I Love My Kids, But I Find Babies ‘Disgusting’

In a recent interview with Vogue, Serena Williams expressed a fear many pregnant women can relate to. “I don’t really think I’m a baby person,” she said. “Not yet. That’s something I have to work on. I’m so used to me-me-me, taking care of my health, my body, my career. I always ask, ‘Am I going to be good enough?'”

Many women believe that in order to be good parents, they have to be the kind of people who love being around babies, gush over kids, and always dreamed of having their own. But in reality, plenty of women who aren’t baby people become moms—and succeed at it.

“I’ve always found it hard for me to get on [kids’] level, and [I] find them annoying when they ask endless questions. And for the most part, [I] find lots of babies to be not cute, not that interesting, and pretty disgusting,” Chandani, a 33-year-old with a 11-month-old, told Glamour. “Babies are basically pooping, screaming, crying machines who make you feel both utterly necessary and also completely helpless, and that’s a lot for a parent to feel at the same time. But also, I wish we would stop pretending like all babies are amazing all the time when a lot of them suck some of the time, and some of them aren’t cute, and newborns are freaking weird alien creatures who make way too much noise while sleeping.”

This general dislike for kids actually gave Chandani a special bond with her daughter. “She makes both me and my husband feel like we are meant to be her parents when we both generally don’t run to look at or hold other babies,” she explains.

“I really thought that not being a baby person would make it harder for me to bond with my own kids. That (thankfully) was not the case,” says Anna Lane, a 39-year-old mother of two. “Just because you’re not a baby person does not mean that you won’t love your kids.”

“I’ve never been an ‘awww… look at that baby’ kind of person, but I have learned that I love kids,” echoes Grace, a 39-year-old mother of two. “Like, five and up. I like the original way they think, their honesty (even when it hurts), and the way they make life more interesting…. I realized it wasn’t babies I didn’t like so much as the idiots a lot of people turn into around them. And that’s their choice—not mine.”

Sometimes it takes time for moms to become fond of their kids, and that’s not a problem either. “I had never changed a diaper until I became a mom and had only held a baby probably two to three times! The nurses were aghast that I had no idea what I was doing,” says Emily Popek, a 39-year-old mother of a five-year-old. “Honestly, it took me a long time—maybe two years—to really bond with my daughter and feel like I loved her.” Susie Meister, a 38-year-old with a five-year-old son, says she didn’t enjoy being a mom at all until her son was around four. Both moms now adore their children.

Most parents who aren’t baby people find that once they meet their babies, they don’t have any trouble taking care of them, says licensed clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula, Ph.D.. “It doesn’t mean they will ooh and ahh and become paralytic with baby joy, but we as a species do tend to be somewhat wired to get in there and do what needs to be done.”

And it’s OK for moms not to go around “coochy-coo”-ing at their kids or showing everyone baby photos, because there are many ways to be a loving parent. “I’m not a ‘play with the baby’ type, so although I may not have played in a traditional sense, I read to them, listened to music with them, and talked to them,” says Crystal Brown, a 37-year-old mother of two. “I think some eyebrows raise when people hear me talking to my babies like little grownups, but people who know me have accepted I’m a little different.”

Some moms even feel that not being baby people is an advantage. One upside for Lane was that watching her kids grow up wasn’t sad for her. “I don’t have as much sadness and/or nostalgia about my kids getting older,” she says. “I loved giving away the baby gear and getting rid of the bottles and baby food maker! I’m glad I had the experience of the baby years, but I don’t miss them.”

For Grace the advantage was going into parenthood with tempered expectations. “I find that the people who go into it expecting their kids to just fall in line…end up seeming rather resentful of their older kids, wishing they were still pliable infants,” she says. Grace also thinks her lack of infatuation with babies helped her treat her kids as equals. “I never saw my babies as just babies. I saw them as little people,” she says. “I have always treated them with respect and with the understanding that they are individuals.”

Meister agrees that it can be good for kids to have a mom who would often rather do something that doesn’t involve them. “I’m kind of invested in my kid developing a healthy sense of self, one in which he knows of my love but doesn’t think my world or identity hinges upon him,” she explains. In fact, she found the expectation that her life should revolve around her son incredibly isolating. “I just didn’t feel the role as mother to be rewarding in any way for many years, and yet it was expected to be my number one priority and my top interest,” she says. “I absolutely felt bad about not enjoying motherhood, and felt completely alone.”

We rarely hold men to these standards or make them feel like they’re not good parents if they’re not baby people. “As a culture, we expect women to coo over babies,” says Dr. Durvasula.

“I think dads get excused because men aren’t expected to be nurturing [or to] have that maternal instinct and biological clock ticking,” says Brown. Popek even described her attitude of “This kid can’t do anything! Call me when we can go toss the football around” as being “like a stereotypical dad.”

“When I was pregnant, people kept telling my husband, John, ‘Oh, you’re going to be such a great dad!’ Me: I got nuthin,'” says Grace. “I don’t think people think of it as a ‘great’ mother when you are one. You’re just meeting the barest expectation.”

Despite the expectations they’re held to, it’s actually rare for moms to take naturally to every stage of parenting, says Dr. Durvasula. And they shouldn’t feel guilty about asking for help if they’d like some time off from their kids.

“A lot of those Pinterest moms are sucking back bottles of wine and worse just to white-knuckle it through the madness,” says Meister. “You don’t have to love all—or even most—of parenting to be good at it and to raise a dynamic kid.”