Recently I broached the subject of maternal ambivalence with my teenage daughters. I asked if it made sense to them—if it felt possible and true—that “I fantasized about walking out on my kids” did not equal “I didn’t love my kids” or “I wished they didn’t exist.”

Because when my daughters were much smaller than they are now, I did fantasize about walking out. Instead of doing that, I wrote a novel about a mother who carries out that escape fantasy and a daughter who lives with the fallout. That novel is soon to be published, and I’m in the pre-publicity stage where my publisher is asking me to write answers to questions like “What compelled you to write this book?” 

Gulp. It’s time to decide whether I’ll be hiding behind fiction or whether I’m brave enough to answer truthfully and publicly—and the biggest consideration is how will it affect my daughters if I do?

I really don’t think I’d have been capable of following through on child abandonment (and I’m not just saying that to cover my butt). But when I was in the throes of early motherhood, under-resourced, overwhelmed, my identity and intellectual life and creative dreams thoroughly decimated, I understood women who do walk out. I got it. I wanted to.

But in a culture that has smashed a lot of taboos, this still feels like a thing you’re not allowed to say.

If you don’t have children, it’s okay to express doubts about devoting your time, finances, body, brainpower, and emotional energy to domesticity and decades-long responsibility for a dependent human. I underlined line after line in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and was so grateful for her transparent questioning of the toll modern motherhood exacts—but she doesn’t have kids, which means these questions can be a kind of thought experiment, free of any charges of neglect, with no living humans to interpret or misinterpret what that ambivalence means about their very existence.

If you do have children and you write fiction about a mother who neglects or leaves her kids, it’s okay to gesture to some kernel of related personal experience as long as you quickly distance yourself by emphasizing that THIS IS TOTALLY FICTION I WOULD NEVER EVEN THINK THIS. I’ve read more than one interview with a novelist-mother who takes this approach, and I’m always left feeling cheated or tricked in some way, slightly shame-faced that here I was relating to their bold fiction while they deny their own identification with it.

It does feel important to me to be truthful as I begin talking about my novel out in the world. Important for the current overwhelmed, under-resourced woman in the throes of early motherhood. Important for the child-free woman feeling pressured by societal encouragement to reproduce and hoping her doubts will magically evaporate the moment the baby’s in her arms. Important for the woman who wants a child but isn’t sure she wants to be a mother, not in the traditional culturally-sanctioned way.

But—just in case I’m sounding confident here—I’m worried about this honesty. 

In my novel, the mother (an actress) creates a one-woman show called The Mother Act when her daughter is a toddler. The daughter grows up in the shadow of this scathing depiction of maternal ambivalence, and she’s harmed by it. Now that my book—also called The Mother Act—is about to come out, and now that my daughters are not toddlers but teenagers fully capable of reading and making meaning, this plot point is feeling even more fraught. It’s also very meta. I don’t want the art I’ve created to have the same damaging effects as the art in the story.

But I have to believe that my decision to be honest is ultimately for my daughters too, these two sensitive, perceptive, scary-smart young people I’m privileged (let me be clear) to have in my life. These girls are making their way into a world that has certain expectations of what it is to be female. If I want them to be free to discover and speak what’s true for them, doesn’t that start with setting my own example?

But maybe I’m just saying that to make myself feel better?