Rubin’s conceptualization of fog happiness helps resolve what appear to be contradictory research findings about the happiness of parents. Ask a young mother to pause from playing with her fifteen-month-old at eleven a.m. and indicate her current happiness level, and her answer will be about the same as when she’s vacuuming at four p.m. Ask that same woman when she’s eighty-five years old what her top three sources of happiness were, and “being a mother” or “caring for my children” will surely make the list. Vacuuming, not so much. Immediate joy and fun in parenting are scattered stars in the great black sky of strain, boredom, and unrelenting responsibility in parenting. But when the joy comes, it comes insisting. And when we take the long view and ascribe meaning to our life’s activities, little else competes for first place with raising our very own human beings.
For many of us, this juxtaposition of dull or difficult moments against fundamental joy and fulfillment is visible every single night in the sleeping faces of our children. So many nights, exhausted or just impatient, I have been eager for my children’s bedtime. One son’s chatter barely registers in my ear because it’s the same chatter I’ve been hearing all day. The other son’s chain of requests—for a sip of water, to be tucked in (again), for another sip of water, to turn the hall light on—feels like fingernails on a chalkboard. Minutes later, as I peek into their rooms and see that they have each fallen into slumber, I see all sweetness and splendor in their faces. I want to lie down next to them and hold them close. I wonder what that last bit of chatter was that I tuned out, whether it was something important about my boy’s world that I missed. A tiny voice saying, “Can I please have another sip of water?” echoes in my head, and I hear it more clearly now as, “It makes me feel secure and cared for when you get me a drink of water.” Their well-being matters more to me than anything, and I feel at a cellular level the honor and joy of being their mom . . . now that they’re asleep.
Babies Do Not Bring Couples Closer Together
Often, newly-in-love people describe their certainty that they have found “the one” with some statement along the lines of “I want to have his baby” or “I just know she’s going to be the mother of my children.” This kind of sentiment conveys how much emphasis we place on child-rearing as the ultimate achievement of a romantic union. For 90 percent of adults, when we find ourselves deeply in love and maybe even convinced that we’ve met our soul mate, we set our sights on making and raising a baby with that person. It is a beautiful fact of nature that children are living, breathing products of a union between two people. I am not here to undermine the beauty—one might even say the miracle—of human life arising out of love. But I do want to counter a very pervasive myth, and I want to articulate one of life’s greatest ironies. The myth, which somehow persists even though the strains of parenthood are well known, is that having a baby cements a couple’s bond. The irony is that children quite often threaten the very connection from which they came. The intimate, sexual, emotional tie between their parents that led them to make a baby in the first place begins to unravel when the baby materializes. This is usually true for even the happiest and sturdiest of couples, so imagine the rude awakening in store for those unstable couples who, searching for remedies for their ailing relationships, say to themselves, Maybe a baby will bring us closer together.
Study upon study shows that marital happiness takes a significant hit when spouses evolve from partners into coparents. Their sense of intimate connection, emotional and sexual, drops precipitously. Their level of conflict rises sharply; new parents argue nine times as often as they did before they had a baby.10 Problematic communication patterns—like one partner pursuing contact while the other withdraws—happen far more than before the baby was born. Self-reported marital satisfaction levels are significantly lower than those of childless couples, especially among women, and especially in that first year after the baby’s birth.11
Even when we broaden the scope beyond just the initial transition-to-parenthood years when couples are destabilized the most, we see that the strain of parenthood shapes marriages in a lasting way. Just like research demonstrates that personal (individual) happiness is higher for non-parents than parents, we also have an abundance of studies showing that marital happiness is higher for non-parents than parents. And while a lot of couples recover at least partially from the disruption of their marriage brought on by the birth of their first child, many do not. The divorce rate among couples with children is highest in the early parenting years, and the parents of young children are overall more likely to divorce than their childless counterparts.12
Interestingly, the decline in marital satisfaction for new parents is sharper now than it once was. Compared to the new parents of the 1960s and ’70s, today’s new parents take twice as steep a nosedive in their marital adjustment. As we will see later, because our ideals about marriage have shifted, the losses ushered in by parenthood hurt more than they did in previous generations. More than ever, marriage is expected to bring emotional support (not just, or even necessarily, financial support) and intimate companionship. Add a baby to the equation, and the support and intimacy for which we strive in our marriages become much harder to generate.
In my experience, women tend to be more vocal about this particular “secret” of new motherhood. It is relatively easier to air gripes about one’s partner or husband and to confess to feeling disinterested in him than it is to reveal feeling disinterested in, and destabilized by, motherhood itself. It is less shameful to hit a rough patch in one’s relationship than it is to question one’s competence as a mother, or to wonder whether one is “mother material” when motherhood is exalted as the ultimate source of meaning and identity for women. What so few people seem to realize, however, is exactly how much these marital changes affect, and are affected by, their own well-being as women and mothers.
For decades, marital therapy has been an accepted form of treatment for women’s depression. Studies show it to be as effective as other forms of therapy in alleviating symptoms of depression in women.13 This isn’t rocket science. If strengthening a marriage alleviates depression in a wife, then depression has at least some of its roots in an ailing relationship. And there’s a great deal of research to support that idea.14 Furthermore, the links between postpartum depression, in particular, and marital health are many and undeniable. Women who experience PPD report lower marital satisfaction, compared to mothers who do not meet the criteria for depression, as many as five years after the initial episode of PPD.15 Among the strongest statistical predictors of PPD are marital distress and poor social support, particularly lack of paternal involvement in the care of the baby.16, 17
Evidence for the role of relationship distress in mothers’ depression pours in from all different angles. For instance, women who feel less secure in their relationships are more likely to suffer PPD, and when women diagnosed with PPD are offered a short-term course of therapy designed to help them cope with caring for an infant, their depressive symptoms improve more when their partners attend therapy with them than when they attend alone.18 Everything about this makes sense, and yet a woman’s depression is still primarily regarded as a “woman’s problem,” something originating within her rather than within the space between her and her mate or in the impossible standards to which she is held. When husbands do not see their role in their wives’ suffering—both in contributing to it and in having the capacity to help her out of it—women are at even greater risk of falling into the shame hole. Sometimes it might even seem that our husbands are kicking the ladder out from under us as we try to climb out, because they tell us our feelings are unfounded, ridiculous, or wrong. Responses like those, while perhaps offered in the hope of alleviating some of our pain, only reinforce our sense that something is wrong with us. And they most certainly don’t generate feelings of closeness in the relationship. As we will continue to see in subsequent chapters, the extent to which our partners stay close as we navigate the uncertain territory o
f new parenthood makes all the difference, not only in our sense of well-being as women but also in terms of our marital health and happiness.
3
The Full Catastrophe
To opt for kids is to opt for chaos, complexity, turbulence, and truth.
—Harriet Lerner
There is a wonderful collection of essays called Finding Your Inner Mama that I wish all new moms knew about and had the time to read. In one piece, “A Crash Course in Vulnerability and Other Lessons,” renowned psychologist Harriet Lerner says this:
When things go by the book, which statistically speaking they are likely to do, pregnancy is still a lesson in surrender and vulnerability. Your body is inhabited; you live with the realization that childbirth is a wild card; and you know at some level that your life will soon be altered in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. No matter how well you prepare yourself, you are not going to be able to run the show. You’re in the thick of a full catastrophe, and change is the only thing you can count on for sure.1
As Lerner implies, the metamorphosis that motherhood brings begins not when the baby is born but during pregnancy. My client Julia came to me when she was about three months pregnant with her first child. A little depression-prone all her adult life, she now found that she was anxious, too. Many women become preoccupied with their developing baby’s health and worried about the act of childbirth, and this was true for Julia. But her anxiety also ran deeper. She had recurring dreams about her baby being a girl, and she said to me, “I realize I want so badly for this baby to be a boy. Because I think sons look more to their fathers and daughters look more to their mothers as they are forming their identities. I’m terrified that if we have a girl, I’ll ruin her.”
Julia’s fear made me very sad. In so few words, she told me a great deal about how she felt about herself. I assumed that as we talked further, I’d hear more and more about her negative self-image and all the ways this had hindered her long before getting pregnant. I was wrong. As I got to know Julia, I found that she was a self-possessed, energetic, gregarious, determined woman who—though often contending with low-grade sadness and irritability—was genuinely proud of her accomplishments and felt well liked by her peers and her family. It was only during pregnancy, as she started to imagine herself as a mother more vividly and to contemplate the influence she would soon have on a brand-new human being, that she began to encounter some very dark facets of her self-image. These facets weren’t accessible to her before. She’d never had a reason to doubt herself as seriously as she now did.
Fast-forward about a year, and Julia is sitting on my couch breastfeeding her five-month-old son, crying as she tells me about her latest argument with her husband and how close she is to “losing it” because her house, her marriage, and her life are in such disarray. The concerns that brought her into therapy now seem almost existential; they have become peripheral in our work, pushed aside by the more pressing matter of her overwhelming daily life. She is too busy trying to keep from drowning to worry about what kind of person her son will grow up to be under her care. Besides, she got her wish: he is a boy, and rational or not, her fears of damaging her child are less pronounced because of that.
Julia spends her days proficiently taking care of her baby. He is healthy and content and adorably chubby, and Julia exudes confidence in the visible realm of parenting. She feeds him, changes him, and rubs eczema cream on his winter-worn cheeks during our sessions while also keeping her train of thought squarely on its tracks and expressing herself eloquently. I am struck by her grace and efficiency. But this appearance that Julia projects, this air of being “on top of things,” is quite the opposite of her internal experience. Julia does not recognize her own life anymore. She uses that phrase over and over again to capture just how much has changed. Normally extremely responsible and conscientious, Julia has lately forgotten to show up for doctor appointments, gotten her car towed for parking in a no-parking zone, and neglected to return important phone calls. Once a social butterfly, now she would rather stay home than meet with friends. When she does get together with others, she replays their conversations afterward in her head with self-loathing about her “verbal diarrhea.” A self-described neat freak, she looks at the messes in every room of her house and feels simultaneously suffocated by them and unmotivated to clean them up. Time is too precious; when the baby is napping, she needs to take the world’s fastest shower or answer her husband’s text about what to pick up at the grocery store on the way home. And besides, any tidying progress she makes will just rapidly come undone by her own frenzied manner of going about the day or her slob of a husband. Before their son was born, she considered herself quite happily married, but now she looks at her husband and feels either aggravation or indifference. She’s not sure which is worse. And as if all this doesn’t feel bad enough as she’s living it, the interpretive frame she puts around it makes her feel even worse: “I’ve become a different person, and I hate who I am now.” There are plenty of other ways she could frame her current struggles (for instance, “Sleep deprivation has really started to take a toll”), but the interpretation she has chosen is one in which her very personhood has been altered, and not for the better. It’s a frame that adds a layer of unfortunate, unnecessary suffering to the inevitable pain of her daily life.
If these words, “pain” and “suffering,” seem strange, let me explain the context in which I’m using them. A certain kind of distinction between pain and suffering has proved quite helpful in the mental health field.2 Pain is inevitable. It is part of the human condition. We will undoubtedly injure ourselves, and be injured by others, and so we feel pain; this is true both physically and emotionally. Suffering, on the other hand, comes when we do what human beings seem uniquely inclined to do, and that is to relate to the pain cognitively and emotionally. We analyze it, judge it, scorn it, resist it, try to control it, deny it, distort it, hate it, blame someone for it, scoff at it, wallow in it, scrutinize it. The realm of pain is primitive and primary; our bones ache from the piercing cold, our muscles are sore from carrying a hefty baby all day, our bodies are heavy and our heads throb from another night of insufficient sleep. The realm of suffering is auxiliary and secondary; we react to our experience of cold, aching bones with perhaps a scornful thought directed at the self (“I’m so stupid for forgetting my coat”); as we massage our tense shoulders, we drive ourselves crazy wondering why our baby needs to be held constantly; and as we face another sleep-deprived day, we dissolve into tears of frustration and anger about why the stupid no-cry sleep method doesn’t work on our baby.
As Julia spoke, I heard the places in her story that gave rise to the suffering. And Julia’s story very much resonated with me. While buried beneath the weight of new motherhood, I, too, experienced a profound identity shift and often felt like a stranger to myself. When Noah was seven months old, I wrote in my journal:
Motherhood has apparently transformed me from an extremely mellow, even-keeled person to a tense and high-strung person with mood fluctuations so pronounced that my husband has asked me, on more than one occasion, what I’ve done with his wife and when she’s coming back. During my pregnancy, my blood pressure was 112/60 at every single prenatal doctor visit I had. The nurses commented each time on how amazingly consistent I was. It seems silly, but I took pride in this, feeling it was a clear physical indication of the ever-so-stable and calm person that I am. At my six-week postpartum visit, my blood pressure was so much higher that the nurse asked me if I was nervous. “Nervous?” I asked. “No, just exhausted and on edge from having a baby who never stops crying.” Six months later, my baby boy is as happy as a clam, but I’m not. I’m guessing my blood pressure hasn’t returned to that low number that reflected my internal calm and stability. I’m not the same, and I wonder if I ever will be. Seven and a half months into motherhood, I sometimes don’t recognize myself. If a client were describing to me this same set of concerns, I would be inclined to reassure her that the funda
mental person she is remains unchanged, and that this is merely an adjustment period. I know better than to assume we are that fragile, and I have a lot of faith in the resilience of human beings. Living inside my own skin, though, I’m filled with a fear that something about me—something that previously defined who I am and served me quite well—is irrevocably different now that I’m a mom.
Like Julia, I had a tremendous amount of judgment about the strange new person I had become. I did not like her. I liked my old self much better. Julia liked her old self much better. What neither of us knew, at the time, was that the very qualities we felt we had lost and were grieving were the qualities that set us up to be so discombobulated by motherhood. One of the first things to disappear when we cross the threshold into parenthood is any semblance of order that our lives may once have had. No new mother is unfazed by the changes a baby brings, but people who thrive on having a sense of control and agency, who put a high premium on productivity, and who feel calm only when “on top of things” are likely to experience significant challenges when a baby enters the picture.
Lerner cautions women, “Don’t have [children] if your life’s purpose is to dwell in complete stillness, serenity, and simplicity; or if you have a great dread of being interrupted; or if you are on a particular life path that demands your full attention and devotion.” Of course, her advice is tongue-in-cheek. Ninety percent of adult human beings do have children, and very few people think carefully about whether they are exactly the right kind of person to be a mother or father. Nobody with a strong urge to create their own human being is going to heed Lerner’s advice and say, “Oh, okay, never mind. I’d rather have a serene and uninterrupted life.” We just carry on with our plans to have a baby, more or less aware that it might be a little hard on us. Indeed, whenever dissonance is caused by two competing ideas, such as “I have baby fever” and “Raising a baby is really, really hard and I’m told it will turn my world upside down,” we are pretty good at negating one of those ideas in order to eliminate the dissonance. Most people resolved to have a baby (or two or three) find ways to dismiss the evidence for how exceptionally difficult it will be. We are equipped with all kinds of tricks and tools for this, because our species depends on it. If everybody got cold feet about this procreation business, well . . . we would cease to be. So we say to ourselves, It can’t be that bad. Everybody else is doing it. Or They had a tough time of it when their baby was born, but that’s because their marriage was falling apart, too. Or They had a tough time of it, but that’s because they had no family around to help. At least my in-laws live across town. Or simply, It’ll be hard, but we’ll get through it. Vague reassurances, rationalizations, pep talks, arrogant notions that we will handle it better than others do . . . these are all effective strategies to muster the courage to plan a pregnancy, or to cope with an unplanned one.
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