Guilt as a mother: “I love my daughter, but I never enjoyed being a mother”

She said that when night fell, she would watch her daughter sleeping and feel “overwhelmed with love and gratitude.”

“But the next day I just felt overwhelmed again,” she said.

“Now that hurts. I mean, seriously, can you imagine being a kid and realizing that the only person in the world you rely on for your happiness and self-esteem doesn’t want to spend time with you?”

Now that her time of having a child at home is coming to an end, she is full of regrets.

“I just wish now that I could go back and be better and do all these things properly and correctly. But that’s not possible. This book is an attempt at an apology. To her, to myself,” she said.

But she has single-handedly raised a child who is about to go to university, while also enjoying success as a writer. Why is she so hard on herself?

“It’s hard to get forgiveness for that, and it’s hard to forgive yourself,” she said.

Educational scientist and radio presenter Sue Atkins describes so-called “mother guilt” as “feelings of self-doubt and fear of not being a perfect mother” and says it is incredibly widespread.

She insisted that there are “no perfect parents.”

She said the pressure could come from society, relatives or the mother’s own expectations. Social media could also “fuel feelings of guilt and inferiority.”

“It’s not just mothers who suffer from parental guilt, fathers suffer too,” she said.

“They want to be present, they want to change diapers, they want to engage with their children, play with them, talk with them, eat with them and of course, trying to provide food in the midst of a cost of living crisis is a challenge for fathers too.”

Rhian said the death of her father when she was 12 was the catalyst that sent her “down the wrong path”.

“I call them the chaotic years of my life… I just did a lot of things I shouldn’t have done that gave my life a different direction,” she said.

She said that after the birth of her daughter, she felt like she was leading a double life.

“I had one life where I had to be a mother, or at least a shoddy attempt at being a mother, and then another life where I went to college and university and still wanted to be that teenager who partyed and had fun,” she said.

Despite all this, her determination to become a writer never waned.

“It was the only plan I ever had in my life,” she said.

She attended what was then the University of Glamorgan to study creative writing and wrote her first novel, Six Pounds Eight Ounces, when her daughter was three or four years old.

The novel, about a schoolgirl growing up in the Welsh valleys, was published in 2014 and she is working on an adaptation as a television series with Pendragon Works.

Her second work, a series of poems entitled The Last Polar Bear on Earth, was published in 2018.

Her latest book, Girls etc., is by far her most personal work. In addition to her reflections on life as a teenage mother, she writes about the drama of life with a teenager and explores issues such as abuse in same-sex relationships.

This came about because she “just realized that I was writing about the girls in my life – my daughter, ex-girlfriends,” she said.

“It’s just my process of processing things that have happened or difficult things in my life.”

She said she was afraid that family and friends would read it.

What does your daughter say about this?

“She doesn’t talk about it. She doesn’t talk about much other than Taylor Swift,” she laughed.

“She’s embarrassed by everything I do. She thinks I should get a real job.”

But she hopes that her daughter will read the poems one day.

“This book was, in a way, my conversation with her,” she said.

“Despite my best efforts, she has turned out great. She is really smart, kind and conscientious, despite her Taylor Swift addiction.”