When You Love Your Baby But Don’t Like Motherhood

There’s a thought that a lot of mums have and almost none of them say out loud.

I love my baby. But I don’t like this.

The relentlessness. The loss of yourself. The long days that blur into each other. The feeling that your whole life has contracted down to snacks and nap schedules and managing small emotions while your own go entirely unmanaged. The sense that this is supposed to be the best chapter of your life, and you are mostly just getting through it.

If that’s where you are, this post is for you. And the first thing I want to say is this: you are not a bad mother. You are a person having an honest response to something genuinely hard.

Why Nobody Says This Out Loud

The reason this thought stays private is shame.

We live in a culture that treats motherhood as an arrival. The thing a woman’s life has been building toward. The experience that will make everything make sense. When you feel that story and your reality are miles apart, the conclusion that feels most available is that something is wrong with you specifically.

So the thought stays inside. You smile at the school gate. You say you’re tired but fine. You post the nice photos. And the gap between the performance and the reality gets wider and more exhausting to maintain, particularly in the long weeks of summer when the structure falls away and you are suddenly with your children almost constantly with very few breaks in sight.

What’s worth knowing is that the thought itself is extremely common. Research on maternal ambivalence consistently shows that the majority of mothers experience some version of it: the feelings of tedium, of depletion, of wishing for a version of your old life back. These are part of the normal emotional landscape of motherhood. They are just almost never spoken.

Loving Your Baby and Not Enjoying Motherhood Are Not Contradictions

This is the thing that feels impossible but is actually true: both things can be completely real at the same time.

You can adore your child and find the day-to-day of caring for them repetitive and depleting. You can feel fierce, protective love and also miss your old life with a grief that surprises you. You can be a devoted mother and still resent, some days, what motherhood has cost you.

These are not contradictions. They are the full, complicated emotional reality of a huge life transition. The love and the difficulty are not in competition. You do not love your baby less because you are finding it hard. And finding it hard does not mean you are doing it wrong.

What the Feeling Underneath Might Actually Be

When mums describe not enjoying motherhood, the feeling underneath is often one of several things. It helps to know which one fits.

Matrescence. The identity-level transformation of becoming a mother is genuinely disorienting. The version of yourself that existed before the baby had a sense of her own preferences, her rhythm, her place in the world. That person doesn’t survive new motherhood unchanged. The in-between stage, no longer who you were but not yet clear on who you’re becoming, can make everything feel wrong in a way that’s hard to name.

Grief. Becoming a mother involves real losses: freedom, spontaneity, the relationship with your partner before the baby, the career trajectory you were building, friendships that haven’t survived the transition. Grieving those losses doesn’t mean you don’t want the baby. It means you are a whole person whose life has changed profoundly. The invisible grief of new motherhood covers this in more depth.

Postnatal depression or anxiety. When enjoyment has gone, when the flatness is persistent, when you are going through the motions but nothing lands, that can be a sign that something more than ordinary adjustment is happening. PND in particular can look exactly like not enjoying motherhood: the hollowness, the disconnection, the sense of watching your own life from a slight distance. Postnatal depression in high-functioning mums covers the version that is most often missed.

The wrong conditions. Sometimes not enjoying motherhood is a reasonable response to genuinely difficult circumstances. Not enough support. A hard relationship. Financial pressure. Isolation. A birth that left a mark. Motherhood in hard conditions is hard. That is not a personal failing.

Summer Makes It Sharper

There is something particular about the summer holidays that brings these feelings into focus.

The structure that made the days manageable disappears. The school run and the nursery drop-off and the small pockets of quiet that punctuated the week are gone. Suddenly you are with your children, intensely, for weeks. And if your feelings about motherhood were already complicated, that intensity can make them feel much louder.

The guilt that comes with this is significant. You are supposed to be enjoying it. These are the days, people tell you. You’ll miss this. And somewhere underneath the relentlessness, you know you love them. But right now it is a lot, and the gap between loving them and enjoying this is very wide.

That gap is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of honesty. And it deserves to be met with compassion rather than shame.

The Shame Makes It Worse

One of the most important things to understand about maternal ambivalence is that the shame surrounding it makes the experience significantly harder than it needs to be.

When you believe that what you’re feeling is wrong, you add self-criticism and isolation onto an already depleting situation. You can’t talk about it. You can’t seek support for it. You can’t even sit with it honestly, because it feels like evidence of something terrible about you.

Removing the shame does not remove the difficulty. But it makes the difficulty survivable in a different way. It turns a secret you carry alone into a human experience you can talk about and get help with.

Not enjoying motherhood is not evidence that you don’t love your baby. It is evidence that you are honest about something most people pretend isn’t there.

Is This Just How It Is, or Is Something Else Going On?

This is a question worth sitting with, because the answer changes what would help.

For some mums, not enjoying motherhood is a painful but temporary feature of a huge adjustment. With time, support, and the gradual development of confidence and identity, things shift. The enjoyment comes. Not every day, but enough.

For others, the flatness or the dread doesn’t lift. It persists across seasons, not just difficult weeks. It affects relationships, sleep, the ability to feel anything much. When that’s the case, it’s worth considering whether postnatal depression or anxiety is playing a role, because those are treatable conditions and you don’t have to push through them alone.

If you’re trying to work out which side of that line you’re on, Do I Need Therapy, or Will I Just Get Better on My Own? is a good place to start.

What Helps

Saying it. Even once, to one person who will not react with alarm or judgement. The act of naming it out loud reduces its weight significantly.

Finding the version of motherhood that fits you, rather than the one you think is supposed to fit you. Not every mum thrives in the long unstructured days of summer. Not every mum loves the toddler years or the school holidays or the sensory chaos of small children at home. There is no single right way to experience this, and the pressure to perform a particular version of enjoyment is one of the things making it harder.

Getting support for the things underneath it. Whether that’s the grief, the identity loss, the depression, or the isolation, these are real and addressable. Therapy creates space to work through what’s actually going on, without judgement, at your pace.

The free I’m Coping checklist is a gentle place to start if you’ve been wondering whether what you’re experiencing is more than just a hard few weeks. Download it here.

One More Thing

The mums who feel this way are not the ones who care least. They are almost always the ones who care most. The ones who wanted this so much, who expected it to feel a certain way, and are quietly devastated that it doesn’t.

That caring is not nothing. It is the thing that will carry you through, if you can get the right support around it.

You are not a bad mother. You are a tired one, in a culture that doesn’t give mothers nearly enough. And that is worth saying out loud.

You might also find these helpful:

→  The invisible grief of new motherhood and why nobody talks about it

→  Why motherhood feels nothing like you expected

→  Mum guilt: why it happens and what actually helps

If you’d like to talk through what you’re experiencing and whether therapy might help, I offer a free 15-minute consultation. No pressure and no obligation. You don’t need to have the right words or a clear story. Just reach out. 🤍