Parenting
You love them and you also resent the life you don't have because of them and the guilt makes it worse.
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You love them. You also catch yourself imagining the life you’d have without them. The trips you’d take. The career you’d have. The version of yourself you used to be. You hate that you think about it. You think about it anyway. You can’t tell anyone. Other parents either tell you you’re awful or tell you they don’t feel that way and you don’t fully believe them. You read articles about regretful mothers and feel relief that someone said it.
The resentment is real. The love is also real. They’re both running at the same time.
The resentment is back the next morning.
You very likely came up watching the adults in your life perform contentment about parenthood whether they felt it or not, and you absorbed that the resentment you’re feeling is something to keep silent about. You may have grown up with a parent whose own resentment leaked through everything they did, and you’ve been determined to never let your kids feel what you felt. The determination has made any whisper of resentment feel like a betrayal of who you swore you’d be. You may have arrived at parenthood thinking it would complete you, and the gap between what you were promised and what you’re living has been hard to admit. You may have been the kid who took on the emotional weather of the household, and parenting has surfaced how much being responsible for other people exhausts you.
The gratitude reframe assumes the resentment is wrong. The resentment is information. It’s telling you something specific about what’s been getting starved in your life since you became a parent. The gratitude practice doesn’t address what’s getting starved, it just shames you for noticing.
The shame layer is the second loop. Resentment arrives. You feel guilty for resenting. The guilt produces the resolution to feel grateful. The gratitude practice fails to land. The next resentment arrives. The next guilt arrives. The cycle deepens.
If the resentment includes thoughts of leaving entirely, see I have suicidal thoughts for the safety baseline. If the underlying issue is depression, see I’m depressed .
The resentment isn’t a moral failure. It’s information about what’s been costing you and not getting addressed.
Strategic therapy treats the resentment as data. We figure out which parts of you (the work, the friendships, the body, the silence at 6am) have been getting starved since the kids arrived, and we work on the small daily concessions that have been costing you without producing anything. The guilt loop loses fuel as the underlying scarcity gets addressed.
You stay a parent without disappearing into being one.
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