I used these strategies myself. When I was pregnant with my first child, an acquaintance who was, at the time, an exhausted new mother told me she didn’t even have time to brush her teeth anymore. I recall thinking, Oh, c’mon now. It takes two minutes to brush your teeth. Well, let’s just say karma did its thing. While life with a newborn does allow for a “free” two minutes here or there throughout the day, usually there are far more pressing things than teeth-brushing that we choose to do with those two-minute stretches. Like peeing. And eating.
There is no question, then, that most expectant parents do not appreciate the level of chaos they are inviting into their lives. It’s just one of those things that is impossible to anticipate or understand until it is being lived. But what I also know, and what Lerner’s words illuminate, is that coping with this chaos is an individual endeavor that varies widely. There are some mothers for whom the chaos is barely noticeable, and others for whom it is a crippling problem. The majority of us, like me and like Julia, are somewhere in between, perhaps vacillating between tolerating the chaos just fine and feeling for a moment that we might rather be dead than continue to live amid such mayhem.
One of my oldest, dearest friends happens to be the most disorganized, fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants person I know. She has a demanding career, a husband with a demanding career, three small children, and a tiny two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. When she came with her family to visit us for an autumn weekend in Vermont, she pulled from the trunk of their car one of those giant, cobalt blue, faux suede Amazon.com gift bags into which she had hurriedly shoved a few articles of clothing, along with a few toothbrushes, for everyone in her family. She did this after spending the morning working from home to meet a tight deadline, with all three of her children in the apartment, while her husband was at work.
If I were headed out of town for the weekend, I would have the suitcases out the night before, carefully choosing outfits for my children and myself and probably checking things off a packing list. I would find it enormously stressful to have to spend the morning at my computer, frantically completing a work project, while my children made various demands and messes, knowing I then had to pack for a trip and load up the car and drive for six hours. I would arrive at my destination exhausted and in need of a cocktail. For my wondrous friend, this was just another ordinary day. She was truly unfazed and arrived at our house late that night in her usual good spirits, three beautiful sleeping children in tow.
She and I have long teased each other about our very different ways. She aspires to have more of my planning and organizational skills, and I have always admired her relaxed, laid-back approach to each day and the attendant freedom from all the anticipating, planning, and worrying that sometimes bogs me down. In a sense, my friend dwelled in the chaos long before she became a mother, so when her first child arrived, she was better prepared to handle the ensuing disorder. She embraces the full catastrophe of motherhood in the same way that she embraces the full catastrophe of life.
The term “full catastrophe” as I am using it here, and as Harriet Lerner used it in the earlier quote, is borrowed from author and mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn. As he wrote in his classic book Full Catastrophe Living, the catastrophe describes the full experience of life: the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, the messy and the neat. Like other Buddhist thinkers, Kabat-Zinn suggests that peace can be found in embracing things as they are, rather than preoccupying ourselves with how things ought to be, or might someday be, or should have been, or could have been. Mindfulness, as a practice of noticing and (here’s the hard part) accepting without judgment all of what the present moment brings, was first integrated into mainstream medicine for its stress-reduction potential. What I find so valuable about it for psychological health is what happens when we apply it to emotion. A widely held misconception is that mental health means fewer negative emotions. If that’s our goal, we aren’t likely to embrace each of our emotions equally as they come up, especially not the ones that don’t fit with our preferred notions of ourselves as mothers, like “cool, calm, and collected” or “in control” or “patient and forgiving.” But inherent in the human condition is a wide and inevitable array of emotion; we cannot avoid pain, sadness, loss, grief, boredom, sorrow, loneliness, uncertainty, regret, and fear and experience only joy, excitement, connection, wonder, awe, and love. We encounter all these as we walk through this world. That is the full catastrophe, and nowhere, I would argue, is the catastrophe fuller than in parenthood.
In the essay collection Finding Your Inner Mama, writer Andrea Buchanan describes her experience of the unexpected feelings that arise within this emotional chaos:3 “I knew to expect sleepless nights; I knew to expect crying; I knew to expect exhaustion; I even knew to expect joy. I did not know to expect ambivalence. I did not know to expect doubt.”
In the early days of motherhood, we exist within a spectrum of emotional states—some spoken, some unspoken. We speak of the joys, and we mean it; the pleasures of parenting are real and deep. We speak of the practical challenges: poor sleep, sore nipples, dirty diapers, and inconsolable crying. We ask for advice about those practical challenges (Cry it out or soothe to sleep? Pacifier or no pacifier? Cloth or disposable?), and most of us hungrily gobble up any strategies or tricks offered to us that might make the logistical stuff of parenting just a little bit easier. But we rarely speak of the thickly layered and varied ways in which we feel, sometimes quite intensely, unpleasant and uncomfortable emotions in the presence of and in relation to our new babies. That is, we do not speak of the full catastrophe. Instead, we place interpretative frames around our unwanted emotions; they mean we aren’t good mothers, or our marriages are failing, or we don’t love our babies enough. So we pick and choose from among our feelings, hoping some will cease to be if we just push them over to the margins. The problem is that this comes at a tremendous cost.
The Freedom to Feel
The thing is, we cannot selectively mute some feelings and leave others to frolic about freely within us. We may think we’re able to press the mute button on the feelings that trouble us—through denial, compartmentalization, or other attempts to ignore them—but in the process, we also block out everything else. The sounds of sorrow and the sounds of joy disappear. We cannot invite happiness, passion, and contentment into our lives as welcome companions but order sadness, fear, and boredom to take a hike. I’m not suggesting it wouldn’t be really lovely if we could; who among us wouldn’t like to avoid the feelings that are no fun and bask only in the good stuff? Too often we believe this is possible, that we can outwit or avoid our emotions, as if emotional states are a choice. Never mind the troubling consequences of this misperception (e.g., the shaming belief that a depressed person just needs to choose happiness instead), but also, psychologically and physiologically, our minds simply don’t work that way.
In a prominent place in my therapy office, I’ve posted this quote: “The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor the absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.” 4
Many people in this world say many wise things, and it would be easy to plaster the walls of my therapy office with quotes that might enliven, inspire, encourage, or comfort my clients. But these words, from author Alice Miller, are the only ones I have displayed. In a sense, they say everything that really matters to me in my work as a therapist, and everything I hope for the people who walk through my door. I hope for lives of freedom. I hope for the heart of emotion to beat steadily inside every human being. I hope for lives lived in full color, lives unmuted, lives vitalized. And it is only with the willingness to feel all our feelings that we become truly alive and truly free.
Access to the entire landscape of emotion requires the skills of recognizing, validating, and regulating all of what we feel, and this comes much more easily to some of us than to others. The seeds for these skills are sown in childhood, when we depend on our caregivers to help us make sense of our i
nternal worlds. Starting with our earliest experiences as babies, those who care for us play a critical role in whether we can identify and tolerate our own emotions. The popular Pixar film Inside Out brought this truth to light in a powerful and accessible way.
In the film, ten-year-old Riley is uprooted from her beloved Minnesota life when her father takes a job in San Francisco. Attempting to adjust to her new surroundings, Riley encounters a whole host of painful emotions, from social anxiety and awkwardness among her new peer group to grief and sadness about the life she left behind. None of this is the problem. The problem is that her parents, with all good intentions, cannot see or tolerate their daughter’s distress. They want her to cheer up and embrace all her new life in San Francisco has to offer. In one pivotal scene, Riley’s mother makes it known that Riley’s good cheer is an important contribution to the family’s tough adjustment process. From that point forward, because Riley does not feel entitled to her sadness and discomfort, her entire emotional life malfunctions. It is only when she can cry for what she has lost, in the comforting arms of her mom and dad, that she recovers her capacity for joy. The clear implication is that if only her parents had helped her to identify the painful feelings in the first place, and given her space and permission to feel them, she would not have fallen into such a dark place where joy was out of reach.
In the film’s closing scene, when Riley’s concerned, loving parents envelop her and stay close as she cries and shares the whole truth of her emotional experience, I was a puddle of tears—and I’m not sure there was a dry eye in the theater. Riley was lucky her parents were there for her, if a little late in arriving. Many of us grow up without a steady witness for our emotions, or any witness at all. Attuned parents see the fear in our eyes and say, compassionately, “Oh, is that loud sound scaring you, sweetheart?” They wipe away our tears and say, “I know you’re sad. Grandma and Grandpa are so special to you, and it’s hard to say good-bye.” They give us names, and reasons, for powerful feelings that might otherwise be overwhelming. But no parent succeeds at this key task at all times. And many parents—whether because they’re caught up in their own stressors, or they’re uncomfortable with their children’s negative emotions, or they never had the benefit of this kind of emotional attunement as children themselves—cannot do it consistently or skillfully. Maybe sadness is mirrored back empathically but fear is ignored or even ridiculed. A child’s anger may not be tolerated so she learns early on to swallow it.
In the best-case scenario, children are encouraged to feel, fully, any and all emotions (while, of course, being guided toward a solid understanding of what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate to do with those emotions). Those children are likely to grow into adults who, equipped with the capacity to recognize and regulate their negative emotions, are not tempted to hit the mute button when those emotions arise. They grow into adults whose rivers of emotions flow freely—no logjams or frozen-solid parts. They grow up to be adults who lean into the full catastrophe—neither denying their own impatience, anger, fear, or sadness nor judging it or interpreting it as evidence of some fundamental change or flaw in their character. But since that scenario is as rare as it is ideal, for the rest of us, there are many obstacles to overcome before the river can flow freely.
The Perils of Expectations
When my older son was seven years old, an acquaintance whose first baby was due in a month posted on Facebook that she was going to bed at seven p.m. and looked forward to getting her energy back after her pregnancy was over. I commented, perhaps overzealous to give this young woman a reality check, and maybe with just the merest hint of bitterness, “You may never get your energy back. I’ve been tired for seven years!” While I was exaggerating, of course, my attempt at truth and transparency was quickly countered by someone else’s more typical, encouraging words: “Just wait until your baby is two months old. He’ll be sleeping through the night by then and you’ll feel like your old self again.”
What? There is a guarantee that a two-month-old infant will sleep through the night? And there is a guarantee that two months after becoming a mother, this woman will “feel like her old self again”? Apparently, social media—aka the world of illusory perfect and happy lives—is not the place for a reality check. Though silent on her Facebook page after that, with a heavy heart I pictured this new mother three months later, rocking her crying son into the early morning hours, feeling exhausted and discouraged, wondering how things had gone so wrong.
For a lot of years, I’ve been thinking about the effects of expectations on the experience of motherhood, marriage, and life more generally. Expectations can be helpful if they are realistic—they allow us to prepare in both psychological and practical ways for what is to come, and to avoid the emotional discomfort of being caught unaware. But when they are not realistic or, worse, are simply false, they set us up for disappointment, frustration, and anger. They restrict the quality and flow of our internal experiences, because if any of those experiences was unexpected, we may view it as bad or wrong or unfair or shameful, and when we attach those labels to what we feel, we are almost definitely going to cut off or distort those feelings in some way. In short, the human tendency to expect generates a whole host of distorted perceptions and self-critical judgments, and acts as a roadblock to full-catastrophe living.
Part of the problem with expectations is that there is a whole host of things we ought to expect that we do not, because hardly anybody speaks of them. Remember Jasmine, who wasn’t expecting to dislike being a stay-at-home mother when her previous career had involved being in the constant company of children? She was steeped in shame when she found that being with her own children around the clock was not nearly as fulfilling. I was similarly caught off guard when my once sunny outlook darkened into agitation and irritability a year into motherhood. There are vast plains in the terrain of motherhood that we simply did not know we would travel. And we trudge across these plains, wearily, uncertainly, perhaps numbly, perhaps with self-righteous indignation, thinking, What the hell is this? Why didn’t anybody tell me about this part of the journey?
The other part of the problem is that the expectations we do hold quite often do not come to fruition. In fact, I’d argue that more often than not, whatever is “supposed” to happen in the world of parenthood doesn’t happen. Our babies do not sleep through the night by three months. Our vaginas do not feel like having a penis inside them at six weeks. We do not naturally, automatically know what to do to soothe our babies’ cries. Our voices are not as calm in responding to our toddler’s hundredth demand for a snack as we once assumed they would be. It isn’t any easier dropping off our ten-month-olds at day care than it was dropping them off at four months old. The initial breastfeeding challenges aren’t any less challenging with Baby #2 than they were with Baby #1. Our progressive, well-intentioned husbands are not sharing baby care duties with us fifty-fifty.
Few new mothers are unaware of, or unintimidated by, the vast amount of parenting opinions and advice pouring from books, blogs, and magazines. There are books about how to conceive a child, how to navigate pregnancy in a healthy and happy manner, how to breastfeed, how to care for an infant, how to get your baby to sleep through the night, how to create a “superbaby,”5 how to manage toddler tantrums, how to increase your baby’s IQ, how to eliminate behavior problems through dietary changes, and on and on and on. In the classic feminist manifesto The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes an infant as “an existence as mysterious as that of an animal, as turbulent and disorderly as natural forces, and yet human.” Though this may be construed by some as a particularly dramatic and dark depiction of human infants, I suspect de Beauvoir’s words resonate with a great many mothers and fathers. Within these words we can see why there is such a market for how-to books about parenting. Who wouldn’t want some explicit guidance about how to tame the turbulence and disorder, offered up by an “expert” who claims to have unlocked the mysteries of these strange litt
le beasts who baffle us so?
Though I am the owner of a sizable stack of books about pregnancy (because it is a fascinating topic to me even when I am not pregnant) and sleep problems (because neither of my children had much use for sleep during their first years of life), over time I have become increasingly clear in my conviction that moms should not immerse themselves too deeply in how-to guides. These books carry some problematic, even dangerous, messages. Many of them convey the notion that there is a “one size fits all” solution for problems arising in infancy, or at least a “type” or “category” into which every baby fits. This implies that if you can just identify what kind of baby you have, you will figure out the solution.
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