Trigger warning: This post tackles the dark side of motherhood from the perspective of someone who has never experienced it firsthand… only witnessed it up close. If you came here for a warm celebration of motherhood, this is not that post. But if you’ve ever felt something you were too ashamed to say out loud… keep reading.
I have nephews, nieces, and an unofficial stepdaughter who belong to me in every way that matters even if they didn’t come from my birth canal… it is what it is, fight me if you don’t agree. Luckily, I have had the absolute privilege of experiencing the best parts of them, most of the time, without the pain that comes with being their actual parent. I get the highlights then I get to hand them back. And because of that distance… I can see things that those in the thick of it sometimes cannot.
Consider this post the view from the outside looking in. Not judgment. Perspective. There is a difference.
The Crack
Recently, I read Verity by Colleen Hoover. A fiction novel… and a deeply disturbing one at that. But somewhere between the shock and the disgust, I kept finding myself pausing and thinking… I’ve seen glimpses of this in real life. Not the extremes, not the violence, but the feelings underneath. The inner monologue, pressure and the unraveling.
What the novel captures with terrifying precision is what can happen when a woman is crushed under the weight of an impossible standard… and what it might look like when she stops holding it together. I am not saying real mothers are villains. I am saying that Verity gave language to feelings that exist outside of fiction, feelings that real women carry in silence because there isn’t really a safe space to say them out loud.
Here are the things about the dark side of motherhood that nobody posts about… but everybody who has been paying attention already knows.
1. The Jealousy Nobody Will Admit to… Especially Toward Daughters
Let’s start with the one that will make people the most uncomfortable, because it should.
There is a documented, researched, and very real phenomenon of mothers experiencing jealousy toward their own daughters. And it is not rare.
Research found that while mothers reported feeling better about themselves when their sons’ achievements surpassed their own, they actually felt worse about themselves when their daughters did better or achieved more. Read that again. A daughter’s success can make her own mother feel worse about herself. That is not a character flaw in isolation… that is a psychological reality that nobody wants to put on a greeting card.
(Eternally grateful I didn’t have to experience this with my mother. I couldn’t imagine.)
According to psychologist Karyl McBride, a narcissistic mother may perceive her daughter as a threat. If attention is drawn away from the mother, the daughter may suffer retaliation, put-downs, and punishments. The mother can be jealous of her daughter for many reasons including her looks, her youth, her accomplishments, and even the girl’s relationship with her father.
Now let’s bring it into the real world for a second, because this isn’t just a clinical conversation.
You know what I’m talking about. One minute a man is completely devoted to his partner… and then they have a daughter together, and suddenly his whole world shifts. That little girl becomes his everything. And if her mother is not in a secure place within herself… that shift can quietly plant a seed of something dark. Something she will never say out loud. Something she may not even fully recognize in herself.
Psychological research suggests that a mother’s unconscious jealousy can manifest as suppression of her daughter’s future, and psychologists believe this type of behavior is often not intentional… it operates more like an unconscious habit.
Sometimes it looks like a backhanded compliment. A subtle dismissal. A mother who wants her daughter to shine… but not too bright.
Why This Matters
- It creates a double bind for daughters: succeed and be punished, don’t succeed and disappoint
- It can permanently damage a daughter’s self-worth and sense of identity
2. The Loss of Self That Nobody Prepares You For
Here is the thing about becoming a mother that the pretty Instagram posts will never show you. You disappear.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. But piece by piece, the woman you were before… the one with her own identity, her own name that wasn’t “Mom,” her own dreams that had nothing to do with school pickups and pediatrician appointments… she starts to fade.
You become a slave to a tiny human who did not ask to be here. Let that land. They did not ask to be here. And yet your entire existence is now reorganized around keeping them alive, fed, loved, and whole. You look around one day in the middle of a Tuesday that looks exactly like every other Tuesday and you think… how did I get here?
Your identity becomes “mom.” That is it. That is the whole label. And for some women, that is enough… genuinely, beautifully enough. But for others, it is a kind of erasure. And the resentment that grows out of that erasure is not aimed at the child, not really… but it lands there anyway, because the child is the most visible reason for everything that changed.
What Identity Loss in Motherhood Can Look Like
- Giving up a career or passion without a plan to reclaim it
- Feeling like a stranger in your own body and life
- Quiet resentment that has nowhere to go
- Mourning a version of yourself that nobody else seems to notice is gone
This is not weakness. It’s what happens when a human being is handed a life-altering responsibility without adequate support, space to grieve what they’ve lost, or permission to admit that it is hard.
3. The Devastating Reality of Loving Something You Could Lose
This one is perhaps the most quietly devastating thing about motherhood… and the one I think about the most as an outsider.
To become a mother is to sign up for a permanent state of low-grade terror.
From the moment that child exists, you are never fully at peace again. Every fever is a potential catastrophe. Every school trip carries risk and every unanswered text from a teenager is a spiral waiting to happen. You love something so completely that the possibility of losing it becomes a kind of background noise you can never fully turn off.
That is not joy and sorrow existing side by side. That is joy wrapped in sorrow… inseparable, inescapable. The love is real and enormous and it is also one of the most haunting things a person can feel because of exactly how much there is to lose.
Nobody tells you that loving a child is also signing up for a specific kind of anxiety that lives in your chest forever. And when that anxiety is not addressed, when it has no outlet, when it compounds with the identity loss and the expectations… it grows into something much darker.
4. The Relationships You Lose When You Gain a Child
Motherhood is sold as the ultimate gain. And in many ways it is. But what they leave out of the brochure is the very real loss that arrives alongside the miracle.
Friendships quietly dissolve. Not dramatically… just slowly, the way a text thread that used to be active every day becomes a check-in once a month, then once a season, then not at all.
Ambitions get shelved with the best of intentions and sometimes never come back down.
And God forbid the partner is not pulling their weight. God forbid there is no family support system, no village, no one to call when you are running on empty at 3 AM. Because when those layers of loss pile on top of each other without a support system to absorb the weight… the darkness has room to move in.
The Losses Mothers Rarely Acknowledge Out Loud
- Friendships that couldn’t survive the shift in priorities
- Career momentum that never fully recovered
- Romantic partnership that changed under the pressure
- Personal goals that got quietly buried
- The version of themselves they always planned to become
5. The Depression Nobody Calls by Its Real Name
We talk about postpartum depression. We have a name for it now, which is progress. But what about the depression that sets in six months later? A year later? Five years later?
What about the woman who looks at her life… a life that checks every box society handed her… and feels nothing but a hollow kind of weight? That is not postpartum. It’s something deeper. That is what happens when grief, identity loss, isolation, and impossible expectations are left unaddressed for long enough.
The dark side of motherhood does not always arrive immediately. Sometimes it creeps in and looks like exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. Sometimes it looks like a woman who stopped laughing the way she used to and nobody noticed.
So What Do We Do With All of This?
This is the part of the post where I am supposed to tie a bow on it and offer solutions. And I do have some. But first I want to sit in the discomfort a little longer, because I think that is exactly what we have been failing to do as a society.
Unsolicited advice on how to move forward:
- Therapy. Not as a last resort. As a first resource. Especially before resentment has had years to harden.
- Mom groups that tell the truth. Not the curated ones. The ones where someone can say “I love my child and I am losing my mind” without being judged for it.
- Open dialogue with partners. The weight is not meant to be carried by one person. If it is… that is the first problem to solve.
- Permission to grieve. Grieving the life before motherhood does not mean you regret your child. It means you are human.
- Reclaiming identity in small ways. A hobby. A night out. A goal that has nothing to do with being someone’s mother.
The Bigger Picture… Women’s History Month
We are in Women’s History Month. A time to celebrate the strength, resilience, and contributions of women throughout history.
And I want to be clear… I am in awe of mothers everywhere.
But honoring women fully means honoring the complicated ones too. The ones who struggled, fell apart, and the ones who felt things they were ashamed of and carried it alone because there was no room in the narrative for anything less than grace and gratitude.
True women’s history is not a highlight reel. It is the full story. And the full story includes the dark side of motherhood that nobody posts about… but everybody who has been paying close enough attention already knows is real.
We do not serve women by only celebrating the parts of their experience that are comfortable to witness. We serve them by making space for all of it.
