To Have and to Hold

by Molly Millwood, PhD

  Equally problematic is the pervasive message in these books that there is a solution at all. Many “problems” for which these books provide solutions are not problems at all if we do not view them as such. Is it a problem to have an infant who still does not sleep through the night by the time she is six months old? It’s rough, certainly, but is it a problem to be solved, or is it just the current reality, one that will, sooner or later, morph into a different reality? Is it a problem to have an older baby who prefers to fall asleep while cradled in his mother’s arms, as opposed to alone in his crib, or a toddler who clings to his father’s legs at day care drop-off? Last time I checked, most of us prefer a set of loving arms around us when we’re tired, upset, or scared, whether we’re three months old or three years old or forty-three years old.

  I think we make a costly mistake when we turn repeatedly to books that classify our babies and children and offer recipes or color-by-number-style solutions to their “problems.” I dream of a world in which people’s approach to parenting is as unencumbered by expectations as possible, and parenting books are counter to that cause. The great majority of them generate a host of expectations. When expectations are not met (as invariably happens), the search for the right solution begins; in turn, this search adds an unnecessary layer of suffering to what would otherwise be just the pain of motherhood. First we find that motherhood is far more difficult than we thought it would be, then we observe (incorrectly) that every other mother seems to be sailing along just fine, and finally we conclude (at great cost to our self-esteem) that we are doing something wrong. The sense that what we’re doing isn’t the right thing to do, or that what we’re feeling isn’t the right way to feel, leaves us feeling inadequate, or worse. Meanwhile, we’re expending precious energy attempting to pinpoint what it is we should be doing differently to make our babies fit the mold and adhere to expectations of development or internal visions of how things should be.

  Without the extra layers of suffering caused by unmet expectations, our misguided attempts to deny or suppress our feelings, and our self-critical interpretative frames, we would simply feel the pain. Of sleep deprivation. Of missing our old lives. Of not having enough time for ourselves. These things are all painful, but pain is far more tolerable than suffering.

  I’m not arguing that the most emotionally sophisticated among us feel only pain and bypass suffering all the time. But we would all do well to ask ourselves, periodically, Are there layers of pain and suffering that could be peeled apart? Might I be able to find some relief if I remove the judgment from what I’m feeling, and just notice the feeling itself? To return to the concept of full-catastrophe living, the suffering comes when we resist, fear, or deny that the full catastrophe exists—when we favor the good and the beautiful over the bad and the ugly, as if we might somehow, if we just try hard enough, be able to experience the former without the latter.

  And so we see the damaging effects of unmet expectations manifest in mothers racking their brains to figure out what they are doing wrong, what they have done to deserve this, and how they could possibly have found themselves in this situation that is so far off the mark from what they expected. When things do not go as planned, we experience not only the pure pain of the situation—a hard time breastfeeding, a colicky baby, marital tensions—but also the suffering arising from unfulfilled expectations. We attach judgment to our babies, ourselves, our husbands. “I have a difficult baby and so-and-so has an easy baby.” “I don’t have the patience for this. Maybe I’m just not cut out for motherhood.” “If my husband weren’t so self-absorbed, motherhood wouldn’t be so hard on me.” I once had a conversation with a colleague whose son was about a year and a half old at the time and was sleeping poorly. She was at her wit’s end about his sleep problems (and her own, by proxy). She noted that, ironically, in the very early weeks and months, her son was sleeping far more poorly, but she and her husband were coping better. Now that he was over a year old and showing some less-than-stellar sleep habits, they found themselves far more distressed. Why? Because they expected him to be sleepless when he was brand-new. Now they expected him to sleep more, so when he didn’t, they wondered and they worried and they blamed and they suffered.

  What if our expectations could be more realistic, or at least less rooted in value judgments of “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong”? Or, better yet (but perhaps next to impossible), what if we could enter motherhood unattached to expectations? What if we could completely embrace any scenario that comes to pass?

  We can work on the realistic expectations part by cultivating a more honest, open dialogue in our communities about the emotional hardships of motherhood. Here we are making a bit of progress. The resisting of expectations altogether is a more individual endeavor, an internal one that requires considerable psychological effort. For most of us, this won’t come easily or naturally. But when it happens, it is a beautiful thing. I have witnessed again and again that when struggling new mothers let go of the expectation that they should be enjoying their new babies constantly/better able to console their fussy babies/more grateful for being able to stay home with their babies/missing their babies more than they actually do when they go back to work, they also let go of a great deal of suffering. Sometimes this is only a momentary letting go, and sometimes it is a pivotal moment of insight that forever lessens the emotional burden they carry. Always, it comes in part from realizing that among other mothers, things are not what they seem. Other mothers do not succeed 100 percent of the time at soothing their fussy babies. Other mothers, despite the smiles on their faces, are not free of the occasional thought that a life without children sounds much more appealing. Other mothers, despite how serene they appear in the grocery store when their toddlers are having a tantrum, scream at their children and pour themselves a glass of wine when it’s only three p.m.

  I remember that during my older son’s toddler years, the foulest moods I had ever experienced in my entire life came when he refused to take a nap. I would try for hours to shepherd him toward sleep with books, singing, back scratching, butt patting, head rubbing, rocking, and drives in the car, and I would emerge defeated, as angry as I can ever recall feeling, because he was still awake. I remember the day I recognized how toxic this scenario was and vowed I would never again have an emotional investment in whether he napped or not. I was liberated that day.

  What was the problem before that? What had taken me so long to realize that this daily struggle was a choice I was making, and that I had other options? I expected him to sleep.* Toddlers take naps—everybody knows that! And, of course, I had my own “selfish” reasons for wanting him to take a nap; his naps meant precious freedom for me, and they meant a smoother afternoon and evening because he was less likely to be cranky. The words in my head were, Why the f*&# won’t this child sleep? and they played over and over in the sea of anger and self-pity that was my inner experience. My expectations, my convictions about what a toddler was supposed to do (take a nap, even if it required a little coaxing), created a context in which I was blind to the many other options available to me. For example, I could’ve stopped trying to get him to take a nap at all. I could’ve set a timer for thirty minutes and promised myself I’d only try for that long. I could’ve instituted a daily “quiet time” ritual instead, with Noah in his room but not asleep, during which time I could’ve plopped down on the couch with a cup of tea and picked up Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living and said to myself, “Yep, here I am, right smack in the middle of the full catastrophe.”

  4

  Mom, Interrupted

  We are all struggling, with more or less grace, to hold on to the tiger tail of children’s, husband’s, parents’, and siblings’ lives while at the same time saving a little core of self in our own, just enough to live by.

  —Louise Erdrich, Writings from a Birth Year

  When I was pregnant with my first child, I took a road trip to Montreal with a group of close friends. The scen
ario was such a positive one. I was on vacation, in great company, I had a baby in my belly, and we were headed off on a fun weekend excursion to a city I love. And so it caught me by surprise when I had zero patience for the traffic jam we encountered on the way. With good humor but also genuinely riled by the impasse, I began pounding the steering wheel, shouting, “COME ON, PEOPLE! We’ve got places to go!!”

  My friends giggled about my restless energy and agitation, something they’d never seen in me before. At the time, I was inclined to attribute it to pregnancy hormones. Looking back, I see this as the beginning of a whole new way of relating to time. I have been in a hurry ever since I became a mother.

  On a recent visit, my client Julia talked about her struggle with time. “I’m constantly playing catch-up, never able to savor the moment,” she said. She imagined that if she could just get enough of a break from holding and feeding her baby, she could finally cross off some of the items on her lengthy to-do list—a constant preoccupation—and enjoy the delights of parenting. Julia told me that when she’d complained to an older friend about this issue, her friend had responded, “Enjoy this time. He won’t always want you to cuddle him constantly.” Of course, this friend is right: there will come a day when Julia’s baby isn’t a baby and will not wish to be held or cuddled by her. But this friend’s well-intentioned advice also failed to acknowledge Julia’s reality: the hard work of caring for her son was so draining and monotonous that she found herself unable to enjoy the sweet moments as much as she would have liked. Instead, she often found herself fast-forwarding to the next hour, the next day, the next month, when she might have that break she needed.

  Julia wanted more than anything to be able to savor her abundant physical contact with her son. Like so many other new mothers I’ve seen in therapy, she described what felt to her like a constant struggle to maintain focus on the present moment, to see and fully experience the beauty and wonder of her children. But she was also worn from the struggle, and feeling defeated by the stubborn urge to be somewhere else, do something else, feel something else besides what she currently felt. Even as she hurried through her days, she berated herself for letting moments with her infant pass by unsavored.

  For many—perhaps even all—new mothers, there is a desire to be more present with our children, coupled with what feels like a total inability to fully embrace the moment. The work of caring for a child is so all-consuming that we often struggle to stay present. That’s true even when we are having a good time with our children, let alone the times when they are cranky, whiny, oppositional, or boring. Which can be often.

  Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t

  The inability to focus on the present isn’t limited to new moms. Most people are so busy anticipating what will come next, whether it is the next millisecond or the next day or the next year, that they fail to notice what is right in front of them. In his bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert described this phenomenon as “nexting.” Gilbert proposes that this is a uniquely human propensity, and that while in the past it served us very well in terms of survival (we needed to anticipate whether a bear was about to charge us if we stood a shot at getting out of its way), today it may serve as an impediment to authentic, sustained happiness. Why? Because anticipating the future obscures our experience of the present moment. Although some happiness comes from envisioning good things in the future (many people say that planning and anticipating a vacation is as fun as the vacation itself), technically happiness can be actively experienced only right now—not tomorrow, or when our daily chores are done, or when our children are just a little older and more independent, or when we get that new job or new house, or when we retire.

  According to Gilbert’s research, people spend nearly half (47 percent) of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are currently doing or what is happening around them at the time.1 “A human mind is a wandering mind,” write Gilbert and his Harvard research partner Matthew Killingsworth, “and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

  In their study, Gilbert and Killingsworth used the research methodology I mentioned in chapter 2, known as “experience sampling,” to measure participants’ attentiveness and its correlation to their happiness. More than two thousand participants were prompted with an iPhone app at random intervals to record what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how they were feeling.2 The results show that when the mind is focused on what has already happened, what will happen in the future, or what may never happen at all, happiness is lower. While it may be tempting to conclude that being discontent sends the mind wandering, thanks to time-lag statistical analyses, the researchers could pinpoint mind-wandering as the cause, rather than a consequence, of unhappiness. “This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present,” the researchers state, and in turn, “mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of [un]happiness.”

  Interestingly, the activity during which the mind wanders the least is sex. Killingsworth and Gilbert found that people are the happiest while exercising, engaging in conversation, and making love. These activities seem to harness the most focused attention and, in turn, generate the greatest sense of well-being. The implications of these findings for couples are quite compelling. Both common sense and research tell us that talking and being sexually intimate are important ways to nurture our relationships; couples with higher frequency of sex, better emotional communication, and better communication in general are more satisfied. What Killingsworth and Gilbert’s findings suggest is that the same activities that fuel our relationship satisfaction also involve the greatest focus on the present moment, which, in turn, fuels our happiness as individuals.

  The trouble is that when we are parenting babies and small children, we are not only less likely to make time for exercise, sex, and conversation, but also may be more caught up than ever in “nexting.” As the minutes and hours tick by, we wonder when we will be able to put the baby down and get that report filed for work, when the next chance will arrive to tackle the pile of overdue bills, or when our partners are going to get home from work to lighten our load just a little. And as we drift away from what’s happening in front of us, or drift off to sleep at night, we’re often contemplating big questions about the future. We wonder when our baby will finally learn to sleep through the night, when or whether we should get pregnant again, and when we will be able to take our eyes off our danger-seeking toddler for more than two seconds at a time.

  The cruel irony is that this difficulty staying present occurs right when we would benefit most from the stress-reducing effects of mindfulness. The challenges and uncertainties of early parenthood, by their very nature, position us to do a whole lot of nexting. But nexting is the opposite of mindfulness—the ability to notice and accept, without judgment, all of what the current moment involves. And the practice of mindfulness has been shown by an abundance of research studies to ameliorate stress and the symptoms of anxiety and depression,3 all of which are increased in the transition to parenthood.

  For a long time, I was too ashamed to tell anyone how much I imagined fast-forwarding time when I was home with my new baby. I often counted the hours until his next nap, or until I could put him to bed and draw myself a bath and call a friend. If there were pediatrician appointments or errands to run, I was glad, because it meant there were things to anticipate, outings for which I needed to prepare us both, drives in the car that would help the hours go by a little faster. Even though I loved my baby boy and truly delighted in him, I also found some days home alone with him interminable. Taking care of him often meant that I was exhausted, bored, or both. Similarly, with my second child, who was an extremely active toddler, the thought of the vast expanse of a day at home with him was not usually a pleasant one. I left the house more than I actually needed to, making extra trips to the g
rocery store because I couldn’t stand one more minute of trailing behind him and monitoring his every move while he explored the sloping, rocky terrain of our yard. I’d like to let him explore out here to his heart’s delight, but I’m too bored, I’d think.

  Hanging out constantly with babies and small children is pure pleasure for only the rarest of us. Sometimes we are sad and lonely, because we long for more adult contact or the easier life we once had. Sometimes we are angry, because our children do not listen to us, and sometimes we are bored. What we don’t always realize when we’re in the midst of these states is that none of them will last. We assume we are in some kind of permanent new reality. Following a toddler around the yard, it can feel as if this is what life has become. Feeling lonely for adult company while playing with a baby, we might think, My social life is over.

  Earlier, I mentioned the concept of impermanence. This fundamental truth, that nothing lasts, is so uncomfortable that we tend to look away from it, preferring instead to believe that we can count on things to stay the same. To some degree this denial is adaptive, for we might otherwise live in a state of relentless fretting about when we will lose each of the people and things that are so important to us. But we are so adept at denying the fact of impermanence that we also fail to reap its benefits. I remember, during the early months of my first son’s life when the fog of sleep deprivation was so dense, believing with real conviction that I would never get sufficient rest again. Somehow I could not grasp that the state in which I was functioning was an impermanent one, and that at some point, this little person would learn to sleep all night long.