I Guess I'm a Mom Now? Parenthood as Transition

It’s probably a good thing that nature makes us wait some 40-odd weeks before a baby arrives. As my grade school teachers used to say, time to “think about what you’ve done.” My own rapidly expanding belly and the movements inside it remind me constantly, something new is coming. These forty weeks are a time to inventory the unknowns; good, bad, and simply different; that come with this terra incognita.

When you start to tell people about a baby on the way, some kind cynic will give you the meta-advice to “get ready for the unsolicited advice.” Brace yourself. I don’t mind tips on annual sales and Youtube videos to watch. The strange nuggets for me are the sweeping, semi-ominous ones like “everything will change”, “you have no idea til you get there”, and my personal (least) favorite “it’s never going to be the same.” What on Earth am I supposed to do with that? 

From what I was hearing, I was pretty much going to turn out like this within the first two months.

These dark auguries smack of something called a “crisis orientation to parenting”, as described in the words of mid-century social work scholar E.E. LeMasters. While the word “crisis” can have connotations of opportunity, the first definition to come up on Google is “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.” Reading LeMasters’ work now, it is apparent that the couples he interviewed were ill-prepared by their 1950s culture’s fantasies of family life. As LeMasters writes, the 38 out of 54 couples in his study who seemed to be in crisis:

 “...appear to have almost completely romanticized parenthood [before giving birth.] They felt that they had had very little, if any, effective preparation for parental roles. As one mother said: ‘We knew where babies came from, but we didn't know what they were like."

-LeMasters, 1957, Parenthood as Crisis

Perhaps the “crisis orientation to parenting” I hear in the advice given to me by others, comes from a cultural desire to not let another generation be caught unawares. Parenting is hard work, and the birth of a family’s first child does force a rapid reorganization of energy, a sleep-deprived whirlwind of new tasks and problem-solving in order to simply keep a household afloat. But I cannot accept that the best way to greet a baby is as a harbinger of crisis.

I have to be humble with the parts I I haven’t lived yet. But I can’t help thinking, what helps me prepare for the unknown territory ahead is a gentler framing of this time as one of developmental transition for me and my husband, as well as our baby. Developmental transitions are both biological and sociocultural as roles and identities change throughout the life cycle. The event of a birth signals a transition into life for a baby, into a child-rearing unit for the family, and into parenthood itself for the adults involved.

The psychologist Erik Erikson was one of the first to propose a theory of developmental transitions that spanned the entire life cycle, which is still one of the best-known and widest taught today. A student of Freud’s, he borrowed heavily from his teacher’s theory of psychosexual development. His contributions were to expand the breadth of the model to include the changing psychological tasks beyond childhood and through adulthood, and to examine how one’s interpersonal world shaped their development.

Other thinkers have since framed their own models and concepts of developmental transitions throughout adulthood. In 1973, a time marked with rising acceptance of women and women’s issues in academia, Dr. Dana Raphael introduced the term “matrescence” to describe the transition for women into the role of “mother.” This has been adapted into “patrescence” for the parallel process of a man’s development into “father”. The word structure harkens back to other named human developmental transition periods such as “adolescence” and “senescence”, which refers to aging.

To have a name for this time of life gives it defining lines, a sense of if not understanding then at least the possibility of understanding. Words act as anchors. As a therapist, I have heard countless clients express profound relief at a diagnosis that gives them the words for what they’re going through. There is power in knowing what something is called, much like the folktales and fantasy stories where knowing your enemy’s true name confers power over them. Not to mention, having the right term to Google can be a game-changer.

Dana Raphael looks so fun! I would totally have a (non-alcoholic, at least for the next few weeks) drink with her! In addition to her contributions around the idea of matrescence, she also invented the modern Western usage of the word “doula” to describe a professional who provides practical and emotional support during the postpartum period.

Parenthood is one of the major transitions of our life. Sometimes it absolutely deserves the word “crisis”, in its full teeth-rattling glory. Ask me in a few months. As Erikson reminds us, though, we are always in transition, and as Dana Raphael adds this is not something we must succumb to as incomprehensible and crushing. For us first-time parents taking on a changed life with a no-returns policy, we need frameworks of parenting that include not just sleepless nights and heart-seizing worry; but also joy, transformation, and the literal adventure of a lifetime.