As a mother you are supposed to say your child is wonderful, perfect, the most amazing thing you have ever done with your life. You aren't supposed to admit that as a newborn he or she was actually quite ugly (in retrospect, of course ) or that sometimes you don't feel like picking them up when they cling to you. But you are not abnormal if you feel these things.

Anna I have quoted this passage from Adrienne Rich's book, "Of Woman Born : Motherhood as Experience and Institution" so many times I think it should be in my signature:

My children bring me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings towards these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance ... I love them. But its in the enormity and inevitability of this love that the sufferings lie.