For good or bad, nothing changes you quite like becoming a mother. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience some of the incredible joys of motherhood, but, tragically, I’ve also endured the worst thing a parent can ever go through. Here are four children I had to abandon because I got bored.
1. Grady
My sweet little Grady. He was my first. I loved all my children equally, of course, but there’s a special bond between a mother and her firstborn child, which made the boredom that led me to abandon Grady all the more difficult. For the first few years that Grady was in our lives, it was nothing but joy and love and purpose like I’d never felt before. And then, one day, it wasn’t. It was boring. Unbelievably boring. Raising Grady became been-there-done-that, stuck in traffic, doing taxes, b-o-r-i-n-g. Observing Grady’s growth and development was like watching paint dry. My husband and I tried everything to make raising him more exciting. We put a top hat on him. We gave him tassels. We legally re-named him “The Ayatollah Of Breastfeeding,” which was only interesting for a few days before I got bored again. Nothing helped. So, on what was supposed to be Grady’s first day of preschool, I mustered every ounce of feigned interest I had and forced myself to say goodbye, leaving him behind at an interstate truck stop, forever. I’m yawning just thinking about wherever Grady might be now.
2. Emma
If you’ve ever been stuck listening to an elderly person tell a long, uninteresting, anticlimactic story, you might be able to understand how I felt being Emma’s mother. In fact, I was bored from the very second she left my womb. As soon as I held her kicking, screaming little body, I was bored to tears. My husband and I were both inconsolably unenthusiastic on our drive home from the hospital. Worse, Luigi’s Mansion 3 had just come out for Nintendo Switch, and with all the demands of a new baby, we feared we wouldn’t have time to play it. I realized then that I had to make a very difficult choice: Either I could spend my life parenting my little snoozefest Emma, who wasn’t doing or saying anything even remotely interesting, or I could get rid of her and instead have fun playing Luigi’s Mansion 3.
My husband saw the look in my eyes, and he knew. He didn’t say a word. He just handed me the Switch controller, kissed my cheek, and drove Emma to Six Flags, where he left her in a designated smoking area with a note that said “Boring” pinned to her swaddle. To feel a mother’s boredom is to know the deepest depths of human disinterest. And I have felt it.
3. Isabel
Though Isabel grew up to be nine years old before I got bored and abandoned her, it was with her that I felt the deepest boredom. It’s difficult for me to talk about in detail without getting bored again. What I’ll say is that when her time came, we sent her to sleepaway camp for the summer, then moved to a different state and changed all our contact information while she was away, knowing everyone involved would be better off. All I have left of Isabel is her passport, social security card, and birth certificate, which are tucked somewhere deep in our attic, out of view. I can’t bear to look at them without feeling the weight of all the time I wasted doing something so boring when I could’ve been doing something fun and interesting, like rock-climbing or checking out Coney Island or playing Settlers of Catan.
4. Craig
No mother in the world should have to go through what I went through. Craig was a happy, healthy baby. There was zero reason I should’ve been as bored as I was with feeding him, clothing him, and giving him all the love and care I could. There never is a reason. It starts with checking the clock, and ends with you praying it ends already so you can learn guitar, or go to a parade, or do literally anything more amusing. Anything at all. So several weeks ago, I put Craig on a flight to a Romanian farm I found on Workaway.com, and only now am I starting to recover from the boredom I felt being his mom. I may never fully recover from it.
I’m so lucky to have a husband that’s stood with me every time I abandoned our children. Without him, I might never have found the strength to cut my losses and move on to exploring a hobby and watching critically acclaimed TV shows, instead of rearing a child. All I know is that I still want to be a mother one day, and will keep trying for as long as it takes. If I have to abandon four more children to finally birth one that isn’t boring to raise, I know it’ll be worth it.
