To Have and to Hold

by Molly Millwood, PhD

  My client Maria tends toward what has been labeled “attachment parenting.” Though not particularly extreme about it, she believes her baby daughter is better off in her arms or in an Ergo on her back than alone in her crib or stroller. She is not comfortable with most parenting strategies that are designed to teach self-soothing (such as the “cry it out” method). She trusts her baby to let her know when she is ready to stop nursing rather than imposing the weaning process at a time proscribed by books and experts. Maria’s husband, on the other hand, does not have the same leanings. He is vocal about his disapproval of the fact that their sixteen-month-old daughter has never slept in her own room, and makes clear to Maria that he thinks breastfeeding should have stopped some time ago. He wants Maria to be more available to him sexually, and he wants to be able to take their daughter on long excursions instead of short outings that end in a rush home to Maria so the baby can nurse.

  Maria’s choices to continue breastfeeding and bed-sharing are occurring in the context of her husband’s disapproval. Though his consent is not actually required in any true sense5—as the primary caregiver, she can do what she wants with her baby—in the absence of his consent and support she must contend with much that is unpleasant, both internally and within the marriage. Internally, she is becoming far less confident about her natural inclinations as a mother because she is being criticized for them by her partner. She wonders if she ought to be more flexible in terms of allowing the baby to take a bottle of formula every now and then, or if she may be fostering unhealthy sleeping habits in the baby by allowing her to sleep beside her and nurse throughout the night. In the space between her and her husband, tensions are thick. They argue and yell. He resents her for discounting his concerns and ignoring his wishes about how to parent their daughter. She resents him for his failure to grasp exactly how taxed she is from caring for their baby around the clock, and feels that if he wants his preferences about parenting to prevail, then he should be the one staying home with her. He thinks she would have more energy for other things if she just put the baby down sometimes instead of attending immediately to her every need. It’s a tangled web of accusations and resentments.

  Unfortunately, faced with all of what’s so damned hard about parenting, we aren’t likely to smile in our partner’s general direction and say, “This is really hard, isn’t it, darling?” We are much more likely to scowl, or use the hardship as license to be irritable with each other, or even overtly blame each other for how hard it is. We are more likely to be defensive about our choices when we are already feeling unsure, and when parenting is new, we are unsure almost all the time. Whatever internal resources we might ordinarily have available to use for fending off pointless, superficial fights and generating creative solutions to daily problems vanished after the first few weeks of sleep deprivation. We simply aren’t our best selves during this phase. After all, we often don’t feel like ourselves, either. Babies have a way of steering life into the weeds.

  9

  Live-In Buddhas

  Every person must choose how much truth [s]he can stand.

  —Irvin Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

  As I began to sing to a four-year-old Quinn at bedtime one night, he said, “Mommy, do you know the one thing that would really help me to fall asleep? If you lie down with me for ten minutes.” Though my habit was to say no (with justifications in my head like I’m depleted, the dinner dishes are still in the sink, I want him to be able to soothe himself and be his own guide on the journey into sleep), this time I said yes. Feeling his warm hand in mine, his tiny arm across my belly, and his twitching as he fell asleep, I knew I had made the right choice. I experienced his falling asleep nestled up against me as a gift. These moments of quiet connection with my children are precious. I crave them so much, and yet I realize I am sometimes the one who prevents them from happening. If I say yes, slow down, and lean in, they are there for the taking.

  This was a nice moment of enlightenment, until the shadow of guilt crept over it. You turn away from your children so often, said the voice of guilt. You say they’re noisy and in constant motion and you just want them to hold still so you can savor them, but when they hold still and call your name, you don’t always answer.

  As I lay there reflecting on Quinn’s customary ways of being and the reasons he wears me out so much—he is a contrarian, he is insistent and fervent, he is emotionally reactive, he is stubborn, the wheels of his mind are turning a thousand miles a minute—I thought, At least he has his emotional freedom. I am truly so glad for this, because the freedom to have and express my emotions was not a defining feature of my childhood. Or adolescence. Or early adulthood. This, too, was a nice moment of enlightenment, and then, somehow, I felt a little down. Guilt had slipped in again, quietly and through the back door, so I didn’t even notice at first. You’re limiting his emotional freedom when you tell him to quiet down and pull himself together. Maybe you’re envious.

  In just this one scenario, I was faced with one truth after another after another. They were like waves crashing over me, and just as I began to catch my breath, another one would come. It was a little overwhelming.

  In their book Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn liken children to little Buddhas who live with us, offering the possibility of great wisdom if only we can get in touch with what they are teaching us. The Kabat-Zinns and others have noted that our children act as mirrors, forcing us to see ourselves more fully and realistically than we ever have before and to discover facets of self, both pleasant and unpleasant, not previously acknowledged. Psychologist Harriet Lerner said it well when she wrote that having children will “teach you that you are capable of deep compassion, and also that you are definitely not the nice, calm, competent, clear-thinking, highly evolved person you fancied yourself to be before you became a mother.”1

  My children have taught me that I am a terrible multitasker, that my tolerance for noise and stimulation is abnormally low, and that my need for order and organization is abnormally high. They have taught me that although I have a keen radar for their emotional states and a virtually bottomless reservoir of compassion for their fear and sadness, I have a lot more work to do on my ability to sit with their anger and frustration. They have taught me that I am a natural at cuddling, comforting, and reading tall piles of books, but that it does not come easily to engage in creative, imaginative play. My older son has taught me that I can be quite invalidating when he fails to persist at a task or makes disparaging remarks about himself when he finds he is not automatically good at something. When Noah throws down his pencil with a growl after realizing he has messed up his math homework, the fantasy version of me says, “I see you’re feeling quite frustrated right now about not being able to solve this problem. Sometimes I get upset when I keep making mistakes at something, too, especially when I tell myself I should already know how to do it well.” The real-life version of me says, in a tone that reveals my significant annoyance, “Oh, come on, Noah. You’ve been working at this problem for all of one minute. Stop being so impatient.” Later that same evening, I sit down at the piano to try to work out the notes for a song that has been stuck in my head. I can’t find them in the first two minutes that my fingers explore the keys, so I heave a heavy sigh of frustration, get up, and walk away.

  Our children show us what we like least about ourselves. And most of the time, this is happening beneath our awareness.

  In my therapy office, I listen as Jasmine confesses her latest perceived crime with her children. “I really lost it this time,” she says. She describes how she grabbed her toddler by the shoulders and angrily held him in her grasp, gritting her teeth, growling shaming words about his intolerable behavior. Her guilt is palpable in the room. I get it, and not just because I’m an empathic therapist. She tells me how she can hardly stand to recount this story because she never imagined herself capable of such intense fury toward her own child. I think, This is so familiar. It
’s familiar because I have heard it from so many other clients, and because I have lived it. It is the worst kind of guilt, because it is attached not only to a particular transgression we wish we had not made, but also to a picture of ourselves we wish we did not have to see. These are pictures of ourselves we do not recognize, distortions of self in which we are rendered ugly with rage or intolerance. Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn were right: there are Buddhas in the house, and the learning is hard.

  In his book The Examined Life, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells of a patient of his, whom he calls Jessica, and one of her painful realizations on the therapy couch.2 She said to him, “I always thought I was a nice person, until I had a baby.” A woman who derived much of her self-worth from exuding competence and composure, Jessica was troubled by her inability to soothe her daughter’s every cry. More than that, she was deeply troubled by feelings of rage toward her baby girl, so much so that she began to displace them onto her husband. “I thought I’d find a kind of love with my baby that I’d never known before,” she said. “A shared warmth, an understanding. And I did—but I didn’t know a tiny baby could also make me feel so angry.” Grosz relays a story that Jessica told him about one especially bad night, when the baby would not stop crying and she and her husband, Paul, disagreed about the solution. Weary of round-the-clock breastfeeding, Jessica wanted the baby to cry it out so she could learn to self-soothe. Certain their daughter was hungry, Paul wanted Jessica to feed her. Gridlock ensued. Finally feeding the baby himself with breast milk from the freezer, Paul emerged victorious; their daughter had been hungry, and fell into a deep sleep once her belly was full. As Jessica lay sleepless some time later and began to cry, Paul did not hold her close and console her as she wanted and expected. When she asked him why, he stung her with his reply: “I thought you should self-soothe.”

  In processing this awful night with her therapist, Jessica came to understand that her husband’s biting remark was a response to months of mounting tension between them, tension created in part by Jessica’s relentless blaming of Paul for the unhappiness she had felt since their daughter was born. Unable to name (let alone accept) her intense anger at her baby for disrupting her life and her comfortable, false notions of herself, Jessica searched for some other reason why she felt so ill at ease, and landed on Paul.

  I think every woman I’ve worked with in therapy would recognize something of herself in Jessica. In the trenches of early parenthood, we may find ourselves full of hostility for both our babies and our partners, and one of these is far less socially acceptable than the other. We didn’t sign up for these emotions, and experiencing them leaves us prone to self-deception; we must bury our resentment for the baby we love, and we must bury our anger at the spouse we love (and need, now more than ever). But feelings find their way to the surface, even if they are disguised. Displacement is a classic defense mechanism that resonates with all of us, whether we’re psychoanalytic thinkers or not. When it’s not safe to feel or express a feeling in its original context, we find some other context and transfer the feeling there. You can’t yell at your boss for fear you’ll get fired, so you go home and yell at your child instead. You can’t blame your helpless, tiny baby for your rage, so you rage at your husband instead.

  The real trouble is that for couples under the strain of new parenthood, displacement creates a double whammy for the relationship. On top of the often justifiable resentment new parents feel toward their partners for various reasons—they let each other down, they make demands on each other that cannot be met, they feel ignored or replaced or marginalized or taken for granted or put upon—there is all of what they cannot permit themselves to feel toward their babies. A husband thus bears the brunt of his wife’s anger and grief about the losses brought on by their baby, and a husband redirects at his wife his own discomfort, frustrations, and feelings of inadequacy in the unfamiliar terrain of fatherhood.

  The particular needs and personalities of our little Buddha children also shape our identities as parents. Sometimes they push us outside our comfort zones with positive results, allowing us to stretch and grow and willingly take on roles and identities we’d never imagined for ourselves. Other times, they illuminate our limitations; they show us who we aren’t, who we are unwilling or unable to be. My client Jasmine is the mother of two young boys. Jasmine is quite petite, and is married to a man who is six foot five. Their two children are all rough and tumble, at their happiest when rolling around on the floor, limbs entangled, risk of bodily harm to one or the other imminent. Typically, Jasmine wants nothing to do with that scene and steers clear of the physical chaos. One evening, wanting to engage with her children, she joined them on the floor. Within moments, she’d been whacked in the face and was wincing in pain. The son who accidentally injured her said, sincerely, “I’m sorry, Mommy. When is Daddy coming home?”

  Envisioning this scene while my client described it to me took no effort at all, because I know it well. I identify with her probably far more than she realizes, and she does not need to explain to me the sting of her child’s question. What rises up to a lump in her throat when her son communicates to her his preference for Daddy as a playmate is a mix of sadness, injured pride, and resignation. Daddy is tougher, stronger, and more fun. Jasmine has been displaced as her boys have grown older, and she struggles to find her footing in this new phase of motherhood. Her babies are gone, and now she has little boys instead, little boys who are increasingly capable of hurting her, increasingly difficult to pick up and carry, increasingly disinterested in her bids for connection through quiet games or Play-Doh or coloring. They want to roughhouse and torment each other and scale the walls with their little monkey-boy limbs. And they admire their father. “As they should,” says Jasmine, with the peculiar smile-frown I’ve come to recognize in her when she’s attempting to keep unwanted feelings at bay. She is genuinely happy to witness the deepening bond between her husband and each of their sons. And she also envies him his capacity to relate to their children in a way she cannot. His connection with their boys is only just blossoming, while hers feels worn out and weaker than it once was. I’m not surprised when the rest of the therapy hour is spent discussing a list of grievances about her husband’s habits and her lack of sexual interest in him.

  When my own sons were babies, it never occurred to me that I would one day wonder what my place was in their lives. Maybe I knew that once they became teenagers, and went off to college, and had families of their own, I would be far less central in their lives. But that seemed like such a far-off, abstract concept. During their infancy and well into toddlerhood, we seemed to exist in an impermeable bubble of mother-child unity, one in which there was no question whose companionship they preferred. When Noah was a toddler, he said to me one summer evening as we sat by the fire pit at the top of our property, “Mommy? I just love to lay my head back on your chest and look at the view.” We were the center of each other’s universes, and this seemed the natural, immutable state of affairs. The same was true of Quinn’s first few years of life. I had no idea how soon my connection to them would change, or how much I would struggle to find ways of feeling close to them once they didn’t need me—or prefer me—as much.

  It’s not lost on me that the sense of disenfranchisement I’m describing, and the search for ways to connect with my children, are experiences much like what my husband had when I was in that bubble with our babies. He could sometimes get inside the bubble, too, of course, and he had countless moments of intimate connection with our sons when they were little. But I know he felt he was on the margins early on, just like so many other new fathers do. He was brave and good about it, saying with sincerity what a beautiful thing it was for him to witness the affection and connection between me and our babies. In a similar way, one might say I’m being brave and good about the changing tides in our family dynamic; our two not-so-little boys very clearly adore their time with their dad in a way they once did not, and I can say with sincerity it is a beautifu
l thing to behold. I also cannot deny that it is fabulously liberating to no longer be the go-to parent for all needs and wants. It used to be that I would utter the words, “Ask Daddy! He’s right there!” about fifty times a day in response to questions like, “Can I have a snack? Will you help me with this? Will you play with me?” Daddy sometimes seemed to be the invisible man, and the children needed constant reminding that they had two capable, available parents.

  It also goes without saying that it’s because these are boy children that they gravitate so much toward their father now. They identify with him, and they crave the highly physical, bordering-on-violent playtime with him* that they know I don’t offer. Like Jasmine acknowledged, this is as it should be. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt sometimes. More than once in the past couple of years, I’ve spent the weekend or the better part of a week with my boys while their dad was away, and I’ve had the unsavory taste of jealousy in my mouth when he returns home and they seem to come to life. Were they bored the whole time he was away? Are things that much more exciting when Dad is around? Didn’t we have a good time? Somewhere inside me a voice offers, Their faces would probably light up that way if you came home from a weekend away, too. But I’m not convinced. I feel a difficult truth in my gut, which is that he’s a lot better at showing them a good time these days than I am.