You Can Love Your Child Deeply and Still Struggle to Stay Connected

Her four-year-old is losing it because she cut the toast in half. She knows this is not an emergency. She knows her daughter is tired, and she knows four-year-olds can have enormous feelings about things that seem completely irrational to adults. She’s read the books. She knows she is supposed to stay calm.

And yet she can feel herself getting more and more agitated.

“It’s fine. I can make you another piece.”

Her daughter cries harder.

“Okay, but you asked me to cut it.”

Now she’s explaining. Her daughter is still crying, and she can feel that familiar urgency building inside her. Something is going wrong and she needs to do something about it.

This instinct is useful in a lot of places. When something isn’t working, she figures out why. When there’s a problem, she moves toward it. She thinks ahead, notices what needs to happen next and feels good when she can make things work better. She’s probably been rewarded for these qualities for much of her life.

But there is nothing to do about the toast. Her daughter is upset, and for the next few minutes she may continue to be upset. The challenge for her mother isn’t figuring out how to make that stop. It’s being able to remain connected while it’s happening.

This sounds simple. It isn’t.

Some of us have had decades of practice becoming good at managing what life puts in front of us. We learned to anticipate, organize, analyze and perform under pressure. Maybe we were naturally good at these things, or maybe they developed because being competent, responsible or successful helped us feel secure in our families or in the world. Usually it’s some combination of both.

What we may have had much less practice with is being in an experience we can’t improve. We may not have learned what to do when someone we love is hurting and we can’t take the hurt away, or how to be in conflict without becoming afraid of what the conflict means about the relationship. Making mistakes can feel disproportionately threatening, especially when we’ve built a life around trying very hard not to make them.

Of course, this isn’t true for every high-achieving woman, and achievement doesn’t tell us what happened in someone’s childhood. But I do think there is something worth paying attention to here. The qualities that get rewarded in school, work and many families are not necessarily the same capacities that help us remain emotionally connected when a relationship gets uncomfortable.

Maybe you grew up in a family where emotion had plenty of room. People got angry and nobody panicked. Adults could apologize without falling apart or becoming defensive. You learned that someone could be disappointed in you and still love you.

Or maybe uncomfortable feelings made everyone a little nervous. Problems were handled quickly. Mistakes carried more weight than they needed to. You discovered that being easy, responsible, accomplished or helpful worked pretty well, and you became very good at those things. None of this requires a terrible childhood or parents who didn’t love you. It may simply mean that there were some relational skills you didn’t get much opportunity to practice.

Then you have a child.

Children have an uncanny ability to bring us directly into the experiences we are least practiced at tolerating. They are disappointed when we’ve made the right decision. They have feelings that don’t make sense to us. They become anxious about things we can’t promise will be okay. We hurt their feelings even when we didn’t mean to, and sometimes we lose our patience in ways we regret. There are also moments when the intensity of our reaction tells us that something older is getting stirred up alongside whatever is happening with our child.

This is where I think we need to separate loving our children from having the skills to sustain connection with them under stress. A mother can adore her child and still find that child’s distress almost unbearable. She can have a wonderful relationship with her child and become defensive when she hears that she has hurt them. She can care deeply about raising an emotionally healthy human and have very little tolerance for her own anger. Love is absolutely part of the equation, but it doesn’t automatically teach us how to do any of this.

Many high-achieving women have spent years strengthening their Strategic Intelligence: the ability to anticipate, plan, analyze, organize and take effective action. Those capacities aren’t the problem, and motherhood certainly doesn’t require us to abandon them. There are plenty of moments when being able to solve a problem quickly is exactly what our families need.

Relationships, though, also require Relational Intelligence. We need enough capacity to stay engaged with what is actually happening when it’s uncomfortable, uncertain or different from what we hoped would happen. That might mean noticing how activated we are before deciding that our child’s feelings need to change. It can mean tolerating the fact that someone we love is disappointed with us, or recognizing that we’ve made a mistake without turning that mistake into a referendum on whether we’re a good mother. Repair becomes possible when we can stay present long enough to see what actually happened rather than rushing to defend, explain or fix it.

Back in the kitchen, this mother may eventually realize that her daughter doesn’t need another piece of toast. She doesn’t need an explanation for why the toast was cut correctly either. Her daughter is having a four-year-old-sized experience of something going terribly wrong, and her mother can be with her while she has it.

Maybe she sits down next to her. Maybe she says, “You really didn’t want me to cut it,” and lets that be enough. Her own discomfort is still there, but she doesn’t have to obey it. Over time, experiences like this teach a child that big feelings don’t endanger connection. They also give the mother an experience she may need just as much: I can be here with someone I love while they are upset, and I don’t have to make the feeling disappear for us to be okay.

This is the part of motherhood that I think we prepare women for so poorly. We spend enormous amounts of time thinking about what babies need, what children need and how to do motherhood well, while paying much less attention to the internal capacities a mother needs in order to actually be the person she wants to be when the relationship gets hard.

That’s where the idea of equipping women for motherhood feels important to me. Not because women are inherently unequipped to mother, and certainly not because successful women need to become less driven, organized or ambitious. But some of us arrive here with a very well-developed set of capacities and another set that has had far less practice.

Motherhood is going to be uncertain, unpredictable and emotionally messy. There is no way to become good enough at motherhood that we eliminate those things. What we can do is develop more capacity to live inside them: to stay connected to ourselves when we’re uncomfortable and to remain available for connection with our children when they’re uncomfortable too.

That changes much more than what happens over a piece of toast.