Son Wonders If He’s Wrong For Feeling ‘Really Hurt’ When His Mom Told Him She’s Excited To ‘Experience Motherhood For The First Time’ After Having Another Baby
“I couldn’t understand why she’d say something like that to me.”
Liudmila Chernetska | CanvaPro In a recent post on Reddit, a 24-year-old son said he’s struggling after his mother told him she was excited to experience motherhood for the first time after having a baby.
His childhood was nothing like what his newest siblings would experience. He lived with his grandmother for many years until his mother returned from college and gained some financial stability to support them.
However, now that his mother is happily married and financially stable with a new baby, he can’t help but feel resentful that his experience was incredibly different — and that she seemed to forget that he was her son as well.
An adult son turned to Reddit after hearing his mom talk excitedly about ‘first-time motherhood’ with her newborn.
“I have a good relationship with my mother,” he wrote at the beginning of his post. “She had me when she was very young and obviously lacked the maturity to raise me… for most of my childhood, I lived with my grandparents below the poverty line.”
Zoran Zeremski | Canva Pro
While his mother went to college, he stayed with his grandparents. “I don’t blame her… I know she worked hard to improve herself,” he wrote. “It wasn’t until I was 11 or 12 that she was stable enough to get me to live with her.”
However, now that she’s turned 40 and has cemented a stable life for herself in direct contrast with her life as a teen mom, she seems to have forgotten that her new baby is not her first baby.
Is it any wonder he felt "really hurt" after she told him, "She now has the chance to experience motherhood for the first time.”
The son candidly told his mom that she wasn't experiencing motherhood for the first time.
“I don’t live with her anymore,” he explained, “so it wasn’t until yesterday that I managed to visit her and see my half-brother for the first time. I noticed she was surrounded by a lot of fancy accessories… a baby’s Lexus stroller and a Louis Vuitton diaper bag, of course.”
Sarah Chai | CanvaPro
Joking with her that she “went overboard” for this pregnancy, her next comment truly hurt him deeply — “She was feeling like a first-time mom because she was so young, unprepared, and financially vulnerable. I told her that she was not a first-time mom.”
Especially after being disconnected from her for the first decade of his life, her passing comment felt like a dismissal of his childhood. She couldn’t take away the fact that he was her firstborn, whether she was ready for him or not.
Watching his newborn brother get all the ‘fancy accessories’ and excitement from his mom, he couldn't help but feel resentful.
“I couldn’t understand why she’d say something like that to me,” he wrote. “She tried to argue that she didn’t mean it like that, but I was still upset… I also didn’t pick up when she tried to call me.”
While it might be difficult for this adult son to grasp, it’s normal for a mother to be excited about her newborn. Her first pregnancy with him was not the experience most young girls dream of when they think of starting a family. While that certainly isn't his fault, she didn’t have the financial or emotional means to be a mother, and now she does.
Many commenters agreed that this adult son’s resentment wasn't directed at his mother’s excitement over the new baby but rather at a lifetime of feeling unheard and unwanted.
His mother, who had her first child in a scary, all-consuming, and unstable space, now has the freedom of financial security and support for this child — of course, it’s exciting.
“I don’t think she’s wrong for being excited,” one person wrote. “But, it sounds like seeing the financial stability and comfort your half-sibling has been born into made you feel some things… now that comment has pushed you over the edge.”
Clearly, this son and his mother need to have an open conversation in which he can explore why the comment made him so unhappy. Not many parents have to think about this complex situation with their children, and pushing away isn’t necessarily the correct answer.
It's essential that they heal from the past before moving forward and get honest about their pain — even if it’s difficult to verbalize.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a News & Entertainment Writer at YourTango who focuses on health & wellness, social policy, and human interest stories.