What makes a good mother?

Sarah Wheatley - 13 Aug 15

“I feel as though I’m about to give up everything that I really love.”

This is what a pregnant woman recently said to me, and after listening to her description of her full, interesting and varied life, I could see what she meant. Although I had every confidence that what she would experience as a mother would bring her a new range of possibilities to enjoy, I also knew that she would struggle to do many of the activities that currently brought her so much joy, at least in the short term. Maternity, to her, meant loss and she was unsure whether she would be a ‘good’ mother if she felt so ambivalent.

The psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, talked about ‘splitting’ and how we can struggle to integrate the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in ourselves and others. Sometimes it feels too difficult to accept that people, things and situations can be both good AND bad, and so we try to pretend that they are one or the other. We can deny evidence to the contrary, because it is easier to see things in black and white. It gives us a sense of being in control.

It might help explain the notion of  ‘parenting tribes’. When we are parents, we are bombarded by others’ ideas of what a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ parent looks like and so we sometimes need to bolster our own sense of getting it right by finding others who think similarly. The danger lies when we strongly identify with any position as being the ‘good’ position or the ‘right’ one. This polarisation makes it dangerously easy to make any other position the ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ one.

I know I’ve done it from time to time. Have you?

The truth is that none of us will ever perfectly fit any ethos of good and bad, except our own. Trying to make ourselves fit can really lead us into problems, and many people become depressed or anxious when they find that they don’t suddenly become the kind of mother who they think they should be. For some people it is distressing not to be the kind of mother who loves going to mother and baby groups, or the kind of mother who goes back to work after 2 months, or the kind of mother who breastfeeds, or the kind of mother who doesn’t…

I loved the recent advert that showed all the warring tribes, and emphasised the fact that really we all just want to do the best for our babies, whilst not losing sense of ourselves.

It can be hard at times to admit to our negative OR our positive experiences of being a mother. Sometimes it feels as though we might lose something if we do just that, as then others might judge us. Or we might judge ourselves.

Mothering is not a ‘zero sum‘ equation. We don’t automatically gain so much from being a parent that it cancels out all the things that we lose. Conversely we might find it hard to accept all the joy that we can gain from being with our babies, especially when we want others to understand how difficult we find it at times.

The thing is – mothering is a ‘both-and’ kind of equation. It can be both rewarding and awful at the same time. It can give and take in various measures. As a friend wisely told me many years ago, “being a parent makes the highs higher and the lows lower” (and check out this TED talk from the founders of Babble.com, who have an interesting theory on what happens to our happiness as a new parent). This dynamic can shift on a minute by minute basis.

Knowing this can make it easier for you to grasp your own sense of being a parent and not be as swayed by the highs and the lows. The bits that you love about being a mother will continually surprise you, and the bits that you hate equally so. Accepting both the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as being part of being a parent means that you can work out strategies for helping yourself through the hard parts and really allow yourself to enjoy more of the enjoyable parts. You don’t have to deny either.

And then, you might find out that you really are a good mother.

Image courtesy of Waiting for the Word, under a Creative Commons License.

Sarah Wheatley

Counsellor, wife, mother, bee lover. Lives beside the sea in Edinburgh. Works with pregnant and new parents to help them not just cope but thrive.

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