Why I Sometimes Ask Myself if I Regret Having Kids
The snack went on the floor first, followed by the water bottle, and then my daughter, who is eight, started to cry. We were in the school pickup line, and Hannah had asked for a cheese stick, then decided she didn’t want it, then decided she did, and by the time I found a half-crushed bag of pretzels in the glove compartment, none of it was acceptable. The car smelled like sour apple yogurt and rain. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and actually thought it. What was I thinking?
Not what was she thinking, but me. What was I thinking, having a child. What was I thinking, believing I was someone who could handle this—the noise, the unpredictability, the way every small request feels like a negotiation with a tiny, emotional bureaucrat.
The thought arrived like a car pulling into my driveway: quiet, familiar, and entirely unwelcome. I didn’t say it out loud. But it was there, sitting in the passenger seat next to the discarded backpack.
That moment was three years ago, when Hannah was five. She doesn’t throw her snacks on the floor anymore. She does, however, have opinions about whether her homework folder is organized “the right way,” and she recently informed me that I ruined her life because I bought the wrong brand of watermelon-flavored gum. The thoughts still come, too. Not every day, not like a constant ache, but in flashes—usually in the middle of homework arguments or on Sunday evenings when I remember I have to go to work and then come home and do it all over again. Did I make a mistake?
I used to hang up on the thought. I’d tell myself I was being dramatic, or ungrateful, or hormonal. Then I had a conversation that changed how I understand those flashes, and it came from an unlikely place: my daughter’s first-grade teacher, Ms. Delgado.
Hannah was having trouble adjusting to the new grade. She was tired in the afternoons, and we were having meltdowns over minor transitions—toys to dinner, dinner to bath, bath to bed. I was exhausted. I mentioned to Ms. Delgado, half-joking, that someone had forgotten to warn me that parenting would involve this much logistics. She laughed, but then she said something I have never forgotten.
“The kids aren’t the problem,” she said. “The problem is that we all expect to feel a steady, uninterrupted sense of fulfillment, and that is not in the contract. The contract is just showing up and figuring it out.”
She told me about her own son, now in high school, who had gone through a phase in middle school where he barely spoke to her. “For a whole semester, I felt like a failure,” she said. “I remember sitting in the car after dropping him off at school, and thinking, I don’t even like being around this kid right now. And I had to sit with that thought and not panic.”
Sitting with the thought. That, apparently, is the skill.
Here is what I have learned since then, mostly by messing it up on a regular basis. The “regret” feeling—even the full sentence, I regret having children—does not necessarily mean that you actually wish your child didn’t exist. It usually means something quieter. It can mean you’re grieving the life you had before. It can mean you’re depleted and your brain, in that exhausted state, is looking for a simple explanation for why you feel so worn down. It can mean you’re in a season of parenting where the relationship feels one-sided. For me, it meant I was tired of being needed every single minute, and my brain mislabeled exhaustion as a life evaluation.
What I have started doing is small, but it helps. First, I stopped confessing the thought every time it appeared. Not because confession is bad, but because I was turning a passing feeling into a crisis. I would mention it to a friend, and then we would spiral about it, and then I would feel worse. Now, I just let it sit in the car with me. I name it: That’s the depleted thought. Then I wait. Most of the time, it gets out and walks away.
The second thing is about the practical, boring details. I began tracking what was actually happening when those thoughts appeared. The pattern was obvious: they showed up when I was hungry, tired, or surrounded by clutter. So I moved a basket to the front door for her school papers. I started pre-slicing apples for after-school snacks. I stopped trying to have emotionally significant conversations between dinner and bath time, because that was the worst possible window of the day. These are not grand fixes. But treating the thought as a sign of a logistical problem—rather than an existential one—took away a lot of its power.
I also learned something about the concept of “splitting.” It’s a term kids use in school, but it applies to parents too. It’s the pattern of seeing something as absolute: either you are a good parent or a bad one; either you love your child completely or you’re a monster. The regret thought only exists when I’m in that all-or-nothing mode. When I can hold both things at once—I love Hannah fiercely and I sometimes wish I could disappear for a week—the thought becomes less sharp. It becomes a passing cloud instead of a lightning bolt.
There are concrete phrases that help when I’m in the middle of the hard moments. Instead of asking, Do I regret this? I now ask, What one thing is solvable right now? Maybe it’s just turning off the lights in the hallway. Maybe it’s saying, “Let’s stop this and read a short book.” The goal is not to solve the entire relationship. The goal is to make it through the next twenty minutes without emotionally unraveling.
Hannah is eight now. Last night, she drew a picture of the two of us standing under a rainbow. It was crayon, one of her hands was bigger than her head, and she had written “Mom and me” in crooked letters. I felt warmth in my chest, the kind they write about on greeting cards. And then, forty minutes later, she had a total collapse over the way I poured her milk, and I felt the other thing again.
I think that’s the actual answer. Not a resolution, but a rhythm. The regret thought is not waiting for me at the end of some healing journey; it’s just another thing that appears on a Tuesday. I don’t know if it will ever fully go away. But I know it doesn’t have to be the boss of me. Sometimes, I just sit with it, the way I sit with my daughter when she’s still angry even after I’ve apologized. I let it be there. And eventually, it softens. The car keeps moving. We get home.
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