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

by Molly Millwood

our culture values a mother’s skill at parenting over her well-being as an individual.

Too much of the existing literature on motherhood, both scholarly and popular, diminishes or completely overlooks the relational context in which motherhood occurs. Certainly, mothering is recognized as relational in nature; mothering is about interacting with our children. What gets less attention is that motherhood, as an experience and identity, usually unfolds within the context of an intimate adult relationship. Experiences of loss, separation, power, control, autonomy, dependency, and conflict within a woman’s romantic partnership are, at various times, either background or foreground in the experience of motherhood. These issues simply cannot be disentangled from the supposedly “individual” ones that characterize new motherhood, like mental and physical exhaustion and loss of personal freedom.

What if we could trust that as long as we are intentional in our choices and clear about our needs, whatever it is we are doing to take care of ourselves also makes us better mothers, and that whatever time we take away from our partners to do something meaningful actually breathes new life into our relationships?

Author and poet Adrienne Rich said it best forty years ago: “I believe increasingly that only the willingness to share private and sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective description of the world which will be truly ours.”3

Misconceptions, author Naomi Wolf uses the term “postpartum grief.”

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.

We speak in vague language like, “Oh, your life is about to change!” Everyone knows to expect a big change. Hardly anybody knows that that change can feel a lot like grief.

Full Catastrophe Living, the catastrophe describes the full experience of life: the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, the messy and the neat. Like other Buddhist thinkers, Kabat-Zinn suggests that 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.

“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor the absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.”

“This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present,” the researchers state, and in turn, “mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of [un]happiness.”

couples with higher frequency of sex, better emotional communication, and better communication in general are more satisfied.

What Killingsworth and Gilbert’s findings suggest is that the same activities that fuel our relationship satisfaction also involve the greatest focus on the present moment, which, in turn, fuels our happiness as individuals.

“nexting.”

In their book Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, Jon Kabat-Zinn

It can be exceedingly difficult to sit and be, whether we are attempting to meditate on a cushion or soothe a crying baby. We feel a pull toward doing something “useful” or having something to show for our day.

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. And the more value a moment holds, the greater our capacity to stay present to it.

Stripped of this deeper meaning, these encounters leave me feeling angry, depleted, and at my wit’s end as I mentally search for a “solution” to my son’s limit-testing behavior. But when I cast a net of curiosity and sift through what’s inside, I find tremendous meaning. I consider the possibility that there is no solution at all because there is no problem; there is only my inquisitive, fervent child who is just beginning to understand this world. He bumps up against the edges of it again and again to learn its shape, because what else is there for him to do? And what else is there for me to do but notice it, notice him, and breathe my next breath?

Our bodies remember even when we want to forget. Our bodies remember even—perhaps especially—if we never formed a conscious verbal memory of the experience in the first place. In other words, when those dramatic moments are also traumatic, dissociation is a common reaction. We cope with the unbearable by removing ourselves psychologically, and the results are fuzzy, distorted, or even nonexistent memories of what happened. But it turns out that sometimes the faintest, fuzziest of memories can have the most impact.

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women,

It might cost the family more money if Dad takes parental leave, but that might be income extremely well “spent” if it is viewed as a kind of insurance policy against developing gendered power imbalances in the relationship, and the marital dissatisfaction that comes with them.

there is overwhelming evidence that encounters with other people in our social circle—even those on the outer borders of that circle—provide not just momentary boosts in well-being but significant long-term health benefits.

for our health, happiness, and life satisfaction, the breadth and depth of our social connections are of vital importance.

“Oxytocin surges through your bloodstream, damping down pain and inflammation, making you feel good in the here and now, and ultimately increasing your chance of survival.”

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. Especially during the early years of our children’s lives, creative pursuits are paused, friendships wane, physical fitness declines, sexuality hibernates, and career goals are abandoned or delayed.

regardless of how hard a couple works to establish an egalitarian relationship prior to becoming parents, and no matter how progressive or unconventional their pre-baby division of labor may have been, when that first baby comes home, their who-does-what arrangements become more gender stereotypical than they were before.

A woman’s return to work after maternity leave most assuredly does not redistribute the care of the baby; an abundance of research shows that care remains unevenly distributed, even when the number of hours each partner works outside the home is exactly the same. When women are earning more money than their spouses, they still do twice as much domestic work and three times as much caretaking of their children than their husbands do.

In other words, for every hour a man spends in the domestic sphere, a woman spends three. Fifty years ago, for every hour a man spent on domestic duty, a woman spent five hours.

More often than not, when couples talk about joint and equal participation in the tasks of raising children and running a home, they are referring to either an illusion or an aspiration, rather than a current reality.

Men are likely to vacate the house for the day to pursue leisure activities, leaving their children and their chore lists behind. In contrast, women are more likely to relax with a magazine and a cup of tea in the living room, risking contamination of their leisure time with requests for a PB&J, the buzzer on the dryer indicating the laundry is ready to be folded, or the words “I’m done!” being shouted from the bathroom.

When we become mothers, we claim a distinct kind of maternal consciousness or maternal identity that justifies, and ultimately is cemented by, a gendered division of labor.

For Tess, as for so many others, the question of marriage is not a religious or legal question. It is not even a question of social pretenses or appearances. It is about what the decision to marry represents at the most fundamental psychological and emotional level.

Tess cannot shake the feeling that her partner has not yet truly committed to spending his life with her. She tells herself she is crazy to feel this way, since they have two children and a third on the way and own a home together. The years are ticking by, and they are, in effect, spending their lives together. Nonetheless, her feelings are understandable. Sure, not everybody in her position would feel that way; plenty of lifelong committed couples are happily unmarried, with neither the relationship nor either partner’s self-esteem suffering as a result of their choice not to marry. For Tess, though, her partner’s reluctance to marry her even now that he knows how much it would mean to her is extraordinarily painful. She is not confident in his availability. She cannot get an affirmative answer to the million-dollar question: “Are you there for me?” He is not, therefore, a safe haven for her from the fears and uncertainties of life. In her mind, if he were really, truly, no-holds-barred there for her, he would have no hesitation about getting married. In the attachment terms we are about to discuss in depth, their bond is not secure.

“In attachment terms, any response (even anger) is better than none. If there is no engagement, no emotional responsiveness, the message from the attachment figure reads as ‘Your signals do not matter, and there is no connection between us.’”

“four horsemen” (the other three are criticism, defensiveness, and contempt),

Prominent couples researcher John Gottman states that within every negative emotion, there is a longing or a wish.

As the room fills up with angry accusations, defensive retorts, and heavy, despairing silences, I listen for what hasn’t been said. I listen for hidden longings. I look for the fundamental emotional states behind the words. I ask myself, If we could lift the veil of anger (or defensiveness, or stony withdrawal, or whatever the case may be), what would we see?

Typically, as a couple becomes more entrenched in a pattern of focusing on their mutually unmet needs, problems with both expressing and listening arise.

Research suggests that within the context of marriage, each moment of turning toward is like a deposit of intimacy and goodwill in an “emotional bank account.”

misattunement, or a lack of emotional responsiveness in couples, results in sometimes unbridgeable chasms.

Our attachment histories actually determine how we will perceive and handle our current circumstances.

“I’m so afraid you’ve lost interest in me”

and I can’t seem to trust that you’re really there for me,”

Are you there for me?

These moments of quiet connection with my children are precious. I crave them so much, and yet I realize I am sometimes the one who prevents them from happening. If I say yes, slow down, and lean in, they are there for the taking.

This was a nice moment of enlightenment, until the shadow of guilt crept over it. You turn away from your children so often, said the voice of guilt. You say they’re noisy and in constant motion and you just want them to hold still so you can savor them, but when they hold still and call your name, you don’t always answer.

Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting,

our children act as mirrors, forcing us to see ourselves more fully and realistically than we ever have before and to discover facets of self, both pleasant and unpleasant, not previously acknowledged.

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

How do we go about sorting out the two types of guilt? We begin by claiming the guilt—registering its existence instead of trying to ignore it or push it away.

it is our own unmet needs, our own fears, our own longings—and not those of our children—that sometimes influence most powerfully the choices we make as parents.