend, the sort of person you say hello to without really seeing. It was not until a university trip to Hawaii that summer that something shifted. Six weeks, a group of students, and a lot of time with nowhere particular to be.
He was not what I had always told myself I wanted. He was younger than me, and slightly shorter, and I had always assumed I would end up with someone older and taller, as if I had written those requirements down somewhere official. But he was easy to talk to in the way that some people are, not performing, not trying, just present. Like someone I had known a long time already. We had similar interests, a similar way of looking at things, and what I can only describe as matching temperaments. Someone told me once I had an old soul. He had one too.
One night I had a bit too much to drink and fell asleep in his room. I woke up in his bed. He had slept on the floor. He didn’t make anything of it. Neither did I, not out loud. But I noticed.
That was the moment, if I’m honest. Not a kiss. Not a declaration. Just a quiet, decent thing that told me exactly who he was.
We were engaged within two months of coming home. Married eight months after that. Twenty felt grown at the time. It does not, in hindsight.
We did not have a dramatic love story, and we knew it even then. No lightning bolt, no consuming chemistry, no grand gestures. What we had was conversation. Ease. A shared sense that life together would be calm rather than chaotic. I used to wonder, in my more uncertain moments, whether that meant something was missing. I had read the novels. I knew what a spark was supposed to feel like.
But over twenty years, what we built has held. Quietly, and completely.
There have been seasons of distance. A period somewhere around ten years in when I questioned privately whether I had mistaken comfort for compatibility. Those thoughts did not linger, but they existed, and I think it is worth saying so. A long marriage is not a continuous feeling. It is a series of choices, some of them easy and some of them considerably less so.
What I can say now is this: I am still myself.
Marriage did not swallow me or shrink me. I have always known I could stand on my own two feet if I needed to, and that independence has never threatened him. His steadiness has never confined me. We talk constantly. The best parts of our holidays are often the long drives, stretches of road where conversation unfolds without effort. Even when our daughter was young, we were careful not to lose ourselves entirely in parenting. We did not want to wake up to an empty house and find we had become strangers.
Do I sometimes wish for more tenderness? Yes. I wish he would come up behind me in the kitchen and wrap his arms around me without prompting. I wish for small, unannounced gestures. Not passion, just quiet closeness. The sort that says I see you, without needing to say anything at all.
But longing for a little more does not mean lacking love. It means I am still human. Still wanting. Still alive to the idea that even a good marriage can keep growing.
We are two people who talk well together. Who travel well together. Who have built something that does not look like the novels but has proven, over twenty years, to be more durable than anything dramatic could have been.
It is ours. It has grown quieter and deeper and more certain with time.
And after twenty years, that feels like something worth keeping.
— Kate
I used to assume that if I ever had a daughter, she would be like me. Quiet. Independent. Capable of sorting through her own problems without much fuss.
Instead, I was given a girl who feels everything.
She cries at sad films. At kind gestures. At disappointment. At things I would have simply swallowed and moved on from without a second thought. She talks through her worries. Replays conversations. Questions herself in ways that leave me genuinely tired just from listening.
For years, if I’m honest, I mistook our differences for weaknesses. Hers, not mine.
I didn’t understand the drama of secondary school friendships. I didn’t understand the tears over boys who hadn’t earned them. I didn’t understand the anxiety over marks when she was already doing well. At her age, my friendships were uncomplicated, mostly boys and very little emotion. I got on with things, and when I grew bored, I simply disengaged. Life felt rather straightforward. I assumed everyone found it so.
Hers does not.
She sets impossibly high standards for herself. All top marks or nothing. Certainty or failure. Love or rejection. Very little middle ground. I encourage her. I reassure her. I tell her she is more than capable. Sometimes she believes me. Often she doesn’t, and I have learned not to take that personally.
And somewhere along the way, I had to sit with something I hadn’t particularly wanted to admit: that just because I don’t experience the world the way she does doesn’t mean her way of moving through it is wrong. It is simply different from mine. That sounds straightforward enough written down. It took longer to actually believe.
She is in her second year at university now, eight hours away. Brave enough to build a life far from home. Strong enough to navigate things I never had to. Sensitive enough to care deeply when others might not even notice.
I am proud of her. Not because she is like me. But because she isn’t.
Perhaps that is the quiet work of raising a daughter, even for those of us who never quite felt the instinct the way others seem to. Not shaping her into who you would have been, but standing steady while she becomes who she already is. Still learning her, even now. And I suspect she is still working me out as well.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 