Single women, mothers, and the nuclear family

I recently read an interesting Atlantic article on the current singleness epidemic among women, and while the topic was singleness, the article also made some broader statements about how women participate in society.  One idea in particular struck me:

“We are not designed, as a species, to raise children in nuclear families,” Christopher Ryan, one of the Sex at Dawn co-authors, told me over the telephone late last summer. Women who try to be “supermoms,” whether single or married, holding down a career and running a household simultaneously, are “swimming upstream.” Could we have a modernization of the Mosuo, Ryan mused, with several women and their children living together—perhaps in one of the nation’s many foreclosed and abandoned McMansions—bonding, sharing expenses, having a higher quality of life? “In every society where women have power—whether humans or primates—the key is female bonding,” he added.

Image: graur codrin

My mom lived with us the first month after I gave birth, and I still went into my room to cry without her knowledge almost every night, so having other people around won't prevent PPD.  But my mom's presence did help with a lot of new-mom anxieties.  She didn't know how to use the new, high-tech diapers we have these days (she used cloth back in the day), but she reassured me of some obvious truths:  newborns can't be controlled by a schedule, kids are resilient and won't be easily messed up, and most importantly, it will get better.  Not to mention her cooking and what a relief it was for me to have someone else do baby-rocking duty when I couldn't stand it any longer.   I believe in the traditional, nuclear family, but it's quite possible that the way our nuclear families are organized (each one separated by walls, fences, and a lot of space) may not be the way God intended. 

I don't see our society ever moving back toward communal living, but the concept goes a long way in perhaps explaining why motherhood is so hard for so many of us.  Stay-at-home-moms have a martyr complex about their brains turning to mush for the sake of the kids, and working moms have a constant guilt complex about not being home with the kids.  Maybe if we lived more communally, SAHMs would have more of the community and intellectual stimulation they seek and working moms would have a greater ability to work from home to be around their kids more.

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Sleep Training (or my first regret as a mother)

I try to avoid drive-by prayers where I treat God like a genie in a bottle (eg: "Please make the neighbor's dog stop barking!" or "Please help me get to my client meeting on time!").  But my two most common (and often only) prayers when I was initiated into motherhood were "Please make this baby stop crying!" and "Please make this baby go to sleep!"

At six weeks, my daughter started waking up in the middle of the night and not going back to sleep.  I knew she was tired because she would cry and claw at me with her little baby fingernails, but no amount of nursing or rocking would put her to sleep.  One time I held her for two hours in the middle of the night, and then she got the hiccups.  The hiccups put me over the edge.

My husband and I decided to sleep train our daughter.  I had read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (HSHHC) and was sufficiently spooked about the adverse effects that sleep-deprivation would have on my baby's neurological and emotional development.  I had also read Babywise and was afraid to raise the clingy, needy child that it described would be the result of my not taking a hard line on teaching my baby to self-soothe.  So we let our baby cry.  She cried over an hour for some of her naps and over two hours most nights in the first few weeks.

She's a great sleeper now, but my first regret as a mother is having sleep trained our daughter so early.  Even though I was at the end of my rope physically and emotionally, I feel like I traded her emotional well-being for mine.  It was either me suffering or her suffering, and I chose for it to be her (although technically it was both of us suffering because I think a part of my heart literally died from hearing her cry for so many hours).  I wish I hadn't been so weak.

I doubted myself as a mother.  I thought I had no maternal instincts, and when I started believing that about myself, I could only make intellectual decisions based on books that I had read.  My co-worker had told me that Babywise was good as a guideline, but my rules-based approach to the world did not understand what it meant to use something as a guideline.  I kept out of trouble by following rules.  I made good grades by following rules.  You always get the right answer when solving a math equation by following rules.  What did it mean for something to be a guideline?

I'm still a big believer in crying-it-out (CIO) for sleep training but just not at such an early age  (I made it a goal to hold out until at least 12 weeks with my second, but God saved me by giving me a baby who puts herself to sleep without crying).  I'm also still a big HSHHC and Babywise fan.  I kept Babywise next to my glider after having our second child and referred to it almost daily in the beginning.  But this time around, I had a better idea of what it meant to use it as a guideline.

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What do you do all day?

One of the big things I struggled with after I became a stay-at-home-mom was what to do with my baby all day.  Of course, I spent a lot of time nursing/feeding her, changing her, and trying to get her to sleep, all of which took a lot more time than it sounds.  But there was also this troubling thing that a lot of baby books call "awake time" where the baby isn't eating, sleeping, or pooping, but just...awake.

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I'm not a baby person.  I think babies are cute, but I don't really have the need or desire to hold other people's babies or play with them.  When I get together with other moms, I'd rather have an adult conversation than to play and babytalk with our kids.  Yet I decided to stay home to "enjoy this time," so I felt like I needed to spend every waking hour playing or interacting with my daughter.  I asked other moms what they did all day with their kids and tried to implement the suggestions:

• Read - 2 minutes if you read a whole bunch of board books
• Go for a walk - not possible 6 months out of the year where I live
• Peek-a-boo - 3 minutes (baby could go longer, but I get sick of it)
• Sing - 5 minutes if I sing every song I know multiple times
• Dangle random toys in front of them (I came up with this one) - 1 minute

After many long minutes of sheer boredom, I would think, "We must have passed at least 30 minutes!  It's probably almost naptime!" only to glance at the clock and see that I barely made it past the 10 minute mark.  (Now I always divide my guess by 2 before looking at the clock, but my estimate is usually still too high.)

So here's every (sane) SAHM's dirty little secret: You can do other stuff.  Do chores, work on a hobby, "like" a few things on Facebook.  My friend of a friend at efootprints advised playing with kids in 15 minute chunks.  Having "permission" from someone I consider a supermom to not spend every waking minute interacting with my child was liberating!

Just don't get your expectations too high about what you can accomplish.  If your wife is a SAHM, or if you're tired of your SAHM friend being a "bad friend," please read the next part very carefully --> The time is not consolidated.  Some days it takes me an entire day to do one load of laundry.  I worked on a few home improvement projects that would take a normal person two weekends to complete but took me two months.  I've also found being active (eg: chores or crafts) was more acceptable to my toddler than reading a book, surfing the internet, or talking on the phone (my sister is starting to develop the skill of talking over crying babies, but I don't assume my other friends have that skill).  Also, the time that is spent interacting with my kids is very draining, so sometimes I just want to do nothing when I have free time, and that doesn't mean I'm lazy.

Of course, I still think it's important to spend a lot of quality time with my kids.  I have them "help" with my chores or activities, but I also make time each morning and afternoon to do what they want to do, to hug, kiss, and sing to them, and to make sure I am paying attention to them.

Even though I no longer suffer from postpartum depression (I'll continue to blog about that process in other posts), I still struggle with "regular" depression sometimes.  The sheer boredom and tediousness of taking care of little children contributes a lot to the depression, and having permission to do other stuff has helped me tremendously.  It seems like common sense now, but for the longest time I felt guilty if I wasn't spending quality time with my daughter every waking moment.  I hope sharing my experience frees up other struggling moms to take time away from their baby if that's what they need.

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What misconceptions do you have about counseling?

For anyone seeking counseling, finding the right counselor might seem overwhelming.  There are so many different counseling designations, approaches to therapy, and on top of that, you need to have chemistry with whoever you see.  My friend who is a counselor recently addressed many of my misconceptions about counseling.  Below is a condensed version of an email she wrote in response to my asking what differentiates the types of therapists (counselor vs. psychologist vs. psychiatrist) and in response to my frustration that I never got a clear diagnosis of PPD.  I wish I had known the information below before seeking counseling so that I would have had a better idea of what to expect (it’s very possible that my counselor was using the goal-oriented method, but I just didn’t see it because I was focused on getting a diagnosis).

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The term "therapist" or "counselor" is just a loose word for any professional who has a license to engage in therapy. This is usually an LPC (Licensed Professional Counselor), an LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker), or a Psychologist.  LPCs, LCSWs, and Psychologists can all do the same thing, but they just have different designations from going to different graduate schools.  It is really someone's training and expertise (not the letters behind their name) that qualifies them to address clinical disorders. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who gives meds--but they usually do not provide any therapy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of therapists out there who just do “talk therapy”--they listen, support, and "explore" with you.   It sounds like you were frustrated with this approach and would have benefited more from therapy that was goal-oriented and had specific therapy approaches designed to decrease symptoms, get to the root of irrational thoughts/lies/myths, and develop healthier coping skills.

Also, the therapists that I am on a team with don't really spend a lot of time focusing on the diagnosis.  Even if your therapist told you that you had PPD, a skilled therapist would be focused on:

1. Identifying the specific symptoms that are interfering with your quality of life,
2. Coaching you in coping skills to decrease and eventually eliminate the symptoms,
3. Explore what made you vulnerable to the symptoms and then addressing this vulnerability area (ie: the root issue causing the symptoms), and
4. Walking with you through the cognitive and behavioral changes so that you can see progress and feel better.

The only reason therapists will "diagnose" is to help clients make sense of things and to help them normalize what they are going through, but the real focus of the therapy should be on addressing the symptoms, getting to the root of how to cope, and being sure you understand what made you vulnerable in the first place so that you have LONG term healing.  A good therapist will help you connect the dots by understanding the deeper issues underneath the symptoms and how to change that, not just put a band-aid fix over your symptoms.

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For better or for worse

Men can be pretty clueless most of the time.  I asked my husband to pick up some winter squash for one of our meals this week, and he came home with decorative gourds.  I know a guy whose wife had the baby blues after having each of their kids, and he said, "I don't know why she was depressed.  I mean, she just had a baby, so shouldn't she be happy?"

Image: nuchylee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

On the other hand, men can be exceedingly patient and compassionate, despite not knowing what's going on.  When I asked my husband whether or not he thought I had postpartum depression, he said, "No."  He later claimed that he was afraid saying yes would cause me to feel sorry for myself and get even more depressed.  Whether he really knew I had postpartum depression or not, what matters is how he treated me.  We had the same conversation almost every day.  "What should I do?  Will I ever feel normal again?  What if I'm like this for the rest of my life?  Do you wish I would stop being this way?"  And every day he engaged in this conversation with me with patience and a listening ear.  It wasn't just my depression and anxiety he had to put up with either.  I was irritable and angry, and my husband bore the brunt of it.  He later told me that he literally had to recite Bible verses to himself on the way home from work to be able to face whatever he was coming home to.

One time near the end of one of my counseling sessions, I was talking about my husband and how he had an unwavering faith in God.  He read the Bible, prayed, and did memory verses every day.  He reminded me that God was good.  He told me that God loved me.  He trusted God to heal me.

And then I cried.

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