It may seem strange to put a chapter about the very beginning of becoming a parent – about pregnancy – some way into this book. But even if your child has already been born, or indeed is a teenager or an adult, this chapter may throw some light on your relationship and why it is where it is. If there is something in your relationship with your child that feels stuck, the ideas in this chapter may help to repair it. If you are near the beginning of your relationship with your child, it may help to steer you in the direction of the loving lifelong relationship we all want.
I often see parents thinking they can treat children as things to be efficient about, to deal with and fix. It’s usually because the parent is busy, life is busy and this is how the parent has learned from their own parents to deal with children. It is a dominant, old-fashioned ideology that promises you can slot parenting easily into your busy life. But too often there is a price. If you don’t treat your child as a person, if you have dealt with them rather than felt with them, you might find, when that child becomes a teenager or an adult and you want to have a conversation with them, they are not very forthcoming with you.
You might think the following case study about a thirty-eight-year-old woman and her eighty-one-year-old mother is hardly relevant in a section on pregnancy. But if you haven’t done it yet, pregnancy is a good time to reflect on your own relationships with your parents and think about what you wish for your future relationship with your child. You can think about how you’re going to aim for one that is honest and open and not confined by roleplay.
We form bonds with our children. Natalie, who told me the following story, does have a bond with her mother. But a bond can be so much more than a filial tie; it can be one of real connection, of liking as well as love. That is what honesty and openness can bring.
‘If you met my mother,’ said Natalie, ‘you’d think she was a perfectly nice woman, charming, even – and she is. It’s just I don’t feel I’m myself when I’m with her. I feel I ought to go and see Mum more often, but something in me just doesn’t want to go. I have to force myself to visit her.’
Something about the relationship as Natalie described it was obviously not working. On a later visit, Natalie got some more insight as to what it might be.
A few years ago, I decided to take what was, for me, a risk with Mum. I thought if I was more real with her, maybe she’d be more real with me. So I told her what I was really feeling, that I’d been having bouts of depression since my partner and I had split up. Mum just said, ‘Oh, I have a really happy life.’ And that was the end of it.
It clicked: I realized my ‘difficult’ feelings were unacceptable to her. I think even her own ‘difficult’ feelings are denied by her. So when I’m low, maybe for her it feels like some sort of threat. I have tried to discuss it, but that emotional door is firmly shut.
I want to be kind to Mum but, after thirty-eight years, our relationship is stuck at arm’s length, in the polite-conversation stage. It doesn’t seem we can go anywhere else.
When I got pregnant with Brigitte, I knew I didn’t want her to visit me when I’m old only out of duty. I want her to want to come – or not – out of choice, and I want her to feel she can be herself and share anything she wants to share with me. I thought about how to do this a lot when I was pregnant. I thought, if I don’t feel like myself with Mum, then possibly Mum didn’t or doesn’t feel like herself with me.
This might seem daft, but I made a resolution not to be fake with Brigitte but to always be myself. When Brigitte was born and I was faced with the forceful sincerity that only a baby can give you, I knew it felt like the right thing to do. I decided to do my damnedest to pay her the compliment of being sincere. Of course, the level of honesty has to be age appropriate, for sure.
I’m really working on being open to and accepting of Brigitte’s every mood, not just her smiley ones. And of my own moods too. I now know how hard it can be when you’ve got a baby who cries a lot and is difficult to calm. When that happens, it brings up all sorts of feelings in me. I feel useless, I feel angry – at three o’clock in the morning I have been known to join in with her and cry too. But I know I’m feeling those things, I accept them and work on acting in a caring and loving way, on treating her in the way that I would like to be looked after if I was that baby in my arms.
I have had to work at not feeling like a failure when I can’t cheer Brigitte up. It has sometimes been hard not to frantically try to fix whatever may be wrong, especially when it is not immediately obvious. But instead I try to be with her, alongside her, trying to understand.
I’m not saying it is easy and I’m not saying I manage it all the time, but I talk to her and, when I’m with her, all of me is there. I don’t want to be a cut-out parent from a parenting manual, I want to be myself. I hope this will help Brigitte to be able to be all of herself with me when she’s older.
As expectant parents, and as parents, the best thing we can do is to take the long view. By this, I mean we should not see our babies, children and teenagers as chores to feed and clean or otherwise fix but as people from the off, people we are going to have lifelong relationships with. This gives us the best chance of making our bonds with them loving and secure.
When you become a parent you begin to form a bond with your baby, a bond that can strengthen with every year. In fact, it’s in pregnancy that the foundations for this bond are laid down. Once your child becomes independent from you in practical ways and has their own social network and significant others, this bond can continue to grow as you continue to keep up with each other’s lives and concerns.
How do our relationships with our children generally begin? As soon as you announce you’re pregnant, you are given a barrage of advice about how to eat, what not to drink – and generally what not to do. The actual advice differs according to the culture and the time, but this process – of being given a lot of advice – is pretty much the same.
Such a large number of rules and advice to be followed may give you the impression that there is such a thing as an optimal pregnancy … which may unwittingly lead you to assume there’s such a thing as a perfect parent who produces an impeccable child.
I believe this way of thinking may interfere with our relationship with our children, not help it. Believing that pregnancy, childbirth and parenting can be somehow optimized puts us in danger of bringing into the world an object to be perfected rather than a person to relate to. It would be better, rather than giving in to overbearing, impossible perfection, if we realized that pregnancy and parenthood are not projects. They are, instead, as I keep saying, about bringing into the world a person with whom you are going to have a lifelong liking and loving relationship.
There’s a second reason you may want to think about how you react to all the rules and advice you may be given about pregnancy. Obeying all the rules and taking all the precautions we’re advised to, although some of them may indeed be helpful, can give a false feeling of control over pregnancy or what chromosomes and diseases we pass down to our child.
Think about it like this: there are so many rules about pregnancy, and they vary from culture to culture. But it can really put parents into a panic if they feel they haven’t followed the advice they are given to the letter. In the UK, for example, you will be given advice about avoiding unpasteurized milk products. If you digested some before you knew you were pregnant, you may panic that you’ve contracted some ghastliness that will hurt your baby.
Some risks you will be warned about; some you won’t. The reality is, it’s impossible to have a completely safe pregnancy. Pregnancy is, by its nature, a risk. You may have a child who is different from most children and therefore does not fit into this draconian category of ‘perfect’ – but you are creating a person to love, not a work of art.
Some cultures, like the Kaliai people in Papua New Guinea, believe that for a pregnancy to be successful the couple need to have sexual intercourse as much as possible up to and possibly during labour. The Kaliai also believe that if a pregnant woman eats flying fox, a common meal in their culture, the child will be mentally defective or tremble in the way the flying fox shakes.
You’ll find such customs and taboos throughout the world. Anthropologists call this ‘sympathetic magic’: symptoms are connected to something the mother ate or did during her pregnancy or lactation period. Whatever rules you’re being told to follow, whether they are scientifically proven medical ones or folklore, they’ll be different depending on where you live in the world, and they continue to change. I’m not suggesting you should ignore medical advice, but do consider how it makes you feel.
You might be delighted with this research from Yale University: pregnant women who in the last third of their pregnancy ate five or more portions of chocolate a week had a 40 per cent lower risk of developing pre-eclampsia. And, apparently, there are more reasons to eat chocolate. In 2004, Katri Räikkönen at the University of Helsinki researched the association between the amount of chocolate mothers ate during pregnancy and their baby’s behaviour. When the babies were six months old, their behaviour was rated in various categories, including fear, how easily soothed they were, how often they smiled and laughed. The babies born to women who had been eating chocolate daily during pregnancy were more active and smiled and laughed more. They also measured the stress levels of the mothers. The babies of stressed women who consumed chocolate regularly showed less fear in new situations than the babies of stressed women who did not do so.
The trouble with any advice is that, if it comes too late for you, you may feel you’ve done your baby some harm. The chocolate advice came too late for me. I don’t regularly eat chocolate and my baby laughed frequently anyway. Sympathetic magic, be it medically proven or traditional, can be reassuring when we do follow it and panic inducing when we do not. As I said before, we have less control over pregnancy than we may find it comfortable to believe.
Extreme stress (sometimes called toxic stress) caused by trauma, such as ongoing physical danger in pregnancy, does adversely affect the development of the unborn child, as does malnutrition and, of course, we all avoid such things if we can. Normal stress, like having a difficult job or working through our differences with people, will probably not affect your foetus.
There is a risk you might have a child with an abnormality or that the child might not survive. And there is very likely nothing you could have done about this, no magic that could have prevented it, whether it’s avoiding eating flying fox or whatever rule you think you have broken.
The sympathetic magic I think is most helpful is to think of your experience of pregnancy as affecting the foetus, as though the environment of the womb is telling the baby a story of what they will find after they are born. So, if you enjoy yourself, feel relaxed, eat well and feel optimistic, the story you will be telling them is one that they, and you, will want to continue after the birth.
One way to begin this story is to notice how being given all this pregnancy advice makes you feel. When appropriate, steer those feelings from fear to optimism. I believe it helps if we don’t think about our unborn child as something that might go wrong. I don’t think that’s the way to necessarily build the best foundation for a mutually satisfying relationship with this new person. We get into habits about the way we think about people, and your foetus is the beginnings of an individual person.
Concentrate on what can go right, not the scary stories you hear. Oh, and the same goes for people’s difficult birth stories. Being in a good mood will affect your unborn child. Looking in the direction you want to head in rather than concentrating on where you don’t want to go will make your outlook more positive and serve as a better foundation for your relationship. (Besides, if the worst does happen, having been terrified that it might won’t alleviate any grief.)
The habit of optimism where our children are concerned is necessary. For their sakes, we need to believe they’ll develop and learn and get the hang of things. I know how much easier it is for me to achieve anything when someone I look up to believes in me, and I’m sure I’m not a freak to feel like this. I couldn’t have attempted this book, for example, if my literary agent hadn’t believed in me. In the same way, your child needs you to believe in them so they can thrive. And you can get into this habit of optimism during pregnancy.
Before you meet a new person you may hear about them from other people. You begin to form a picture of this person before you’ve even begun to know them for yourself. Think about the influence what you’ve heard has on what you think about this person. We may like to think that we reserve judgement until we have met them and know them for ourselves but, in my experience, most of us do not.
In her book Origins, Annie Murphy Paul describes an experiment in which 120 pregnant women were asked to describe the movements of their foetuses. If the women knew they were expecting a boy or a girl, it made a significant difference to the language they used to describe the movements they felt. Key words used for female foetuses were ‘gentle’, ‘rolling’ and ‘quiet’, whereas for boys the words were ‘energetic’, ‘vigorous’ and ‘jabbing’. The language of women who didn’t know the sex of their baby didn’t follow these clichéd patterns. This is just one area we need to be self-aware about in order not to lumber the child with expectations of what they are like before they’re here. Instead, we need to get into the habit of observing rather than judging.
How you are thinking about your unborn baby will also influence your future bond with them. If you get into a habit of thinking about your foetus as a parasite, a wilful invader, a burden, or as an imaginary friend, a living god or something in between, it may well make a difference to your later relationship with your child. It will also influence whether you are apprehensive about meeting your baby or, as I hope you are, looking forward to it.
Exercise: How are you thinking about your baby?
Observe yourself as you think about your unborn baby. Think about the way you are thinking about them and how it may influence your future relationship. This will put you in a better position to make a choice about how you begin to relate to this person you have not yet met.
Talk to your foetus, out loud, to help you strengthen your bond. Foetuses can hear from eighteen weeks’ gestation. You will hear yourself and understand how you are relating to this person, which can help you become more aware about what you are bringing to this relationship. It will start the habit of talking to your baby once they are born too, as well as the habit of seeing them as another person.
According to a seminal book first published nearly thirty years ago but which remains as valid now as it was then, there are two main types of parent, regulators and facilitators. In Psychological Processes of Childbearing, Joan Raphael-Leff describes how regulators tend to be more adult-centric and routine-led, whereas facilitators are more child-centric and go with the flow of the infant rather than trying to get the infant to fit in with them.
If you’re a regulator, you prefer to get your baby into a routine. The regulator philosophy is that children feel safe and secure if the same thing happens at the same time every day, because the child knows what’s going to happen and there are no surprises. Parents also know what should happen when and, if they have childcare, the carer sticks to the routine too. People are drawn to this idea if they feel supported by order, by having a structure and knowing what is going to happen and when.
Or you could be a facilitator. They also believe predictability is important for their child, but rather than the routine being predictable they prioritize always giving the baby a predictable response. So the baby gets to know that their cues are responded to and their needs generally met, the idea being that the baby learns that their world is safe and this makes them feel secure.
There isn’t much point in arguing which is better, because you will have a leaning towards being one or the other, perhaps because of your culture or in reaction to how you were brought up. And the roles are fluid. With your first child, you may be a facilitator because when there is only one baby to look after you can follow their lead, but when you have another you may need more of a routine so that everyone’s needs are met. For example, you cannot let the baby sleep if you have to do the school run with an older child or children; the baby will have to get up and come too.
Sometimes one parent in a partnership may be a facilitator and the other a regulator. If this is the case, it won’t be particularly helpful to lob facts backing up your preferred parenting philosophy at each other. Quoting facts and figures and tables and statistics to support your argument is more likely to keep you fixed in your respective corners.
You probably feel your position is based on facts and not your feelings – but we tend to find the facts that fit our feelings rather than the other way around. Discuss it with your partner in terms of your feelings, not facts, trying not to get hooked up on what you think is right or wrong. Feelings are feelings; they are never right or wrong. It may help you to become less entrenched in your position if you admit that you prefer leaning towards a facilitator position or a regulator one because it suits you better rather than believing your position is only for your child’s sake.
Whichever philosophy you are more inclined to follow, remember that acceptance, warmth and kindness are the things that matter most when it comes to our children (and most other relationships as well).
Raphael-Leff noticed that those who fall more into the facilitator camp tend to give in to the emotional upheaval of pregnancy, whereas the regulator tends to hold out against it more. She observed that the facilitator becomes more inward-looking, marvelling at the wonder unfurling inside her, while the regulator wants to cling on to her normal persona for as long as possible and tries not to ‘give in’ to her altered state. She may even feel the pregnancy as invasive. Facilitator types are more inclined to experience their foetus as an imaginary friend.
A facilitator feels that her identity is enhanced by pregnancy, whereas a regulator may feel that her identity is somewhat threatened. Facilitators may regard birth as a mutual transition in life for her and her baby, but a regulator may see birth more as merely a potentially painful event. I mention all these differences to help normalize any feelings you are having. If most of your pregnancy and parenting peers are on the opposite sides of the facilitator/regulator spectrum to you, it can feel lonely.
There are many arguments, customs, traditions, directives and books taking each side to persuade you that one way or the other is better, but what matters – what really matters – is that facilitator or regulator, adult-centric or child-centric, you are honest with your child and with yourself. This means acknowledging your natural inclinations and your feelings. And it means acknowledging that the way you are is because of how you are naturally inclined and how you feel.
Exercise for expectant mothers and fathers
Notice what feelings the experience of becoming a parent is bringing up in you.
Are you running towards being a parent or feeling anxious and wanting to run away from it?
Notice what expectations you are having about becoming a parent. Think about managing these expectations and notice how they are influencing how you are acting. For example, if you are full of worries that begin with ‘What if …?’, try changing that ‘What if …?’ into a ‘So what if …’ If you realize you have been assuming that children just need to be tricked into behaving conveniently, challenge that thought and think in terms of relating to them rather than manipulating them. Think about your body as your principle way of communicating with your baby and visualize it becoming familiar and comfortable to your child and your child becoming comfortable to you. Begin to talk to your baby; they can hear you. Look forward to meeting them.
If you are co-parenting, do this exercise and discuss together what it brought up for each of you.
Exercise for existing parents
If, after reading this, you felt your attitude was ‘wrong’ in pregnancy – for example, you were extremely stressed and emotional, something that can happen not only because of hormones but also because there’s more to worry about – forgive yourself immediately. We want to make sense of our world, it gives us a feeling of being in control, but try to make sense of it in a way that does not leave you with a feeling that you have caused a rupture which is now impossible to repair. For example, you may be telling yourself that you or your partner worried so much when you were pregnant that it caused your child’s current problems with, say, concentration. There may be no environmental reason why your child is the way they are. Observing them in the present is more useful in working out how best to help them than thinking it is something you did when you were pregnant. Heal that stressful pregnancy by acknowledging you did what you could for yourself at the time with the knowledge and resources you had. Berating yourself will not help anyone.
The next few pages are about the way you meet the baby, the birth and how you might feel in the first few minutes, hours, weeks and months after the birth. Although we would all like to have a calm birth and an instant bond, although this time is sold to us as the biggest and most important moment of our lives, it isn’t a fairy story, it’s real life. This means things may not go to plan. I would also say there’s quite a lot of sympathetic magic needed to make us feel safe, to get us through the birth and the first few days. Get help when you need or want it – no one can do this completely alone – and when it comes to advice, follow that which feels most like reassurance to you rather than that which feels like a leap too far. Being guided by that will allow you to be in your life as it is and not make you feel like something is wrong just because life is not measuring up to a perfect ideal.
You’ve probably thought about the type of birth you think would suit you, whether that’s one with all the pain relief going, one where you float in a pool, or something in the middle.
And it is worth taking the time to do some research. Plan whatever to you seems the most desirable and the least traumatic, as that’s what’s more likely to get you and your baby off to a good start.
As I’m sure you’ve heard from other women’s stories, your baby’s birth may not necessarily stick to your plan. A planned epidural may turn out not to be possible and a natural birth may end up as an emergency Caesarean. But planning may get you nearer to the birth you feel you want, so long as you stay flexible about possible, necessary changes to that plan. It’s a bit like planning the life you want: all you can do is steer in the direction you want to go and then be flexible about what you cannot control.
When I was pregnant, I wanted a calm, natural, peaceful birth and I made a birth plan accordingly. Yes, I really would have liked that, but my daughter’s birth was one that went off plan. The baby’s heartbeat dipped – the cord was wrapped three times around her neck – so the lights had to go on and the baby had to be pulled out by ventouse extraction, quickly. But many peaceful birth plans do work out.
My baby had to be whisked off to a special-care unit. I felt a sense of loss that she and I were not having the skin-on-skin contact I believed (and still believe) to be so important. But, we were both alive. It turned out there was nothing wrong with her but precautions were taken because there might have been. As soon as I could stand, I found the unit and met my daughter. Try as they might, the staff could not make me leave. I have told this story many times and I have needed to, because I found her birth traumatic. Now, over twenty-five years later, I can tell it without becoming emotional – but it took a while.
When we do get a live baby at the end of pregnancy and birth there is a feeling we should be grateful, however traumatic the birth experience. But I believe that as well as being grateful it’s important to debrief from the experience, and as often as you need to, in order to regain a sense of equilibrium. This might be part of the reason why, when you’re pregnant, you may hear more scary birth stories than ones that went smoothly – because people may need to debrief more from these births.
Becoming a parent for the first time can be overwhelming in itself, never mind getting over whatever experiences you go through giving birth. Even if it is a beautiful, wonderful experience, it can also feel like a momentous event and so it’s one you need to talk through.
Some mothers feel guilty about or let down by their birthing experiences. But remember, there is no such thing as perfect. All of life is about getting back on course each time the path takes an undesirable turn. It isn’t what goes wrong that matters so much as how we make things right again. And you’re getting back on track as you learn to get to know your baby and form that bond.
I don’t know whether the separation after my daughter’s birth increased my anxiety as a new mother or whether it made my baby more fretful in those early months. Perhaps we would have been like that without the upset of separation immediately after her birth. But I do know that, in those early months, it sometimes seemed as if my baby was hard to soothe, and I was anxious about that. It seemed to me that she was born distressed. By gradually learning how to soothe her, I did find myself somewhat soothed in the process. So, if the birth was traumatizing for her (and it was for me) then in time that rupture was repaired for both of us.
We are, when it comes to our children, often in a hurry. We’re in a hurry to go into labour, to speed up labour, for the baby to breastfeed, to sleep through the night, to wean, sit up, stand up, walk and talk, be independent, get on the property ladder, save for retirement. But if we hold back to observe what our babies can do, we can learn not to be in a rush and our children can teach us to live more in the present.
There is an incredible example of this that happens just after birth. Babies have a seeking mechanism for the breast and can find it with less help than you might have thought. It’s called the breast crawl. Widström and others at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden researched this and found that when a newborn is placed on the mother’s abdomen directly after the birth the baby can find the mother’s breast all on their own. For an average of fifteen minutes nothing much happens, then the baby uses their legs to propel themselves into position, alternating bursts of activity with rest.
At about thirty-five minutes, the baby first puts their hand to their mouth and their gripping reflex allows them to reach for the nipple and stimulate it. At forty-five minutes, sucking and rooting movements begin. And at fifty-five minutes, the infant spontaneously finds the nipple and starts to suckle. These results have been repeated in subsequent studies. Apparently, if the mother has amniotic fluid on her breast, the baby can find their way there even more easily.
It is not surprising babies are born with this instinctive drive to seek out the nipple because it’s the norm for other baby mammals. Like other animals, babies have a variety of natural reflexes facilitating our survival in the world, with one of the most obvious being able to cry to tell you they need your company or to be changed, held and fed.
A further study has shown that babies kept on their mothers’ bodies in skin-to-skin contact cry far less than those kept in a cot next to their mothers. After twenty-five minutes, those babies who had skin-on-skin contact cried for an average of just sixty seconds, whereas for those in cots it was just over eighteen minutes. Fifty-five to sixty minutes later, the babies allowed to breast crawl with continuous skin-to-skin contact were not crying at all, whereas the control group cried for over sixteen minutes. After eighty-five to ninety minutes, babies with skin-to-skin contact cried on average for just ten seconds, compared to over twelve minutes for the group kept mostly in cots.
It’s as though our babies can do this stuff as naturally as any mammal but we have been too keen to interfere with the process. There are other things that may interfere with it too, such as pain-relieving drugs or a Caesarean birth. So many, many babies, probably including you and me, have been denied this self-propelling, natural start in life … and some of us have still turned out to be, on the whole, well balanced, fully functioning, loving people who can form wonderful, lifelong bonds and friendships.
What breast-crawl research and practice can show us is that it’s okay to watch our babies and learn about what they can do and what they need by observing them. When we watch them we can take our cues from them, in more of a natural rhythm of give and take rather than merely doing stuff to them. To allow a baby to follow their instinct to do their own breast crawl or any other natural action, like gazing at you, crying for you, is to respect them and to trust them and from the start to help them to know that they are not an object that things are just done to but a person who has agency. A person who is in a relationship with you.
Throughout your pregnancy, your body has been telling your baby your story and the story of your environment, through what you have been feeling, what you’ve eaten, the sounds that surround you and which come from your body. Once your baby is on the outside of your body, that story continues.
Many parents feel an instant connection and rush of love for their newborn, like Emma.
I was worried I wouldn’t bond with my baby, John, as I’ve never been particularly interested in anyone else’s. But as soon as he was put on me I knew he was gorgeous and I loved him fiercely. My labour lasted ten hours. I walked a lot and I used a birthing stool, which worked for me. It was painful but, as contractions come in waves, I did get a rest between each one. I think knowing to expect that helped a lot. I had a bit of gas and air towards the end. After John was born I felt sorry for the other mothers because their babies weren’t as beautiful as mine! I didn’t realize, because it felt such a special and unique experience, that most mothers think and feel as I did. I didn’t know the other mothers were probably idolizing their own infant and pitying me!
A reaction like Emma’s is probably due to a rush of the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin. Some drugs given during birth, or being shocked or traumatized by the birth, may interfere with the release of oxytocin – which may mean that this rush of love, as Emma describes it, is absent for you.
That was Mia’s experience.
My baby, Lucca, was induced. The birth was extremely painful, the worst pain I have ever had. I couldn’t have an epidural because the anaesthetist couldn’t get the needle in.
When Lucca was born, I didn’t feel anything except shock. My mother was with me, and I made her hold him because, I don’t know why, I just wasn’t ready. Then he was taken to the special-care baby unit for a day.
Those first two weeks I had difficulty even believing he was my son. I seriously thought about having a DNA test because I was sure he had got mixed up at the unit. Anyway, thank god for Mum. She listened to me and my worries calmly and didn’t argue with what I felt. And she told me I wouldn’t always feel like that. Mum stayed with us for a month. She’d say things like, ‘Oh, Lucca has your eyes,’ and ‘He’s so like you were as a baby.’ And gradually I began to bond with him.
It wasn’t until Lucca was about six months old that I feel our bond really cemented. I was holding him in the pool at a baby swimming class and he was hitting the water with his fist. He looked up at me and laughed – and we laughed together.
Those first few months were hard, I can’t lie. I felt I was ‘acting as if’ we were bonded and it got me through, but it also got me down.
Don’t believe that you are a freak or somehow the ‘only one’ who feels how you feel after the birth. What you need is someone to listen to and accept how you feel so you can accept your feelings too. You need to accept where you are rather than berate yourself for not being where you think you should be. This was key in Mia’s progress in forming a bond with Lucca. Mia’s mother did not argue with her or tell her she was wrong to feel how she did but simply acknowledged it.
Exercise: How does your baby feel?
Lie on the floor. Imagine what it is like to feel lonely, hungry, thirsty, uncomfortable in this position yet to have no words – no words to think with and no words to communicate with. Imagine what it is like just to be body and feelings, unable to sit up or roll over or feel that you belong. All you can do is lie there and be your feelings. Now imagine what it feels like to be rescued, to be picked up, made comfortable, held close and to feel part of someone else, although you still have no words, no past, no future, just now and body and feelings.
It can feel hard to give time, respect and warm responsiveness to a child when you’re running on empty. It may be just because you are exhausted right now, or because it feels like those things weren’t given to you by your parents. To parent we need to have been parented in turn. That said, you will probably be amazed just how many reserves you’ll find and how long it is possible to keep going. But this is not indefinitely sustainable so, if you do feel depleted, get support.
That support might be in terms of practical help to free you up to give more attention to your child – or to sleep. Or it might be having someone listen to you and feel with you while you are in the midst of giving what you feel you were not given or have not got to give. Being listened to, being heard, not being judged for whatever feelings parenting brings up for you do not necessarily need to be done by a trained therapist. Friends and family can be good for this too, if they can accept and relate to normal parental ambiguity. We need to remember it is not our feelings or the things we find ourselves imagining that can harm our children, it is how we act towards them. Think about Mark’s case study (see p. 19). The fact that he wanted to run away didn’t adversely affect his son because he didn’t run away.
This is Charlotte’s story:
I used to have really scary thoughts about hurting my baby, Rosanne. When she wouldn’t stop waking me up during the night with crying, I had thoughts of throwing her or shaking her. These thoughts upset me more than her crying did. I felt really ashamed of them and thought, if I told anyone, Rosanne would be taken away from me. Then I tortured myself with thinking perhaps she should be taken away. The only time I had anything like it before was when I wanted to kill my parents when I was a teenager. Those thoughts were not as intrusive as the ones I had about my daughter, though. I really thought I might lose it and hurt her. When I couldn’t stand it any more I plucked up my courage and talked to my sister. She told me that everyone feels like that at times and what she does is just watch herself have the thoughts, just like listening to an annoying person you have no intention of being influenced by. Just having her accept me as normal and not think I was going mad really helped, and I think the thoughts of hurting my daughter started to lose their grip on me after this. And I know I can talk to my sister again if they were to come back. I wish I’d spoken about it earlier.
If, as a parent, we feel we can’t talk about less-than-ideal thoughts, feelings or imaginings, they can become bigger and harder to manage. It is important to be able to talk about them, to have a place to dispel feelings in a cathartic way, so we don’t act them out at the expense of our children.
The sort of support you need is someone who really hears you, who gets what you mean and can take on board all your feelings without being overwhelmed by them so that person acts as a sort of calm container for them. Their calmness comes from the knowledge that, whatever you’re going through in terms of anxiety or doom, it will pass. Their gentle optimism can carry you through. That is the sort of help that Mia, in the previous section, got from her mother and Charlotte got from her sister.
You need this sort of support because, in turn, the baby needs you to be able to hold all their feelings without being overwhelmed by them. It’s your job to offer this kind of supportive relationship to your child. And it’s hard to give that sort of attention to anyone unless you’re getting some of it too. You may have to spell out to your nearest and dearest that this is the type of help you need.
You may also need practical help. Some people around you may be good at guessing that you do and offering help but, if they aren’t, do ask for it. Also, it is not just mothers who need emotional support but fathers too. Humans are not meant to stand alone, mute and strong; we are pack animals, members of a tribe. Get the tribe to help. It is so much harder to finance a family now than it was for the generation before us because buying or renting a home costs many times as much as it did. I believe that, while we wait for the politicians to rectify this unfairness, perhaps the previous generation could help out new parents financially as well as emotionally.
We need help that enables us to form a better bond with our children, not help that allows us to push them away. Sheena’s story gives an example of how that can happen and how to get back on track if it does. Sheena, a part-time stylist, already had two children and was pregnant with twins.
When Sheena had a month to go of her pregnancy she was told that one of her twins wasn’t thriving and she’d need to be induced. The subsequent birth was traumatic and dangerous both for Sheena and for the babies. One twin, Charlie, was born fine; the other, Ted, required a lot of help and had to be incubated. Sheena stayed in hospital with poorly Ted and Charlie went home. For four weeks, Sheena helped and held Ted until he was well enough to leave hospital. Sheena’s partner, Judd, a very successful musician, worked long hours and was often away from home on tour, and either wouldn’t, or perhaps felt he couldn’t, take extra time off to become more involved in his family at this time. Possibly he also feared that he wouldn’t be able to control his emotions if he dwelt on the fact that he had nearly lost his wife and one of his children in childbirth. The often-asserted belief that men have to be ‘strong’ does, in my opinion, far more harm than good.
When she got home Sheena couldn’t quite take on board the fact that she was the mother of twins. She kept on the nursery nurse they’d hired to look after Charlie. She knew Charlie was hers on a cognitive level but didn’t really feel as though he was – she saw him as the nanny’s and Ted as hers. Because this felt so uncomfortable, she wanted to forget it and believe that nothing was wrong.
Sheena distracted herself by showing everyone just how fine she was. She went out a lot, regularly clubbing until the small hours. Her feelings kept hitting her like shocks – the shock of having twins, the shock of a very difficult birth, the shock of nearly losing Ted and, worst of all, the feeling Charlie was not really hers. When she felt one of these shocks, rather than looking into it, she got more childcare and distracted herself by going out.
When Charlie cried she never really felt like comforting him. If the nanny wasn’t around, she’d ask one of the children, Judd, her mother, the cleaner – ‘Anyone but me,’ she said later. Her way of comforting him was to try to distract him rather than soothing him through any distress – not unlike how she was trying to distract herself from being overwhelmed by her own feelings.
It wasn’t until Charlie was about four years old that, emotionally, Sheena could accept him as her son. ‘I think I was in shock for over three years, but I only realized this when I started to come out of it,’ she says.
What affect has all this had on Charlie? Now, the twins are ten years old. Sheena’s other children, including Ted, are happy-go-lucky, but Charlie is an anxious child and very clingy. He seems to feel he cannot take any relationship for granted and that, to be lovable, he must work hard. Sheena says Charlie would do anything for Ted, even though Ted does not return the compliment, or at least, hasn’t yet returned it. Sometimes friends and siblings experience Charlie’s wanting to please as neediness and find it annoying. This compounds his problem and then he tries even harder to get it right for other people. This insecurity he has about relationships in all likelihood has something to do with the early separation from his mother and the lack of bonding after her return. Sheena says the only time he is more relaxed is when she spends one-on-one time with him – no easy feat when you have a job and four children.
But once a week Sheena and Charlie go to an art class, just the two of them. Sheena says it’s helping. When the art class doesn’t meet because of holidays she makes sure they have their two hours every week at exactly the same time, to do art together, just the two of them.
I asked Sheena what might have helped her to do things differently, early on. She felt that, had the birth been less traumatic, she might not have been in so much shock, which she thinks is one reason she went into denial about being a mother of twins. But she thinks the main cause of the rupture was not being with Charlie for those four weeks after the birth. When she got home, she says, ‘He didn’t smell like my baby, but Ted did.’ She also thinks if she’d had counselling at the time she would’ve been able to face up to what had happened and talk through the impact it had on her. Although Charlie was crying and wanted to be found by Sheena, she too needed to be understood and to be found. By not being able to feel for herself, she was impaired when it came to feeling for others, especially for Charlie. Not feeling for him made it easy for her to distract herself and run away from him, to leave him in the care of the nanny.
Sheena loves and adores her Charlie these days, relishing her one-to-one time with him. By spending as much time as she can with him, she is mending the early rupture. When we are bringing up our children we can only do our best, and, as I keep repeating, to have good relationships with our children it is not so much the ruptures that count but how they are repaired.
Now Sheena and Charlie’s bond is cementing, Charlie’s sense of security in his relationships is improving. As his sense of longing diminishes, his sense of joy will increase. Because the good news is that, although we are never again the sponges we were as babies, we are not made of stone. We form in relationship with others and we can re-form in relationship with others as well, for the rest of our lives. If Sheena hadn’t addressed this early rupture with Charlie, it’s possible that, when he got older, his romantic attachments might have taken on the same pattern of feeling insecure, and love to him would have felt more like the pain of longing rather than joyful union.
One day, Charlie may need more help to become more trusting in relationships and less anguished. He may need his parents to tell him the story of his early life so he can make sense of the way he feels. It will help him to know that the way he feels is not because of any fault of his, and certainly not because he is less lovable than anyone else, but because when we are babies we are so very impressionable.
Sheena’s partner, Judd, didn’t notice she hadn’t bonded with Charlie. And he didn’t attempt to bond with Charlie either. Had he taken on the role of a primary carer from Charlie’s birth, rather than completely relying on the nursery nurse to fulfil all Charlie’s needs, I believe Charlie would have felt more secure in his relationships. I am all for extra help, but children need a primary bond with their parents.
I’m not telling this story so we can tut-tut at Sheena and Judd. He was just doing what the men in his family, and many men in the past, have always done – leaving the early parenting to mothers and to paid help. It is hard to break these cultural patterns because they are so entrenched, unless we are sufficiently aware of them to challenge them.
Sheena probably learned her pattern of dealing with her difficult feelings by distraction rather than working through them because it was how her early caregivers had tried to cheer her up. Just as her husband believed that parenting is not a man’s role, it’s easy to believe a way of acting is ‘natural’, whereas it is merely indoctrinated. And these indoctrinations can get in the way of our relationships with our children. It’s not a matter of being a ‘bad’ parent or a ‘good’ parent – everyone does their best. But if we can make ourselves aware of as many of the effects and beliefs of our culture and our upbringing as we can, we can make repairs that lead to a more functional way of going forward.
Most parents need help with their children, from relatives or paid helpers, so they can work, or even just take a shower. However, the most important people in a child’s life should be their parents (and remember: by ‘parent’, I mean the person or people who have the primary responsibility for the child, so ‘parent’ may mean foster parent, adoptive parents, step-parent, guardian, surrogate parents, rather than people who temporarily help with this responsibility). Everyone needs a primary bond as a safe anchor in their life. Paid helpers leave, and this can break the primary bond, which may have effects later on. And children need to feel they are a priority for their parents, especially in their early years. They need to feel like they’re people to relate to rather than tasks to be delegated.
Exercise: What support do you need?
Write your name or draw a symbol to represent you in the middle of a piece of paper. Around you, write or draw your support network. Think about who will support you naturally and who you will have to ask. For example, your mother may show up and ask the right questions and listen and offer to pay your rent for a year; your sister may cook you meals with the minimum of fuss; your partner may help to keep you company, the home clean and the family financially afloat. Other help may need organizing, for example, starting or joining a group of other parents in a similar position to you or getting professional support if you need it. Draw your diagram using solid lines from support to you if it will just happen naturally and dotted lines if you will have to arrange it. Think about the types of support you might need – emotional and practical. Look for any gaps on your support diagram, then take steps to fill them.
And parents may need support not just after the birth of a baby but at any time while their children are dependent. So this exercise can be repeated every couple of years so that you can ensure you get the help you need to help you make the best possible relationships with your children.
You have a huge advantage over your baby; you have some idea what to expect from becoming a parent. You may have watched your parents look after younger siblings, you will have witnessed other parents with their children, you may remember how you felt as a child, you may have read parenting blogs and books and, most importantly, you have been a baby. Your experience will be consigned to unconscious memory, but it will still be there.
A baby, on the other hand, has no idea what it’s like to be a parent. They haven’t even been a baby before. Everything a baby experiences is a first experience. It is almost impossible to imagine what that’s like, but try to bear it in mind. The first experience of anything forms the deepest impression. These days, as adults, we have fewer opportunities for first impressions. When we meet a new person we get an impression of that person, but it will not do much to change our philosophy of people in general, consolidated long ago.
If you go on holiday to a new place and the people happen to be lovely and the weather just how you like it, that place will probably have good associations and you will think of it fondly. In the same way, life will be easier for a baby if their first impression of the world is as a safe and loving place, one where they feel they belong. Whatever calamities befall them in life, they will be less easily knocked off course and they will recover more quickly if they have always felt that they count, they belong and they are lovable. They will either get this feeling from their very earliest caregivers – you – or they will get different messages.
Imagine if you suddenly found yourself in a desert. No food, no shelter, nothing to drink and, worse than all this, completely alone. How would you feel after one hour? After two? Then, what if, in the distance, you saw some people? You would go berserk trying to get their attention. You’d scream and shout and wave. You’d be desperate. Maybe a baby feels a bit like this.
A baby comes from the womb, an environment synchronized by nature to their needs, into the outside world. After their birth the baby must signal to us what their needs are. It is up to us to read the baby’s bodily cues to decipher what they need. Every time they manage to communicate and we manage to respond appropriately it is as if that person in the desert managed to get the attention of those people and was rescued.
If being alone in the desert was your first experience of being alive, you would form your world views and your personality by how those people responded to you. Whether that response was attuned or mismatched; whether you had to scream for a long time before you were attended to; whether your needs were quickly understood and met. And, probably more than anything, how long you were left alone without company when you wanted it would lay down a feeling, a mood deep inside yourself, that would become a default way of being for a long time, until enough other experiences happened to change this.
Babies come into the world pre-programmed to form attachments – bonds – to others. Whether people generally have easy, close and loving attachments, or needy, clingy, complicated ones, or whether they find it hard to attach at all or kid themselves they are better off alone, is, according to attachment theory, rooted in how they were related to as babies. The four main styles of forming bonds are: secure attachment style, insecure/ambivalent attachment style, avoidant attachment style and dismissive attachment style. What you want, in your baby, is to foster a ‘secure’ attachment style. And to do this, it’s first worth thinking about the attachment style you had in relation to your caregivers. If you didn’t have a secure bond, you will have to be more thoughtful, self-aware and deliberate about how you are with your baby in order to form a bond than if attuned and empathic responding comes naturally to you.
If, when you were a baby, your needs for closeness and sustenance were usually consistently met, you’re likely to grow up feeling that other people are generally good. This means you can trust people, get on with others, generally feel optimistic and connect easily with others. All this helps you to have a nice life. Thinking you are an okay person and that other people are okay too optimizes your luck in life. It is as though, when you were dropped into the desert, there was always someone there to catch you, you did not have to work very hard to get their attention, they were there for you and very soon you were not alone and did not feel alone.
This is what we like to aim for. Sometimes parents worry because, when babies reach several months old, they can suddenly become clingy. It’s very common for them to want only you and not willingly go to other people. It’s because they are securely attached – a good thing – but have not yet developed what psychotherapists call ‘object permanence’. This is the ability to feel someone or something exists when they cannot see them or it. If you keep meeting your baby’s needs regularly, they will develop object permanence sooner or later and this phase will pass. I do not like to give an average age for when this will happen because for some it happens sooner, some later.
If, as an infant, your needs were only inconsistently met, if you often had to scream long and hard to get attention and sometimes even then didn’t get it, it’s likely the belief you have of the world is that you will be ignored, overlooked and will have to make a lot of noise to be noticed. You will not be able to take companionship for granted. You might not think of yourself as generally an okay person, nor will you assume that most other people are good and trustworthy. It is as though you had to jump up and down a lot in the desert to get those people to pay attention and they often left you and didn’t take you with them. Although your first experiences tend to give you your blueprint, it’s possible to develop a secure attachment style if a more consistently positive experience happens often enough to supplant the earlier patterns of relating.
If you were often left to cry it out and a lot of the time no one answered your cries, you tend to give up. Your internal belief system and mantra would become ‘I won’t get their attention so what’s the point of trying?’ You wouldn’t believe you have influence over other people, you wouldn’t expect to be understood by them and you’d grow up seeing yourself as a loner. When the people pass you in the desert, eventually you stop waving to get their attention because you don’t see the point – and they probably think that, as you’re not waving and crying, you don’t need them. The disadvantage of this style is that, in later life, you can’t allow other people to get close to you. As with the insecure attachment style, it is possible to work to change an attachment style, with a lot of practice and work.
Imagine if you were in that desert and the people often did not stop and then, if they did, instead of seeing to your needs, they expected you to meet theirs, or they abused you, didn’t give you sustenance, even caused you physical harm. Imagine the effect that would have on your belief system and how you’d learn to relate to other people. You would probably see others as a source of harm and you would develop little or no empathy and a shaky moral conscience.
Exercise: What’s your attachment style?
Can you figure out what sort of attachment style you formed in relationship to your caregivers? Can you trace how these attachment patterns were passed down through the generations of your family to you? If you feel you have an insecure attachment style, an avoidant attachment style or a dismissive attachment style, what will you do differently with your baby to what was done to you? If you feel secure in your attachment style, where do you feel that sense of security coming from? How will you replicate it with your baby?
You probably hear your infant’s cries like a demand. This is because a baby’s cry is what we call a ‘coercive’ cry. People and, indeed, all mammals are biologically programmed to respond to a coercive cry – they are essential to the survival of the species. The cry is an alarm, like a zebra in a herd who notices a lion and communicates this to the herd who then immediately react. You cannot help but be pulled to obey it.
A baby’s emotions tend not to be subtle; when they are distressed, they sound desperate. That’s because they are. It helps if you know that wants and needs are the same thing for an infant. A baby cannot survive without you.
If you try to block out a coercive cry, you will have to shut down parts of yourself to do it, to go against your nature. You will also be jeopardizing the development of your baby because intimate companionship is vital to babies and vital for your bond together. Their brains do not develop on their own but in relationship with other brains in their environment. Our brains don’t stop developing in relationship with those around us until the day we die, but those early days, early months and early years are when most connections are formed and so babies need us to be around and available to relate to.
If you weren’t automatically and naturally responded to, surrendering to this process of hearing and responding to the coercive cry will bring up feelings for you. I repeat this warning rather a lot, but if you do feel anything along the spectrum of unsettled to despairing in response to becoming a parent, find support. You do need someone to contain these feelings for you, not to be overwhelmed by them, so you can in turn contain the feelings of your baby.
When babies feel unheld and unmet in their distress what seems to happen is that they dissociate, cut themselves off from it. They may stop crying but, as studies of babies left on their own to teach them to sleep without company have shown, their cortisol levels remain as high as they were when they were crying. Dissociating from distress is a mammalian survival mechanism, a reflex, but the downside to it is that people can experience flashbacks to those feelings they cut off from. Dissociating from a memory leaves people without any control over when they access it, and it can come to haunt them as though it had come out of nowhere.
If you’re having difficult feelings as a parent, you may wonder why. It’s because having a child of your own can trigger any feelings you dissociated from as a child, which may be uncomfortable, disconcerting, distracting and strange. The triggers may be subtle, but you can be triggered just the same.
If you train your baby not to cry by not responding to them, what you are doing is causing the baby to dissociate from their feelings. They may seem generally fine, but what can happen is that these feelings may surface later in childhood and/or adulthood. I don’t think this is a risk worth taking, especially as there’s no risk attached to responding to a coercive cry.
If you left your baby to cry for long periods when they were little because you thought it was the best thing for them and for you, what I’ve written may be frightening or angering you. It won’t do any good to beat yourself – or me – up about it. What you can do to repair the situation is to start to take your child’s moods seriously, not dismiss them as unimportant or silly, and to keep your child close when they want to be close. You can even tell them what you did and why you did it and that it wasn’t their fault. If they are haunted by difficult feelings that seem to come out of nowhere and which they cannot understand, telling them may help them make sense of how they feel. Being taken seriously for what they feel is healing whatever age a child (or an adult) is, and if the person taking you seriously is your parent and they are not defensive and blaming, is powerful medicine indeed.
We can never synchronize ourselves to our baby as perfectly as nature synchronizes the womb. There will inevitably be misunderstandings and ruptures. What we can do is attempt, as far as we can, to care for, respond and react appropriately to facilitate the development of our children’s sense of security and to make the transition from being in utero to being on the outside as smooth as we can. Those cries you hear are nature’s coercive cries. Loneliness is a feeling like discomfort, thirst or hunger that needs attending to for an individual to keep healthy.
During pregnancy and after the birth it can feel as if everything you felt before has been multiplied by ten. Victoria is nine months pregnant with her second child: ‘I was watching the Winter Olympics speed skating and the woman I was rooting for fell over and crashed out of the race. I burst into tears. That is not me. I am not usually this emotional.’
Well, it might not have been you, Victoria, but it is you now. If you feel things more than you are used to feeling them, don’t assume there’s something wrong with you. It’s not that you’re going mad. And although your feelings may seem exaggerated, it doesn’t mean they don’t matter or that what you feel charged up about is not significant for you. For example, being upset about seeing a sportswoman doing her best and then crashing anyway may be a metaphor for your own anxieties so the cry you have about her can give you some much-needed release. And when you see her get up again and line up for the next race, she is a good model for you.
Hormones, or whatever the trigger is for this increase of emotion, make feelings seem to come from nowhere, but they are just an exaggeration of what you already feel. And having highly attuned feelings will help you be more responsive to your own needs and your baby’s too.
The baby might not be the only one plagued with loneliness. Although you’ve had nine months to get used to the idea, becoming a parent happens overnight. And as your old life fades into the background and your new one has yet to get itself established, becoming lonely is a real danger. Unless you are in the centre of a large family or other group who are geographically and emotionally close to you, it is usual to feel lonely as a new parent.
Juli is a thirty-two-year-old mother of one. Johann, the baby’s father, left her when the baby was two months old. Juli told me, ‘I didn’t sign up to do this alone, but as soon as Sophie came along he left.’ She was shocked, panicky – and lonely. Loneliness is a feeling that afflicts many parents, even if they haven’t just been left by their partner. What made Juli feel even more lonely was that her parents seemed not to be able to see, or to admit, how near to her wits’ end she was.
Loneliness used to be associated with poor social skills or being a bit odd, so there’s still stigma and shame attached to it. But there shouldn’t be: loneliness affects everyone. It’s felt so strongly because it’s alerting you to what you need to do – find company. Humans are not isolates; we are pack animals. We feel hungry when we need to eat, we feel physical pain when we need to get out of the fire, and we feel lonely when we need to be with other people and feel seen and accepted by them. Loneliness is a necessary feeling, just like thirst and hunger. Ignore it at your peril, as it can be a major cause of deterioration of mental and physical health.
When we’re lonely we can feel how bad it is for us, so why don’t we just join a group or make more friends? Sadly, it’s often not that easy. Juli was exhausted and having to do something about her loneliness felt like another job she had no energy for. But there’s another reason why tackling loneliness feels so hard. Feelings of loneliness trigger a state of hyper-vigilance for social threat and rejection, make us super-sensitive to possible rejection or coolness. And when we expect social threat, we can behave in ways that are more likely to get us rejected. Even though we may feel on the edge, we fear putting ourselves back into the centre again in case we are rebuffed – and therefore we pull ourselves even further away from people. This is how expecting to be rejected can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Juli’s confidence took a nosedive after her partner left and she began to think of herself as ‘useless’. The thought of joining a parents’ support group or going to the mother-and-baby singing sessions she saw advertised locally made her just want to curl up indoors and never come out. It’s not only humans that feel like this; separate any social creature from their group and they will feel wary of rejoining that group or wary of joining a new group, in case they are pushed away and find themselves even more isolated. Research has shown that rats, and even fruit flies, after they’ve been separated from their group, don’t throw themselves back into the middle of it but stay on the edges. We have an advantage over rats and fruit flies: we can use reasoning to override our instincts to get what we need. Yet it feels hard and we come up with all sorts of excuses not to do it. It is normal to feel that you won’t fit into a new group and to make up reasons for that, the most common of which are thinking that you are somehow inferior (‘They’ll all know what they’re doing and I don’t’) or superior (‘I don’t want to join a group of parents who will only want to talk about weaning and nappies’). It may seem surprising that Juli, who a few months before had been a competent HR professional, couldn’t face joining a group, but it isn’t. People in isolation are more likely to scorn the idea of social interaction by thinking they are somehow better, or somehow worse, than other people, and thus give themselves an excuse not to try. Both these thought patterns – ‘I’m too good’ and ‘I’m not good enough’ – lead to a spiral of withdrawal and intensify the sense of social isolation.
It felt like a big step for Juli to admit the loneliness and talk herself into joining a group to combat it.
I’ve joined a breastfeeding-support group that I found through Facebook and it’s made a world of difference. We meet up a couple of afternoons a week in each other’s houses. It’s good to have other mums listen to my experience, and I feel useful when I can offer support to them too. The group is online as well, which is invaluable in the middle of the night – so many of us are awake anyway! I can see I got into a habit of telling myself I was useless. Sharing with other parents about this and other woes has not made them go away but it has made them more manageable.
Exercise for coping with loneliness
- Be prepared to recognize when you are lonely. Don’t deny it or judge yourself negatively for feeling it.
- Understand what loneliness does to you: remember, as a member of a social species, it’s dangerous to feel isolated.
- Learn to recognize that hyper-vigilant state so you can over-ride it – don’t be a fruit fly. Quite often, new parents don’t want to join groups because they’ll feel too clever for them or too inadequate, so watch out for such feelings of superiority or inferiority. They’re just excuses to cling to the distrust that loneliness can produce.
- Reach out and be reachable. See what parent and baby groups are available near you, see if you can connect with other local parents online, ask friends over to visit and visit friends.
Loneliness can be a factor in post-natal depression too, although depression after the birth or the acquisition of parental responsibility has many causes. Symptoms of post-natal depression include: irritability, deep sadness and despair, feeling useless, anxiety, insomnia, every small thing feeling like it takes a huge effort, wanting to hide away from others, thoughts of self-harm and, in extreme cases, psychosis. Post-partum depression affects 10 to 15 per cent of new mothers each year. Several studies also suggest that as many as 10 per cent of fathers also suffer from this psychological disorder.
This is Paula’s experience of post-natal depression:
Ricky screamed when I didn’t pick him up and he screamed when I did. When I handed him to my partner, she seemed to know what to do more than me. I began to feel I didn’t know what I was doing. I was terrified I would somehow break Ricky doing a nappy change. I was so ashamed about how I felt I told anyone who asked, including my health visitor, that I was ‘fine’.
I was sure there must be something wrong with Ricky, though, to cry so much. I took him to the GP’s surgery, but they could find nothing wrong. I felt even worse because then I felt ashamed for taking him in.
I began to feel my baby would be better off without me. I couldn’t even breastfeed as my nipples hurt so much – it felt like pins going through me. Bottle-feeding made me feel like even more of a failure.
It all came to a head when Ricky was twelve weeks old. I completely broke down and my partner and my brother saw I wasn’t coping. They wouldn’t accept my reply of ‘fine’ any longer. I had to confess I wanted to die, or at least run away. I have never felt so awful, so bleak, so depressed. It felt much bigger than just becoming a mother. A dense cloud of misery had descended on me.
It was tough on my partner because she had to do most of the baby care. She was finding it hard to cope too, although she wasn’t in the dark place I was, and I don’t think she had time for my feelings as well as everything else. She made me go to therapy, which made me angry at the time because it felt like she was pushing me away. I thought she and the baby were the couple and I was being pushed out.
When I look back at this period it seems unreal as I was, in a matter-of-fact way, planning to kill myself. I believed everyone would be better off without me. I fully expected to follow it through – but thought I’d try therapy first.
The therapist asked me to think about my own babyhood. I couldn’t remember it so I asked my family. My cousin told me that when I was three months old my parents had handed me into the care of an aunt and a nanny and gone abroad for a month without me. I asked them why they’d done this. My father said they were getting a bit fed up with being in the world of baby and needed a break. My mum told me she was so upset when they came back because I didn’t recognize her. And she said it in a tone as though she was still cross with me.
I felt sad because I hadn’t been enough for her as a baby, and anger that she had left me. And I realized why Ricky felt like an alien to me – I had felt like an alien to my own mother. I realized why I felt my partner and Ricky were the couple and I was pushed out, because as a baby I really had been pushed out. I started to think, ‘No wonder I felt I couldn’t do it, my parents couldn’t do it either.’
Making this connection somehow helped. I began slowly, indiscernibly, to get better. When Ricky was eight months old, I realized I was his mother and therefore I had to be there for him. I came to a sort of acceptance that I was for him and he was for me. I could connect more with him and feel for Ricky when he cried rather than take it as though it was a punishment directed at me.
After a year of going to therapy weekly I was not back to my normal self but I was more accepting of my new normal self. Gradually, I got to know this new version of myself – and even got to like her. And, by the way, my son is a kind and lovely twenty-two-year-old now.
It can help to find a narrative that makes sense of your feelings, like Paula did. Even knowing there is a narrative that would make sense of how you feel, even if you do not know what it is, can be sufficient.
The more we can speak about impulses and reactions we have in relation to our baby and have them understood and accepted, the more we are able to reflect and to perceive the baby as a baby and not as an object on to which we are unknowingly projecting a monster or a ghost from our past. And the more we can speak, the more we can feel that we are not a monster because we imagine we may harm the baby or fantasize about escaping from them or running away from our life. Remember: a fantasy is not harmful when it is just a fantasy. Talking about fantasies and feelings can help to place them where they were first felt, that is, to think about them in the context of our own upbringing. This can help to minimize them.
I believe we all need someone non-judgemental to talk to, someone we can be fully and unapologetically ourselves with – that is how your baby needs to use you, after all. This person or people can be other parents who understand. Or, if you want to speak to a therapist or your doctor, do not hesitate because you’re thinking you don’t feel bad enough to warrant it or so bad they will be shocked and horrified. Having a baby is a big deal emotionally and physically. All the different hormones are exaggerating your emotions and, if your feelings cause you to withdraw from interacting with your baby or your family, it’s a good idea to seek support and professional help.
This is Gretchen’s experience of post-natal depression:
I was the first of my friendship group to have a baby. I missed my old life. I missed work and I missed seeing people. At work, I was a high achiever with high standards. As a mother, I felt as if I was wrong all the time. I did all the right things, like going to mother-and-baby groups, but when I was there I’d compare myself with the other mothers and find myself lacking.
When my baby cried it grated on me rather than making me want to soothe him. Leaving the house was so stressful I thought I’d end up forgetting the baby in a shop, so most of the time I didn’t bother. I avoided answering the door. Even getting dressed was too much some days. I wasn’t sleeping much. I’d needed forceps at the delivery and I’d found the whole procedure very invasive. When I did get to sleep I’d keep waking up, reliving the whole nightmarish experience of the birth.
Just before my boyfriend got home I’d get dressed. I’d tell him everything was wonderful. I thought if I told him or anyone just how useless I felt they would judge me. He did notice I was nervous and shaky and kept asking me what was wrong. I said it was just lack of sleep and I was okay. I really wasn’t okay.
I dragged myself to another local mother-and-baby group, ready to pretend I was fine again, just so I’d have something to tell my boyfriend when he got home. One woman there, Suzi, announced that she was not coping, described how awful she felt. The others started to give her advice, which I could see just made her feel worse. I took my courage in both hands and said, ‘Me too,’ and I told her my experience. We became friends. Suzi found out about a group for women with depression – together, we thought this is what we had. The group had a crèche. All we mums did was crafts – like kids, sticking bits of cloth on to paper to make collages – but it was the best thing for both of us. As we stuck and sewed things, everyone just talked. Told it like it was. I think realizing I wasn’t a freak and other people were going through the same thing was what made the depression begin to shift.
Three years later, I have a great relationship with my son. Our sticky start doesn’t seem to have done much damage. I now have a second child, a daughter who was born a year ago. The differences this time are that now I’m not isolated and I don’t believe that, unless everything is perfect, I’m a failure. It’s not that I think these are the reasons for my depression after my son was born, it just felt hormonal to me.
Remember: your experience and your feelings after a baby comes into your life are not right and they are not wrong. However weird and unusual they seem to you, do not keep them to yourself. Find like-minded people to talk to like Gretchen did, and don’t hesitate to seek professional help. Don’t think you are not in a bad enough state, or in too bad a state, to do this. You not only owe it to yourself to feel present and correct, you owe it to your child.
Exercise: The hidden parts of parenting
The following exercise is what is called a guided visualization. You will be asked to visualize a scenario in your mind’s eye and the idea is to really explore it to try to find out what’s going on in your hidden depths.
Imagine three rooms. The first one is a reception room, then two doors lead off the reception room into the second room and the third room. Think of this three-roomed house as a metaphor for you as a parent. In your mind’s eye, go to the reception room. This is where you receive visitors. Here, you have your public face on.
The second room is where you feel most unsure, and perhaps most angry, regretful, ashamed, frustrated, sad or dissatisfied. This is the room of difficulty and vulnerability when it comes to being a parent. Walk into that room and dare to feel what it feels like in here. Have a look round and note what you see without judging yourself. As you spend time in this room and feel what it is like to be in here, notice your breathing. If you were holding your breath or breathing shallowly, breathe normally again. Take one last look round the room of difficulty and then come back into the reception room again, back into the public space. Notice what it feels like to shut the door on the room of difficulty but know that the difficulty is still there.
Now it’s time to open the door to the third room. This is the room where you feel most positive. In this room everything is going right, you feel a sense of pride in who you are as a parent and you feel the joy you can feel with your child or children, and possibly more pride than you could show in the reception room. Have a look round the positive room and see what it is that is there. Keep looking and notice what you feel in this room. Good.
Now come back into the reception room. As you stand in the reception room, have a good sense of what is behind both closed doors. Remember: we all have these rooms as well as the public face of parenting when other people can see us with our children. And we all have how we feel about ourselves as parents, things we feel great about and things we feel less than great about. What is so important is not to compare our own private room of difficult feelings to other people’s public face of parenting.
Remember: we all need someone accepting to talk to about those two rooms off the reception room. Someone who can hear us when we feel flooded with love and someone who can accept us and the more ambiguous feelings that parenting brings up.