There’s a phenomenon most mothers experience but rarely talk about: when two completely opposite emotions rise at once. You look at your child and feel overwhelming love, and at the same time you feel exhausted to your bones. You feel grateful for this life, and yet you miss who you were before it. You feel deeply connected, and strangely alone.
For many women, this contradiction feels unsettling. We’re conditioned to believe that if something is good and wanted, it should feel purely positive. So when frustration, grief, resentment, or boredom show up alongside love, mothers often interpret it as a sign that something is wrong.
But psychologically, nothing is wrong at all.
The Psychology of Ambivalence: Two Truths, One Heart
In psychology, the experience of holding conflicting emotions at the same time is called ambivalence. It’s not confusion or instability, it’s emotional complexity.
Research in affective science shows that human beings are capable of experiencing mixed emotions simultaneously, especially during significant life events. In fact, the more meaningful the role or relationship, the more likely we are to experience layered emotional responses. Did someone say motherhood?!
Parenthood is one of the most emotionally loaded roles we ever take on. Studies of close relationships show that high attachment and investment can amplify both positive and negative emotions. Deep love does not eliminate frustration or fatigue, in fact, it exists alongside it.
So when you think, “I love my baby more than anything, and I’m overwhelmed by this,” you are not contradicting yourself. You are experiencing a very normal psychological response to something that matters enormously.
You Didn’t Just Have a Baby, You Became Someone New
Motherhood is not just the addition of a baby, it is the transformation of identity. Psychiatrist Daniel Stern described early motherhood as a developmental phase in its own right, a transition he called matrescence. Like adolescence, it involves a reorganisation of priorities, relationships, and sense of self.
READ MORE: How To Thrive During Matrescence
Neuroscience supports the idea that this shift is both psychological and biological. Studies show structural changes in the maternal brain during pregnancy and postpartum, particularly in regions associated with empathy, emotional regulation, and social cognition. Your brain adapts to caregiving, which then can heighten sensitivity and emotional intensity.
At the same time, identity research suggests that when we take on a new, central role, we often experience a temporary imbalance. The former version of self doesn’t disappear, but it must be integrated with the new one. This can feel like expansion and loss happening simultaneously.
You can feel empowered by motherhood and unsure of yourself in the same breath. You can feel proud and invisible. You can love your child deeply and grieve your old autonomy. That tension is not ingratitude, it’s integration in progress.
Why Holding Tension Is Resilience
We often mistake resilience for positivity. But resilience is not the absence of hard emotions, it’s the ability to tolerate them.
Contemporary resilience research defines it as flexible adaptation in the face of stress. Emotional flexibility, the capacity to acknowledge and move between different emotional states, is associated with better long-term wellbeing. Studies even suggest that the ability to experience emotional complexity during difficult periods predicts stronger coping.
In motherhood, resilience often looks like saying: “This is beautiful, and this is hard.” It’s allowing joy and grief to coexist without trying to eliminate one in order to justify the other.
When we suppress the harder emotions because we feel we “should” only feel grateful, they tend to intensify. When we allow both, we create psychological space. That space is where regulation lives.
Holding tension is not a weakness. It is nervous system strength.
The Cultural Problem: Why We Struggle With “Both”
Part of why ambivalence feels so destabilising is cultural. We are fed a narrow narrative of motherhood - that it is the most fulfilling experience of a woman’s life and that joy should eclipse difficulty. When lived reality doesn’t match that ideal, mothers often internalise shame.
Research shows that unrealistic expectations about motherhood are linked to increased self-criticism and depressive symptoms. When ambivalence is not normalised, women assume they are alone in it.
But ambivalence does not cancel love. Secure attachment is built through consistent responsiveness over time, not constant bliss. You can feel tired, touched out, or frustrated and still be a deeply safe parent.
Motherhood Is Both
Motherhood stretches you in opposite directions. It expands your capacity for love while exposing your limits. It roots you and unsettles you. It fills you and depletes you.
Two opposite feelings can exist at the same time because human emotion is not linear. Growth is rarely tidy. Transformation is rarely singular.
If you are feeling two different emotions at once, nothing has gone wrong.
You are not failing. You are integrating.
That capacity to hold two truths at once.
That is motherhood.