Where Does the Insecurity of So Many New Mothers Come From?

The long-awaited moment of coming home with the baby is regarded by most mothers as very exhausting and difficult.

Caring for a newborn is, in fact, a demanding task carrying great responsibility, allowing for only occasional breaks, which at first can't even be planned. In many cases, whoever is caring for the baby (usually the mother) isn't sufficiently prepared to do so, because until she experiences it, she doesn't even realize how much it will take over every aspect of her existence.

In the past, the role of the extended family, besides offering help and support to the new mother, allowed her to gain experience, to learn with other people's newborns before her own what to do and how to do it. Today, however, for many women, having to care for a baby is a challenge for which they are often unprepared, neither «theoretically» nor practically!

Many, in fact, don't realize what the real needs of a creature just a few days old actually are; they struggle to understand how their desires are expressed, and don't know how or when to satisfy them.

Most learn «on the job» how a newborn should be held, fed, dressed, and washed. Indeed, few first-time mothers have already had the chance to care for a baby this small before the birth of their own!

It is understandable, then, that they feel a sense of uncertainty and anxiety when they realize they must serve as the point of reference for a being who depends entirely on them, to whom they are supposed to communicate a calm they aren't actually able to feel.

But beyond these commonplace considerations, could there be something else that makes these mothers so insecure, something that keeps them from enjoying the first period of their child's life?

Could it be that the newborn's total lack of security undermines the mother's own, since, seeing herself mirrored in her child, she is brought back into contact with her own most distant past?

Every human being, at the very dawn of life, has felt that sense of abysmal helplessness and uncertainty that Freud described using the German term «Hilflosigkeit». Neither Italian nor English can translate it with a single word that captures at once the distress, the fear, and the insecurity a baby feels from the moment they are catapulted out of the mother's womb.

A womb that, as we have already written, should not be thought of as a kind of paradise for the embryo, since before accepting and protecting it from all the stimuli (internal and external) it will have to face after birth, it was hostile to it due to the cellular incompatibility of the very earliest stages of pregnancy.

It can be hypothesized, then, that women who experienced this state of distress, insecurity, and fear in early childhood more intensely will sense it resurfacing once they find themselves, after giving birth, in close contact with a newborn, even if they don't realize what it actually is.

As if putting themselves in the shoes of a newborn baby brought back traumatic experiences capable of shaping their very ability to understand and care for the child!

For a mother, however, understanding the reasons behind these difficulties is not enough to overcome them, nor does it erase the regret of not having enjoyed this period of her child's life. A period of fundamental importance for building the security the child will need to face many situations in their future life, security the mother can still give them later on, especially if, by working on herself, she manages to free herself from what conditioned her as a child.