What Mothers Don't Dare to Admit

The birth of a child, especially a first child, is a new event for parents, one they experience while often forgetting that the reality they must face has many different facets, not all of them easy to manage or accept. Especially when the child was sought and longed for, all the more so if conceived after overcoming many difficulties, or if the child has health problems, parents don't even consider the possibility that it might stir up feelings other than love and tenderness. They picture themselves as available parents, ready to meet every need of their little one, tireless and inexhaustible in lavishing affection on them. And yet this isn't always what happens, especially for mothers who spend their whole day with the baby: the tiredness, the exhaustion after childbirth, in some cases the struggle to recover because of some unexpected complication, the difficulty of coordinating the baby's rhythms with those of daily family life, the change in lifestyle that becomes necessary for a shorter or longer period, all bring them face to face with scenarios they had never even imagined, in which they struggle to recognize themselves and to recognize the baby. On certain occasions, in fact, the beloved little one seems to turn into an insatiable leech, never satisfied, always ready to ask for more and to make the mother feel inadequate, inefficient, drained of energy and time, and inevitably less and less well disposed toward whoever is causing her these feelings. This is how aggression appears, which in most cases is not only unrecognized but also denied. Recognizing it would plunge the woman into an abyss of guilt, making her feel wicked, perverse, different from the other mothers she compares herself to. So it feels better to hide from others, and from herself, what she is feeling, to avoid naming her feelings, to suppress them, to redirect them toward something or someone else just to distance them from their true object.

But trying to erase certain feelings, acting as if they didn't exist, doesn't help ease the tension that accompanies them; instead, that tension finds alternative ways to discharge itself, in particular through overprotectiveness or carelessness toward the child. These are actions carried out unconsciously, almost carelessly, which can also have extremely serious consequences since they can jeopardize the child's safety: letting them fall from the changing table or high chair, not noticing that the milk in the bottle or the bathwater is too hot, not giving weight to unmistakable signals through which the child expresses a health problem, and so on. These are situations that could be avoided if the mother became aware of her fleeting but intense aggressive feelings toward her little one.

Most women experience them at certain moments, depending on their character and the objective situation they are living through. So a mother shouldn't feel «different» from other mothers, even if they claim otherwise!

Recognizing these feelings is the first step toward managing them, limiting the consequences they could have on the child. It is better to let the baby cry in the crib than to feel obliged to pick them up to calm them down, if at that moment the mother is cursing the fact that she ever wanted to bring them into the world!

Having the courage to look within, without disguising what one feels, also makes it possible to «monitor» the frequency, intensity, and duration of these moments when one isn't the mother one would like to be, knowing that, if they become excessively intrusive, it is worth seeking help to try to defuse them.

A good mother is one who has the honesty to recognize, without minimizing them, the feelings of aggression she sometimes feels toward her baby (when the baby prevents her from fulfilling certain desires or causes her intense moments of frustration), but who is able to manage them so that they don't cause the child harm.