Your Baby Isn’t the Only Thing Shaping Your Experience of Motherhood

Imagine it’s 2:00 a.m. You’re awake feeding your baby, so you pick up your phone. You see something about signs your baby isn’t getting enough milk, then a post about why responsive mothers shouldn’t ignore their baby’s cries, then something about insecure attachment. Eventually you see a mother reminding you that you’ll never get this time back, so you better soak it all in.

You put your phone down and twenty minutes later your baby cries. But now you’re listening to that cry through everything you just took in. Is she getting enough? Should she be crying this much? Am I responding quickly enough? Is something wrong? Am I doing something wrong?

Your baby hasn’t changed, but what you are paying attention to may have.

I think about this a lot because mothers today are surrounded by an almost unbelievable amount of information about what they should be paying attention to. Sleep, feeding, attachment, milestones, language, screens, separation, daycare, emotional regulation, independent play, sugar, toxins, nervous systems. There is always something else we could be watching. And that thing will, inevitably, find us inside our algorithm.

Some of this information is incredibly useful. Sometimes it helps us recognize something important that we might otherwise have missed. But I think there is a difference between having good information available to us and being taught to constantly scan for evidence that something might be wrong. I’m not sure we talk enough about what that does to mothers.

Long before we have children, most of us have already absorbed all kinds of ideas about what a “good mother” looks like. She is patient. She knows what her child needs. She enjoys being with her kids. She doesn’t yell. She creates secure attachment. She puts her children first. Somehow, in the middle of all of this, she also remembers to appreciate every minute because it goes so fast.

Then you actually become a mother and…your baby won’t sleep. You have no idea why they’re crying. Breastfeeding hurts. You’re bored. You desperately want to be alone. You miss your work. Your toddler wants your partner and not you. You lose your temper.

These things happen, and almost immediately we start deciding what they mean. My baby won’t sleep becomes maybe I’m doing something wrong. I really want to go back to work becomes maybe I’m selfish. I hate playing on the floor becomes what kind of mother doesn’t enjoy playing with her child? My child is furious with me becomes I’m damaging our relationship.

There’s what happened, and then there’s what our mind does with what happened. I think mothers need to know there is a difference.

For more than 20 years, I’ve worked with women who are incredibly capable. Many have built careers, led teams, started companies, earned advanced degrees, cared for other people and handled enormously complicated things. They know how to solve problems. In fact, they’re often exceptionally good at it.

Then they become mothers and find themselves in a culture that gives them an endless supply of possible problems to look for.

Take sleep. Your baby wakes three times and here’s where your thinking likely goes: Maybe it’s the feeding schedule, wake windows or sleep associations. Maybe I should sleep train. Maybe sleep training is the last thing I should do. You Google it, ask friends, listen to a podcast, change something and then watch carefully to see if it worked.

Before long, “my baby woke up three times last night” has become something much bigger.

It’s possible that there really is something to figure out. Of course there are problems in motherhood that need solving. But sometimes a baby waking up three times is a baby waking up three times, and nothing more than that. Everything else comes from the meaning we give it. She should be sleeping longer by now. I’ve created a bad habit. This is going to get worse. I need to figure this out.

Once we decide something is wrong, we start looking for more evidence of it. Because we’re looking for it, we tend to find it. Then we have even more to solve.

It can become a pretty exhausting way to mother.

It makes me wonder what would happen if we were much more thoughtful about what we prepare mothers to notice.

What if a new mother heard just as much about how variable babies are as she heard about wake windows? What if she knew that difficulty isn’t necessarily evidence that something has gone wrong, or that it’s normal to not know what your baby needs sometimes? What if mothers understood that a child can be unhappy with them and still feel completely safe with them? What if we talked more openly about the fact that you can adore your children and not enjoy being with them every minute?

And what if we told mothers that not every uncomfortable moment requires a solution?

Think about that same mother at 2:00 a.m. Her baby cries. Instead of immediately asking, “What’s wrong?” maybe she first asks, “What’s happening right now?”

She might end up in exactly the same place. Maybe the baby needs to eat. Maybe something about the schedule really does need to change. Maybe she notices something concerning and calls the pediatrician. The point isn’t to stop solving problems. It’s to give ourselves enough room to see what is actually happening before deciding there is a problem to solve.

Because sometimes the baby is having a hard time. Sometimes your toddler is furious. Sometimes you’re exhausted and irritated and wishing everyone would leave you alone for ten minutes. Sometimes nobody knows what the hell is going on. That’s motherhood too, and none of it automatically means something has gone wrong.

You don’t have to make every hard moment disappear to be a good mother inside of it.

Mothers don’t need to get any better at figuring everything out. We’re already asking an awful lot of them in that department. We just need to pay more attention to what we’re teaching mothers to look for in the first place.

See first. Solve second.