I love giving birth, but I hate parenting.

These are probably some of the most unacceptable confessions of a mother.

I considered having a third child primarily because I wanted to go back to the hospital.

I remember the births of my two children.

For the first one, I was in labor for nearly two days. I experienced the kind of pain that I never experienced in my entire life. For the second one, I experienced labor for about 12 hours before popping her out. Again, excruciating pain. (I found out later that I actually have a slightly deformed uterus that makes childbirth even more laborious and harder to induce than a typical uterus.)

But I also experienced a few other things during labor:

• An absolute and unparalleled prioritization of my own needs. A room full of people on call for the sole purpose of maximizing my comfort.

• Zero expectation (both external and internal) for me to check my phone or respond to anyone in any capacity.

• An unlimited supply of Subway sandwiches and pretzels in the recovery ward. (I had like 8 Subway sandwiches after my first delivery and like 20 bags of pretzels after my second. Did you also experience insane postpartum cravings?)

I came to recognize at some point: there was never any other time in my life where I felt like I could prioritize my body the way I did here completely guilt-free and shame-free.

While the unspeakable physical pain became a distant memory, the imprint of unprecedented emotional relief I experienced never left my body.

I found myself chasing that high day in and day out. Especially because it became even more challenging to find space for it once I had children whose health and safety I had to prioritize above my own.

The kind of emotional safety in prioritizing myself guilt-free would never be available to me again in the presence of my kids.

Whatever I am doing, I am either thinking about what I could be doing better or regretting everything that I have done. Even as I am entertaining thoughts of self-prioritization and self-sufficiency, the self-flagellating inquiry around how I can love our children even more deeply is often louder and never goes away.

I would hazard that it is because we have never known the kind of love for our children, the kind where it is so big that we cannot fathom ever being enough for it.

So when I find myself in the shoes of a parent, it is one that I can never escape because I don’t allow myself to escape it. It is a place where I messily and abruptly try to make it all about me every chance I get because I feel like I have willingly lost myself already to the identity of being a parent. A place where I am crying for attention, for validation, for acceptance…because it has never felt more scant.

And when I express the prison-like nature of parenthood, I feel the need to qualify and justify:

• “Not that I don’t love my children. Look at how much I love them.”

• “Not that I am totally unhappy. Look, I am totally happy.”

• “Not that I am a bad parent. Look, they love me too.”

Parenting then becomes a performance rather than a sacred experience of my own humanity.

I am sick of the lies. Here is the truth of my own humanity:

• I have a very hard limit on how much time I can spend with my kids each day. Sometimes it’s three hours. Sometimes it’s three minutes. It depends on where I am and the capacity I have. This comes from an extremely privileged position of being able to afford childcare when I want. I am not very good at feeling grateful when I am at capacity.

• I daydream a LOT when I am with my kids, especially during the weekend when my time with them is extended and child care is limited. I am so exhausted by the constant need to get them ahead and happy and safe and healthy all at the same time. I cannot do all of them, and sometimes I need to zone out to escape the pressure.

• I resent the standardization of any kind on parenting. One time I went to a public event specifically for small toddlers who cannot talk yet, and the person leading the class was telling parents how we “need” children to know a certain number of nursery rhymes before they enter Pre-K so that they can be at “grade level.” While everyone else seemed to appreciate that, I cannot explain to you the level of rage I felt. Not to mention the the fact that nursery rhymes are US-centric. Please stop telling me what to do with my children. I already feel dismally behind, and I do not want one more thing to worry about when I look at my children’s eyes.

• The weekend feels like prison. Mondays feel like freedom. I celebrate each morning with a Starbucks for carrying out my basic duty as a parent of giving them a ride to school.

• I am terrible with birthdays and school events. I wish they didn’t exist. I cannot focus on anything else until I get that done so that I don’t subject myself to judgment from other parents. I don’t know why I am so terrified by how other parents judge me. I keep thinking that they have secret parenting methods that I don’t know about that somehow makes them more capable of being a better parent than I am, and I am paralyzed by fear every time I see them.

• During the weekends, even when I do have childcare, my brain is still half occupied by the guilt that I am not spending that time with them. I have been conditioned to believe (both by family and acquaintances and the culture at large) that my presence, even when I am in a zombie state, is better for my children than anything else in the world. So I often find myself needing to get the fuck out of my zombie state. And then being unable to do so. And then just riding that vicious ass cycle about how I am not good enough as a parent.

I think that’s enough for now.

I am not sharing this to say, “We’re in this together!” We’re not. We are absolutely not. I am too busy doing my own shit, and you probably are, too. We both probably don’t have the proverbial village it takes to actually raise a child, and there is no goddamn article in the world that is going to magically pop you out of whatever state you are in, misery or otherwise. Nor am I interested in doing that.

What I want to do instead is to do my part in challenging the culture that makes it so unsafe for us to be real about our parenting.

Here’s the paradigm I want to challenge: the “positive” grows when we focus on the positive.

It is simply not true. And yet so many people love to do that and perform their positivity in the hopes that, if they talk about how much they love their family to everybody else, it will be reflected in their household.

That is not how humans work.

Instead, the more they talk about how much they love their family and how perfect they are, the less willing they are to do the work in actually looking at how they can love one another even more skillfully. This is incongruence, or the false outside reflection of what is actually going on in the inside.

As one of my teachers Fabeku Fatunmise says, “The amount of dissonance is directly proportional to the amount of resonance you will experience.” Kind of like the way that celebrities that get the nastiest hate also get the most attention and the most obsessive fans. Taylor Swift is an example that comes to mind.

Same thing with uncomfortable, ugly, and nasty feelings. The amount of distress (aka the fuckery) is often directly proportional to the amount of joy and euphoria you will experience as a parent. (Generally speaking. This is not always the case, and I acknowledge that.)

There are very few things that don’t require an inordinate amount of pressure, stress, destruction, and slowness before it can ever come alive and into fruition.

And our culture has positivity-washed the experience of parenthood. Even the “candid” and “real” accounts of parenthood somehow has joy and goodness embedded throughout so that it can “make up” for all the grossness of parenthood.

One reason I want to really bring to light the absolute horrendous nature of parenthood, exactly as it is, is that that alone explains the magnitude of inexplicable joy in holding your children. Because the greater the distress, the greater the joy. It simply goes without saying.

When parents are sharing only the good parts of parenting, I immediately think to myself, “I really wonder how little capacity they have for the shittiest parts of parenthood. I hope they are getting some support.”

When we don’t actively expand our capacity for the fuckery, there will be a hard limit to the fuckery we are capable of experiencing, understanding, and accepting. Ruptures will repeat ad nauseam with no end in sight. This is why so many people turn elsewhere and outwards, like to their business or careers or extramarital relationships, to chase the high of positivity because they never built their capacity for fuckery to begin with.

So when parents talk about just how fucked up their life is, it becomes very clear how much work they have done to expand their capacity for the fuckery. It’s like they know how to deal with anything because the ability to share your demons is an indication of your competence in dealing with those demons.

As always, you never have to agree with my assessments. Perhaps you are a very happy parent who has everything going for them. Or perhaps you have a more nuanced view. All I can say is that I appreciate you entertaining mine.

But if you feel like everything is so fucked and you’re doing this alone (even when you are not technically doing this alone, like, on paper), I just want to tell you how right you are.

I, too, am annoyed by people telling me about “benchmarks” I need to meet and asking me “have you tried this” questions. The deeper the fuckery is, the more you have already tried all the goddamn things. The greater the fuckery is, the more you are unraveling the scariest and darkest corners of your humanity so that you can build capacity for the fuckery.

If your fuckery feels unmanageable, your humanity is taking you to places you’ve never been. (Sometimes without consent. Which makes this whole experience quite violent.)

And if you are available for inquiry as you navigate those places, here are a few to choose from:

• Where have I abandoned myself for the sake of following the rules of parenthood that I never got to have a say in?

• Where am I requiring others to perform for the sake of perpetuating my own paradigm of what parenting ought to be?

• Am I prepared to have my own back when I get dirt honest about how miserable I feel in this very moment?

• Am I willing to feel selfish, gross, and incompetent if it means I get to witness my truth and expand my capacity to hold myself amidst all the fuckery?

• Am I the one that has failed, or has the system failed me? If it is somewhere in between, where will I take responsibility for my own failures, and where will I speak up against the systemic failures that have made it more exhausting for me to exist?

Sometimes I ask these questions if I feel curious. Sometimes I don’t if curiosity feels like homework. I will always be messy in the ways I witness my own humanity my own way.

As another one of my teachers James-Olivia Chu Hillman says, “In order to change the culture, you need to be different.”

Today, that’s all I’ll be. I’m gonna be different. I’m gonna be disgusting, unacceptable, and horrific as a parent.

Because I am, in fact, different.

So if you feel different and alone, well, I am doing that with you. At least we are changing the culture. One yucky piece of our humanity at a time.

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You can find more of me at angela-han.com.