In hundreds of thousands of homes in our country, parents are reinventing the wheel … of parenthood.
Upon having a baby, many parents realize that they do not have the slightest idea what to do. They do not feel prepared to care for that baby. Often, after years of feeling competent at work, they suddenly feel incompetent – – – and anxious.
Donald Winnicott, the famous and beloved British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst wrote, “The most important element at any one moment is the ordinary home in which ordinary parents are doing an ordinary good job, starting off with infants and children with that basis for mental health which enables them to eventually become part of the community” (The Spontaneous Gesture,1950, p. 21).
However, in our country, and I suspect in other places as well, there is no “ordinary” way to raise a child. This sort of communal knowledge or this set of common values has been lost.
And the mental health of both infants and parents is affected by this.
Many new parents have focused on their own lives and education and have just not had prior experience with babies or young children. They really don’t know what to expect from a one-year-old or a five-year-old and, as they become parents, they are at a loss when called upon to meet the ordinary situations of child rearing.
Henri Parens, another child psychoanalyst, advocated for parenting curriculum to be instituted in every school. As one of my psychoanalytic mentors, I often heard him talk about this, and quite honestly, at the time, I didn’t see the point. But now that I am working daily with first-time parents, professional parents, and harried parents, I do.
I see that the parents I come in contact with are desperate to know what is developmentally “normal” at each age as well as to know how to handle the inevitable challenges of raising children at all of the various stages of development.
Given the much heralded death of the extended family and the loss of true community for most young families, questions arise: where are people in the early years of parenthood supposed to learn how to parent? Where are they supposed to learn about child development? And where are they supposed to learn how to manage their own internal reactions to the extraordinary stressors of normal parenthood?
Somehow, we have come to a place in history where many kids grow up never once having to take responsibility for a younger sibling or cousin and never having worked as a babysitter. We have put the emphasis on children doing well in school and going to college, and in some cases, even graduate school. In this march toward “success” many young people never learn about babies and children.
I do not know if Henri Parens had the right solution – teaching about parenting in the schools – or if there are other solutions to this problem. But what I do know is that right now, right here in our country, hundreds of thousands of parents are struggling – more than in other generations, I think – to figure out how to do even “ordinary” parenting.
We all have expectations of our children. We are conscious of some of these – and less conscious of others.
I want to talk about several issues regarding these expectations:
First of all, expectations are not necessarily good or bad. They just ARE. And they start even before conception. As soon as we think about having a baby, we imagine what that baby will be like, what they might look like, what their personality might be like, what talents and abilities they might have.
This is universal – – and it is normal. It is part of the process of becoming a parent.
Often we hope for a child who will be a particular way, and have particular skills and abilities. Whether school was important for us, or whether we missed out on going to college or graduate school, we might hope for a child who is “smart” and does well in school. Or, if we were shy as a child, we might hope for a child who is gregarious or assertive. If we love sports, we might hope they will be talented athletically.
In one way or another, our expectations will be formed by our own histories, values and wishes. And to the extent that they are unconscious, it is a good idea to try to make them more conscious. This allows us to decide whether they want to act on these expectations – or to rework them.
Because our expectations WILL affect our children.
Children naturally want to please their parents – and this is good motivation for them. But when we expect things of our children, we also want to make sure that our expectations are realistic, and that we leave room for our children to be who they are, and to establish their own goals in life.
So, small expectations – like helping around the house, being kind or doing homework? That’s a definite YES.
But regarding our deeper fantasies of what we want our children to be as people? We need to ask ourselves if these are reasonable. For example, if we expect our children to get all A’s, what happens if our child turns out to have a learning disability? What happens if reading or math just doesn’t come easily for them? How will they feel about themselves when they come home with B’s or C’s…or worse?
And how will WE feel?
Will we be disappointed? And will our child pick up on that disappointment? What will this do to their motivation? Will they try harder? Or give up? Will they feel badly about themselves? Less confident?
For a while, everyone was talking about Oscar winning actress, Bri Larson’s YouTube content. She said, famously, “my job is 98% failure”. She talked about how many times she was turned down for parts in TV and movies before she got anything significant at all.
Perhaps we need to spend less time expecting our children to be a certain way and more time helping them to learn how to handle the times when they don’t meet our expectations – or their own. Perhaps we need to help them to be more like Bri Larson. And maybe we need to think less about our own wishes for our children’s success, and instead, help them to learn how to fail – and to survive through failure. Because, after all, Bri Larson is right. Life is full of failures, both little and big. And, if our children are to be successful, we have help them to learn to keep trying, and not let individual failures define who they are.
Perhaps it is more helpful as a parent to think about how we are going to talk to our children when they don’t get an A or when they don’t make the team or get the part in the school play. All children experience these disappointments and all children feel badly about them.
Here are some things you can do as a parent:
1. Make goals small. Starting in infancy, when your baby is trying to learn something new, encourage them. But also, watch out if you notice yourself comparing what your baby is doing to what other babies are doing.
2. Concentrate on your own child. Stay in the moment with your own baby or child. Stay with them where they are.
3. Make your goals small for your child. Help them to accomplish tiny milestones; for example, an extra minute of tummy time, one new word, one spoonful of a new food, or for an older child, getting a B when their last grade in that subject was a C.
4. Help build frustration tolerance. The famous psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, coined the term “optimal frustration”. He talked about how important it is for people to learn to tolerate some frustration – not so much that they feel like giving up – but enough that they feel challenged. When your baby or your child gets frustrated, whether it’s building a tower that won’t stay up, or learning the letter R, just tell them, “It’s hard. But it’s OK. We’ll try again later.” Build in the idea that some things are difficult but you can take a break…and then keep trying later….after you’re done being frustrated.
5. Check your own expectations. As children get older, keep checking your expectations, keep setting your goals small and keep helping your child to keep their goals small. For some kids, a more appropriate expectation than getting all A’s is establishing longer and longer periods of doing homework. For a child who can’t sit still for an hour, success might mean doing 20 minutes of homework when they only used to be able to do five.
6. Normalize failure. Tell your child your own stories of failure. Tell them how you reacted. Tell them about Larson and what she said and how she persevered through lots and lots of failure.
7. Talk to your children when they are not in the middle of feeling frustrated. Talk about how hard it is to not get what you want or to succeed in the way they want. Talk to them about frustrated feelings and how hard they are. Encourage them to take breaks when they are frustrated with a math problem or with their average when shooting baskets. Encourage them to come back to the activity later when they feel less tired and frustrated.
We want our children to learn how to live in the real world and to endure both the downs and the ups of life. It is important that we think about how to best do this — and how our own expectations may play a part in how our children do or do not “succeed” and ultimately feel about themselves as people.
For many men, finding out that their partner is pregnant is the beginning of a roller coaster of feelings and an enormous amount of internal change. For those who welcome the pregnancy, first time fatherhood can represent the real marker of adulthood. And over the months of their partners’ pregnancies, these men often reevaluate their sense of self, their expectations of themselves, their values, their lifestyle and their priorities – and it’s not easy. (1)
They are in the process of a psychological overhaul.
Some men meet the news of the pregnancy with elation, some with mixed feelings and some with dread – but whatever their initial reactions, many men experience the perinatal period as the most stressful time of all in their transition to fatherhood. (2)
First of all, they often feel a bit disconnected from the reality of the pregnancy. Some take a number of weeks to really accept that the pregnancy exists. Many feel cut off, being able to experience the pregnancy only by proxy. While their partners have the embodied experience of the physical changes of pregnancy, they must rely on second hand accounts. (3)
And in one study, performed by Jan Draper, many of the men found that the reality of their partner’s pregnancies was different than their expectations. Some felt that the reality of the pregnancy alternated with periods during which they went about their lives as usual without an ongoing awareness of the pregnancy: “Some men suggested that their lack of continuous physical experience meant that they were able almost to opt in and opt out of their involvement of the pregnancy; they had an element of choice that their partners did not. These men remained focussed on everyday life, frequently their paid work, rather than on the minutia of the progress of the pregnancy. The sometimes part-time nature of men’s involvement was a theme…James, for example… was committed to the concept of involved fatherhood and apologetically contrasted his choice of part-time involvement with the continuous involvement of his partner. Steve, a novice father, described how the pregnancy kept `drifting away’ and how he felt guilty about `forgetting’ he was a father” (4).
Some also felt surprised by their reactions to their partners’ changing bodies. Some felt put off by the size of their partner’s bellies and some felt that the pregnant belly was actually a barrier between themselves and their partners.
Some just could not connect the pregnancy to the reality of a baby. One said, “I can see Julie pregnant and I can see her with a baby and the two don’t seem to go together and that’s a really odd feeling and I don’t know how to describe that. You see a pregnant lady and then you see someone with a baby and…. it seems two separate type things” (5)
But getting to see the scans of the fetus as they were happening or feeling the fetus move inside their partners bellies helped many of these men to connect more directly to the pregnancy. One father-to-be said, “It feels nice (feeling the baby’s movements). It does. I think it’s harder for me because I get frustrated that I can’t experience any of it physically at the moment, other than putting my hand on the outside and feeling the movement”. (6)
And all the men in Draper’s study valued and enjoyed the accounts given to them by their partners about the pregnancy and the fetus’s development.
During their partner’s pregnancies, some men feel the need to take on new responsibilities – to take care of their partner and prepare for the baby’s arrival. Some feel more protective of their partner and worried about the wellbeing of their unborn child.
But some fathers-to-be may find themselves in conflict – on the one hand, feeling much of the above, and, on the other hand, resenting the new demands and responsibilities – whether the pressure to take these on comes from their partner, from what they perceive as societal expectation or whether it come from within themselves.
Contributing to these feelings may be the fact that in recent years, fathers have been expected to be more hands-on and more involved during the pregnancy and more intimate with their babies and children once they arrive than in previous generations. Fathers are generally expected to take at least an equal role in parenting – a job for which they may feel ill-prepared.
Many men have very little – if any – experience with babies and small children. They may never have held an infant before they hold their own – and they may know almost nothing about child care or child development.
And, of course, it is also confusing – because what constitutes fatherhood is ever-evolving. The wishes and needs of fathers and mothers and the societal norms around parenthood are alway in being reconfigured.
And then there are the physiological changes involved in impending fatherhood. For example, a study published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings demonstrated that men go through significant hormonal changes alongside their pregnant partners and that these changes are most likely initiated by their partner’s pregnancy. The evidence suggests that fathers have higher levels of estrogen, the well-known female sex hormone, than other men and that increase starts 30 days before birth and continues during at least the first 12 weeks after birth – and possibly much longer. Although estrogen is best known as a female sex hormone, it exists in small quantities in men, too. Animal studies show that estrogen can induce nurturing behavior in males. So, it seems increasingly clear that just as biology prepares women to be committed mothers, it prepares men to be dads as well (7).
Furthermore, the study showed that men’s cortisol levels rise in the week before their baby’s birth and their testosterone levels decrease in the week after birth.
And then there are historical considerations in preparing for fatherhood as well: many men reflect on how they themselves were fathered. Old feelings are often stirred up around childhood memories, whether these are fond or those which include deprivation, harsh parenting, and abuse. And for those men who had fathers who were excessively strict, depriving, or angry, there will be many questions about how to father differently than they were fathered. They may have to evaluate how to deal with their own anger in ways distinct from their fathers, how to be more emotionally available than their own fathers, how to be more open than their own fathers, how to be less judgemental than their own fathers and/or how to be more generous than their own fathers
Fathers-to-be have to consider what they want to take from their own experience of being parented and what they do not. They have to think about what kind of father they want to be and how to separate themselves from automatically fathering as they were fathered.
And these thoughts can lead to potent feelings of uncertainty. In a study done by Meleagrou-Hutchins, the fathers studied anticipated various profound changes to their personal and professional lives beyond the birth of their baby. And they worried about their ability to cope with the demands of fatherhood. They were all planning ahead and preparing, to varying degrees, so as to manage, or minimize, the disruption that fatherhood would cause in their lives.
They also felt invisible. Many felt their partners were getting more attention than they were in regard to the upcoming birth and that their health and wellbeing was being overlooked. Some felt sidelined, ignored during medical appointments – and at the same time many wondered whether they were really entitled to support. Some also felt that they lacked a concrete goal during the pregnancy leading to feelings of powerlessness and frustration (8).
Many of these fathers reported feeling insufficiently supported as they worked to prepare themselves for fatherhood. Many felt their partner was their main source of support and yet they regretted putting further burden on her by needing this from her (9).
Preparing for fatherhood is a complex physiological and psychological process and clearly, men require more support in understanding their own experience as well as more institutional and societal support as they do so.
Genesoni, L. and Talandini, M., (2009). Men’s Psychological Transition to Fatherhood: A Review of The Literature, Birth, Dec;36(4):305-18. doi: 10.1111/j.1523-536X.2009.00358.x.
Meleagrou-Hitchens, L., Carla Willig (2022). Mens’s experience of their transition to first time fatherhood…. Department of Psychology, School of Arts and Social Sciences, City University London, EC1V 0HB London, UKDOI:10.31083/jomh.2021.102 Vol.18,Issue 1,January 2022 pp.1-11.
This is the seventh post in a series on The Transition to Motherhood.
In her book, Matrescence, Lucy Jones discusses the idea that society — and women themselves — often feel that childbirth and caring for young children diminish their memory and cognitive capacity. While they are pregnant and after they give birth, women often complain of not being able to remember anything, being scatterbrained, or feeling stupid.
But when looking at the research, Jones found the opposite!
In fact, it seems that having a baby concentrates the mind. Brain structure and the neurochemistry of the brain actually change during and after pregnancy in order to aid the mother to tune into her baby and her baby’s needs. It may be that some of the old things the mother used to think about are less the focus of her attention after her baby arrives and she may feel less capable of concentrating on them — but this is far different from being “stupid.”
In fact, Bridget Callahan, a researcher at UCLA, found evidence of enhanced learning, memory, and cognitive capacity after childbirth (Callahan, et al, 2022).
Of course, this makes sense, because new mothers need to expand their ability to tune in to their babies, to learn what helps and doesn’t help their babies to feel comfortable, and to learn how to solve the many problems of everyday childcare.
In fact, in reviewing the literature, researchers Erika Barba-Müller et al found that there are structural and functional changes in the woman’s brain both during pregnancy and following delivery which stimulate her to progress from being an individual with self directed needs to being responsible for her baby. These changes are highly adaptive and aid in the woman’s transition to motherhood.
Similarly, in a review of the literature, Winnie Orchard found that there is evidence that the brains of pregnant women become more flexible, efficient, and responsive.
Minor difficulties in word finding and short-term memory often make women feel less competent during pregnancy and early motherhood — but this is not all that is going on.
Referring to Orchard again, Lucy Jones says that the lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain may be positive and that the cognitive load of adapting and adjusting to one or more growing children may help the brain to be resilient.
Think about it: So many people have started doing the daily word puzzles put out by the New York Times — as well as doing all sorts of gaming apps on their phones — in order to preserve and enhance their cognition. But these do not provide even a portion of the challenge that comes up in a day for the parent of a newborn or child of any age!
For a first-time mother — and her partner — the day they come home from the hospital is often a terrifying day. Suddenly, they realize that it is up to them to figure out how to care for their new baby and to keep them alive. Soon it is clear that caring for a newborn requires a completely new set of skills. And there is a great deal of trial and error. Every day new problems need to be solved. So much has to be learned — not just about babies in general — but about this particular baby, her sensitivities, and her preferences. And then, just as the parents are getting the hang of it, the baby starts a new sleep pattern, develops new feeding preferences, or enters a new developmental stage. And learning how to deal with these things requires a great deal more problem-solving.
So as for “Mom Brain” — yes, there is such a thing, but it is not what we often think it is. The Mom Brain is a more flexible, more competent, more resilient brain than the non-mom brain.
References
Barba-Müller, et al (2019). Brain plasticity in pregnancy and the postpartum period: links to maternal caregiving and mental health. Arch Womens Ment Health. 2019; 22(2): 289–299. Published online 2018 Jul 14. doi: 10.1007/s00737-018-0889-z
Callaghan, B. et al., (2022) “Evidence for cognitive plasticity during pregnancy via enhanced learning and memory”, Memory 30(5) , p. 519-536.
Jones, Lucy (2023). Matrescence.
Orchard, E. R., et al., (2022) “The maternal brain is more flexible and responsive at rest: Effective connectivity of the parental caregiving network in postpartum mothers”, bioRxiv
In her book, Matresence, Lucy Jones says that pregnancy is a metamorphosis. Like a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly, the woman’s previous identity must melt away in order for her new identity and concept of self to emerge.
And during her own first pregnancy, Jones found this process very disturbing. She says, unlike other stages of life for which there are parties and ceremonies to mark the transition of one stage of life to another, during pregnancy, for which there are no ceremonies in our culture which celebrate the mother, the woman can feel profoundly awkward and alone.
Jones talks about how, during adolescence, she felt similarly awkward. She felt like she didn’t know what was going to happen next or how to be; she felt unsettled by the changes in her body.
But, she says, she had friends going through the same thing and films and articles and music which addressed the strangeness and alienation of adolescence, so she didn’t feel completely alone.
But as she went through her pregnancy, she did not feel accompanied. Part of this may have been because she, herself, did not understand what was happening to her mind, her body, or her self — and therefore she could not really talk about it with others.
She says that missing from pregnancy books or health apps was information about how pregnancy affects a woman’s mind – and her actual brain. She quotes Rosemary Balsam from the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society as calling this the “vanished pregnant body.”
She suggests that the very idea of the pregnant woman, of being two people in one, may make other people uncomfortable.
For example, there’s the the story of the runner, Allyson Felix. Felix was an Olympic medalist and many time US National Champion when she became pregnant. One of her sponsors, Nike, cut her pay by 70% and refused to offer her reasonable pay protection during her postpartum period. Felix reports being told “runners should just run” – in other words, women runners should not be pregnant.
Clearly having a premier spokesperson be pregnant was uncomfortable for Nike. And Jones talks about how it was uncomfortable for her – as it is for so many women — and not just because of the bodily changes, but also because of the emotional disequilibrium she felt and because of the changes in the way she perceived others as seeing her.
Experiencing this was hard for Jones because she felt external pressure to “pretend that pregnancy was a less dramatic and drastic event” than what she felt it to be.
And it is a dramatic and drastic event. For all women.
Thank goodness for Lucy Jones for saying so and letting us all heave a sigh of relief. We didn’t have to say it. But she did.
Toward the end of her pregnancy, Jones describes bowing out of work and not feeling guilty. She realized this was not typical of her — but she felt that she wanted to be at home and she didn’t mind being alone. She says that she felt “calm and placid, pleasantly vague, like nothing could touch me”.
Later she found out that this is normal — that there are physiological changes that accompany each of the many stages of pregnancy and that at the end of pregnancy, the reactivity to stresshormones is dampened. No wonder she didn’t feel the normal pressure to work and perform and please her boss. And luckily for her, she had the ability to step away.
The biology and neurobiological literature supports Jones. When she reports that she felt that her brain was changing during her pregnancies, she was right. In one study by Niu et all (2024), ten pregnant women were followed over the course of their pregnancies. Changes in brain structure were charted. Reductions in gray matter volume were found over the course of pregnancy. In other words — the pregnant woman’s brain actually shrinks! Their conclusion? There are profound neurobiological changes during pregnancy.
Moreover, in a review of the literature, Esel (2010) found evidence that the brains of pregnant women and women with children are very different from the brains of women who have not had children who are within the same age range. Moreover, Esel found ample evidence of neurobiological and hormonal influences on women and their feelings and behavior. She says that maternal behavior develops over the course of a woman’s life, including during pregnancy. This happens through the development of special neural networks, which are cooperatively developed by genetic, environmental, and hormonal factors.
In fact, the biology is fascinating. Esel points out the importance of hormonal influences in preparing women for motherhood. She says that estrogen, prolactin, and oxytocin stimulate maternal behavior after birth — and that the stimulation of the vagina during birth initiates the release of oxytocin, so important for the initiation of maternal behavior as well as milk production. She also discusses the finding that women are prepared to become mothers from their own birth. She says that early exposure to estrogen during the perinatal period in their own early lives may be responsible for women’s greater interest in and facility with social relationships over that of men. She suggests that this capacity primes women to be interested in and to relate to their infants once they become mothers. Then, during pregnancy the capacity for relating to their own infants is further primed by the high levels of progesterone and estrogen which are secreted. Furthermore, she says that the hormonal exposure of the brain during pregnancy plays an important role in the development of maternal neural networks and systems.
In the same vein Esel says that in humans, the ability to establish social relationships is inversely related to levels of fetal testosterone both in females and males — so in other words, men, from birth, are less primed to establish social relationships.
No wonder women feel different when they are pregnant — and no wonder they feel a shift in both body and identity. The hormonal influences on their brains, their bodies, their feelings and their behavior are powerful.
I look forward to reading the rest of Jones’s book to find out more about the research on the physiological and psychological changes that come about during pregnancy. I know too little about this.
In fact, most of us know too little about this.
Scientists are looking at aspects of the woman’s experience during pregnancy in a way that they might not have considered doing years ago, even though we have needed this information for a long time. But perhaps, as Jones suggests, science waited until there were enough women in the field to make this a priority.
Yanbin Niu, Benjamin N. Conrad, M. Catalina Camacho, Sanjana Ravi, Hannah A. Piersiak, Lauren G. Bailes, Whitney Barnett, Mary Kate Manhard, David A. Cole, Ellen Wright Clayton, Sarah S. Osmundson, Seth A. Smith, Autumn Kujawa, Kathryn L. Humphreys (2024). Neurobiological Changes Across Pregnancy: A Longitudinal Investigation, bioRxiv, The Preprint Server for Biology doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.08.584178
Let’s take a deeper dive into the transition to motherhood in this, the fourth post in a series on this subject.
In the Introduction to her beautiful book, Matrescence, Lucy Jones says, “Pregnancy, then birth, and then – big time – early motherhood, simply did not match up with the cultural, social, and philosophical narratives I had grown up with…I started to realize that that my mind had been colonized by inadequate ideas about womanhood, about motherhood, about value, even love… A sense that I had been fundamentally misinformed about the female body and maternal experience set in fast” (p. 9, 10).
She describes how, during her pregnancy she noticed changes in herself which she had no language to describe – but she noticed that her “consciousness felt different: restructured or rewired” (p. 10).
She says, “I thought the baby would grow inside my body, …that I would still be the same person. But that didn’t seem to be the case” (p. 10).
I think that many if not most women feel all of these things. But do they have the language to speak about them? Or do they feel permitted to speak about them?
I suspect not.
Jones talks about how ill prepared she was for motherhood – how she had never changed a diaper and knew nothing about what it took to raise and take care of another human.
And I think many women feel this way – especially with their first babies.
Jones speaks about her guilt if she tried to do anything just for herself during those first months of motherhood.
She also writes about the idea that women are supposed to have a built in maternal instinct and how this works against the acknowledgement that motherhood absolutely requires the acquisition of knowledge and skills about babies, children and mothering.
And in saying this, I think Jones puts her finger squarely on the shame and embarrassment many mothers feel when they don’t know what the right thing is to do for their baby – whether it is something as simple as whether to put them down for a nap or something as complex and important as when to call the pediatrician.
As she says, “this is a set up in which mothers (are) destined to fail” (p. 11).
She says, “I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil, bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard core, edgy, gnarly” (p. 14).
Finally, we have someone who tells the truth about motherhood.
We have needed a Lucy Jones for a long time.
Women feel that they are not allowed to talk about the utter fatigue, boredom, tedium, panic and downright hardship of childcare. Yes, the difficulty of juggling work and child care is talked about. And the under valuation of parenting work is mentioned now and then. But as a society? We do not have much of a discussion around many of these issues – and we certainly have not made changing any of them a priority – in our own minds, with our partners and friends, or at the ballot box.
There is still pressure to put on a good face as a mother, to treat the work we do as joyous and to present that point of view to anyone other than our closest and most trusted friends and fellow parents.
Jones calls this “cultural apathy”. And she says that many women feel that they themselves are to blame for the extent of their troubles as new mothers. However, the fact is that a majority of women feel anxious after having a baby, at least 45% report feeling low, and at least 35% describe themselves as depressed. One in five mothers do not tell anyone about their feelings and over half report not feeling supported by their families. Almost half say they feel like they have to handle everything alone.
But there is hope. Jones writes about a burgeoning field of neurobiology that is looking at the changes in the brains of pregnant women and those who care for young infants. And she quotes Alexandra Sacks, a psychiatrist interested in this subject, as saying that simply by talking about the difficulties inherent in transitioning to motherhood, many women will feel relief.
And this is why, Jones says, she wrote her book: as an invitation to start talking about the process of becoming and being a mother.
A while back I wrote a post on matrescense, or the transition to motherhood, which seems to have struck a chord. This post is the second in a series on this subject.
To give some background, matrescence is a terms that was coined in the 1970’s by medical anthropologist, Dana Rafael, in her book, Being Female: Reproduction, Power and Change. More recently, the term was brought back to our attnetion by Aurelie Athan, a reproductive psychologist at Columbia University.
Athan notes that Rafael “pointed out that in many cultures, the birth of a new baby is announced by saying, “a woman has given birth.” Athan’s point is that the focus is on the mother and what she has done. And that emphasis is important. The mother is given credit for what she has accomplished. This is symbolic of the meaning the culture gives to the event and how it is handled. In cultures other than our own, mothers are often more supported after the birth of a baby, and more taken care of.
For example, in South Korea, it is common for mothers to go to a retreat for the first 21 days after they give birth. There, fresh meals are delivered three times a day, they can receive massages and facials and attend childcare classes, and there are nurses available to watch over the baby if the mother needs a rest.
There is a special soup to drink, traditional in South Korea during the postpartum period, lactation consultants and exercise routines to help with recovery, and body realignment to help new mothers get back in touch with their bodies.
In South Korea, eight out of ten mothers go to such a spa after giving birth.
This is the kind of thing that mothers in the United States can only dream about.
Here, mothers are often isolated in their own apartments or homes after their babies are born. During their leave from work, they often struggle with feelings of loneliness and anxiety. And this is especially true for first time moms who are not entirely sure what they are doing.
For example, a New York Times article profiled Alicia Robbins. When she had her first two children, she, like almost every woman who has birthed a child before her in this country, felt overwhelmed upon leaving the hospital. Never mind that she herself is an obstetrician and gynecologist. She said, having a child “was way harder than I expected. I kept wondering if it was OK that breastfeeding was so difficult or that I felt anxious. I kept asking myself, ‘Is this really my new normal?’”
Her mother came to help her, “but she kind of froze,” Dr. Robbins said. “I love her, God bless her, but we had fights over things like whether you need to sterilize the breast pump for three hours.”
In this country, as Aurelie Athan says, we talk about the baby, not the mother. We pay attention to the infant, give gifts to the infant, visit the infant….and we don’t talk so much about what the mother has accomplished and what we can do for her.
But the process of becoming a mother is something that we, in our culture, need to pay more attention to. As Daniel Stern said in his two books, The Motherhood Constellation and Becoming a Mother, giving birth to a new identity may be as hard, or even harder than the act of giving birth to the actual baby.
Becoming a mother changes who a woman feels herself to be. It expands her identity — but, as with many changes, this expansion can be fraught with uncertainty and anxiety. Who am I now? Do I know how to be a mother? Am I doing the right thing? What kind of mother do I want to be? Can I ever get back to doing the things I used to like to do? And if I do, will I be neglecting my baby? Can I still work? How much should I work? Can I still be good at my job?
The questions are endless.
Additionally, becoming a mother changes a woman’s identity as a partner. And this is not always easy. Sometimes a woman wonders if she still has room in her emotional repertoire for her partner. Sometimes the partner is jealous of the time a woman spends with her baby. Sometimes a woman feels she can only share her body with one person at a time and she feels resentful of other demands being made on her or torn about who that person should be — the baby or the partner? Often, a mother and her partner differ on how they each feel caring for the child should be handled. Conflicts come up over sleep training or how much of a schedule the baby really needs. And the energy for talking through these conflicts can be in short supply. Women often feel they carry more of the mental load for making doctor’s appointments, reading up on child development, and thinking about what the baby needs.
This identity shift is especially difficult, as a new mother needs her partner for support, and any resentment, difference of opinion, or outright conflict can get in the way of feeling supported.
The identity shift a woman faces after giving birth is hard. Like shedding a skin that no longer fits, the woman must say goodbye to aspects of herself and ways of being and doing that were part of her previous self, and she must grow into her new role as she works out what that will be.
Just knowing that all women experience this, that having a hard time with this shift is normal, and that it can be named and learned about — and even, in some cases, talked about with other mothers — can be helpful to new mothers.
I recommend that anyone suffering from this transition reach out — whether to friends, other new mothers, more experienced mothers, or even to a therapist who can discuss these issues openly.
After my last post, one such mother reached out to me and said that she felt less alone just knowing that what she was feeling was not unique to her.
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For more good discussion of this subject, see the references section below and watch this blog for part 3 of this series.
The other day one of the mothers I work with told me that while she was playing with her son, she picked up her phone to look at a text. He told her to put her phone down. He knew that her attention to the text was taking her away from him.
And how old is he?
Two.
This little boy is two years old and he already feels like he has to compete with Mommy’s phone for her attention.
Imagine what a five year old feels. Or a ten year old.
No wonder kids want their own phones. And no wonder they’re wanting them earlier and earlier.
It’s hard to buck this trend.
Kids are asking for phones early in their lives. But if you want to be able to put off their phone ownership, or, if once they own one, you want to be able to limit their usage, the first thing you really need to do is to be more aware of your own phone usage – especially in the presence of your children.
One thing that I find particularly worrisome is the way that some parents use their phones when feeding their babies. Parents may think it doesn’t matter. What does a newborn notice? If you use your phone while nursing or, while bottle feeding, perhaps you feel like it doesn’t matter.
But, like with the two year old I mentioned, and like with the five year old or the ten year old, it’s more about what you aren’t doing than what you are doing.
With a newborn, what you aren’t doing is looking into their eyes, being present with them, feeling their soft skin, smoothing their little bits of hair.
And what you aren’t doing is necessary for building connection and attachment – theirs and yours.
So, will they remember that you were on your phone while feeding them? No. But will it affect them that you weren’t as present as you might have been, that they missed that face to face, direct eye contact that can sometimes occur with feeding? Yes, I think it will.
And I do not say this to induce your guilt. I just say this to encourage all parents – including the parents of newborns and young babies – to limit your phone time to times when your baby or child or teen is not with you – or when they are napping or sleeping or when you absolutely have to take a call or a text.
And if you do absolutely have to do one of these things in the presence of your toddler or your older child, explain why you are doing it.
This will make it much easier later when and if you decide to put limits on your child’s screen usage – and it will also be better for your relationship with you child – and theirs with you.
The hardest part of the pandemic for me has been tolerating the deep sorrow that accompanies illness and mortality while simultaneously protecting my children from this very feeling within myself.
Although I am one of the lucky parents – I did not contract COVID and was vaccinated in early 2020 – there was illness and death all around me. The first months of the pandemic were hard — my uncle, who I grew up adoring (and feeling adored by) died suddenly from COVID. I remember one day in early April 2020 my mother called to tell me that he was feeling ill. Three days later he died in a nearby hospital. Luckily, his doctor was a family friend and allowed my aunt (his wife of fifty-five years) to be by his side as he took his last labored breath.
My heart felt broken.
Days later my family gathered on Zoom for his funeral and shiva. I sat in my own home, on our family couch. I was surrounded by my husband and my two boys, my youngest, sitting on my lap, wrapping his little fingers inside my palm. And, even though there were familiar faces and voices on my screen – my cousins, aunts, parents, and sibling – I felt very alone in my grief. So many parts of these rituals were missing – hugs with my family, communal vibrations of song that soothe when many voices join together in a single space, and of course, the presence of my family elders ushering us (the younger generation) through loss.
All of a sudden everything and everyone around me felt fragile and I could no longer take anything for granted. I stayed awake at night wondering how I would raise our two young boys if my husband (a physician who treated COVID patients) became ill and died? And what would happen to my dear boys if I died?
Without a government that took the pandemic seriously, how would I keep my boys safe even if I did manage to survive? And, in my most terrifying moments, the only thing I could think about was how George Floyd’s last words spoke every boy’s deepest source of security – “mama.”
It is misleading to say that the pandemic is solely responsible for the slow tear that pervaded my veil of security. In the months prior to the emergence of COVID in the US, my life had already been uprooted by illness. In fact, I spent most of the fall of 2019 caring for important people in my life who were ill. In October of 2019, I stayed with a close friend and helped with her two daughters as she endured treatment for stage IV lung cancer. And then, in the final days of 2019, my father was diagnosed with Leukemia and I underwent surgery, donating my bone marrow to him to increase his chances of survival.
By the time the pandemic hit, I was exhausted and needed time for reflection. In a normal year I would have used the spring to sort out the feelings that came with the previous fall. On my hours off from work and while my kids were at school, I would have enjoyed visits with my dad and taken long runs by the river. I would have met friends for tea and shared my experience, emerging from the interaction feeling grounded and full. Now, my whole world shrunk down to the few rooms of my home – with my kids at home for school and my husband working at the hospital I could no longer leave the house to hold my dad’s hand nor to go running by myself. Suddenly, it was no longer safe to meet friends in person and as a therapist I often did not want to set up one more Zoom session even if it was for the purpose of talking to friends. I found myself crying in the shower so that no one would hear me, especially my children.
As a daughter of a severely depressed mother, I have worked hard to hide my sorrow from my children. I don’t mean I never let them see me sad or upset. Rather, I’ve tried hard to protect them from the deep sorrow many daughters of depressed mothers inherit – the feeling that we are undeserving of goodness and are responsible to make our mothers better so that we may have the goodness we see others enjoy. Over the years, I’ve buoyed myself with my professional work and beautiful experiences that remind me I am worthy of joy (such as fun family vacations). And, I’ve healed the broken part of me through many deep relationships – my therapist, mentors, friends, and especially my husband who understand this part of me and support my many endeavors to live fully, with strength and joy. Together, we have been able to give our boys the things that my mother could not give me – a deep sense of hope, agency in the world, and freedom to be children. Now, without my traditional ways of recuperating – usually out of my children’s sight – how would I manage not to slip into my own depression? How would I protect them from my own fears and sorrow – stirred by so much illness and death (not to mention protect them from very real threat of COVID)?
I wish I could say that over the last 15 months I rallied by establishing a daily practice of yoga, baking bread, and used the extra time at home to “Marie Kondo” my closets (as I witnessed so many others do in the many articles I read online at 3 am). But, I did not. My children are still home for remote school and they are unvaccinated. I had to find ways to allow myself to feel what I was feeling. And I did. I found a way to stay close to the rhythms of my sorrow and move through them, this time along side my children rather than outside their view.
Over this pandemic time of sadness, I have come to realize that I do not have to hide my sorrow from my children in order to protect them. In fact, I have recognized that in order to prepare them for life as it really is, I have to allow them to know about sorrow and sadness. And I have decided that we can now talk, as a family, about how some parts of life are naturally hard and sad and that giving ourselves care and comfort in these hard times is essential.
Before it was safe to have a babysitter, I would run around the baseball field, tracking my miles, while my boys played catch and cheered me on to run one more lap. Now, both of my boys look forward to beginning the week when they have “extra movie time,” while I meet with my therapist online. They know that I often need to cry when I learn that their grandpa was re-admitted to the hospital and they see me moving through the pain by baking him his favorite date-nut bread for when he returns home. Additionally, they accompany me on visits with my friends in the park, developing their own loving relationships with them.
I am still tired. I still look forward to the time when my kids can return to school. I need more time to myself and they need to feel independent and have time with their teachers and friends. In the meantime, I am doing the unthinkable – I am healing myself along side my children. Without burdening them with my sorrow, I have let them see how I find my resiliency in the face of hardship. I am hopeful we will all emerge stronger and my boys, if they ever lose their own sense of inner strength, will know they can always find their way back.
The hardest thing this year about being a mom was letting go.
I have a college aged son with a chronic disease and having him away at college during a pandemic was not easy. Of course, I went through the worry of what it meant for him to be apart from me multiple times when he was growing up – when he went on sleepovers to friends’ houses, when he went away to camp and then again when he originally left for college.
Each time he left, whether it was for a night or a week or a semester, knowing I would not be able to check on him at night was nothing short of panic inducing. He has Type 1 Diabetes and what most people don’t know – and what I did not know before he was diagnosed – was that night time low blood sugars are a real danger which can result in hospitalization or death if they are not caught immediately. There really IS something called “dead in bed syndrome” and of course once I knew this, I simply could not get it out of my mind. There is all sorts of new technology which helps to make this MUCH less likely – like alarms on blood glucose monitors and phone apps that alarm when the child’s blood sugar level goes too low – but of course these things work only if the child or parent wakes up to the alarm. As a result of the fact that I had a very good sleeper for a son, I often checked his blood glucose levels three or four times a night when he lived at home.
So when he went away – whether for a night or a semester, and I could not check on him, I had to learn to tame my anxiety.
Every parent wants to protect their child from danger. But we have to struggle between fulfilling this wish and allowing the independence and autonomy which are necessary for our children to grow.
At each stage of development, we learn to allow a little more independence; we hang back a little to see what our child can do on his or her own. But it’s hard. We have to be able to tolerate the possibility that they will fall, fail, hurt themselves or feel defeated.
I could not stand that I would not be there to check my son at night – and I considered not allowing sleepovers or overnight camp and having him go to a local college and live at home. I just was so worried that he would not take adequate care of himself.
But again, each time I had to tame my anxiety and allow him to move forward.
And when a pandemic struck and I did not know whether he was at more risk for severe illness due to his disease or whether he would abide by the rules of physical distancing when at college, well, I had to really work on my anxiety.
I had to remind myself that the need for independence for my son trumped my desire to keep him safe or even my wish to KNOW if he was safe.
I also had to restrain myself from too much questioning of his habits. I struggled with my wish to be in control and my knowledge that I was not. And I think for all of us, this pandemic taught us that thinking we have control over our lives – and that of our children – is, at least in part, an illusion. Not only could I not control whether my son went by all the CDC guidelines, but I could not control his three roommates – nor could I even begin to know what their habits were in regard to keeping themselves safe from Coronavirus.
At some point, early in the pandemic, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation issued a statement saying that kids with Type 1 Diabetes were not more at risk for complications and death from Covid than other kids. Whether or not that was actually true, I have no idea, but at the time I found it tremendously reassuring.
I also found it helpful when my engineering-major son would joke that for engineers, this pandemic did not present a tremendous contagion risk as they didn’t socialize all that much to begin with. AND I liked the fact that his college seemed to be doing all it could to ensure safety and to keep parents and students aware of the precautions being taken (including daily analysis of the waste water from all the dorms to identify new cases!)
I clung to these reassurances and worked on keeping my anxiety at bay. My son needed his autonomy and independence.
Of course, I DID call him and email him and forward him articles about Covid…..
But limiting my anxiety through energetic use of all my defenses – and keeping the NUMBER of calls and emails to a minimum – well, that was the best I could do. I had to learn how to let go on an all new level, even though I had practiced so many times over the years.
Thoughtful Parenting 