To Have and to Hold

by Molly Millwood, PhD

  Ari and I exchanged a knowing look in response to our friends’ story, because a week or so before, the very same dynamic had cropped up when he and I were in the kitchen having our Friday Night Date Night cocktail. This is a tradition* we had recently instituted at the time, when Quinn was about three years old—old enough to start watching kids’ movies with his big brother in the basement while we did our own thing upstairs. No babysitter required. Kid food for the kids, delivered to them downstairs, and a simple but very much adult meal for us upstairs. On this particular Friday night, early on in the tradition, lovely conversation was flowing between Ari and me, and the kids were contentedly watching their movie in the basement.* Suddenly the words falling out of my mouth were, “I feel guilty.” The pure loveliness of this moment—drinking a delicious adult beverage, engaging in uninterrupted conversation with my husband, hearing the giggles of my boys from downstairs as they watched a funny movie—was suddenly tainted by the feeling of guilt. I felt it wasn’t right to be occupying a separate space from the boys, having our own kind of enjoyable time apart from them. We should all be together instead. We should be watching their funny movie with them, or maybe playing a board game. Ari looked at me, baffled, and said, “Are you kidding? We have earned this. We’ve put in some hard years with these kids. Things are easier now. We deserve these moments. They’re happy right now, we’re happy, everybody’s happy!” Right. All that sounded true enough. But in my bones I still felt guilty.

  As I’ve already made abundantly clear, I’m on the high end of the Maternal Guilt scale. I examine the phenomenon of my persistent guilt nearly every day, often quite carefully and extensively. I do not try to sweep it under the rug. I hold it up to the light and turn it over and around, again and again, studying it from every angle, trying to understand its essential nature. I haven’t yet figured out if it is largely that unfounded kind of guilt I defined earlier; on good days, I’m inclined to think so, and I try to ignore it. But ultimately, even with all this exploring and confronting of my guilt, I remain without answers. And it retains some of its power to undermine, not always, but still more often than I’d like, the good times I’m having as a mother, a wife, a woman.

  One recent morning, Quinn and I were cuddling on the couch as I sipped the last bit of coffee from my cup. I had one hand on his sleepy head, gently running my fingers through his hair, while the other hand ran a pencil across the page, putting a few more words in my journal before the busy phase of the morning began. Most mornings, some version of this scene plays out; it seems Quinn has learned to let me finish my ritual, because he isn’t being a chatterbox or asking immediately for breakfast. I’d like to say the scene is all ease and peaceful coexistence, but the reality is that I am working hard, internally, to fight off guilt. What’s it like for him to come downstairs and find me always writing, absorbed in a task and not yet ready to give him my full attention? Does he feel like my journal is more important than him? Should I be getting up earlier so I’m done with my solitary morning ritual by the time he wakes up? On this particular morning, I asked him, “Do you know why you always find me sitting here alone early in the morning, with my notebook? You know that I am trying to take good care of myself so that I can be a good mom to you, right?” He replied, “You’re already the best any mama could ever be.”

  It wasn’t just the words that got me. Something about his tone—the plain and simple quality of his declaration, as if it were indisputable fact—pierced through my ever-present guilt, at least for a moment. That is his subjective truth. He sees no room for improvement. The innocence of his perception somehow makes it more accurate than mine, instead of the other way around. I wasn’t thinking, Oh, how sweet and naive you are. If only you knew all the ways I am failing you. One day you will. I was thinking something more along the lines of, If he thinks so, maybe it’s true. Much like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, maybe mothering adequacy is in the eye of the mothered. I think of a bumper sticker I’ve seen that says, “I wish I was the person my dog thinks I am.” That morning on the couch, I didn’t wish I was the mother my son thinks I am. I was the mother my son thinks I am, at least for a moment. Maybe I can be her more often. Maybe we all can.

  Reparenting and Repair

  More often than we realize, our uneasy and guilty feelings as mothers originate at least in part from needs of our own that went unmet when we were children. I turn again to Judith Warner’s wise words in Perfect Madness: “All around me, in recent years, I’ve seen women living motherhood as an exercise in correction, trying to heal the wounds of their childhoods, and, prophylactically, to seal their children against future pain.”8 As Warner points out, it is our own unmet needs, our own fears, our own longings—and not those of our children—that sometimes influence most powerfully the choices we make as parents.

  My client Lucy recently focused much of our hour-long session on her concern that her child is not well liked at school. After she wondered aloud whether he had enough friends and whether enough of his peers had RSVP’d “yes” to his birthday party, I asked her, “How does he seem to feel about his social life at school?” The question seemed to catch her off guard. When she responded, “He’s such a happy kid, both at school and at home,” I could see the lightbulb turn on in her head. She paused and said, “I guess I should be giving that a lot more weight.” “Right,” I said. “If he is not in distress about his friendships, then should you be?”

  Lucy was a sensitive child who struggled with being excluded and teased at school. As an adult, she continues to be sensitive, understandably, about her relationships with friends and coworkers. What came into view in that moment during therapy was that Lucy’s persistent longing to feel connected and liked fuels her concerns about her son’s social acceptance.

  Sometimes the power of our unmet needs is triggered by major life decisions or family conflicts—like the mother who gave up her career to stay home with her baby and becomes depressed when her daughter postpones graduate school after becoming pregnant, or the father who grew up too poor to attend an Ivy League school and rails against his son’s wish to attend a community college. But subtler, everyday iterations of this phenomenon abound if we look closely. Our own unmet needs may be behind the choices we make about where the baby sleeps, where the seven-year-old sleeps, how long to breastfeed, whether to breastfeed, whether to work late, whom to turn to for help with childcare, or whether to ask for help at all. Warner’s point is that “much of what we do in the name of perfect motherhood is really about ‘reparenting’ ourselves. It’s about compensating for the various forms of lack or want or need or loneliness that we remember from our childhood.” I agree with her, and I agree that it can be quite problematic. We don’t need even more reasons for the stakes to feel so high in parenting, and nobody benefits when there is confusion about whose needs belong to whom. But I also think it’s only natural, and that if we bring awareness to it, we can reduce much of what’s problematic about it.

  When we are not aware that we are acting on our own unmet needs, we are parenting not the small child in front of us but the one inside us. These are, quite obviously, two different people, so the problem is that what we are giving to our actual child and what he or she needs may be out of sync. Lucy’s son, for example, was eagerly anticipating his upcoming birthday party and hadn’t even asked how many kids were coming, while Lucy was hiding in her bedroom making phone calls to try to round up more kids to attend. She wasn’t aware of what was driving her motivation to do so until we talked. But when we are aware of what motivates our actions as parents, it becomes possible to parent our actual child and our own “inner child” simultaneously. Nobody tells an expectant mother with a toddler in tow, “Uh-oh. You can’t mother two different children at the same time.” Of course she can, and she will, and many of us are quite masterful at meeting the immediate needs of many different human beings, big and small, all at once. So what’s so crazy about the idea that we can attend to some of our own unme
t needs while we also attend to the needs of our children? There is actually a powerful opportunity here, but it is one that requires being willing to look, and look deeply, at what our children’s needs and behaviors are stirring up in us.

  My client Anna, whom you met in chapter 1, experienced the tension between mothering herself and mothering her baby girl as she attempted to implement the “cry it out” sleep method. Though she bought into the strategy on an intellectual level—if you don’t reward your baby for crying out in the night by going to her immediately and cuddling or feeding her, eventually she’ll stop crying out in the night—she found that implementing it was unbearably painful. Her understanding of the behavioral principles involved in the strategy was no match for the primal pull to answer her baby’s cries. Those cries conjured, for her, memories of crying alone in her room as a little girl and wishing her parents would stop fighting long enough to hear her and go to her. Anna’s husband, Pete, was very much in favor of letting baby Gracie cry it out so they could all get a better night’s sleep. The conflict between them about how to proceed was not easy to navigate, but Anna stood her ground. She relayed to me what it felt like to go to Gracie after one grueling forty-minute attempt to let her cry it out. In the dark nursery, Anna rocked her baby girl, whispering, “I’m here, I’m here.” As she wiped the tears from Gracie’s cheeks, she let her own tears fall, and felt a release of long-held grief about how alone she had felt as a young girl. In that poignant moment, she was meeting her baby’s needs and her own, and it was her awareness of that that made all the difference. We cannot undo the past, but in doing things differently with our own children—giving them what was not sufficiently given to us—we can change our relationship to the past.

  One weekend a few years ago, some visitors of ours had grown weary of the behavior of their four-year-old son, who had thrown multiple tantrums over the course of a morning. When this little boy’s mother sent him outside and then proceeded to lock all the doors of our house so he could not get back in, I watched in disbelief. I was doing my best to keep my judgments in check, but in truth I was appalled; I found it so cruel to shut out a small child like that, especially in an unfamiliar setting, far from home. My internal judging voice was saying to the boy’s mother, I totally get the frustration and the being at your wit’s end, but wow. I would never shut my child out like that. I’d never want to make him feel he didn’t have access to me if he needed me. It would be a long time before I realized why I was so distressed by what unfolded at our house that morning, and why I was so quick to judge the parenting as wrong and damaging. Everyone else seemed to think it was no big deal, and maybe even a little funny. The little boy was seemingly unfazed by the doors being locked and soon enough found something to do outside that entertained him, but that concerned me all the more; had this happened so many times before at his own house that he’d grown accustomed to being shut out? Had the fire of protest died down to ashes of resignation? All I knew then was how much it bothered me, but that I didn’t feel it was my place to confront our company—friends we didn’t know all that well—about their parenting.

  Two years later, I awoke from a nightmare about Quinn, something to do with him being held down by someone else and looking at me with pleading eyes, begging me to free him. In my semi-awake state, I first flashed on the face of the little boy who had been locked out of our house, and then his face morphed into Quinn’s, much younger, in his high chair. Suddenly I was in touch with a long-forgotten memory, one much more upsetting than the memory of some other person’s child being locked outside. Because it was my child, and I was the one who had shut him out.

  Quinn was maybe about two and a half, and it was an ordinary evening except that I was parenting alone, slogging through the trials and tribulations of dinnertime with a toddler and a first-grader. I don’t even remember the details of why I was so irritated or what was exhausting my supply of patience, and the fuzziness of my recollection is not surprising. This is one of those memories I wish I could wipe away, and to a great degree I did. What I do remember is that when my frustration toward Quinn reached a crescendo, I picked up his entire high chair, with him in it, and placed it on the other side of the door to the garage. I picked up my intensely aggravating, disobedient, but ultimately helpless and strapped-down child, and I shouted at him as I hoisted him across the kitchen, and I shut him in the garage.

  I’m pretty sure I had the decency to turn on the light out there, and I probably told him that when he stopped doing whatever “wrong” thing he was doing, I would let him back in. But that hardly lessens the blow of this assault on my ego, this most unwelcome memory. I remember how hard he was wailing when I slammed the door and walked back into the kitchen without him. I remember how quickly I went back out there and released him from his chair and held him tight, apologizing, tears streaming down both our cheeks. It was a truly awful moment for which I feel absolute remorse. What could he possibly have been doing to ignite such fury in me, especially while strapped into his high chair at the age of two?

  I’ll probably never know, but I do now understand the roundabout way in which this memory came back to me, and the multiple layers of meaning in that sequence of events with Quinn in his high chair that night. I had the nightmare when I did because of a deepening awareness at the time of the ways in which I, as a child, didn’t have enough access to my own mom and dad. Despite their good intentions and their best efforts as parents, they were young and preoccupied, and I learned self-sufficiency—especially in managing my distress—at an early age. The nightmare, in which I see my child pleading with me to come to his aid, put me in touch with a memory I had tried to bury. I didn’t want to see myself as a parent capable of slamming a door in her small child’s face. But in remembering what there was to remember, a powerful process of integration occurred. I realized that yes, I was capable of that kind of shutting-out, as we all are, and I remembered that I also made a swift and heartfelt repair with my child. When we cried together cheek to cheek on the same side of the door I had slammed seconds before, there was a here-and-now repair of the momentary rupture in our relationship. And in giving my son what I had not myself gotten earlier in life, at least not enough, something in me was being repaired, too.

  As has likely become obvious by now, Quinn is a powerhouse of emotion. It takes little to provoke feeling in him, and once provoked, the feeling is not mild in intensity or shy about making its presence known. It’s kind of like a tornado that comes without warning, sends everything swirling and tumbling in the air, and then it all drops back down again exactly as it was. I don’t relate to any of this. My older son’s emotional processing system is wired differently, and much more like mine. Like his brother, Noah is sensitive, and he feels things deeply. He is also highly attuned to the emotional needs of the people around him, but other people often have no idea what he is feeling. I see him putting energy into impression management and emotional containment. He tries not to cry, he tries to disguise a moment of embarrassment or surprise as something he meant to do or knew was coming, he seems brave and confident when he’s really uncertain or afraid. He wants to appear as if he is in control and unfazed, even though I see that he is most definitely fazed. When he gets upset, he stays upset for a good long while. He broods and ruminates and holds grudges.

  I am parenting both of these boys in ways that are, without a doubt, influenced by my own emotional history. I am jarred over and over again by the intensity and sudden onset of Quinn’s emotions, and because I am a flawed human, I am tempted sometimes to shame him for his outbursts. “You are six years old now, Quinn,” I might say. “You’re not a toddler. Get up off the floor and use words to tell us what’s going on.” But always there is a part of me rejoicing in his emotional freedom, and that part of me usually (not always!) steps forward when he is upset and defines a space for him in which he can have and show his emotions. He is entitled, completely and totally, to feel what he feels. I love him no matter what he is feeli
ng, and I sure hope he knows that. I wish I had had that certainty when I was little. I wish I hadn’t operated under some unspoken mandate that it is crucial to keep emotions in check and that big emotions are meant to be experienced in private. I’m still figuring out how to undo that learning. When I tell Quinn that it’s okay to feel quite a lot and to show it, I’m talking to my inner child, too.

  Without these two children—one whose emotional habits are alien to me and one whose are uncomfortably reminiscent of mine as a child—I would not have developed the same level of awareness about who I am as an emotional being. I fancied myself an extremely self-aware person before I had kids, especially because I am a psychologist. Sitting in the therapist seat, tracking other people’s emotions and the nuances of my own responses to whatever they bring into the room, most certainly has taught me a great deal about myself. But nothing compares to the reality check our children foist upon us. Nobody shows us our true nature—all we are capable of in both good and bad ways—like our children do.

  Except maybe our spouses.