pain vs. suffering, 42, 54–56, 247–48n2
paradoxes
inherent within motherhood, 76, 217, 224
parental leave
author’s experience with, 93–94
for fathers, 96–99, 249n6
financial consequences of, 97, 249n6
in U.S. vs. other countries, 96
“Paternity Leave” (Miller), 96
Perel, Esther, 1, 216
perfectionism, 29
Perfect Madness (Warner), 186, 197–99
Pinker, Susan, 100–103
postpartum depression (PPD), 9–10, 17, 37–38, 139–40, 148, 235. See also depression
postpartum grief, 5–7, 40–44
postpartum recovery, 90–99
author’s experience with, 91–92
inadequate support for, 90–91, 92–93
lying-in period, 94–95
maternity leave, 93–94
past vs. present, 94–96
postpartum transformation, 1–15
author’s experience with, 3–5
lack of books about, ix–x, 86n
loss, sense of, 5–9, 11–12, 14
marriage, strains on, 12–14
misconceptions about, 14–15
mixed emotions of, 3–4, 9, 11–12, 14
postpartum depression, 9–10
social connections and, 102
PPD, 9–10, 17, 37–38, 139–40, 148, 235. See also depression
pregnancy, 39–40, 51, 59, 77–78, 113–14, 115, 153
Psychology of Parenthood (seminar), 119
psychotherapists, idealization of, xiii–xivn, 130
Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone, 102
Rich, Adrienne, xiv, 224, 245n2(Intro)
Rubin, Gretchen, 31, 34
The Second Sex (de Beauvoir), 53
self-compassion, 225
self-deception, 124, 127–28, 131
self-discovery and empowerment, 224–30
selfishness, 109–10, 110n
sex, 62, 92n. See also libido, loss of
children preventing or intruding upon, 152, 216
mindfulness and, 62
shame, 17–38
childbirth and, 79
cultural messages and, 105
happiness, parenting and, 29–35
intrusive images and, 17–18, 21, 26–27
marriage and, 26–27, 35–38
mixed emotions of motherhood and, 14, 18–22, 29, 52, 223–24
resenting our babies and, 27–29
shame hole, 18, 18n, 19, 26, 28, 38
silence and, 27, 224–25
social media and, 23–27
Shields, Brooke, 9
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 68
sleep deprivation, xiii, 64, 210
sleep struggles
childhood memories and, 199–200
expectations and, 56, 57–58, 57n
marital tensions surrounding, 133–37, 200
social connections and social isolation, 100–105
social media, 23–27, 51, 102
sons vs. daughters, 215–16, 216n
stay-at-home mothers, 65, 105n, 120, 125, 192, 249n11
stonewalling, 148–49, 169
Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert), 61
suffering vs. pain, 42, 54–56, 247–48n2
support for new mothers, 77–106
balance, difficulty in achieving, 105–6
childbirth and, 78–90
childcare, 95, 99–101, 104, 106
during postpartum recovery, 90–99
pregnancy dream signaling need for, 77–78
public policies and, 105
social connections and, 101–5
Sweet Spot (Duvekot), 213
“Sweet Spot” (song), 226
Teigen, Chrissy, 9
testosterone, 188
The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (Yalom), 19
time and presence in the moment, 59–76
his and her versions of time, 70–75
impermanence, 9, 64–67
mindfulness, 46–47, 63, 66–68, 76
mind-wandering, 61–62
value of mothering and, 68–69
transformation, postpartum. See postpartum transformation
traumatic memory
the body’s responses to, 87–89
unattractiveness, feelings of, 151, 230–33
uncontaminated free time, 126–27
The Village Effect (Pinker), 100–103
Viorst, Judith, 140
Warner, Judith, 186, 197–99
well-being, partner responsiveness and, 208–9. See also mental health
When Nietzsche Wept (Yalom), 177
When Partners Become Parents (Cowan and Cowan), 116
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (Slaughter), 68
Wolf, Naomi, 5–6, 15, 77
work-family guilt, 116–17
working mothers, 65, 65n, 105n, 120, 157, 249n11
Writings from a Birth Year (Erdrich), 59
Yalom, Irvin, 19, 177
About the Author
Molly Millwood, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice specializing in couples therapy, motherhood, and women’s issues. She is also an associate professor of psychology at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, where she teaches courses on intimate relationships and marital therapy. She lives in the woods of the Green Mountains with her husband and their two children.
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Copyright
to have and to hold. Copyright © 2019 by Molly Millwood, PhD. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* A very interesting and reliable phenomenon in psychotherapy is the tendency of clients to idealize their therapists. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, including the need to believe that the professional is relatively free of her own personal
problems and so is better equipped to offer help. But the reason closest to the heart of this book is how readily we make assumptions, in the absence of any obvious data to the contrary, that other people are doing better than we are. The psychotherapy relationship is set up in such a way that the therapist, disclosing so little about herself, is a bit mysterious to the client. Faced with that mystery, most clients conjure up fantasies of the therapist’s life in which she is infinitely competent, even-keeled, and free of turmoil.
* It is worth stating the obvious here, which is that a classic catch-22 explains the existence of this erroneous assumption. When women suffer during the transition to motherhood, they generally keep it to themselves because it does not seem that others are similarly suffering. Why not? Because other women are keeping their suffering to themselves, too.
* I borrow this term from Brené Brown, author of Daring Greatly and other excellent books.
* With my second terrible sleeper, Quinn, I found that his unpredictable, ever-changing night-waking habits caused me far less anguish. I was tired, but I was not angry, confused, or searching the far recesses of my mind or the internet to figure out what may have caused him to start waking at one a.m. when he had previously been sleeping until four a.m. I was only tired. Pain, not suffering. I accepted that his changing sleep patterns seemed to have no rhyme or reason, and that just as nothing in particular seemed to have caused him to start waking three or four times a night, he would return to sleeping more solidly without any intervention on my part. I observed his awakenings, his restless sleep, his need for more nighttime nursings, with a curious nonjudgment most of the time—a skill I lacked when I was new to the trenches of parenting. “Most” really is the key word in the previous sentence. I was not immune to occasional moments of despair, anger, and righteous self-pity so pronounced that I didn’t know why nobody had yet volunteered to take care of my baby while I checked into a hotel to sleep for a week.
* I use this term because it is less cumbersome than “mothers who work outside the home,” and with no implication whatsoever that stay-at-home mothers are not working. We are all working really hard, at home and at work.
* There is also quite a lot we know from research about the connection between children’s well-being and their parents’ capacity to attune to them emotionally. I’ll say more about this in later chapters.
* I also couldn’t help but think, What a creative form of birth control!
* I must again express my dismay at how many books there are about pregnancy and childbirth and how few books there are about the complete metamorphosis we undergo once we become parents.
* See Vicki Iovine’s The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood for a hilarious account of navigating sexual intimacy after having a baby. I’ll also address the emotional and psychological challenges of new parents’ sex lives in subsequent chapters.
* Rates of depression are twice as high in women than in men.
* According to Pew Center research, as of 2015, in nearly half (46 percent) of all two-parent households, both parents worked full-time. Only 26 percent of households had a mother staying home full-time.
* A similar issue is when fathers are depicted as “babysitting” their children when mothers are away. Has any man in the history of the world ever referred to his wife being alone with the kids as “babysitting”?
* I didn’t choose “selfish” for this example in a random fashion. Research has shown that among unhappily married couples, the number one attribution people make for their spouse’s bad behavior is selfishness. This is quite important, and I’ll come back to it later.
* If you’re curious, the remaining two couples were considered “unacceptable inequality” couples. They espoused egalitarian ideals but were characterized by a great deal of conflict rooted in an overtly unequal distribution of power.
* My guilt has many sources, but one of them is invisible male power. If I go out for the evening or he spends a day somewhere with the kids while I am home alone, I feel somehow indebted to him. Yet if he is away on a trip or out with a friend or at a meeting during the evening, I feel zero sense that he owes me. I just feel immersed in mothering and being in domestic mode, doing what I am supposed to do.
* Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010.
* Of course, I am the mother of two kids who act as if we are punishing them when we tell them it’s time for bed, and for whom “sleeping in” means sleeping until six fifteen a.m.
* Although this finding emerged out of attempts to understand the factors that contribute to PPD, we must ask ourselves whether the same factors are at play in mothers whose distress does not fit into a neat diagnostic category. As we discussed at length in chapter 1, it is a misconception that women either have PPD or do not have it. Not all distress is clinical, and negative emotion in women is not a form of pathology.
* It may be less obvious why I’m saying this trigger is present in most new parents, but read on.
* Mirror neurons are so named because they fire in response to what we see other people doing or experiencing, but our neural activity looks just like it would if we were the ones doing the behavior or having the experience. It’s as if our brain activity is mirroring another’s circumstances. For instance, if we see an object being thrown at someone else, our brains will light up on an MRI the same way they would if the object were being thrown at us, and physically, we might even flinch. The more closely we are tracking the other, the stronger and more elaborate the mirrored neural activity will be, and the greater the empathy.
* It is important to note that this difference in men and women is directly linked to the issues of gender inequality—and the tendency for heterosexual couples to revert to more traditional gender roles when they have a baby—discussed at length earlier. As long as the burdens of caretaking fall unevenly in a two-parent household, with mothers doing more than fathers, the immediate attachment concerns will look different for each partner. Mothers are looking for more support, both practical and emotional, and fathers are wondering where they fit into this new equation.
* Affectionately known in our household as “The Abusement of the Daddy.”
* In motherhood, guilt and anxiety tend to travel together. Guilty feelings about perceived failures or inadequacies often generate concerns about whether we have somehow damaged or endangered our child. Those concerns can be very compelling and can translate to persistent anxiety about our child’s well-being. It can also work in the other direction: the anxious worries we are certain to have during early motherhood can leave us feeling vaguely guilty about what we might not be doing right. Here my primary focus is on the construct of guilt and the importance of curbing it.
* Also note that “excessive or inappropriate guilt” is one of the diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder.
* Now known as “Friday Night Terdishons,” as Quinn referred to it in a note he wrote us one day when he was five or six.
* I feel obliged to point out that this is a fully finished, very comfortable basement with a big-screen TV and a pool table. The boys love to hang out down there. Just in case you thought it was some other kind of basement, the kind with nothing but an overflowing kitty-litter box, a broken-down 1970s stationary bike, and old musty cardboard boxes full of broken Christmas ornaments. Because then you’d probably be thinking, She should be feeling guilty!
* I borrow this term, “believing mirrors,” from writer Julia Cameron and her book about cultivating creativity, The Artist’s Way.
* Truly, I realize that for me in particular, part of what makes parenting my children difficult is their Y chromosomes. The way they want to tell me blow-by-blow accounts of actions. “Mom! Mom! Check this out! I slammed this into that and then this went flying up and did twelve flips in the air and then it landed on that and sent this spinning across the room!” The way they are in constant motion and cannot resist climbing and jumping on the furniture. The way their butts make no contact with t
heir chairs at dinnertime. I notice my impatience and irritation peaking at bedtime. When I want cooperation and a smooth transition into cozy, tender, quiet time, I get resistance, frenzied energy, and a sudden loud and enthusiastic chattering about all the things from their day I was so eager to hear about earlier, when they couldn’t pause from their living room acrobatics to talk to me. I’m tired just writing about this. Would I be so tired if I had daughters?
* And dogs. Our dog, Poppy, has an uncanny ability to wedge herself right between my husband and me even when we are sitting as close to each other as we possibly can. She makes a place for herself where there isn’t one, nuzzles us with her wet nose, and shamelessly asks for the love she seeks. Sometimes I’m annoyed, but mostly I’m glad to have a securely attached dog.
* And I really do mean “extreme.” The first time my husband played one of my recordings for some friends at our house, I hid in the garage.
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