To Have and to Hold

by Molly Millwood, PhD

  From my vantage point as a therapist, I worry most about social media’s capacity to fan the flames of shame. The social media habit provides an abundant supply of “evidence” that others are doing better, and it moves us further away from honest dialogue about the underlying issues that are aching to be acknowledged. Even when people post photos that expose the chaos of their home life, with self-deprecating and funny captions like “#parentingfails” or “#Calgontakemeaway,” there is a playful tone that belies the more unsettling feelings that lurk beneath. It feels to me like the din of daily superficial posts is drowning out the sound of hearts quietly breaking. Painful truths get buried beneath the censored, enhanced, or patently false fronts we project. Among the painful truths are these:

  “I am not the kind of mother I thought I would be.”

  Having a baby has not brought me and my partner closer. Actually, I feel further away from him [or her] than ever before.”

  “I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

  “Sometimes I wish I could go back to life before children.”

  “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a mom.”

  I’m pretty sure we won’t see any of those statements as status updates or hashtags. From behind the safety screen of social media, we either put our shiny happy faces forward, or we vent about the superficial messes and stresses of parenthood. Both practices cloud our view of our deeper shared experiences as mothers. Our trouble with emotional vulnerability and authenticity has been around a long time, and it won’t vanish anytime soon. Social media has intensified it, creating a whole new invitation to wear our masks and indulge our perpetual temptation to deny or distort the feelings that unsettle us the most. We now spend increasing proportions of our lives in this strange new online world, where it’s so easy to trivialize or exaggerate and so hard to be real.

  I like to imagine what could happen if just a fraction of social media posts were replaced, or at least supplemented, with time spent writing a few pages in a journal. Or with intimate, unhurried, brave conversations with friends and partners. In those mediums, we are far more likely to remove our masks and begin to connect to the current of our deeper emotions.

  In my fantasy alternate universe in which all women are transparent about exactly how hard mothering is and every mother feels full permission to have and to voice any emotion, Jasmine’s story would sound very different from the shame-saturated one I described earlier. She might say, upon arrival to therapy, “I need a little support as I attempt to adjust to my life as a mother. It’s a much bigger transformation than I imagined it would be. I’ve got a lot of mixed emotions, and I’m exhausted.” In those words, there is an absence of judgment, self-criticism, and shame. The words depict in a matter-of-fact way how hard it is to do the work of mothering and to regain equilibrium within such a radically changed identity and lifestyle. In an ideal world, women would have access to this kind of language to describe their experience of motherhood.

  As both Rachael and Jasmine hinted early on in our conversations, the experience of motherhood wasn’t the only shameful part of their lives; their private concerns about their marriages also fueled their shame. Like Rachael and Jasmine, many women feel shame and guilt for resenting a “good” husband. Rachael recognized the many helpful contributions Scott made to their daughter’s daily care, which made her feel worse about being unable to let go of her irritation over all the ways he wasn’t helping. It was up to Rachael to figure out alternate arrangements when the nanny was sick. Rachael was the one who heard their daughter crying in the night. Rachael spent weekends catching up on laundry, cleaning, bills, and every other thing that slipped through the cracks all week, while Scott spent weekends catching up on sleep.

  As long as we are keeping our problems to ourselves, we stand no chance of learning that these kinds of issues are common and that there are good reasons for them. If, instead, we share our stories with other women, we are almost sure to discover that their struggles are remarkably similar to our own. Sometimes our husbands are even the ones to help us out of the shame hole. When Rachael found the courage to tell Scott about the horrible intrusive images she’d been having, he looked her in the eye with loving compassion—not fear or disgust—and suggested, gently, that she seek help. He told her she was a wonderful mother, and he sat beside her on my couch during that first therapy hour, helping pave the way for the long journey that has brought her out of shameful darkness and into the light of ordinary, universal struggles.

  Silence—our own and others’—keeps us stuck in shame. False, distorted, and censored accounts of motherhood—our own and others’—keep us stuck in shame. Only when silence is broken and secrets are revealed can we begin to revise the shame story. Thus, this seems like as good a time and place as any to let some big cats out of the bag:

  Sometimes we resent our babies.

  Babies do not equal happiness.

  Babies do not bring couples closer together.

  Sometimes We Resent Our Babies

  I didn’t know she had colic; I just thought she was an asshole.

  —The Longest Shortest Time, episode #10

  I recently listened to a podcast about a mother whose newborn baby started crying one day and didn’t stop for six or eight weeks. During that time, the mother very persistently had the thought that she should probably give the baby to her sister. She was at her wit’s end, utterly exhausted by her attempts to soothe a baby who could not be soothed. Her thought that she should give the baby to her sister originated in part from a sense of incompetence; surely her sister (older than her, and an established mother) could do a better job of caring for this fussy infant. What interested me more, though, was that this new mother did not even like her baby. She did not feel connected to the baby and did not have fond feelings for her. Her courage in revealing this to a potentially enormous audience of strangers was refreshing. I think that perhaps one reason she had the ability to do so was because more than a year had passed since those difficult days. In that time, she had bonded with her baby and gained hard-won perspective. She could look back and laugh a little about how terrible the experience was.

  A good friend of mine told me about the night she angrily dropped her two-month-old baby onto a mattress while declaring, “I hate him.” Like the woman from the podcast, my friend was drained of her usual mental and emotional resources by a baby who would not stop crying. When she told me about this—without a trace of shame, because she is a rare and wonderful bird—I remember filing it away in my brain as evidence of how much better off we are when we can voice our emotional truth, however taboo it may be. She did hate her baby in that moment. She is also a loving mother. Those two things do not cancel each other out, and she knew that; otherwise, she would never have told me the story. She had climbed out of the shame hole a long time ago, if she had ever fallen in it. Because of her uncommon and unapologetic candor, I picture her standing at the edge, aboveground, shouting down to the mothers trapped within, “Come on up! I hate my baby sometimes, too!”

  Another friend tells me that she locked herself in the bathroom for longer than she cared to admit, with her preschooler and toddler knocking on the door, because she could not stand another minute of their demands. On a different occasion, after a particularly stressful early morning, she went to the garden with a beer at nine a.m. She relayed this to me with a little bit of a nervous laugh, wondering if I thought she was crazy or horrible, and said, “I have never done something like that before. I have never even considered a drink in the morning, but it was like I needed medicine. I needed something to calm my body.” Again, our children have the ability to rattle us like nobody and nothing else can. This friend is an extraordinarily responsible person, lovely in all ways, playful and fun and creative and nurturing. And sometimes, when her husband is not around to share the parenting burdens, she locks herself in the bathroom and cries, or downs an early-morning adult beverage.

  Of course, for nearly all women, loving feeling
s prevail in the unfolding emotional drama of motherhood. We are devoted to our children, we gladly make sacrifices for them, we protect them fiercely, and we delight in them like we delight in nobody else. But it is the coexistence of the loving and the less-loving feelings that is so difficult to tolerate. It’s as if we expect the resentment will run amok and destroy the love if we acknowledge it. Maternal ambivalence remains a highly uncomfortable concept despite its having been explored by many writers before me. From this intolerance for ambivalence is born the pursuit of perfection, and a great deal of suffering. We shame each other and ourselves for harboring negative feelings about our babies and our roles as mothers, even though maternal ambivalence, at its core, is nothing more than a conflict between our needs and the needs of our babies. Both sets of needs are legitimate, and both warrant fulfillment. It is quite inevitable, then, for this ambivalence to arise. It is an inherent condition of motherhood, reflecting the simple fact that our needs do not cease to exist when we become responsible for a needy infant.

  Babies Do Not Equal Happiness

  Popular culture tells us that having children is one of the key ingredients (along with a satisfying career and a solid marriage) of a happy, fulfilling life. Adults past child-rearing age who never had children are often regarded with suspicion or pity; we wonder if these poor childless souls experienced infertility, or what less-than-optimal personality traits they possess (selfishness, immaturity, curmudgeonliness) if they voluntarily opted out of the child-rearing enterprise. But according to Harvard researcher and bestselling author Daniel Gilbert, those non-parents have an edge over the rest of us when it comes to happiness. Using a research tool called experience sampling, in which people’s moment-to-moment happiness levels are assessed as they go about their daily lives, Gilbert and his colleagues have established that adults without children are happier than parents. Least happy of all are parents of young children, and among women, spending time with a child generates about the same degree of joy as vacuuming.

  In Gilbert’s keynote address at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention a few years ago, he likened parenting to a no-hitter baseball game. The moments of excitement and pleasure are dwarfed by the moments of boredom. We may be reluctant to embrace this metaphor, but it rings true, and his research certainly backs it up. Is there any truth, then, to the folk “wisdom” that children bring their parents happiness? Research tells us that in old age, looking back retrospectively upon parenting is, indeed, a central source of happiness. Gilbert proposes that in order to cope with the extreme hardships of parenting, we need to believe our kids bring us happiness. He states, “We don’t value our children in spite of how difficult they are, we value our children because of how difficult they are.”8 It’s as if we are playing a little Jedi mind trick on ourselves, saying, “If children cost me so much, they must be worth it. They must be an amazing source of happiness.” Coupled with our collective silence about how hard it is to raise children, this mind trick keeps us sane but perpetuates the myth that parenting is bliss.

  None of this is to say that children are not a source of joy. There’s another, critical component of Gilbert’s analogy of the no-hitter baseball game: In the bottom of the ninth, with two outs, somebody hits a home run. Maybe even a grand slam. That one hit makes the whole game worthwhile. Now we don’t resent being there for those nine monotonous innings. Our children seem to deliver these “home runs”—a perfectly timed kiss or cuddle, a shining accomplishment, the most hilarious question, a stunning observation—when we least expect them, and perhaps just when we most need them.

  In her bestselling book The Happiness Project, author Gretchen Rubin coins the term “fog happiness.” She writes, “Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes. Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don’t really seem to bring much happiness at all—yet somehow they do.”9 Rubin suggests that parenting small children falls into the category of fog happiness. If we train our close analytical eye on any given ordinary interaction with our children during any ordinary day and examine our emotions, “happy” is not very likely to be in the mix. It’s even less likely to be the prevailing emotion, the one by which we imagine we will remember that moment if we had a snapshot of it to return to years later. Wrestling our toddlers into their car seats? We feel irritated, frustrated, impatient. Reminding our fourth graders that their homework isn’t going to do itself? We feel annoyed and resent the sound of our own nagging voices. Holding back a child’s hair while she crouches over the toilet vomiting at three a.m.? We feel exhausted, maybe a little grossed out, and worried about canceling all the work meetings we have scheduled for the next day. As Rubin states, zoom in on any one of these moments, and there is nothing happy about it. But zoom out and ponder the big picture of parenthood, and almost invariably we construe it as a source of tremendous happiness. We ascribe meaning to the small moments that may not be a party while they’re occurring, and it is within that meaning-making that the happiness arises.

  Often, parents whose children are grown seem to recall even the most challenging aspects of early parenthood—sleepless nights with infants, endless diaper changes, caring for sick children—through a rosy lens: “Oh, how I miss those nights of rocking my baby to sleep over and over again, holding her close.” They miss these experiences because of the meanings they ascribed to them, meanings centered around nurturance, intimacy, and pride. Those meanings are, almost always, more accessible after the moments have passed. The cliché “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” is perhaps nowhere more apt than in the realm of parenting small children. Parents with grown children always seem to be cautioning in-the-trenches parents about how fast the time flies, how important it is to slow down and savor the experience.

  In her memoir of motherhood, Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott writes, “It’s so easy and natural to race around too much, letting days pass in a whirl of being busy and mildly irritated, getting fixed on solutions to things that turn out to be just farts in the windstorm.” It’s true. Even a relatively small passage of time is often enough to alter, dramatically, the way we think and feel about a parenting experience. Just yesterday, my mother, who has a strange but endearing practice of archiving and frequently resurrecting past emails, stumbled upon an email I had written to her a couple of years ago:

  Quinn was behaving very badly on Saturday in numerous ways when we were out and about, but let me tell you about the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent his beloved fire engine to the basement (which he had been warned would happen). In Barnes and Noble, I was keeping a tight grip on him because he has such the tendency to run off. He kept complaining about that and saying “LET ME GO!” and I was saying “I CAN’T LET YOU GO BECAUSE YOU WON’T STAY CLOSE AND YOU NEED TO STAY CLOSE.” Eventually this exchange was happening while we were standing in line to pay, and he convinced me to let go and promised me he would not run away. The instant I let go, he bolted like a bat out of hell, ran directly behind the cash registers, then all the way across the store to the farthest away corner, laughing and squealing with devilish delight all the while, knocking a couple of books over in the process and almost knocking some people over, too. Meanwhile Noah was standing alone in the line while I was chasing Quinn; we had been in this long line for a while and I didn’t want to lose our spot so I told Noah “STAY THERE” and when I returned with Quinn, poor Noah was standing at the front of the line, with our items to purchase in hand, meaning it was our turn, and he was looking all worried. Jesus.

  I remember that as I wrote that email to my mom a day or two after the incident had occurred, I could already see the humor in it. I couldn’t feel the humor, though. The stress of the situation was what figured most prominently in the way I was carrying it with me mentally. I was aware not only of the feelings I had (anger, exasperation, embarrassment) while at the store chasing my three-year-
old, but also the swirl of negativity that surrounded the incident immediately afterward and beyond. My bad mood in the car on the drive home and the bad taste in my mouth from the harsh talking-to that I gave Quinn. My follow-through, once we got home, of taking away (temporarily, of course) his treasured ride-on fire engine. My ruminating about why it has to be so difficult to have a nice outing to the bookstore with my children on a cold winter day. My ridiculous, neurotic internal questioning of what is the matter with my child that he cannot obey a simple command when I am very serious about its importance, and worse, why does he not have the instinct to stick close to his mother while out in a crowd?

  I know that as I wrote the email to my mom, I thought, One day I’ll think this is funny. And as predicted, when the email appeared in my in-box yesterday and I opened it, I experienced only positive emotions. Quinn is such a rascal, I thought with a smile. What felt stressful and very much un-fun in the moment is now a memory that captures Quinn’s great sense of freedom and adventure—something I have come to celebrate—and the “full catastrophe” of parenthood. It is a funny story. I don’t love the way I reacted at the time—particularly all the needless contemplating of Quinn’s possible defects—but there is no temptation to revisit the negative feelings from that day. There is only a sense of looking back on a classic tale of the perils of navigating a big store with an active, curious toddler, and a realization of how much he has already changed and grown and how much I have come to value his defining features rather than worry about or resent them for the parenting hardships they generate.