And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get Him to swap our places
Be runnin’ up that road
Be runnin’ up that hill
Be runnin’ up that building
Say, if I only could, oh.

Kate Bush

Mother’s Day for the Defective Woman

Apparently, I should not have been a mother.

It is a strange sentence to arrive at on Mother’s Day, somewhere between supermarket tulips and social media posts written in pastel fonts about unconditional love.

But the conclusion has been circling me for years now.

Not directly, of course. Nobody says:

“You should never have had children.”

Modern people prefer subtler forms of execution.

Instead they slowly build the case around you. The studies become evidence. The ambition becomes evidence. The divorce. The exhaustion. A few bad decisions. The sadness nobody could visibly monetise into concern because I continued showing up to work every morning looking relatively brushed.

Eventually every difficult thing your child experiences becomes retroactive evidence that you were defective from the beginning.

And the worst part is this:

I am not stupid.

I see my mistakes perfectly.

People seem to imagine mothers walk through life in cheerful denial, completely unaware of the emotional destruction behind them, like raccoons wearing lipstick and carrying therapy books.

I fucking know.

I know about the moments I stayed too long and the moments I left too early. I know about the exhaustion, the emotional absences, the years spent surviving instead of living. I know about the desperate attempts to prove I was still worthy of love, work, usefulness, existence.

I have lived alone for four years now. Do people think that happened because I was overwhelmed with inner peace?

This entire period of my life has often felt less like living and more like participating in a sophisticated punishment system I designed for myself.

Quiet punishment.
Functional punishment.
The kind adults specialise in.

The Pattern of Mistakes

The kind where you continue functioning so efficiently that nobody realises you are exhausted because your suffering remains productive. Apparently my response to emotional pain was not alcoholism or tax fraud, but excessive functionality, which is deeply inconvenient for everybody hoping for a cleaner narrative.

And now my daughter has problems.

Which apparently means the family has finally located the missing puzzle piece explaining my entire existence.

There it is.
The evidence.

My daughter struggles, and suddenly people revisit my life with the concentration of investigators reopening an unsolved cold case. Every decision becomes symbolic. The studies. The work. The divorce. The mistakes that I made in every decade. The times I tried to become a person outside motherhood itself.

You see? This is what happens.

As if human beings are assembled through perfect administrative decisions. As if mothers are laboratories and children are product reviews.

Most importantly, your children must become proof that you performed womanhood correctly. They should be emotionally balanced, polite, reasonably successful and ideally carrying reusable water bottles while discussing boundaries in calm voices.

Anything less and suddenly everybody starts reopening old files from 2007.

And honestly, I understand the temptation because I, too, have looked at my own life and thought:

Jesus Christ, woman.

The Exercise Ball

For example, if I measured my value through the eyes of my daughter’s father, perhaps the official summary already arrived for my thirtieth birthday when he gave me an exercise ball as a present.

An exercise ball.

Nothing says:

“I cherish your complicated inner world”
quite like inflatable fitness equipment standing silently in the corner of the living room like a large blue reminder to improve yourself.

Very moving.

Not flowers. Not jewellery. Not even one of those mildly depressing scented candles that smell vaguely like divorced optimism.

Just:

“Here. Improve.”

Which honestly feels like the entire female experience condensed into one large blue sphere.

And in all the years of motherhood, I have never once woken up to find my daughter’s father had prepared a Mother’s Day gift together with her.

His explanation was always technically correct.

“You are not my mother.”

Fair enough.

And yet it somehow misses the point so completely it deserves academic study.

Because that is perhaps another strange part of motherhood. A woman can spend years carrying the emotional structure of a family and still remain oddly invisible within it. Useful, necessary, dependable — but somehow not fully seen as a person separate from the function she performs.

Things Six-Year-Olds Understand Better Than Adults

At school I sometimes ask my first and second graders simple moral questions.

“If somebody does a bad thing, are they a bad person?”

Six-year-olds answer immediately.

“No.”

No hesitation. No dramatic moral performance. No podcast psychology disguised as wisdom.

Just:

“No.”

Because children understand instinctively what adults slowly forget. People struggle sometimes. People become angry, selfish, frightened, lost. They hurt themselves and they hurt others. That does not erase their humanity entirely.

Children seem to understand this naturally before adulthood trains them into becoming judges.

And maybe that is what unsettles me now, because when adults speak about mothers, all nuance disappears immediately. Mothers become simplified into outcomes.

Successful mother.

Failed mother.

As if one struggling child can suddenly rewrite an entire woman into a cautionary tale.

Honestly, it is slightly alarming that six-year-olds often demonstrate a more sophisticated understanding of human morality than grown adults discussing motherhood over coffee.

The Inconvenient Part

And yet despite all this — despite the mistakes, despite the exhaustion, despite the quiet suspicion that my daughter’s problems have become symbolic evidence in the long-running case against me — there remains one deeply inconvenient fact.

When I look at her, my heart does not react like guilt.

It reacts like love.

Not noble love. Not the kind appearing in Mother’s Day advertisements beside organic yoghurt breakfasts and handmade cards with glitter falling off them.

Real love.

Complicated love. Exhausting love. Animal love. The kind that survives disappointment, fear, guilt and exhaustion.

Apparently she is the pattern of my mistakes.

Strange.

Because when she laughs, my nervous system still lights up instantly. When she messages me, I still look at my phone with the emotional intensity of a Victorian woman waiting for letters during wartime.

Surely catastrophic failure should feel uglier than this.

But it does not.

That is the confusing part.

People speak about motherhood as though children are final verdicts on female worth. Passed. Failed. Successful. Unsuccessful.

What a brutal way to speak about human love.

Because when I look at my daughter, I do not see evidence.

I see a person.

A difficult person sometimes. A beautiful person. A person I would still choose again instantly despite everything.

And perhaps that is the part nobody understands properly.

If I was truly never supposed to be a mother, then why does loving her feel like the most natural thing I have ever done?

Motherhood, Apparently

Maybe that is the final thing I have learned after all these years of trying to become acceptable.

Women are expected to survive beautifully. We are expected to carry guilt elegantly, to suffer quietly, to remain emotionally available while privately collapsing with good posture and moisturised skin.

I cannot do it perfectly anymore.

I am too tired for perfection now.

But if motherhood means loving another human being beyond logic, beyond pride, beyond your own self-image, beyond even your own mistakes —

then perhaps I was a mother after all.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the women who apparently should never have become mothers in the first place.