The Psychological Side of Pregnancy
While a woman experiences radical physiological changes during the months before birth, every mother-to-be also undergoes profound psychological changes. Becoming a mother for the first time is a major milestone in any woman's development. It's a time when a woman revisits her own childhood and her early relationship with her mother as she considers whom she will emulate. In my interviews with 89 women for my doctoral research, many said they thought more about their mothers during the latter part of their pregnancy than they had in years.
Pregnancy and new motherhood take a woman home. Home to her first intimate relationship. Home to her parents' marriage. Home to her earliest feelings of vulnerability and dependency. Each of us was once a vulnerable baby and small child, and we carry those earliest feelings inscribed in our brains.
If you had a warm, nurturing relationship with your mother and grew up in a stable family, you will find it much easier to transition into motherhood. After all, you know what it feels like to be loved and feel secure. When you've experienced the comfort and joy of a positive relationship with your mother, you bring emotional supplies and commitment to the task of mothering that the woman who has a painful, bitter, detached or unresolved relationship with her mother cannot possibly possess. If you were loved, you can embrace motherhood because you wholeheartedly remember what it felt like to be held in the loving arms and gaze of your mother. You long to pass this rich legacy on.
If, on the other hand, you had a mother who was rejecting or neglectful, or your parents were divorced or wretched together, you may feel conflicted and vulnerable once you become pregnant. Those feelings of vulnerability and dependency will only increase as your baby grows. I've worked with women over the years who became extremely anxious the more vulnerable they felt. They had learned as small children that it was risky business to depend on someone else to take care of them. So they became compulsively self-reliant and attempted to deny their feelings of vulnerability. Having a baby meant they couldn't do that any longer. Hence, their heightened anxiety.
It helps if a woman has a good marriage and a nurturing husband. An expectant mother may wonder: Can I trust my husband to take care of me? Can he handle my increased sense of dependency and vulnerability? Will he be there for me during the delivery and help me when the baby comes? Is he as invested in becoming a parent as I am? Will he be faithful when sex is nonexistent for a few weeks before and after delivery? These are key questions that every pregnant wife needs to discuss with her husband, since these issues can generate a lot of anxiety.
Dr. Christine Conway told me, "I remember having a conversation with my husband before I got pregnant with our first child. It's remarkable to me that I had enough sense to be as scared as I was. I remember saying to him, 'You know, this is really going to be a life-changing event for me.' I wasn't entirely sure he was buying into it as much as I was. What I was really asking him was, 'Is this going to be my baby or our baby?' I had a sense even then that we were talking about a person who would be totally dependent on us for its survival." Conway laughed and said, "I thought I had signed on for 12 to 20 years; now I know I've signed on until the end of time."
A woman's past matters as she faces impending motherhood. It matters greatly whether she had a positive or negative nurturing history, for this is part of the well she will draw from to nurture her baby. This doesn't mean the die is cast if beginnings were painful. It's always possible for a determined, thoughtful mother to find healing for her wounds and pass on more love and security to her children than she experienced during a childhood of privation or suffering.
Nine months of pregnancy can be a rich time as a woman reflects on becoming a mother and addresses any past wounds. If you are overwhelmed by the feelings that going home surfaces, then pregnancy is a good time to get your internal house in order. Seek counseling if necessary. I urge my clients to view this period of time as a gift a time of preparation for the road ahead. A time to begin dealing with the past in earnest. A time to stretch and grow. The fact that a baby is coming is powerful motivation for any prospective mother.
The more you are able to identify with the baby in your womb, the more likely mother love will transform you into a nurturing, loving mother. Even though you carry a baby you can't see and can only begin to feel around your fourth month, it's important that you begin to feel some degree of ownership. There's a baby growing inside, and he or she belongs to my husband and me.
While women of my generation began to feel attached to their babies with the advent of the "quickening," modern medical technology allows my daughter's generation a different kind of gratification with the sonogram. I shall always remember the day Kristen arrived at my home carrying an oversized white envelope. "Want to see our baby?" she asked, waving it in front of me. Soon we were standing by a window, poring over the soft, fuzzy photographs of a 4-month-old fetus. It was amazing for me to realize that those black-and-white images were pictures of my first grandbaby! We gazed raptly at the baby's rounded head and gently curved spine as he lounged on the floor of Kristen's womb-house, one arm nonchalantly cradling his head.
As Kristen, clearly excited, recounted her experience, I could tell she was also immensely relieved. "I was anxious during the exam," she said, describing the undignified process of lying on a table while an ultrasound technician slathered her abdomen with a thick, gooey cream. "Greg was fascinated by the pictures of our baby on the monitor, but I was pretty tense until the doctor finally said, 'Everything looks fine.' Then I could relax." As we shared, I realized that Kristen had edged further along in her journey toward mother love and that my son-in-law was quietly joining her on a parallel path to fatherhood.
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Other Things to Consider
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