Any parent out there will tell you; raising kids is no picnic and they don't come with an instruction manual.
However, despite the many challenges and battles that come with parenthood, many moms and dads will agree that there is no greater love or reward in this life than raising a child.
But one mom has written a blog post confessing that she regrets having her two children and that she believes her life would be better had they never been born.
Writing for the parenting blog Kidspot.com.au, the mom opens her post by declaring: "I am a mother of two, but I wish I was a mother of none. Yes, I preferred my life without kids. I preferred it so much that I wish I'd never had them."
The unnamed mom then says that before she is the victim of judgment, she wants to make it clear that she does love her two sons with "all her heart".
She also adds that she is not "depressed", nor does she "have any sort of mental health condition that makes me a danger of any sort".
In fact, she says with all honesty that her point is "quite simple and straightforward", but not one often spoken by many parents: "I wish I didn’t have my two children because I think my life would be much better without them."
Why? Because she was life was better without them.
The mom explains: "Before I had my two boys, my life was amazing. I absolutely adored my career and my husband and I were extremely happy together.
"We traveled, had an incredible social life, we were like some sort of rom-com montage of two people falling in love and living their best lives - but real.
"It wasn’t just a phase, we were like this for 10 years but then we decided to have children, and once our first child arrived, things changed and not for the better."
After being initially excited by the prospect of having children, the mom says that upon her first son's arrival into this world, "the reality just didn’t meet the expectation".
Despite loving him and stressing that he was an "easy baby" to cope with, she just "didn't love anything" about being mom.
"I wasn’t and couldn’t be who I had been before," the mother writes.
But despite feeling "trapped and restricted" by her son, she and her husband decided to have a second child - another boy.
She explains: "We never wanted to have an only child for a variety of reasons, and although I had shared my feelings about motherhood with my husband, after discussing it, we thought maybe with a second child it would change.
"Needless to say, it didn’t."
Not feeling any better or worse with the arrival of her second son, the mother admits she still felt like she had "lost her identity".
"While none of these things are ‘gone’ completely, they are not how they once were - and how they once were is what I loved," she writes.
Using her work as an example, the mom explains: "My career is now more of a job. While I still hold the same position, I am part-time and it means I just can’t fully invest the way I once had.
She also says that her "social life is lacking" and it is now usually based around the children or her friends who have children.
Despite once again stressing that her children are "truly loved", the mom says they simply are not part of her identity or how she ever wanted to life her life.
Preempting that many people who brand her "selfish" for her sharing her story, the mother claims that having children has seen her turn from a "confident, capable woman with a zest for life, to one who is uninspired, frustrated and who desperately yearns for the life she once had before she became a mother."
In summary, she writes: "If I knew how I would feel after having kids, I never would have had them because, trust me, this is not how I want to live my life."
Is this something you can relate to? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
