I want to be a stay-at-home mum, and feel angry that society won’t let me | Ask Annalisa Barbieri

I’m 30, and have had two abortions in the past three years with two long-term partners, due to not being in a secure financial situation. I feel good about this decision. Even though I’m now with a wonderful man, we haven’t been together very long and haven’t been financially ready.

I’ve spent the past five years building up my business from home, and my boyfriend works and we earn good money, and we should be in a position to buy a small property together early next year. If we can, I would like to start trying to get pregnant.

I’m so lucky and have so much to be grateful and hopeful for. But I’m getting increasingly resentful of my work and life. I know I need to have patience and that a family will happen at the right time, but I find myself increasingly frustrated and feeling like what I’m doing with my life is not “natural”. I want to be a stay-at-home mum, looking after a family full time, which I know will never happen because, even when we do have a child, I will have to, quite quickly, go back to work.

I yearn for domesticity, for children, for a home of my own, and this is turning into a deep resentment and frustration towards myself, my life, the way society is structured at large. I’m increasingly irritated by the ridiculous requests my clients might have, it all seems petty and pointless. A career change doesn’t seem possible, I make good money, can work from home, and it’s flexible.

I’m a leftwing, liberal feminist and LOVE that we can all choose a path – but can we really? My friends joke that I’m a “trad-wife”, and I can’t help but think I would LOVE that (without the horrible rightwing bits).

Any advice for how to get out of this rut would be appreciated.

The sense of dissatisfaction in your letter was strong. But I also picked up on your longing – for something that is always a bit out of reach. I wonder, even if you did have children and a family and stayed at home, how long it would be before that sense of dissatisfaction came back? I think before you do anything – and certainly before you have children – you need to consider when you were last truly happy, and satisfied, and see if that leads you on to a road of self-discovery.

You told me very little about your past, and I felt this was really important, yet absent. UK-registered psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber felt that “if we have a strong feeling of a happily ever after, a romanticised version of that, then that leaves no room for ambivalence, for surprise. You seem to have a socialised mythology of motherhood and marriage, an assumption of feeling the same way forever, but we easily forget that how we feel in this moment isn’t how we’re always going to feel. You seem wildly overcommitted to an idea [being a stay-at-home mum] that is so unverified.”

Of course, within reason, you can do what you want. But the big question is: will it lead to contentment, to satisfaction? What if you get the house, and the family, and still feel resentful. Resentment can be a useful emotion, it can tell us we need to do something, to change things but, rarely, can others help us with this, especially if it’s a deeply embedded feeling. You can’t outsource it and especially not to children.

Fox Weber and I felt you were a experiencing a mixture of deep pragmatism (you are waiting until you’re financially secure) and wild romanticism that something “perfect” can, and will, come along and answer all your issues. “Real life,” said Fox Weber, “is messy and doesn’t match the picture.”

I asked Fox Weber why you might have this idea that everything had to be a certain way before you could establish your ideal life and she explained that it “could be about fear, that things have to be exactly right or not at all. But that feeling you have of wanting to anchor yourself, of thinking it will give you the security you crave is very restrictive and narrow.”

“What,” asked Fox Weber, “does your boyfriend want?” The same thing?

In your longer letter you said you wanted to punch people who tell you that “you’re young and have so much time”. I’m not going to say that but I do think you need to take a bit of time out to work out who you really are because this is not work you want to start doing when you’re a stay-at-home mother with young children.

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