"If I could go back, I might not have children."
"You'll regret it!" — that’s the warning every childless woman gets. But a mother who says she might not choose motherhood again? She’s seen as monstrous.
Hi, I’m Ilaria Maria Dondi. I’ve been a mom since 2016, but I’ve existed in the world since 1981 — which means that for 35 years, I was a woman experiencing different stages of adulthood, first without children and then by choice, childfree. This is my newsletter, where I write about reproductive rights, choices, and conditions — including the right, the choice, and the condition not to reproduce.
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"Break the Eggs" is the English version of my original Italian newsletter, Rompere le uova. This is not a professional translation, but one supported by AI. I apologize in advance for any mistakes or awkward phrasing — but, for the reasons I explain below, taking this step is important to me. Please be kind; I’m doing my best and will keep trying to improve.
"If I could go back, I might not have children, you know?!"
She says it out of nowhere — a woman I barely know, mother of two teenagers, during a break in a work meeting. There’s little intimacy between us, but the topic, as often happens among women, opens a kind of ancient, unspoken bond.
We’re talking about exhaustion — the deep, bone-level kind — and the pressure to keep performing like everything is urgent. About how even our so-called "secure" jobs feel shaky, as if we’re just lemons: squeezed until dry, and if we slip or speak up, swapped for new ones.
We talk about paid work that demands we act like we don’t have kids — or lives. And unpaid work: the quiet, endless care of homes, parents, relatives, children becoming teenagers, teenagers becoming adults.
How are we meant to hold it all together in a society that expects us to be full-time mothers, daughters, wives — as if we weren’t also working — while leaving the long, heavy hours of care on our shoulders?
In this constant trickle of tasks — deadlines, appointments, bookings, demands, needs that aren’t our own — where do we find space for ourselves?
Just a breath. A quiet hour. Time to tend to a dream — one that’s been shrinking, little by little, and now sits there, small but still alive, waiting for a better day.
"If I could go back, I might not have children, you know?!"
She says it with a smile.
Her shoulders lift slightly, like she’s apologizing — like she’s trying to pass it off as a joke. She smiles again, looking at each of us in turn, maybe waiting to see the effect of what she’s just said. Maybe already regretting letting it slip.
The other two laugh, a little awkwardly: “Oh come on, really?”
One of them mumbles something like, “Well, not that far…” She backtracks. Adds context. Of course she’s happy. Of course she loves her kids. Of course she wouldn’t trade them for anything.
And yet. I write and speak often about maternal ambivalence, about mothers who carry regrets. Still, I catch myself in a quiet bias: I wouldn’t have expected it from her. A woman with grown children she adores. A woman who shares hobbies and a balanced, respectful relationship with her teens — no major clashes, despite their age.
What she said makes her feel more human to me. Closer.
A few days later, it happens again. This time, it’s a friend.
I think I’ve realized I wasn’t meant to be a mother. Even if, from the outside, it looks like the opposite. If I could go back, knowing what I know now, I think I’d choose to be alone. To protect my independence.
I expected it even less from her.
We’re deeply connected — and yet, unlike me, she’s always seemed rock solid in her role as a mother. No matter what else shook around her, her maternal identity held steady. It was the backbone that held up the rest.
I love catching myself in these moments — Realizing how easy it is to judge, to assume, especially when someone feels very different from me… or uncomfortably similar. It happens to all of us, I know. But now, unlike before, I welcome it.
Being caught off guard helps me grow — as someone willing to listen, and in relationships, which are always a work in progress and, thankfully, never a final destination.
But I’m drifting
What I’ve learned, after listening to hundreds of women while researching and interviewing for Libere. Di scegliere se e come avere figli, is this: in the quiet intimacy of sisterhood, when judgment falls away, many admit that—looking back—they wouldn’t have had that child. Or not at that time.
There is no guilt in this.
Just as there is no virtue in being the kind of mother who says, “I’d do it all over again.”
Saying “If I could go back, I might not have children” doesn’t diminish the love we feel for those we’ve brought into the world. It doesn’t make us regretful mothers by default.
On the Regret of Childfree Women—and Mothers
One of the most common things said to women who choose not to have children is:
“But what if you regret it?”
It’s the ultimate bias—the one that hovers over childfree women, sometimes like a warning (“You’ll be sorry”), sometimes like a curse (“You’ll change your mind, and then it’ll be too late”). But a mother who dares to say, in hindsight, that she wouldn’t do it again? She’s seen as monstrous.
And yet—regret is part of the human condition. It’s always a possibility, no matter the path we choose. Reproductive choices are no exception.
That said, most women who decide not to have children don’t regret it. That’s what the data tells us.
But what about the parents—mothers and fathers—who wouldn’t make the same choice if given the chance? How many are there?
When Orna Donath’s book Regretting Motherhood: A Sociopolitical Analysis came out in Italy in 2017, I had just come through the postpartum depression I talked about in my essay. I was, by then, a content, confident mother.
And still—reading those testimonies shook me. At times it was unbearable. Painful in a way I hadn’t expected.
Some of the words could have been mine, just a few months earlier. Or more likely, words I wouldn’t have dared to say out loud:
“I regret having children and becoming a mother, but I love my kids.
If I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t want them to exist. But I do want them to exist—
I just don’t want to be their mother.”
To say this, in a society that defines womanhood through motherhood, is to risk your very sanity, your safety. And if that’s true for someone who feels fleeting, momentary doubt—imagine what it’s like for women who arrive at a deeper, more lasting kind of regret. Not tied to hardship or illness, but something existential. Something permanent.
Now, Donath is speaking of a radical regret—something different from the maternal ambivalence I’ve described earlier, shared with me by two women in recent days.
But while writing Libere, I kept turning the same question over in my mind: How many stories of hidden, silenced, hesitant parenthood are hiding behind the façade of “normal” families?
One early answer came to me through numbers—numbers I wish didn’t exist: The staggering data on child abuse within families. A brutal social indicator of how many parents are ill-equipped, unconscious, and yes—perhaps regretful, even if they can’t name it. Parenthoods that, in truth, should never have happened.
But that’s not the point I want to make here. Instead, I’ll leave you with another voice from Donath’s book—another impossible truth, spoken out loud.
“Children? I’d give them up in a heartbeat. All three of them? Yes.
It hurts to admit it, and these lips will never say it in front of them.
They wouldn’t understand—not even at fifty.
Or maybe they would by then. But I’m not sure.
I’d do without them. Truly. Without blinking.”
How many mothers, reading this and other testimonies in Regretting Motherhood, finally saw their truth reflected back to them—not as monsters, but as human beings?
It’s nearly impossible to gather scientific data on such a taboo subject. But a few public experiments give us a glimpse. When journalist Ann Landers asked her Chicago Sun-Times readers if, given the chance, they’d have children again, thousands wrote in. Seventy percent said no. That was in the 1960s.
Thirty years later, Leslie Lafayette from the ChildFree Network ran similar surveys—this time the "no" hovered between 45% and 60%. Most of the parents who regretted their choice pointed to a striking imbalance between sacrifice and joy, and the dissonance between what society had promised parenthood would be—and what it actually was.
Nothing Euripides hadn’t already put in the mouths of the Corinthian women in Medea:
And so I say to you:
those who have never had children
are happier than those who have.
Those without children never know
if they bring joy or sorrow,
and they are spared the anguish.
But the ones raising children
are always worrying—
first about raising them right,
then about leaving them something to live on.
And while they struggle, they don’t know—
they can’t know—if their children
will grow up to be good or bad.
And still, regretting parenthood—especially for mothers—is unspeakable. The world is full of fathers who walk away from their children without ever being called monsters. Or they stay under the same roof but hand off all emotional and developmental labor to their partner. Mothers don’t get either option—not without being branded as unnatural, selfish, cold. A witch, even.
But what if the real monster isn’t the woman who wants to leave—but the maternal duty to love at all costs? The emotional noose that slips off when it’s a man tugging at it, but tightens when it’s a woman who tries to loosen it?
Every choice carries the risk of regret. We all know some decisions can’t be undone—and yet we still make them, without crystal balls. Parenthood is no exception.
And while there may be no easy answers, no one-size-fits-all truths— maybe we can at least say it out loud. Maybe—radical as it sounds—we can even tell our children, when they’re grown. So they, especially the daughters, might grow up a little freer.
It’s not hard to imagine a mother growing to love a child she didn’t plan.
So why is it so hard to imagine a woman wanting to step away from a child she longed for, even one she deeply loves? Why is it still unthinkable to say: I made a mistake by becoming a mother?
"Why do you want children?": The awareness we lack
Women without children have, over the centuries, been trained to scrutinize the voluntary and involuntary reasons for their childlessness. Moreover, they have been stigmatized, blamed, and interrogated when they were not mothers: each one was repeatedly asked to justify this social absence that caused discomfort.
This has forced women who are childfree (those who choose not to have children) or childless (those without children, possibly by chance, not by choice) into an involuntary practice of self-awareness regarding their reproductive choices or circumstances. For some, this practice has gradually become more conscious, giving rise to one of the most vibrant traditions in feminist thought. In any case, as a result of this centuries-old scrutiny, most women without children are well aware of why they don't have or won't have them.
And this is also why, in a childfree choice, regret is a possible option, but statistically, it's rarely encountered.
On the other hand, motherhood is not merely a possible choice; it is an identity that society imposes on women as part of their very essence. No one questions the desire of women who have children or wish to have them* and, in the absence of maternal self-awareness, motherhood often becomes an almost inevitable stage in a woman’s life.
Now, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask oneself:
Why did I have children?
Why do I want to have a child?
I realize this may be uncomfortable, but it’s crucial to understand what drives us:
Do we have children because we truly want them, or because it's the normal thing to do, the way it’s always been? Are we driven by a clear desire, or have we absorbed a societal norm and simply follow it, without questioning our own wishes? Do we have the tools to imagine ourselves not only as mothers, even if we choose to become them anyway, or do we lack the ability to think of alternative futures? (excerpt from my book Libere)
I believe that honestly investigating our past, present, and future choices means giving them dignity and value. Even if we recognize them as the result of stereotypes, in that case, instead of blaming ourselves, we could take pride in our awareness.
If I could go back, would I choose my child (or my children) again?
This is a question we need not answer when it is asked by others, but perhaps it is worth asking ourselves.
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“Why do you have children?”: the answers mothers gave me (and an important note)
I asked this question to many women with children and shared their answers—anonymously and with their consent—in my book Libere. Di scegliere se e come avere figli (Einaudi, 2024).
A clarification that matters:
This question, along with the variation “Why do you think you want to have one or more children?”, was part of a formal questionnaire, designed specifically for the research I was conducting. It was never asked in private or casual conversations.
I want to be clear on this, so no one mistakes my work as a suggestion to casually, or worse, habitually interrogate mothers about their reproductive choices.
Just like it’s unacceptable to question the reproductive choices of childfree or childless women, doing so with mothers is equally invasive, inappropriate, and unjustifiable—no matter how curious or close you feel to the person in front of you.
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Ilaria Maria Dondi