Conscious maternity: Why we are afraid of having children
Text: Polina Novikova
It all starts quite harmlessly: with fantasies about how his name will sound in the context of the middle name, with trying to figure out how a girl or a boy with your features would look like him. Ideally, at a certain point you begin to realize that you know exactly what you want - and this is not a cupcake with a cherry and not a weekend in Paris, but a kindergarten in the living room. Ideally. Worse, if others hint at the biological clock, pregnant girlfriends drive melancholy, and tiny dresses and jeans in the children's corners suggest the idea that life is passing by. One way or another, sooner or later you understand: either it's time to start getting ready for a flight, or all the other passengers will fly away without you. Or worse, your name and last name will be announced via speakerphone.
Psychologists speak of two types of motherhood: conscious and neurotic. If the neurotic is still more or less clear: first I gave birth, then I thought (I first bought, then I measured, I first ate, then I remembered that everything on the diet is familiar), then in the case of conscious motherhood, which more and more women tend to Everything is not crystal clear: it is scary. As something inevitable, but capable of changing life diametrically and irrevocably.
One friend was beautiful and successful, until, having given birth, she did not cease to keep up to wash her hair and paint the roots. The second gained 35 kilograms for pregnancy, and "dropped" as a result of it only three and a half. The third threw the father of the child. Whatever the fear: say goodbye to an elastic chest or stop living as before, - it forces some people to postpone the thought of motherhood for a long time, and others - to fasten and, closing his eyes, throw his head down from a cliff into diapers.
American psychologist Virginia Satir, the founder of family counseling and the author of the book How to Build Yourself and Your Family, believes that fear is peculiar to those who are internally lonely and who distrust life and self. Fear pushes a person to self-defense, and funny pictures (life without a manicure, washing 24/7 and the absence of Saturday's sleep before noon) are exactly that. It is enough to put all your phobias on the table face up. Psychologists are sure: as soon as a person expresses readiness to understand what he is afraid of in the present, his former fear disappears. It turns out that there are no fears, all this is an excuse. Satir quite roughly divided families into "mature" and "problem". The latter direct all energy to trying to live in such a way that there are no problems at all. The “mature” understand that they cannot do without problems, but they know that every time they will try to find ingenious solutions.
Being a good mother in the midst of frantic requests to yourself is more difficult than giving birth to 45
Our mothers existed in the harsh reality: the dogma "30 is the age bearing age" spared almost no one. It is much easier for us - 40-45 years now is no longer considered the limiting child-bearing age. The latest advances in reproductive medicine are such that to conceive it is not necessary to have fallopian tubes or motile spermatozoa, and even experiments to obtain a healthy embryo from a spermatozoon and two eggs are successful. Medicine works wonders, and the biological criteria for a woman’s maturity are no longer as important as personal ones. Being a good mother in terms of setting up multitasks and frantic inquiries is now more difficult for us than to give birth at 45. In the last century, the British classic of child psychoanalysis Donald Winns Winnicott described a complex "insufficiently good mother", whose essence lies in an effort to do everything perfectly, without the right to make a mistake. "Not a good enough mother" sits in every flashy, in every flashing, in every one who is afraid of spending an hour on herself to make epilation or touch up the roots. All others simply know how to find brilliant solutions. Having discovered a pregnancy, in the first place it is necessary to prepare not a children's bedroom or a baby’s wardrobe, but a head that can generate these solutions.
Being “mature” cannot suddenly become “problematic” - and this is still a minus one fear. It is impossible to gain 35 kilograms, if not in your rules, in principle, let everything go to chance and you can read about gestational diabetes. From thinking girls never grow up bad mothers. Rather, they have a chance to hatch out of those who, by giving birth to a child, are trying to resolve a number of issues: with marriage, legalization of relationships, age, debts to parents or the inner “good girl”. "Problem" is a genetic bud that can be inherited from the parental family, but you can nurture it, allowing you to blossom, or forget and let it dry.
In a series of lectures read on the BBC channel and later published in the book Little Children and Their Mothers, Winnicott says that a good mother is a devoted mother. Moreover, the translation is clearly lame: "devotional" in the original is "The Ordinary Devoted Mother". Just devoting herself to the child. Half a century ago, the doctor described today's mother in a multitasking environment: “Women are not absorbed in the thought that their duty is to care for their children. They play golf, are completely absorbed in their work, they completely succeed in various male occupations: be irresponsible, take everything It goes without saying to spend time on car racing. " But at the time when a woman devotes herself to a child, she fully expresses herself through identification with him.
In a popular Facebook blog “Papa”, one and a half thousand likes gathered an anecdote about two nurses, one of whom asks: “Who cries so loudly? Isn’t it the triplet that was born last night?” - and the second replies: - "No, it is their father in the corridor ...". A man - how he will behave, what he will say and what his father will be - is another cause for concern. If a woman identifies herself with a child and he is a way of self-expression for her, then for a man paternity is the highest degree of love: "I don’t understand anything about it, but I love you, so if you want it, then okay." Then, however, it turns out that the main burden of difficulties lies on the man, because if the mother needs to calm the unresponsive child, then the man will have to calm the two: the child and her. It is a little dishonest, because he was promised that nothing would change, everything would be just as cool, we could sit on the summer terrace all together, meet friends, even fly to Berlin for the weekend - because we will have a calm child, not so noisy and unruly like the others, right? A child will only hold our relationship together: nothing that others are too tired to love, they are silent where they used to laugh, and they hate the servility they have fallen in love with - everything will be different for us. The main thing - really want this.
"Rebel! Do not become a sheep! Do not adjoin the herd! Do not do everything as instructed!" - under the anthem, voiced by Louise Bourgoin in the film "Un heureux événement" (in the Russian version - "Sex does not happen much"), the whole world team of future mothers of primitives prays in the final pregnancy. In the same film, an elderly gynecologist gives excellent advice: "Your main enemies are sausages, pates, and also your mother, mother-in-law and all of your surroundings who have children. Do not listen to anyone - and everything will go well."
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