Much like Anna saw each new day as an opportunity to finally “get on top of things,” she also felt each new day would be the day she initiated a conversation with Pete about all the unsettling feelings that had been haunting her since their baby was born. She wanted desperately to give her feelings a voice, and Pete had always been the one to whom she turned when she needed to talk. But something was different now. He felt so far away, and she felt so confused and ashamed by her misgivings about motherhood that it just didn’t feel safe to talk to him. Sometimes she tried to hint at her underlying feelings. “Do you ever miss life before Gracie?” she asked him one day. “I can’t even remember what it was like before her,” Pete had replied. “I can’t imagine life without her.” This was a sweet response in some ways; here is a dad who has welcomed his new daughter into his life so fully that it’s as if she had always been there. But for Anna, it also fell flat; there was no sign in Pete’s response that he shared any of her ambivalence. She felt more alone than ever.
Anna was tormented by her own mixed feelings. She felt guilty for feeling anything other than happiness about parenting. She felt a deep sense of loss about all that had changed for her since her daughter was born, right alongside a genuine sense of joy and gratitude for the addition of her daughter to her life. She resented her husband for seeming immune to the ambivalence that pervaded her experience of parenthood; he seemed so infuriatingly not rattled by their daughter’s birth. And until our therapy conversation started, Anna didn’t dare mention any of this to anyone else. Everyone else saw a beautiful new mother caring for a beautiful baby girl, with her stable, caring, involved husband in a supporting role. And as Anna looked around at other new mothers, she saw the same illusion: women everywhere with smiles on their faces, delighting in their babies, apparently free of the inner turmoil and marital problems that plagued Anna.
The assumption that motherhood is unfolding relatively seamlessly inside the walls of homes besides our own is a damaging misconception held by too many of us. There is so much anguish associated with this assumption, and such deep shame. If I had to identify the single most common cognitive distortion or false belief held by the new mothers who come to me for help, it is that other mothers seem to be having an easier time, and that consequently there is something wrong with them. What are the roots of this belief? Why do women assume their maternal struggles are singular or abnormal and that, therefore, they should keep them under wraps?* The women in my therapy practice who hold this belief are not necessarily prone to other sorts of cognitive distortions. These are not “faulty thinkers” or “depressive” women who see everything through a negative lens. Rather, these women are victims of a fallacy that permeates our society at every level. As Naomi Wolf puts it in Misconceptions, “It is not the depressed new mother that is aberrant; it is her situation that is the aberration.” There is nothing easy or normal about caring for a helpless, demanding infant, especially in the compromised physical and emotional state that results from the act of childbirth, and especially all alone, as is the typical scenario in American culture.
To witness my clients abandon this crippling assumption is to witness a remarkable transformation. Much of my work as a therapist is related to chipping away at this misconception that their daily foibles with their young children are unique to them, or at least worse and more numbered for them compared to others. I have this fantasy that all mothers—new and more established—could see into one another’s lives, to achieve a sense of really knowing about this shared, universal fumbling through the territory of motherhood, especially in those early weeks (and months, and years). Imagine the rejoicing! Imagine the reassurance, the affirmation, the empowerment.
Sadly, this is not a reality. We don’t often get a clear, unobstructed look into the real lives of other women besides—if we are lucky—a few close friends. Most of the time, we’re limited to little glimpses and hints—glimmers of possibility that others are struggling the same way we are—that are usually dismissed in favor of the default assumption that motherhood is easier for other people than it is for us. I hope the stories I share in this book will provide a window into the truth of things, which is that the struggle is alive and well in just about every other mother out there.
2
Out of the Shame Hole
Nothing is so painful as the pain that cannot be acknowledged, the pain of which we are (for whatever reasons) ashamed or that we construe as weakness or aberration.
—Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood1
Rachael first came to me for therapy when her daughter was seven months old. She was haunted by images of harm coming to her baby, and much of the time, in those images, she was the one doing the harming. She pictured putting her baby in the dryer and turning it on. She pictured dropping her on the floor. She pictured driving off a bridge with her baby in the back seat. Sometimes she thought she might throw her baby against the wall. I can’t imagine that any of us, parents or not, wouldn’t cringe at these images. It’s terribly unnerving to think of precious, innocent babies being harmed or killed. So imagine what it was like for Rachael when the images were about her own treasured baby girl. She loved her daughter deeply, and nurtured and protected her daily. Rachael’s problem wasn’t that she wanted to bring actual harm to her daughter (though sometimes, in severe cases of postpartum depression or psychosis, a mother actually does want to harm or kill her child). It was that she had no intention of hurting her daughter yet was terrified she might. That somehow she would “snap” and lose control and do the unspeakable.
As a therapist, I was immediately aware of what Rachael wasn’t saying. I wondered about the pieces missing from Rachael’s story of what the transition to parenthood had been like for her. It was clear to me that she was working hard to maintain the shiny veneer of a new mother thrilled to be staying home with her baby. Each time a darker aspect of Rachael’s subjective experience rose to the surface in our conversations, it was quickly tamped back down: “Sometimes I feel like my husband isn’t doing enough to help, but objectively I know he is. He’s awesome. I shouldn’t complain.” Rachael was adept at denying her struggles both to herself and to others. So those struggles found the only outlet they could in her conscious awareness: the intrusive images.
As Rachael learned to give voice to the aspects of her experience that were taboo, the images began to fade away. Though intrusive images are what brought her into therapy, the real work we faced together was finding ways to help her access and express the complete truth of her experience as a mother. The images had completely disappeared within the first six months of therapy, but our work together has continued for another six years. These many years of therapy work could be characterized as a long, slow climb out of the “shame hole.”*
One of my favorite lines in a book about mothering comes from Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages. She describes so well the cluttered, maddening, messy, joyful mayhem of her life as a mother of young children in rural Vermont in the 1950s. With the irreverence that characterizes her entire memoir, she states, “I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without children.”
What I love about this line is how efficiently it captures the ambivalence of mothering. Jackson was a renegade, giving voice to her mixed feelings at a time when women were not supposed to long for anything other than a life as a housewife and mother. Furthermore, she voices her ambivalence without equivocation; she says it like it is. Writing like Jackson’s is so refreshing and, sadly, so rare. At least to her readers, she appeared to ride the waves of motherhood, marriage, and domesticity with a sense of humor and an openness to whatever feelings washed over her, without guilt. Her life of chaos was at once sublime and insufferable; there was no competition between the two states. Unlike Rachael, it seems she was nowhere near the shame hole. How can we help more women claim, as matter-of-factly as Jackson does, their mixed emotions about motherhood?
When I was training to become a psychotherapist, one s
pecific area of study that interested me greatly was group therapy. The principles by which group therapy works are significantly different from the principles of individual therapy. In The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, author Irvin Yalom, one of my therapist-scholar heroes, describes what group therapy uniquely offers. Chief among these unique offerings is a ladder out of the shame hole.
Imagine that you are staying home with your new baby and struggling in silence with feelings of boredom and isolation. In your new role as a mother and in your intense adoration for your child, you have many beautiful moments, of course. You savor those moments and cling to them like buoys in the dark sea of stress, tension, exhaustion, and uncertainty you entered when your baby was born. But those moments seem few and far between, peppering what you would otherwise describe as an expanse of boredom.
Boredom is, in itself, unpleasant enough. But because you feel caught off guard by your boredom, and because you have an immediate judgment about it—I should not be bored. I have this beautiful new baby, and I have the good fortune of being home with her. I must be a terrible person, or at least a terrible mother—now you are not just bored. You’re also ashamed. And because you’re ashamed, the last thing you feel like doing is putting words to this experience. You probably won’t tell your husband, and you definitely won’t tell your mother (who has mentioned how lucky you are to get to stay home with your baby because she didn’t have that luxury when she was a new mom), or the two mom acquaintances you met in childbirth class (who always look like they are having the time of their lives with their babies). No, you’ll keep this secret to yourself. Your shame secret.
Now imagine that you are sitting with a group of other new mothers in a therapist’s office, all gathered around for a first session to begin to process, and support one another through, the stresses of early parenthood. (We won’t bother ourselves with how much trouble it took you to get there, how you thought you shouldn’t need to do such a thing, how if you were a natural at mothering like everyone else seems to be, the flyer in your baby’s pediatrician’s office advertising this group would not have grabbed your attention, and how you felt so uneasy pulling into the parking lot at the therapist’s office that you almost turned around to go home.) Imagine that, somewhere near the end of the hour, one woman says, “I never realized how long the days at home with my baby would feel.” You experience a flash of recognition. You think, I wonder if she feels bored, too. Nah. That’s not what she said. She simply said the days feel long. She’s probably just exhausted. But in response, another woman says, “Me neither! I catch myself looking at the clock and can’t wait until he falls asleep because I am just so tired of holding him.” Hmm, you think. That sounds a little like boredom to me. But no, maybe she just feels pulled in too many directions. She wants her baby to sleep so she can get the laundry folded or take a shower. Still, you drive home from that first group session wondering about the possibility that these other moms are bored sometimes, too. You have no solid evidence yet, but a seed has been planted.
If you go back to the group, you’ll hear more of the same, and eventually you’ll realize you are most certainly not alone. Your experience of boredom will be reduced to just that—boredom, not boredom coupled with shame. But if you don’t go back to the group and instead keep your boredom to yourself, you’ll retreat further into your shame cave.
Rachael had found her way into that cave very soon after giving birth, when she encountered a whole host of feelings she wasn’t expecting. They were the same kinds of feelings Anna had experienced, the same kinds I had experienced, the same kinds most, if not all, new mothers experience at some point. Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, sometimes resenting her baby, often resenting her husband, sometimes fantasizing about running away, hating the enormous discrepancy between the mother she envisioned herself being and the mother she actually was—these are all feelings shared by many new mothers.
Unfortunately, Rachael did not have the benefit of a peer group as transparent as the one in that hypothetical group therapy scenario. She perceived every other mother she encountered as competent, happy, and “on top of things,” which only worsened her shame. Unable to face these feelings herself, let alone express them to her husband or anyone else in her life, Rachael kept them hidden from view. And until she began to tell her shame secret in therapy, it poisoned her. It undermined her confidence in herself as a mother, and it planted horrifying pictures in her head of harming her daughter.
Another client who suffered from a similar sense of shame and guilt about her perceived inadequacies as a mother was forty-year-old Jasmine. When I first met with her, she burst into tears as she told me that parenting seemed to come more easily to her husband than it did to her. She saw him as being “a natural”—a doting father who was able to remain calm and patient even when their babies presented the greatest challenges—and wondered if she was simply not cut from a mothering cloth. She couldn’t understand how someone who had worked for years as a pediatric nurse as she had, genuinely enjoying the company of babies and kids, could find the idea of staying home with her own two small children so unpleasant.
Jasmine’s husband had a well-paying job, and they lived comfortably—there was no economic imperative for her to go back to work. In fact, doing so might even mean they would lose money due to steep childcare costs. Jasmine admitted to me that she worried what other people would think if they knew she would rather go to her mediocre job every day than stay home with her kids. She wondered if maybe she had just waited “too long” to have children and having many decades of comfy child-free life under her belt impeded her maternal instincts from kicking in more strongly. She feared she would never be the kind of mother her children needed her to be.
In fact, Jasmine was a wonderful mother who was extremely self-critical and held herself to exacting standards. For far too many women, feelings of shame and inadequacy shape the words they use to describe their experience of themselves as mothers. With each internal telling and retelling of the shame story, the fundamental sense of being “bad” at mothering—or, at best, the sense of isolation in struggling with mothering—grows stronger. And like every other mother plugged into social media, Jasmine found that she didn’t even need to leave her living room to see an image of a woman who appeared to be more competent at mothering, and a lot more blissful about it and gorgeous while doing it, than her.
Shame and Social Media
In the current digital age, we cannot have a discussion about the sources of women’s shame, anxiety, and self-criticism without addressing, at least briefly, the role of social media. What are most breastfeeding mothers doing while immobilized on the couch with a nursing infant? Chances are, they’re not spending the whole time staring at their baby’s face, or reading an absorbing novel that allows them some escape from the relentless inner dialogue about how well they’re performing as mothers. More likely, they’re scrolling through their Facebook or Instagram feed. And I hear regularly from my clients about how this habit makes them feel: lousy.
No matter how informed we are about the hazards of social media, no matter how strong our intellectual understanding that it is a performance-driven medium in which people airbrush their lives with the images and filters they choose, most of us are still likely to fall into the comparison trap. An isolated new mother is likely to contrast other people’s idyllic posts with her own messy, confusing, overwhelming life. In a perverse irony, the sense of isolation she is attempting to counter by turning to social media only deepens her feelings of otherness and separation. Confined to the house with a napping baby, or too constrained by the dual demands of work and motherhood to fit in face-to-face time with friends, she enters a digital world that promises connection and sharing. More often than not, she emerges feeling lonely, anxious, and unsure of herself.
With the staggering popularity of social networking sites and our increasing reliance on them as a means of social support, there is reason to be curious about ho
w our online behavior affects our emotional well-being. Research on the psychology of social media is still in its infancy, and so far it is inconsistent and contentious. One large-scale study demonstrated that the more time a person spent on social media and the greater the number of social media memberships he or she had, the higher that person’s stress level and the lower his or her quality of life.2 Some scholars have used the term “internet paradox” to refer to the set of findings that reveal an inverse relationship between online networking and offline social connection and psychological well-being.3, 4 Others have found that some forms of social media can improve the mental health of people with certain conditions that make face-to-face interactions difficult.5 Still others have shown that although social media involvement increases one’s sense of online social support, this has no direct bearing on one’s overall well-being.6, 7 While the jury may still be out with respect to any definitive causal relationships between social media use and psychological health, at a minimum the correlational findings indicate that we are not likely to find the antidote to what ails us by logging onto Facebook. A fair assessment of the current state of affairs in research might be put this way: Face-to-face social interactions and perceived social support have long been established as crucial to psychological well-being, and scientific investigations have yet to generate any compelling evidence that cyber interactions yield the same benefits. Further research will help to parse the lack of benefits from possible detriments.
To Have and to Hold Page 3