And all your streams they are now fuller
Than what their riverbanks can hold
This is the sweet spot of your life
That day in the studio, it required more takes than I can recall, and maybe even a few glasses of liquid courage, to get the vocal tracks right. I was utterly consumed with anxiety about stepping up to the microphone, not only because of my extreme* inhibitions about singing in general, but also because the person with whom I was collaborating to make these recordings had done such a beautiful job with the arrangements on the songs that I was all the more intimidated. Both songs were so gorgeously rendered, with richly layered and emotionally evocative instrumentation all just waiting for my vocal. No pressure or anything! Having taken a giant leap of faith by finding a recording studio in Vermont when all my singing before that had been “in the closet” (or the shower, or the car), it was almost more than I could bear. But this mattered to me. It mattered enormously. And I came to realize how much it mattered only because of the transformations in me set in motion by motherhood.
I grew up in a family of musicians. My parents and my uncle had a band and played at county fairs, bars, and weddings throughout my childhood. My brother played bass and was in several bands starting in adolescence. But not me. Although I took eight years of piano lessons, the lessons were very traditional; there was no improvising and no music theory. It was entirely about reading the sheet music and playing the song, and not at all about self-expression. I was also exceptionally shy, so it’s not like I was entertaining ideas of one day being on a stage the way my family members were. The thought of that terrified me, and mostly still does. I always considered myself just a quiet but deeply enthusiastic observer of the music other people around me were making. Music was, in a sense, the air I breathed, but I never identified as a musician. I chose a different path. I was much more comfortable in the academic and intellectual realms.
Looking back, I see that I was drawn to music in a way that goes beyond being an appreciator. I know now that the desire to sing and make music has always been in me. Some of my happiest memories from adolescence are of singing my heart out to Carole King and Aretha Franklin with my friends, all of us piled into my little orange 1976 Honda Civic hatchback that we’d named Tangerine after the Led Zeppelin song. As I got older, I continued to surround myself with people who made music, in my circle of friends and in my family, and I watched and listened with a kind of rapt attention I now recognize as longing. I was longing to be a music maker, not just a music appreciator, but this was a secret I kept even from myself.
It was my children who put me in touch with this longing. In my first few days of motherhood, as I rocked and nursed newborn Noah, I sang. I sang to him without inhibition, without even thinking about it. I sang because it soothed him and because it was natural. It was part of how I expressed my love to him. It became a cherished ritual at his bedtime, and later, the same was true with Quinn. Neither of them would stand for a bedtime without a song. Listening from the sidelines, my husband—who had truly never heard me sing in any audible or serious way—was more than a little intrigued. He began to voice his disgruntlement about my singing shyness (“Why are the boys the only ones who get to hear you sing?”). He even tried to “out” me when we had friends over for dinner by having them listen over the baby monitor when I ducked upstairs to put the children to bed.
Gradually, a part of me that had long ago gone underground was beginning to surface. I thought about singing all the time. Though it’s perhaps an odd thing to say, when I open my mouth and sing a song I’ve written, I feel more like who I really am than ever before. Using my voice in this way has felt like coming home to myself. At first, my trips to the recording studio were construed as being in the service of gifts I wanted to give—there was the sweet song I recorded for Ari on the occasion of our anniversary, and the song Noah loved me to sing to him at bedtime that I gave to him on his birthday—because that somehow gave me permission to spend the time and money doing such a thing. Soon enough, I didn’t need that kind of permission anymore. I was immersed in a process of self-discovery or, perhaps more accurately, recovery. I was (and still am, years later) recovering a dimension of myself I had denied. Buried. Lost. Until, in motherhood, it was found.
Let me be clear that the story of growth and self-discovery I’m telling is the product of time and hindsight. It is a very, very different story from the one I would’ve told in those early days of motherhood, or even two or three years out. It’s safe to say I had absolutely no idea back then what my singing to baby Noah meant, or what road it was setting me on. What I felt then was a mix of intoxicating love for him and acute, unexpected loss—loss of personal freedom, order, productivity, time for self-reflection and self-care, intimate connection with anyone other than the baby, and so much else I held dear that seemed to disappear when I first entered motherhood. If you had told me then that I was undergoing a process of expansion, I would not have believed you. All I could feel was the constriction. The shrinking of possibility, opportunity, and even self.
Doing long-term therapy with the many women who were new mothers when they first came to see me, I have witnessed the same kinds of transformations. Rachael, for instance, left an unfulfilling job and started her own business, which is now quite successful. It was through cultivating the feminist values she was committed to passing on to her daughters that she found the energy and determination to extricate herself from an unfair and stagnant work environment and become her own boss. Today, nine years after the first time I saw her, with her first baby in her arms and a relentless emotional fatigue dimming the light within her, I do a double take when I see Rachael in my waiting room. She is glowing. She has an air of strength and confidence. Anna wrote a poem about the night she soothed her own younger self while soothing her baby after a failed attempt at the cry-it-out sleep solution. Encouraged by a trusted friend’s enthusiastic response to the poem, she wrote another, and then another. She submitted one to a small poetry contest, and won second place. Now she is pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing, something she may well never have realized was a passion if not for that painful and ultimately redemptive moment with her baby girl.
Neither I nor Rachael nor Anna, nor any of the other women you met in these pages, would have said, at any point in the first several years of motherhood, “I am feeling so invigorated and inspired by my role as a mother! I am so much more comfortable in my own skin now, and so much more in touch with my dreams and passions!” (Just writing this makes me giggle a little, because it’s so ridiculous.) And yet, in each case, it was the growing pains brought on by motherhood that ultimately led to greater fulfillment. They are growing pains, indeed. Not shrinking pains, despite how it feels at first. Through motherhood, our identities expand. But we must first survive the long, inevitable slog through the dormancy and constriction of our roles and our possibilities.
The Only Way Is Through
Lynn, a thirty-six-year-old woman with an eighteen-month-old daughter, sat on the couch in my therapy office, a lump in her throat, the gate that would allow the tears to flow never quite opening. Her sadness over the year and a half since her baby was born had been about many different things, but on this day it was about experiencing herself as a “marm” without any sex appeal. She told me a story that, for her, was all the evidence she needed that her sex appeal was gone. At an outdoor festival the week before, she had walked up to the front of the long beer line and asked two men if they would mind getting her a beer, too. Their response, something about how it would be wrong if they did that for her when everyone else had to wait in line, confirmed for my client that she simply had no allure anymore. “Two years ago,” she said with such certainty, “those guys would’ve said, ‘Sure!’”
Breastfeeding figured prominently in her view of herself as lacking sex appeal. She could not picture a man finding her sexy as long as she was still breastfeeding her year-and-a-half-old daughter, who had tak
en to requesting her meals with the word “Boob!” Another factor was Lynn’s body image and her discomfort in her ill-fitting clothing. It was noteworthy that the reason her clothes no longer fit was not because she had more weight to lose; she said that she had returned to her pre-baby weight. It was that her body had changed shape. There is such metaphor in this. Her body had changed shape, and so had her entire life. The rhythm and pace of her days, the way she related to her partner, the way she related to her friends and family, the way she experienced her body, the way she experienced herself as a woman out in the world.
What especially pained me as I listened to her story and watched her fight back tears was that her view of herself was so misaligned with my view of her. When she walked into my office that day, I noticed that she looked especially beautiful. Radiant, actually. It had been some time since I’d seen her, about five weeks or so, and I wondered what was different, what kind of update I was about to hear. Was her baby finally sleeping through the night? Had the depressive symptoms that had had a hold on her for the previous many months loosened their grip? Was her heartache about the demise of her relationship beginning to heal, maybe with the aid of a new love interest? I was more than a little surprised when what came out of her mouth was, “I feel old. I feel unattractive and unsexy and none of my clothes fit. I’ve just become a marm with no sex appeal.”
My dilemma was whether to share with her that I was seeing a radiance and beauty in her more pronounced than before or keep this observation to myself. There were pros and cons to both approaches. I know well the kind of pain that comes from construing yourself as unattractive, especially when this involves a perceived loss of your former, more attractive self. It can feel like the changes to our bodies after giving birth are permanent, as if we are inhabiting a different body now, much like how when we move from one house to another, we know we are never going to inhabit the previous house again. It can feel like what left our bodies at childbirth was not only the baby growing inside but also any sense we may have had of ourselves as vibrant, sexual beings. It can feel like the “baby weight” is far heavier emotionally than the number of extra pounds that register on the scale. For many women, these struggles begin with their changing pregnant bodies, not just after delivering their babies. But for most women, it’s easier to ward off the pain of body image woes when there is a baby inside. We say to ourselves something like, I may feel like a beached whale, but that’s because I’m manufacturing a human being. After delivery, we no longer have this justification for our changed bodies. In the best of scenarios, we are gentle and patient with ourselves and trust that we will one day recognize our bodies again, but even then we are not immune to terrible bouts of self-loathing.
Knowing all this, having lived it, I see Lynn despairing about her changed body and I want to take away her pain. I want to challenge her current perception of herself in one of the most immediately effective ways I can, which would be to disclose to her that the moment I saw her in the waiting room, I thought she looked beautiful. We could have a tender exchange about this. I could ask, “What is it like to hear me say that? To know how I see you?” We could slowly, carefully, thoroughly navigate this delicate territory of the discrepancy between how she sees herself and how others see her, prompted by my willingness to disclose my own perceptions.
I don’t do this. I keep my perceptions to myself, not because I am absolutely certain this is the right therapeutic move to make, but because it feels, for now, like the better therapeutic move to make. Lynn can tell her mother and her friends that she feels unattractive, and they will say to her, “Oh, stop. You’re more beautiful than ever!” Probably this has already happened, perhaps even multiple times, and yet here she sits in my office, in despair, not the least bit soothed by the reassurances others have offered her. As her peer, as a mother who identifies with what she is feeling, as a compassionate person, of course I feel a pull to offer her those same reassurances. But I am her therapist, and difficult as it is to withhold words that might comfort and buoy her in the moment, I know that my role is a different one.
I draw from my own experience in the client seat—the experience of longing, over and over, for affirmations of various kinds from my therapist. If only she would tell me how lovely and extraordinary I am, then I’d know it for sure. If only she would tell me I am beautiful, then I’d know it for sure. We bestow great powers upon our therapists. I can’t go deeply into the reasons for that without digressing into an entirely different topic, but I can try to convey the essence of the phenomenon like this: At least in long-term psychotherapy, which is mostly what I know, a therapist comes to know her client very, very intimately. As a result, our therapists’ perceptions of us matter enormously; it’s as if we are asking, “Now that you know nearly everything about me that I normally keep hidden from view, do you still love me?” Why wouldn’t we long for an answer to this question? But if your therapist is any good, she won’t answer you. At least not directly, and not right away. We must come by these answers to our questions of self-worth honestly, of our own accord. The most important truths are self-discovered. What Lynn had lost could not be given back to her by anyone else. She would need to discover it again for herself.
For Lynn to make this discovery, she will have to give up the hope of returning to some earlier version of herself. She will have to embrace, rather than resist, what has changed. But human beings have a tough time with change. We find great comfort in stability and certainty, and our relationship with change is often a resistant, defiant one. We see change itself—regardless of the direction of change—as a threat to our strongly held notions of what is true and real about ourselves, the world, and others. Think about the standard yearbook-signing phrase: “Don’t ever change!” In the realm of marriage, character change is often viewed as the culprit when things go awry; we say or hear things like, “She’s not who she used to be,” “He’s not the same man I married,” “I’ve changed over the years, and he’s stayed the same.” The irony, of course, is that along with death and taxes, change is one of the few certainties in life.
In Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes, “And then how swiftly, how inevitably the perfect unity is invaded; the relationship changes, it becomes complicated, encumbered by its contact with the world. I believe this is true in most relationships, with friends, with husband or wife, and with one’s children. But it is the marriage relationship in which the changing pattern is shown up most clearly because it is the deepest one and the most arduous to maintain; and because, somehow, we mistakenly feel that failure to maintain its exact original pattern is tragedy [emphasis mine].”3 It is actually our resistance to change—our fear of what a changing relationship might mean—that renders us victims. We interpret the change to mean, for instance, that we are incompatible, or that we are losing forever something we once had. It’s as if we are suffering characters in, rather than authors of, the evolving story of our marriages. Lindbergh acknowledges that the original relationship is very beautiful indeed, even that its “perfection wears the freshness of a spring morning.” But subsequent phases of a relationship can be beautiful, too; we move to another phase, “which one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes summer after spring.”
Having a baby changes us, profoundly, and the change itself is a threat to our marriages. But whether that threat ultimately translates to untenable dissatisfaction in the marriage is partly a function of our problematic appraisals of what change means and why it occurs. Change is not inherently damaging to relationships. In fact, many scholars argue that remaining open to the ever-unfolding mystery of who our partners are is a key aspect of keeping love alive. We do not need to know every nook and cranny of our mate’s psyche or personality, nor do those nooks and crannies need to stay exactly the same across time. We only need to know the answer to that million-dollar question: Are you there for me? And it is when we can’t get an affirmative answer—when the strain of parenting and careers and domestic obli
gations and the endless logistics of life impede our ability to show up for each other and tune into each other—that we suffer.
In the early years of parenthood, that suffering is far more common than most of us realize. It is not reserved for the clinically depressed new mother whose postpartum mood disorder is impacting her marriage. It is the emotional backdrop of a great many mothers, the same ones who are beaming with maternal joy or good-humoredly exposing their domestic disorder in the photos they post on Instagram. It is the unspoken struggle of a great many couples, the same ones who look so happy and in love in their profile pictures that they can’t possibly have the kinds of explosive fights we have with our spouses, and they can’t possibly have cried quietly into their pillows the night before, their backs turned to each other, wondering when their closest ally started to feel so far away.
Rather than resisting change, we need to find ways to unmask the emotional complexity of the transition into motherhood, a transition that has the potential to rattle and rearrange a woman more than anything else she has faced before or will ever face again. We need to dismantle false dichotomies, like the one that distinguishes between the majority of women who do not develop PPD and the unlucky few who do, and the one that separates the divorced couples whose marriages couldn’t withstand the stress of parenthood from the ones whose perfect children only enhanced their already-perfect marriage. We need to connect to the current of our own emotions, where we will likely encounter the truth that we are fundamentally changed—not just stressed or depleted or superficially annoyed—by motherhood. We might conclude that our marriages, too, are not the same anymore.
Motherhood transforms us. It is not that we become different people or that we lose ourselves. It is that we discover feelings, impulses, thoughts, and wishes within ourselves that we likely never would have encountered had we not become mothers. Some of these—like the realization that we are as proficient at having emotional meltdowns as our toddlers are, or the wish that we could give our newborn to that woman down the street who seems like a really terrific mother—are not at all flattering. Some—like the way our babies’ smiles can produce a jolt of bliss like none we’ve ever felt—are magnificent and transcendent. In mothering, we come up against the outer bounds of despair and rage, ecstasy and enchantment. We feel more fully the range of emotion our human existence entails. For better and for worse, motherhood holds up a mirror to us, and we see more accurately who we are and what we are capable of feeling.
To Have and to Hold Page 24