Existential parenting: motherhood and individuality

Note: I frequently use the term mother in this piece, which may not represent every family. However, both because the situations referenced do most frequently affect women who are in the role of mother, as well as for the sake of more fluid prose, I thought it best to preserve this term. This is not meant to diminish the role of fathers, grandparents, and others who may take on the role of primary caregiver. 

I was unprepared for my newborn son’s apparent irritation about…everything?  Being alive, maybe? Raw and red-faced, he screamed in pure protest against the world, letting out his own barbaric yawp against cruel fate and a wet bum. At times I took pride in being able to soothe him, like I had some kind of magic mommy special sauce, like I had the touch. But other times I just needed to get away, anywhere, anyhow, in the face of all that need. There was a whole world I loved, and I was banished to a kingdom where I served an angry gnome prince instead.

It’s easier now (sleep helps), but I still come back to those early memories as having the seed of a repeating fractal pattern in them, something about love and merger and separation and how we can want both from the same person at different times, and how that is a hard thing to ask of someone. Sometimes I am happy and proud to be his rock, and sometimes the rock wants to go be a person instead.  To be close to someone is to sometimes desperately struggle for autonomy from them. But, some part of me counters, to be a parent is to always be scanning your child’s face.

Ok but if you take away the perky music, this is kind of terrifying.

What is it like to be a baby? One’s best guess is, a newborn infant is preoccupied with survival. My son cries and shrieks and shakes because he is afraid that if he is not fed right now, he will never be fed again. In Margaret Mahler’s classic theory of identity development (link here), a baby first orienting to the world sees its mother as an extension of itself.  It cries and lo and behold, it makes manifest a breast or a bottle. Over time, though, the infant moves from being immersed in its own immediacy to perceiving that there is a world out there and there is this entity called mother who is separate from themself.

Mahler identified three separate stages and four substages that chart how an infant becomes aware of their separateness. As they learn to crawl and walk they want to explore with mother at some distance, but then return for reassurance, before striking out further afield with an internal representation of their mother as a safe harbor they can return to as needed. Mahler also stressed the need for caregivers to adapt to the needs of the child which will qualitatively change over these phases, with them sometimes craving distance and autonomy, but alternately needing proximity and reassurance.

What goes unaccounted for in this and other theories, however, is the fact that a new mother is learning how to combine and separate at will too. A mother has even gone an extra step: she was an individual before becoming pregnant, then she becomes part of this two-person oneness, and then she individuates again–and as us slippery humans are always changing, it is probably a somewhat different version of herself than the version she left at the station of departure. Furthermore, especially in the case of us mothers who work outside the home, we must learn how to radically combine and separate and recombine in the course of every working day.

Margaret Mahler: An intellectual lady before that was cool, who escaped the Nazis before making a name for herself in psychoanalysis. Also, what a fox!

The idea of symbiotic union with another person is both alluring and terrifying. It is human to crave this kind of seamless intimacy, and to fear engulfment and loss of oneself within it. When my son wakes up I feel my center of gravity shift to his world, his needs, his laughter or frowns. Am I less myself in these moments? Is this how people lose themselves? His happiness and security is my project, but I am my project too. 

This is the stuff of struggle. I still find myself frequently torn between the desire to do the things that have always been important to me—attend professional events, read and write, spend time with interesting and good-hearted people, swim and see art and experience the world—and the recognition that if I am going to create the relationship I want with my son, I need to spend time on his terms. Doing baby things. Sitting on the floor and waving rattles around. Reading picture books with predictable storylines. Things that are frankly sometimes kind of boring, but that initiate me into baby-time and baby-speed and that connect he and I in a webbed matrix of shared experience.

But I’m not done doing those other, more “me” things, either. My son will be ok if I am not constantly attending to his needs, and I will be significantly less crazy which is a win for us both. I am learning to make sure that when I turn back to him, it comes from a place of genuinely wanting to be together rather than a place of guilt. It bears noting that I have these options because of a context not everyone shares: a supportive partner, family and friends who love and want to spend time with my son, and that rarest of gems, an affordable daycare.

Margaret Mahler’s phases and subphrases of object constancy. If you want to know what this means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mahler

My clients’ stories, as well as the works of literature and film, are full of mothers who never quite managed to crest that second, post-motherhood individuation. The privilege of being a therapist as well as a constant reader is to hear so many stories, and thus to have been gifted a database of plotlines to match my own and my clients’ experiences against, and try to learn from the patterns. These mothers are overinvolved; anxious and worried, or even domineering and controlling. I don’t want to be that. Nor do I want to be cold and unavailable. Because after all, each of us wants to have some ability to explore and discover our own private experiences, as well as the relief of having warm arms and hearth to return to.

In the entire lifetime of human relationships there is a dialectic between a need for independence and a need to be close. Parenthood is a microcosm of these alternating magnetisms. At now almost nine months old, my son smiles and laughs with an easy jollity. And oh how I want these smiles to continue. I will do anything. I will do stupid dances and sing old songs and absolutely throw dignity to the wind to get him to crack a smile. The challenge to both of us, mother and son, is to change and adapt. He must draw closer to the world, and I will be nearby.