As a girl, Ivy had been very close to her mother. Though her father was often away from home, either for work or to care for his elderly parents in a town two hours away, he was a gentle soul who was generous with affection for both his daughter and his wife. Ivy recalls many evenings alone with her mother, characterized by abundant conversation and shared experiences. Together they prepared and cleaned up after dinner, did crafts, and picked out seeds from gardening catalogs, dreaming of summer when her father would be home more often and the three of them would spend time in the garden. An only child, Ivy felt treasured and supported and understood. When Ivy’s best friend was killed in a car accident at age twelve, Ivy’s father took time off work to be home with her. She remembers that her parents encouraged her to stay home from school for a week, and during that time all three of them passed the hours together. Her father didn’t know what to say, but his decision to stay home with her spoke volumes and soothed Ivy more than any words could have.
Sam’s childhood memories carried a different tone, one of isolation and rejection and fear. His mother was volatile, moving between episodes of quiet depression and periods of rage. Though her rage was typically directed at Sam’s father, occasionally she blew up at Sam and his brothers. On any given day, Sam might encounter a withdrawn, emotionally distant mother or an aggressive, threatening mother. He learned early on that his best strategy was to keep his distance. He spent most of his after-school hours outside with his brothers, steering clear of the house and the ugly fights that erupted regularly between his parents. After dinner each night, the three siblings beat a hasty retreat to their bedrooms. In one another, they sometimes found comfort and companionship, but as they grew older, they spent more time apart, each coping separately with the fragility of their parents’ marriage and the constant threat of their mother’s rage. She seemed to single out Sam, especially, accusing him of possessing the same unsavory traits as his father. Sam compensated by excelling in school, but no matter how many straight-A report cards or academic awards he brought home, his mother’s approval and admiration remained elusive.
Sam’s gentle, quiet way and his dedicated work ethic were qualities that reminded Ivy of her father. In Ivy, Sam found the kind of affirmation he never got from his mother; Ivy freely expressed affection, respect, and admiration for him, and he felt valued in a way he never had before. In addition, all those years spent trying to read his mother’s face to determine her mood amounted to an attentiveness in Sam that Ivy appreciated; he was adept at sensing her feelings, and seemed eager to please her. They fit well together, and the early years of their marriage were very happy ones.
When their twins were born, things began to change. Part of the problem was that Ivy felt the strain far more than Sam, and in that respect they were like just about every other heterosexual couple in the throes of early parenthood. But their unique histories also played a role in the unfolding drama of their marital unhappiness. Sam’s decision not to take time off work when the babies were born stood in stark contrast to her father’s choice to be near Ivy during a previous time of need, and set in motion a train of thought in Ivy that perhaps Sam was not as reliable or available as she had assumed. Ivy’s irritable mood, once rare but now the norm, thanks to the stress of mothering three small children, signaled to Sam that she—just like his mother—might blow at any time. Her requests that Sam do more to help with the kids and around the house stirred up in him the familiar feeling of never being good enough.
Before they had children, none of these wires had been tripped in their marriage. They had been relatively lucky in terms of encountering any major stressors together. Ivy brought a fundamental attachment security to the relationship that Sam was able to “borrow,” but once they were parents, that changed. Ivy felt far less secure in this new phase of her life, overwhelmed and lacking both the quality and quantity of support she needed from Sam. The anger she directed at him was her way of protesting this new state of affairs, but in Sam, it set off his old familiar way of coping by withdrawing and retreating. His withdrawal left Ivy feeling even more alone and more unsure that he could, and would, be there for her when she most needed him. What began as an unfamiliar dirt road for Ivy eventually became a well-worn path, though still not the paved superhighway that transports Sam so efficiently to a place of panic and fear. Both endured the daily pain of the perception that the other was slipping away.
Sam and Ivy’s story offers a powerful example of the ways in which times of uncertainty and change can activate primitive attachment needs. The transition to parenthood, and even the welcoming of another (second, or third) child into an existing family system, is without question one of the greatest periods of change and disruption. Other scholars have pointed out that a couple adjusting to the birth of a child is essentially undergoing a test of their capacity to provide a secure base for each other under stressful circumstances, and for perhaps the first time, those stressful circumstances are not external or fleeting. They are the “new normal,” and they directly threaten attachment security.4 The parents of a newborn are faced with the task not just of developing an attachment bond with their new child, but of doing so while preserving the existing attachment bond between themselves. In the most basic way, they are moving from a period of focusing on each other to focusing together on someone else. While this is a perfectly natural phase in the developmental trajectory of a marriage, natural is not the equivalent of easy. A felt sense of attachment security within the couple will position them to navigate this shift more easily, but it will not exempt them from the innate responses in our brains and bodies that say, Am I still safe here with you? Do you still have my back?
What is so helpful about this attachment view of a couple’s evolution from non-parents to parents is that it shines the light on the fundamental, perfectly reasonable, and ultimately essential needs that are so difficult to fulfill during this phase. Couples navigating the transition to parenthood often feel crazy and irrational when they are, in fact, following the exquisite order of the human condition. They are reacting to a decrease in their felt security, saying in one way or another, “This is not okay.”
Despite this common denominator of decreased security, these attachment concerns are usually experienced differently by mothers and fathers. Generally, a new mother is primarily concerned with getting adequate support in caring for the baby, and a new father is primarily concerned—though perhaps less consciously—with the fear that he has been usurped by the baby.* Indeed, the feeling new fathers often have in relation to their wives is one of being irrelevant, or at least less relevant than they used to be, and this is typically a very painful feeling to bear. The irony is that though their wives appear to be consumed with the baby, they are actually more, not less, in need of the attentive support of their husbands. At the end of the day, both partners are asking, “Where did you go?” They are both rightfully concerned with preserving the bond on which their well-being rests. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the tactics they employ—the particular ways they say, “This is not okay”—often do the opposite of restoring security. In marriage, the things we say and do can be corrosive to the bond we seek to preserve, and the things we don’t say and don’t do can be erosive.
In my therapy with couples, something remarkable happens when partners begin to see the attachment longings behind their dreadful conflicts. The behaviors that make it hard to tune into each other, like critical and angry words or stonewalling, fall away. I don’t teach constructive communication skills or admonish couples not to engage in those behaviors (though I do try to nip them in the bud, of course, when they occur in the room with me), because actually they tend to disappear when the real feelings find a voice. The real feelings almost always elicit greater compassion. At a minimum, they invite the partner to lean in and listen. When spouses speak words like “I’m so afraid you’ve lost interest in me” or “I’m feeling so overwhelmed and alone, and I can’t seem to trust that you’re reall
y there for me,” there is a vulnerability and a tenderness that emerges in the space between them. The room gets quieter, the signal becomes clearer, and, consequently, the response changes. As Sam began to express his feeling of irrelevance, and his sadness about feeling disconnected from Ivy, Ivy was far less irritated and critical about his desire to make love to her. The voice in her head when he moved closer to her in bed and began to kiss her had changed from I can’t believe he expects me to want sex when I’m so exhausted to He knows I’m tired, and he’s tired, too. He’s reaching out to me. He just wants to restore some of the connection between us. With that different internal narrative, there is less frustration about their being on such different pages, and more room for her to discern and directly voice her own needs. She could say to him, “I get that sex appeals to you right now as a way for us to feel connected. I want connection, too, but physically I just need a little space, and sleep is my top priority right now. I need to listen to my body, and I need you to trust that taking care of myself will help us connect in the long run.” When the phone rings at night during Sam’s time at home with the kids, he picks it up saying, “Hi, honey, we are missing you, too.” When she mentions there is laundry in the dryer, he registers her need for support rather than feeling micromanaged. He says, “I might not get the laundry folded tonight, Ivy, but I know it’s there and I don’t want you to feel alone with all the mounting housework. We’ll tackle it together this weekend.”
In exchanges like these about the ordinary stuff of domestic family life, couples are quite often communicating about that million-dollar question: Are you there for me? When they’re trudging through the thick and tall and thorny weeds, it can be so hard to hear the question in the first place, let alone extend a metaphorical hand and say, “Yes. I am right here.”
The Hardest Job on Earth
While the paradigm of attachment is tremendously helpful for understanding marital tension, I don’t want to insinuate that everything about the tension couples experience during the transition to parenthood can be traced back to fundamental attachment concerns. There is at least one other explanation, and it is this:
Parenting is really hard.
I know, this may win the prize for Most Obvious Statement Ever, but it is critically important to acknowledge this fact. It is a big piece of the puzzle of why the transition to parenthood is so emotionally complicated for us as women. By this I mean that not only does parenthood bring so many losses and changes to the lives we once knew, but the stuff of parenting can also be crazy-making. And the sheer difficulty of it helps explain why conflict and animosity become more abundant in our marriages once we become parents.
Think about it: getting along well with our spouses can be challenging enough when life is humming along smoothly. Engaged in something fairly easy, like, say, a stroll through the neighborhood after dinner or washing the dishes together, we have pretty decent chances of having fond feelings toward our partner. But even then, we might feel irritable and nitpicky and spend the whole walk bickering just because that’s par for the course in a shared life together. Take things up a few notches to more difficult terrain—say, trying to figure out how to get a child to sleep through the night or trying to stretch a limited income or trying to agree on where and with whose family to spend the holidays—and opportunities for tension abound. Physically demanding experiences, like carrying a baby in the womb or bouncing a colicky baby for six hours on an exercise ball or carrying a heavy toddler around while trying to cook dinner, are ripe with such opportunities, too.
I remember that when Ari and I were first getting accustomed to each other as companions on strenuous bike rides and cross-country-skiing excursions as a young and childless couple, it took very little to annoy me during an outdoor adventure. I’d be huffing and puffing behind him on an uphill climb and he’d look back, cheerful and breathing freely, and say, “Almost to the top!” and I would want to kill him. I was in physically difficult territory, and though it was utterly illogical, I perceived that to be his fault, and I didn’t even want him to look at me, let alone offer me support and encouragement. Because I was engaged in something so challenging, I was poised to interpret his every move in a negative way, and I felt a chasm between us. Invariably, the chasm would close once I caught my breath and the path was easier again; then I was all rosy and full of gratitude for the excellent workout and the beauty of our surroundings, brought to me by the same jerk responsible for my brush with death ten minutes earlier when I was about to collapse on the trail.
Parenting is one of the most difficult challenges we will face in our lives. It is way, way harder than pedaling a bike up a steep hill. We never know when the terrain will level out, and when it does, it doesn’t stay level for long. Sometimes we’ve only just caught our breath and then we must embark again, without choice, on the next climb of indeterminate length. Sometimes, there isn’t a long enough rest period for the fond feelings toward our coparent to return, or for us to take in the sweeping vista. Instead we are mired in negative feelings, with righteousness and confusion and helplessness and worries and exhaustion obscuring our view of the bigger picture.
Some of the greatest tensions in my marriage have arisen around the difficult or “problem” behavior of our children. We do not always agree about how to address such behavior, often because we also do not always agree about the origins and function of the behavior. For instance, Ari once said to me, “Quinn is not sensitive to consequences, so we have to make the consequences even more severe.” I disagreed completely. I see our son as being sometimes quite devastated by a negative consequence, even one of small magnitude. Why, then, does he still do the “bad thing” that we warned would have a negative consequence? My conceptualization is that the temptation is too great. He is working hard to have greater impulse control, and this comes more easily for some children than for others. Because it came easily to our first child, Ari and I never had the opportunity to be at odds with each other about this matter. But with Quinn, we find ourselves continually on different pages about what may be going on with him and how to handle it.
There is no question that Quinn’s emotional reactivity is a challenge for our family. He has emotion regulation problems. This isn’t pathological or indicative of a clinical diagnosis in his future; all toddlers have emotion regulation problems. Nobody is born with the inherent capacity to regulate his or her emotions. Rather, it is a skill we develop during early childhood. However, it is also a skill that develops more easily for some children than for others because of inherent differences in temperament. Quinn came into the world wired to feel things intensely, and so our parental job of teaching and modeling emotion regulation skills for him is a challenging one. He is highly reactive, and when he reacts—when he feels an emotion, often anger or frustration or disappointment from being thwarted or given what he considers to be bad news—he does so with great gusto. He stomps, he shouts, he flings his body around, he may throw things. It is very unpleasant for everyone, and we want him to knock it off, of course. But it is exceedingly difficult for him not to do it. So when we tell him, “Quinn, if there is any more shouting or kicking and screaming about the game you are trying to play with Noah, then we will have to stop the game,” he gets it, and he wants very much to keep playing the game. But seconds later, when he perceives some injustice in the way Noah is engaging with him, he is shouting and veins are popping out of his neck and he is jumping up and down in fury. He can’t help it. He needs to learn how, but he’s not there yet, and in my mind, the solution is not to increase the negative consequences. The solution is to stay close, to help him identify his feelings, to tell him for the seven hundredth time that it is okay to feel angry but not okay to shout and kick, to offer him some ideas for how he could resolve this problem with respectfully spoken words. And take a deep breath ourselves, and trust that maybe the seven hundred and first time, it will stick.
It would be comfortable for me to rest in that conclusion, having
gotten there by means of my own theory about my child’s behavior and my own values about parenting. The thing is, my opinion isn’t the only one in the conversation, and it is not the only one that matters. So there’s no satisfying part where I say, leaning back in my chair, resting my head in my outstretched arms, “Yup. That’s what’s going on with Quinn, and that’s how we need to deal with it.” There is only ongoing discussion and tension, each of us believing our own view is right but trying our best to be open to the other’s.
As these struggles illustrate, the hard work of raising children provides couples with countless points of contention. Way back in 1969, the eminent family therapist Jay Haley wrote in his fabulously tongue-in-cheek book chapter “How to Have an Awful Marriage”: “There is a risk, of course, that a child might improve the marriage. However, the odds are that the birth of a child provides a symphony of new opportunities for the couple to make difficulty with each other.” I shared my story of our struggle to agree on the right approach to dealing with Quinn’s emotional outbursts only because it was the first issue that sprang to mind; of course, I could’ve chosen one of the hundreds of other ways Ari and I have disagreed in our approaches to parenting. It’s easier to navigate these disagreements now that our kids are a bit older and we’re not perpetually sleep-deprived or feeling adrift because of the fundamental attachment concerns all couples face when they first become parents. But during the upheaval of early parenthood, disagreements about anything from sleep training to what was causing rashes or fussiness could lead us into more dangerous territory. In fact, for many couples, these kinds of disagreements can lead to real despair.
To Have and to Hold Page 18