Kyndra Wilson announced on her wedding day to 350 assembled guests that she wasn't going to have any children.
Some years into her marriage, and after much deliberation, she changed her mind and went on to have a daughter. But, while pregnant, and once her baby was born, she found that she could not identify with the description of motherhood she heard from other mothers and society.
Below Kyndra explains how she reached the decision to have children and her experience of pregnancy.
Convinced that she could not be the only woman to feel this way, she wrote articles for Mothers Movement Online describing her experiences.
One was entitled "Love: How Do You Know?" In this piece Kyndra explains how she has at times struggled to feel the depth of emotion for her child that she was being told was natural.
On the right, Kyndra discusses her desire to write and her opinions on the need for a more honest approach to the topic of motherhood.
Motherhood Uncensored
After relating her experience of motherhood, Kyndra received a large amount of support from other women who were struggling with feelings of guilt for feeling the way she described.
“I personally didn’t feel that way – maybe because I’m too arrogant! But a lot of women I have spoken to describe that feeling like they’re a failure as a mother.”
But one thing does worry Kyndra.
“I do worry that one day my daughter will catch on, and I’m scared that some day she will ask me, ‘Did you bond with me? Did you feel that unconditional, uncontrollable love?’ And that I will have to say, ‘It took me a while, it took me a while to get to know you, and to get used to you, and to work out how to do this in a way that was going to work for all of us.”.
“And that scares me, because what mother wants to have to say that? It would be so much easier to say, ‘Absolutely, I loved you from the moment I knew I was pregnant with you’. But my personal philosophy is that it’s more authentic to be honest, and to work through the honesty, than to air brush it. I think a lot of women deal very superficially with motherhood because they don’t want to face the possibility it’s not working out the way it should on TV, or in parenting magazines.”
“You have to be willing to listen to the platitudes and the stupid, pithy advice coming back at you. I just remember being really irritated when I would try and talk to women right after I had my baby, and they would say, ‘Just enjoy every minute, it just goes so fast,’ which is true, but at the time I needed someone to go, ‘Yeah it’s really hard isn’t it. There are days when you don’t want to do it, and you can love your child without loving the job.’
When it came to writing about her experiences, honesty was again the order of the day.
“I was a little apprehensive about it, but I also felt like it was a catharsis. For me personally, most of my writing, it’s almost like a journal. I write it because I just have to get it out of my head, and when I get it out of my head I can make sense of it. Obviously when you put anything out there to be published you’re worried that people are going to come back and say, ‘Well, buck up little camper, it would be fine if you just did more crafts with your kids!’
“But I also did secretly suspect that there were a lot of women out there who probably felt like that. And there were. I had a lot of people write me and say, ‘This is the first time I’ve read anything that I was able to relate to from beginning to end, and I was secretly dreading the point where they tied it up neatly in a bow and you never did,’ And they were grateful for that. It was good for them to see that they weren’t alone.”
When asked her opinion as to how best to combat the idealised myth of motherhood Kyndra says:
“Fundamentally it has to do with just be willing to admit that you don’t have your act together. To say, ‘I’m doing my best, but I realise I’m probably making mistakes’.”