My mum wanted kids because she was pretty heavily parentified when she was still a child herself, and was often put in the impossible situations like "I need to figure out how to feed my toddler younger brother who I am responsible for", which led to her having to teach him help her shoplift by hiding food when he was sitting in the shopping trolley at the supermarket. She wanted the opportunity to be the parent that she wished she could've had.

That's certainly a more noble goal than simply wanting to continue one's family line, but there's still a deep immaturity to it in hindsight. Her childhood left her pretty thoroughly fucked up, and you can't move on from that kind of trauma just by deciding to be better. Healing requires a lot of support, time and effort. Although she did infinitely better than her parents did, her baggage ended up bringing a lot of toxicity to my teenage years, and our relationship was permanently harmed by that. Some of her most toxic traits were as a result of overcorrecting after deciding that she wanted to be nothing like her parents had been.