By Claudia M Gold, MD, March 8, 2022
Eight-week-old Asher hovered somewhere between awake and asleep in his mother Esther’s arms. His father Clarence explained that “naps are a thing of the past.” They described pressures they felt to tell the world Asher was a “good baby” when in fact he was often fussy and cried inexplicably. Taking care of this little person who needed great effort on their parts to settle was really hard. They both wanted to accept their son as his full self, free from judgement; not as “good” or “difficult” but simply as Asher.
We learn to listen by being listened to, from the first moments of life. For new parents, as soon as the significance of their relationship is brought to the fore, a sense of blame or judgment typically follows.
Pediatrician turned psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott summed up this dilemma with two powerful quotes (at the time he was writing the primary caregiver was typically the mother
“I think on the whole if you could choose your parents . . . we would rather have a mother who felt a sense of guilt—at any rate who felt responsible, and felt that if things went wrong it was probably her fault—we’d rather have that than a mother who immediately turned to an outside thing to explain everything . . . and didn’t take responsibility for anything.” and “I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.”
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