To Have and to Hold

by Molly Millwood, PhD

  Married to the Buddha

  When my husband and I were a couple of years into our relationship, we had a pretty intense argument about a subject I no longer remember. What I remember is that after we had parted ways angrily and I had ruminated for several hours or a day, I wrote him a big fat letter. The letter detailed all of what I was feeling, and why, and what my point of view was, and how I hoped we would resolve the argument. I left it for him to find somewhere in the house while I continued brooding off in a solitary corner (and claiming a corner like that was not easy in our shoebox-sized first house). After he read the letter, he sought me out and put his arms around me and thanked me for expressing myself so articulately. When he pulled away from the embrace, he had a sincerely puzzled look in his eyes and said, “But I have a question. Why did you write me this letter? Why didn’t you just talk to me?”

  You know how whatever kids experience inside the walls of their childhood home is considered normal, because they’ve got nothing to compare it to? Like, for example, how author Mary Karr tells us in one of her memoirs that she never considered that the way her family ate dinner every night—herself, her sister, her mom, and her dad each sitting on the edges of the parents’ bed, plates in their laps, backs to each other—was a little odd? Well, that’s one answer to my husband’s question. When my parents’ marriage was falling apart, I observed them passing typed letters back and forth—an envelope tucked into a briefcase during the morning hustle here or left on a pillow there. They must’ve felt they were being discreet, but I inferred that every reason for the demise of their relationship, every emotion masked by their poker faces, was spelled out on the pages of those letters. There were no screaming matches, no hushed conversations barely audible from behind closed doors. There were only letters, one after another, and the normal daily routine to which everyone was adhering while the ground crumbled beneath. This manner of handling conflict and distress never even gave me pause, until that night so many years ago when my husband asked me, with those loving and genuinely curious eyes, “But why didn’t you just talk to me?”

  I’m not sure how I responded right then, but I probably said something about being better at expressing myself in writing than out loud, in person. That is a true statement, and most likely it was true of my parents, and that’s one reason they handled things the way they did. But what nobody had the psychological wisdom to see, let alone attempt to remedy, is the massive avoidance the letter writing represented. If we don’t express ourselves in real time, letting the important people in our lives see the anguish, fear, anger, and pain on our faces, how can we expect to feel fully understood? How can we bear witness to each other’s suffering, and help each other through, if the suffering is always channeled—and thereby, in some key way, transformed or distorted—into words on a page?

  Writing is one of my greatest passions, and I’ll be the last person to deny the power of words on a page. But the Buddhas in my life have shown me that there are elements of avoidance and control in the act of writing about feelings. And so I’ve come to understand that my parents’ modeling of this behavior is really only part of the answer to why I wrote a letter about my feelings, some hours or days after they first rose up in me, to my husband. The rest of the answer is that I didn’t have the courage to voice my feelings in a more direct way. I was afraid of my own strong emotions, and determined to get a handle on them before I made them known to anybody else.

  This remains a work in progress for me. It’s much easier to encourage other people to be direct about what they’re feeling than to do it ourselves. As a therapist I help people identify what it is they’re feeling and why. Because feelings almost always have an interpersonal context (that is, the feelings tend to originate in our relationships with the key players in our lives), it is not unusual for the dialogue in therapy to include something like, “What’s gotten in the way of letting him know how angry you are?” Or “Do you think she knows about your fears?” Or “What’s the risk, if you were to tell him that you’re really still quite hurt about this?” Meanwhile, I have to ask myself the same questions when I discover I have feelings I’ve been keeping under wraps.

  Tess, too, is learning hard lessons from the Buddhas in her house. I learned early on in our work together that she is haunted by memories of her unhappy mother. She remembers her as occupying a distant corner of the house, rocking vacantly in an old rocking chair. As a child, Tess felt responsible, if not for putting her mother in that state, then at least for getting her out of it. She also felt responsible for keeping her younger siblings occupied, fed, and out of their mother’s hair. She swore she would never put her own children in this kind of position. She would not be a chronically unhappy mother about whom her children had to worry. She would not allow her oldest child to be in a parental role with the younger two. She has succeeded with the latter; Tess is very, very careful to ensure her ten-year-old daughter is never expected to tend to her younger siblings. But in all her efforts to be the kind of mom who has fun with her kids every day while also providing for their basic needs, somewhere she has lost her own well-being. She sets up activities and outings for the kids and accompanies them as a hollowed-out shell of herself, worn and weary and quietly despairing. Her intensive mothering—the way she has thrown her whole self into her role as a mother—cannot counter the abiding sadness and resentment she feels about doing it all alone. About living with the man who is their father but who is not a coparent. About being in a relationship with someone who is not there for her.

  As she approaches forty, the age her parents were when they divorced, Tess has begun to grapple with some uncomfortable insights about her relationship with David. She sees resemblances between her relationship and that of her parents. She wonders if her efforts to be fully devoted to and available for her children—her commitment to being as unlike her mother as possible—have come at a cost not only to her own well-being but to her partnership. For some women, it is easier to love a child than it is to nurture and maintain a loving relationship with a mate, and nurturing an intimate connection with a child can serve the strategic, if often unconscious, purpose of marginalizing a spouse.

  In his book The Heart of Being Helpful, psychiatrist Peter Breggin writes, “It’s sometimes easier to see the humanity in animals than in people. That’s because we’re less threatened by animals. It may also be that they are more willing and able to express love in a direct, unadulterated manner. Because we’re less threatened, and because they are more open and vulnerable, we become more open to love and to empathy. Similarly, many people find it much easier to love an infant or a small child than to love an adult.”9 In our recent work together, Tess is doing the hard work of confronting this truth. She is realizing that whenever David is more attentive to her, more interested in her, she pushes him away. Being angry with him for not being involved enough in their family life is much easier than contending with her sense of herself as fundamentally unlovable, which is exactly what gets provoked by her partner’s attempts to love her and be close to her. Even her desire for another pregnancy, which he did not share, in retrospect seemed strategically timed. Just when the path to restoring intimate connection in their relationship was made clearer by the growing independence of their two kids, Tess lobbied hard to obstruct it again with a third child.

  Fortunately, when our spouses act as mirrors and show us things we would not see without them, not everything that appears is unwanted. We can be just as blind to our strengths as we can be to our weaknesses. Sometimes, in order to believe in ourselves, we need believing mirrors*—people who see us in a more positive light than we can sometimes see ourselves, and who reflect that positive image back to us. In the best-case scenario, our spouses play that role regularly.

  Recent research illuminates the power of attuned, intimate connection in marriage to propel people toward the best versions of themselves. A team of researchers tracked more than two thousand couples across a period of ten years to determine
what role, if any, perceived partner responsiveness plays in a person’s trajectory of well-being.10 The researchers distinguished between hedonic well-being (generally defined as the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain) and eudaimonic well-being (the kind of fulfillment that comes from achieving one’s potential, finding meaning in life, and ultimately feeling comfortable in one’s own skin, wrinkles and all). As we might expect, both types of well-being were concurrently linked with partner responsiveness; in other words, at both data collection points (when the study first began, and then ten years later), the more a participant felt understood and cared for by his or her partner, the higher that participant’s hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. But in a fascinating twist, partner responsiveness at baseline also predicted increases in eudaimonic well-being across time, and this was not true for hedonic well-being. Translation? Having an attuned partner does not guarantee an ever-greater bounty of pleasure or protect us from pain as we move through life, but it does bring us the kind of well-being that springs from deeper wells: personal growth, meaning-making, and realizing our potential.

  All this is to say that the same guy we resent for pointing out our flaws and unflattering idiosyncrasies may also be the one who helps us lay claim to our competence, our power, and our beauty. But this is possible only if—and this is a big “if”—we can stay in connection and open to his feedback despite the less desirable things we see in the mirror he holds up to us. That’s how Julia, the mother we met in chapter 3, came to view herself as a strong role model for the daughter she later had. Her husband’s perceptions of her—as the dynamic, self-possessed, determined, courageous woman she could not always see she was—played a key role in countering her worries about what it would mean for her daughter to identify with her. And many women have told me it is their husbands, who often see them at their best and their worst parenting moments, whose positive feedback has the most power to cut through their thick and tenacious mother guilt. When we look at ourselves through our partner’s lens, we often get a much more forgiving view.

  But reckoning with our own unwanted qualities, and our habitual ways of being in the presence of those we love, is far from comfortable. For so many women transformed by motherhood, it is painful. It is much easier to deny and distort. We can be very skilled at looking away from the truths our children and partners try to show us. We can generate any number of excuses and justifications, like I did when my husband first began to suggest to me that I was no longer acting like myself. I wanted to believe that if only our son would sleep through the night—and therefore so could I—then I would get centered and become “my old self” again. I told myself that if I’d been blessed with one of the easy babies all our friends seemed to have, motherhood wouldn’t be taking such a toll on me. Both of these explanations for why I was so emotionally off-balance are valid, and I still believe them. Prolonged sleep deprivation and well-being are directly at odds with each other, and colicky babies tax even the most patient parents. But I was far more inclined to attribute my distress to these external factors than to anything internal. Until I had done quite a lot of work to increase my self-awareness, it didn’t even occur to me that I had some habits, tendencies, and qualities that made the transition to motherhood quite challenging. It would likely have been less challenging if I’d had babies who slept through the night sooner than two years old, or who were less fussy, but what I know now is that I was in for a rough transition no matter what. I was especially discombobulated by motherhood because of the high value I placed on so many of the things that disappear most quickly when you have a baby: order, neatness, quiet, solitude, and productivity. Many years and hard-earned epiphanies later, I’ve learned to recognize when these core qualities are serving me, my marriage, and my children well, and when they are not. As many other wise people before me have pointed out, our greatest strengths can also be weaknesses.

  That our virtues in one context may be vices in another is but one of the many profound lessons our children teach us best. They teach us that with fierce love comes deep fear, and that we cannot have joy without also inviting sorrow. They teach us that life does not go the way we planned. They teach us that we, and they, are imperfect. They teach us that no one emerges from childhood unscathed—that we did not get all our needs met as children, and neither will they. They teach us that the only constant is change. They teach us that we are neither as fabulous nor as horrible as we thought. Motherhood not only transforms us; it also forces us to relinquish our illusions about who we were all along.

  10

  Lost and Found

  May it only sting a moment when you dive into that blue

  Because by the time you hit the surface, it has rearranged you

  —Antje Duvekot, “Sweet Spot”1

  When Quinn was a newborn, we bought a king-size mattress and my husband built us a four-poster bed to accommodate it. He did this not because it was a good time to embark on such a project (it wasn’t), but because for Ari, the time to do anything is now. I write things down on my endless to-do list; he walks out to the garage and picks up a tool and gets going. We had a vision of a family bed, the four of us piled in and happily tangled up. A place where hungry babies would be nursed, feverish foreheads would be cooled, little souls shaken by nightmares would be soothed, snores and giggles and stories would fill the air. The building of the big bed seemed to represent a kind of acceptance of the big, sensual, marvelous mess of family life that ours had become.

  One morning, I watched that same little person, the one whose new presence in our lives told us we had outgrown the queen-size bed, take big deep sleepy breaths with his four-and-a-half-year-old body. He had come in at four thirty a.m. to tell me he’d had a bad dream, and whenever he does this, he wants not to squeeze in between his dad and me like I imagine most kids would. He says, instead, “Let me trade places with you.” By this he means, “You scoot over to the middle because I plan to lie down right where you are.” It’s as if he needs to sink his little body into the imprint of mine, and rest his head on the exact part of the pillow where mine left its mark, and once he has done so, he is asleep in an instant. And I think, This is the beauty and the curse of motherhood. Displaced by a person I love so fiercely that I don’t mind.

  The thing is, it was a long, twisty road to being able to say “I don’t mind.” And that mentality doesn’t always apply. Sometimes I do mind, thank you very much. As Susan Maushart says in The Mask of Motherhood, “A woman accustomed to taking autonomy for granted may find the experience of newborn motherhood strangely claustrophobic as she struggles to fit two people into a space formerly reserved for one.” Even though Quinn was my secondborn and that claustrophobic experience had been far more pronounced four years earlier when I first became a mother, when he was a baby, there was an almost literal struggle to fit the both of us into a space once occupied by only me. He was deliciously chubby, and he loved his “milka-pilka,” as he later came to call it, more than anything. The more pounds he gained, the more I lost. It wasn’t just that I was burning calories through breastfeeding; he was also diagnosed with a serious dairy allergy which required me to cut dairy from my diet so my breast milk wouldn’t harm him. Between nursing an always-hungry baby and the pretty extreme change to my diet, I went from fairly slender to really skinny. I was underweight, and exhausted. He was sucking the life out of me. As he took up more space, I took up less. There is an obvious metaphor here.

  All these years later, I’m back to occupying more space in the physical world. I confess I sometimes miss the svelte body I had when I was declining every grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of ice cream I was offered and burning a thousand calories a day just by nursing, but where the metaphor is concerned I’m happy there’s no longer such a struggle to fit two into a space formerly reserved for one. Twelve years after the birth of my first child, I have a handle on my life I could not have achieved when my children were younger. While it is certainly ironic, it is no coincidence that I am
finishing a book about the strain of new motherhood more than a decade after it was new to me. Things are a little—dare I say a lot?—easier now. The strain is not so pronounced anymore, and the emotions are less raw. The chaos of family life is far more bearable. But make no mistake: the life I have a handle on is not the same life I once occupied. It is profoundly changed, as I am profoundly changed. And so are the mothers I’ve been seeing for six, eight, even ten years of therapy.

  Cherished Intruders

  I have often wondered if I would be so tired if my sons were introverts like me. Or even if just one of them was. I have two exuberant, extremely chatty, social-butterfly children who are happiest while actively engaged with others. As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy my solitude a lot more than the average person, and I especially enjoy quiet, and in these regards I am greatly outnumbered in my house. My husband is the extrovert yang to my introvert yin, and he can resemble the Energizer Bunny as much as our children. Basically, I am surrounded by male humans whose strong presences overwhelm my fragile nervous system, and I didn’t ask for this particular arrangement. Another girl,* or even just a male introvert, in the house would have been nice.

  It has occurred to me that the decision to have children is not so unlike the decision to invite perfect strangers to come live with you. Forever. The hope is that everyone likes each other, but the reality is that they could be as different from you, and one another, as possible, and they could have many annoying qualities, and everyone might get along poorly. And even if none of this rings true for your family right now, it could have been true in the past, or it may be true at some point in the future, because like us, our children are ever-changing. Sometimes they are barely recognizable as the same children we had last month or last year.