To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma

by Molly Millwood

I’m guessing you picked up this book because, like the women I’ve just described, you’re wondering what’s become of your life and your marriage since you’ve become a mother. You think maybe you’re losing your mind, too.

Having a baby is a psychological revolution that changes our relation to almost everything and everyone. —Esther Perel1

All these additions to a woman’s life can obscure what is lost and what feels damaged, altered, broken, disrupted. Autonomy and personal freedom. Restful sleep. The familiar and predictable routine of life without a newborn. Confidence in one’s appearance, comfort in one’s own skin, a sense of oneself as feminine and sexual. A sense of connection to, and participation in, the outside world. Occupational identity. The time, and maybe even the interest, to be close to our mates.

The mothers who are fumbling, doubting, and hurting even as they smile, laugh, and genuinely treasure their new babies? The mothers who are wondering, sometimes with profound angst, who this person is in the mirror looking back at them even as they rejoice in their new role as nurturer? The ones who, grateful though they may be for their coparent, are distressed about varying degrees of anger or disinterest toward their partners and worried about what will become of their marriages? Their stories are the norm rather than the exception.

All her hours were filled with the endless stuff of parenting an infant, and when the baby slept, Anna collapsed in exhaustion and stared out the window, thinking about all the things she should be doing.

Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, sometimes resenting her baby, often resenting her husband, sometimes fantasizing about running away, hating the enormous discrepancy between the mother she envisioned herself being and the mother she actually was—these are all feelings shared by many new mothers.

More often than not, she emerges feeling lonely, anxious, and unsure of herself.

Silence—our own and others’—keeps us stuck in shame.

Our children seem to deliver these “home runs”—a perfectly timed kiss or cuddle, a shining accomplishment, the most hilarious question, a stunning observation—when we least expect them, and perhaps just when we most need them.

Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don’t really seem to bring much happiness at all—yet somehow they do.”

In her memoir of motherhood, Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott writes, “It’s so easy and natural to race around too much, letting days pass in a whirl of being busy and mildly irritated, getting fixed on solutions to things that turn out to be just farts in the windstorm.”

It is relatively easier to air gripes about one’s partner or husband and to confess to feeling disinterested in him than it is to reveal feeling disinterested in, and destabilized by, motherhood itself.

When husbands do not see their role in their wives’ suffering—both in contributing to it and in having the capacity to help her out of it—women are at even greater risk of falling into the shame hole.

in between, perhaps vacillating between tolerating the chaos just fine and feeling for a moment that we might rather be dead than continue to live amid such mayhem.

peace can be found in embracing things as they are, rather than preoccupying ourselves with how things ought to be, or might someday be, or should have been, or could have been.

Might I be able to find some relief if I remove the judgment from what I’m feeling, and just notice the feeling itself?

We are all struggling, with more or less grace, to hold on to the tiger tail of children’s, husband’s, parents’, and siblings’ lives while at the same time saving a little core of self in our own, just enough to live by. —Louise Erdrich, Writings from a Birth Year

have been in a hurry ever since I became a mother.

For many—perhaps even all—new mothers, there is a desire to be more present with our children, coupled with what feels like a total inability to fully embrace the moment.

We feel a pull toward doing something “useful” or having something to show for our day.

And those of us who engage in the work of nurturing will remain vulnerable to the nagging feeling that we are somehow worth less, that the way we spend our time isn’t good enough.

But if, on the balance, we are able to shift our perspective and construe the stuff of mothering as not mundane at all but instead profound and meaningful work, we might well find more value in the everyday moments.

“In those rare stretches of alone time once we become mothers, the stakes feel so much higher.”

Why, she wonders, is he not inherently aware like she is of the ten thousand things that need to be done?

Once her husband came home to hold and entertain the baby, that was her chance to do anything else, everything else she had not been able to do all day long. On weekends, she felt pulled in a hundred different directions.

So I’m watching him carefully, scanning his face for signs that he’s growing weary, and I’m checking myself constantly, trying not to be too heavy.

While fatherhood remains one option among many, motherhood revokes the whole concept of free will. It is with motherhood that the myths of equal opportunity and shared autonomy bite the behavioral dust. —Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood

We want to get right to the bottom of why something is upsetting to us, and almost always, the mental shortcuts we take lead us nowhere good.

At worst, the disparity is a recipe for resentment, and possibly rage, in a new mother whose husband is neither as emotionally changed nor as practically challenged by the arrival of the baby.

Time is slipping away, and we are neither savoring our children as much as we’d like, nor are we attending sufficiently to the aspects of ourselves distinct from mothering.

Uniting with our partner against a common enemy is far preferable to viewing our partner as the enemy.

She thinks, I can’t believe he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand my world right now. Maybe even, I am so alone in this.

The deeper questions being asked are these: Are you there for me? Where did you go? I’m calling for you and I don’t know if you hear me. Can’t you see how much I need you?

Anger is a form of protest against unmet needs.

Indifference, on the other hand, signals resignation.

They may have an eagerness to connect with their husbands, only to feel put off by what he chooses to share or how little he seems to know, or wants to know, about her world. Discouraged or annoyed or angered by the disconnect, they feel themselves pulling away from the same person whose company they were craving.

The greatest gift a parent has to give a child—and a lover has to give a lover—is emotionally attuned attention and timely responsiveness. —Dr. Sue Johnson, Love Sense

“I was taking care of everything myself, like usual. Only I didn’t have to resent you for not helping, because you weren’t even here. It felt so good to be out from under all that anger.”

In this case, Sam cannot hear or see Ivy’s longing for comfort, relief, and support because all he hears are criticisms and complaints. He sees only an unsatisfied, perpetually angry wife and expends his energy in defending himself from a perceived attack. Likewise, Ivy cannot hear or see Sam’s longing for affirmation, his need to know he is still special to her and that she desires him. She sees only another needy person placing demands on her. She feels he has no idea how little she has left to give, or how much his lack of support has impacted her connection with him.

There is only ongoing discussion and tension, each of us believing our own view is right but trying our best to be open to the other’s.

We simply aren’t our best selves during this phase. After all, we often don’t feel like ourselves, either. Babies have a way of steering life into the weeds.

“teach you that you are capable of deep compassion, and also that you are definitely not the nice, calm, competent, clear-thinking, highly evolved person you fancied yourself to be before you became a mother.”

Our children show us what we like least about ourselves. And most of the time, this is happening beneath our awareness.

Our husbands’ freedom from guilt—or at least their relative freedom compared to ours—is just another reason to perceive them as so annoyingly unencumbered by the demands of parenthood.

Much like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, maybe mothering adequacy is in the eye of the mothered.

“All around me, in recent years, I’ve seen women living motherhood as an exercise in correction, trying to heal the wounds of their childhoods, and, prophylactically, to seal their children against future pain.”

We cannot undo the past, but in doing things differently with our own children—giving them what was not sufficiently given to us—we can change our relationship to the past.

Nobody shows us our true nature—all we are capable of in both good and bad ways—like our children do. Except maybe our spouses.

If we don’t express ourselves in real time, letting the important people in our lives see the anguish, fear, anger, and pain on our faces, how can we expect to feel fully understood?

For some women, it is easier to love a child than it is to nurture and maintain a loving relationship with a mate, and nurturing an intimate connection with a child can serve the strategic, if often unconscious, purpose of marginalizing a spouse.