Transcriber: Paige Allen Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Nothing brings out your insecurity and self-doubt quite like motherhood.
When I was pregnant for the first time, I thought I had it waxed.
I had a crisp stack of baby books on the nightstand,
a laminated birth plan,
I'd taken notes in antenatal class,
and I had the best night nanny money could buy.
I figured that with all these carefully curated resources,
they would tell me exactly what I needed to know about becoming a mom.
Spoiler alert: they didn't.
So when my beautiful baby girl was born,
I figured, "It's okay, it's okay.
I'm going to turn to my instincts to guide me."
After all,
they'd gotten me through family stuff, finals, career politics, marriage.
I'd be fine, right?
Wrong.
Because my intuition betrayed me too, big time.
And that gut feel that I'd always relied on
got shaken up by my baby's cry,
surfacing 32 years of unresolved feelings and ideas living deep inside me.
So much for my resources.
And as of the baby books I'd so studious gathered,
sure, they were meticulously outlining my daughter's expected milestones:
when she would roll over or make eye contact for the first time.
But nowhere in the fine print
were they organizing or even acknowledging, for that matter,
the deep, internal, emotional developments that I'd be grappling with.
And so, with no explanation for my mixed feelings about motherhood,
my mind quickly took over.
I was inundated by so many questions:
Could I manage this all, carry us all, do this much?
Should I go over what I had?
And if I didn't very quickly grow up and get it together,
would I break the baby?
Where are all these questions coming from?
I mean, look, the problem is not the questions;
we're entitled to questions.
The problem was that the questions were deeply disturbing,
and they were getting between my daughter and me.
I remember thinking,
"How come all the other moms have it figured out,
when I'm like a total lay mom?"
I felt overwhelmed by seasoned mothers and all the unsolicited wisdom -
these veteran caregivers
who were ripe and ready to bestow that one piece of advice,
that oracle that they had that none of the baby books covered.
To be fair, at the heart of their advice-giving
and their insistence on this bottle brand over that
was really just another woman's attempt
to help me name something about motherhood
that as yet had no words.
It was as if they somewhere understood
that things were about to get really, really hard for me,
and nobody knew quite how to describe it.
So they did it in bottles and in brands.
And, in fact, one piece of advice turned out to be pivotal.
There I was in a parking lot in an absolute flap,
in serious negotiations with a stroller.
Because, apparently, you need a degree in engineering
to deploy a stroller out of the car, baby in arm, bag in tow.
So there I am, like all kind of pretzeled in,
keys between my knees,
I'm sweating profusely,
when a mom, noticing all my commotion, asked how old my daughter was.
"Six weeks," I panted.
To which she replied,
"Oh, but then you're just a six-week-old mom yourself.
You can't possibly have it all figured out."
She was onto something.
She was opening me up to a new idea,
that, yes, I was a woman with only six weeks' worth of mothering experience.
But something else too,
that in the wake of becoming a mom for the first time,
my own six-week-old self
from somewhere in my mind
had woken up as well.
And, oh my word, was she needy.
She was insecure; she was unsure; she was dependent.
She was freaking me out.
Great, so now there are two babies in the room:
my daughter and me.
And there I'm still somehow thinking,
"But hang on now. This wasn't in my birth plan."
While I was really unready to unlaminate my long list of expectations,
I did very quickly realize two things.
One, that I needed to give my daughter and I
the best possible chance at this mother-daughter thing.
And two, that in order to do that,
I needed help understanding what was happening.
And so after much time and extensive investigation,
I went into psychoanalysis.
Now, psychoanalysis is a type of in-depth psychotherapy
where you lie on the couch during sessions,
around 4 times a week,
ongoing, for as long as it takes.
I'm now going on my sixth year of treatment.
That is a whole lot of talking about yourself.
So how is this going to help me?
Well, imagine your mind is a smartphone.
You know how your phone
has countless pics, apps and data uploaded onto it?
At first, it's convenient,
until you notice the glitches
that are slowing your device or causing breakdown.
In a similar way, our minds are carrying a lifetime of memory downloads,
things like thoughts, ideas, wishes, habits,
visceral experiences and lots of big feelings.
Some of these are serving you,
but others are causing malfunctions
that are invisibly running your life that is.
So in a particular way, a psychoanalyst helps you double-tap that front screen
and call up that deep programming.
With trust and time, the two of you can now look at these things,
try to figure out
why you downloaded them in the first place
so that you can then decide what to close, keep or delete.
This frees up space so things can run more smoothly.
So for me, it was in analysis
that I really began to think about what that mom said to me that day,
that in a funny sort of way,
becoming a mom was opening me up
and reintroducing me to parts of myself I had long forgotten about.
Through this process, I began to realize just how complex my mind actually is
and that I'm not just operating as a 30-something-year-old grown-up;
I am so much more than my current age.
I am, in fact, a sum total of all my younger selves put together.
And that long list of disturbing questions actually belong to them.
So here's what I've learned about a mother's mind.
A mom is a like a babushka doll.
Also known as a matryoshka doll or a nesting doll,
they are very popular in Russia.
So, these dolls are designed in such a way that they come in a set
and they systematically decrease in size, from very large to very tiny.
And then, because they're hollow,
you can then neatly stack each doll inside the other.
So you, the present-day mom, is the outermost layer.
But what the set of dolls illustrates is that a mom's mind
is also made up of all her life stages and ages that came before.
Meaning that like the little doll that fits inside the biggest doll,
even though mom is now grown,
deep in her mind,
she still has all her younger identities:
part teenager, part toddler, and even part baby.
Each self is encapsulated with all their feelings and all their needs,
frozen at that particular maturity level and coloured by their past circumstance,
which feels pretty crowded.
So the expectation on a mom to always act like a grown-up
is kind of unfair.
How can we always be the bigger person when we're the little ones as well?
And the kicker is that many of these little people
are grumpy and distressed and insecure
and don't necessarily want to play nicely with the other children -
your children.
So what happens
when a mom's real-life toddler suddenly meets her own inner toddler?
Well, psychoanalysts believe that these past parts of ourselves
interact with the world all the time without us even realizing it,
and they have an incredibly profound effect on how we parent.
And they're often a source of huge conflict between us and our kids.
Like the mom who knee jerks
and unexpectedly yells at her daughter
for asking for 10 more minutes of screen time.
Now in that moment,
is mom lashing out in service of a teachable moment?
Or is she somewhere unconsciously getting in touch
with her own 10-year-old babushka
who's angry for, quite frankly, not getting everything that she wanted?
Or how about that mom who gets ratty
because her colicky baby needs to be held all day?
I mean, ya, it could be about her tired arms and her aching back, sure,
but it could also be about a woman who now does all the carrying
while there's still a deep, childhood need to be held and taken care of too.
And so our inner conflicts grow as our children do.
With each of their milestones and developmental stages,
we are somewhere unconsciously reminded of a time when we were there ourselves.
And the experience floods through the nesting doll layers
into the surface,
unexpected and unexplained.
It now mingles with current-mom experience.
And it puts more than one person's needs on the table.
This actually reminds me of a great meme I saw,
it said, "I wish I was still a kid
so I could take a very long nap and everyone would be proud of me."
(Laughter)
You know, it's certainly not my experience.
But it does remind me that even a mom needs someone to be proud of them.
I wonder what else she needs.
Let's ask her - shall we? -
starting with her littlest nesting doll.
Now the term "inner child" is bandied around a lot;
you often hear how important it is to "get in touch with your inner child."
And it is, but I wish it were as simple
as just like calling her up and asking to speak to her.
"Well, so sorry, but she can't come to the phone right now,
because she's a baby and babies can't speak."
Babies feel.
A reason why all this mom stuff feels so slippery
is because a core part of our internal experience
happened when we were just babies,
and there were literally no words to explain what we were going through -
only bodies and big feelings.
Neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms explains that a baby is not born as a blank slate.
A baby has a set of needs
which have to be met out there in the world.
So how does baby know she needs something?
Well, she has feelings about it.
And those feelings then propel and push her out there into the world
to have those needs met.
This is how we survive, by acting on our feelings.
So if baby's lying in her cot, she hears mom outside.
She needs mom to come.
She feels curious,
and she pops her head up to get attention.
If baby needs to be fed, she feels frustration and rage,
and she screams until that milk arrives.
That was her language then, and it continues to be ours today.
We experience this daily.
If you're separated from your kid in a supermarket
and you need to urgently get them back,
you feel panic and you make a plan.
I have a similar feeling of panic
when I'm secretly eating a packet of chips
and my kids overhear my loud crunching.
Then I feel the need to urgently devour that packet of chips at pace.
(Laughter)
Listen, my psychoanalyst said that the origin of that particular feeling
lies in the fact that I'm from a family where I'm one of four kids
and I didn't always like sharing - my parents, not my chips.
You see, that's the nesting doll part of the feeling.
As you peel back the nested layers of your conscious reactions to your kids,
deep at the nucleus, there are these long forgotten feelings
holding your very earliest experiences
of what it meant to be loved and reliant on another person to survive.
Psychoanalyst Diana Breen describes the experience of having kids
as being a reconciliation with your own mother.
It's a confrontation with how you felt about your mom or caregivers
back when you were just a baby,
surfacing all your difficult feelings about that time,
including what you want to hold onto or would prefer to forget about -
like the pain of not always having your needs met.
Now, fast-forward to today.
You suddenly have your own real-life baby in your arms.
And in the most ordinary of ways, that baby reminds you of yourself.
You better believe you have some very strong feelings about that.
And so it really starts to make sense
why our babies and our children are so incredibly evocative for us.
What this all really boils down to
is that our oldest and most vulnerable feelings
are currently still very much in play.
And I'm sorry to tell you, but they're making executive decisions
in all your current, real-life interactions with your kids,
even the big kids.
So when your teenage son snubs your attempt to chat
and retreats to his bedroom until the internet runs out,
if you want to avoid a fight,
it's going to be really important for you to try to figure out
if that betrayal you're feeling is genuinely between you and him
or if it actually belongs to your littlest nesting doll,
who long, long ago, had to let go of the one she loved the most
but couldn't keep forever,
like a mommy who had to go to work
or couldn't come right away when you cried.
As much as we love and adore them,
our children are also a reminder of our younger, more susceptible selves.
And it's damn hard to feel vulnerable and be reminded by our kids, no less,
that there are parts of us that are actually scared and need more.
Doesn't this paint a slightly different picture of our babushkas?
They're not necessarily neatly stacked inside of each other.
They're all jumbled up, in disarray,
doubled up in places with big bits missing elsewhere.
If we have any chance of making sense of the mayhem,
those pieces need to be unpacked,
piece by piece.
So what can we do to free ourselves from the odds stacked against us?
Or rather, the odds stacked inside us?
Well, I do have a suggestion.
But it means that I'm going to have to be one of those seasoned moms
and share my greatest piece of advice that none of the baby books covered.
All these years later, I can honestly say that the best thing I've done in my life
was get to know my own layers with someone who wanted to listen
in a way that would make all the difference.
And in fact, when in came to having my second baby,
my inner crowd weren't nearly as rowdy
and their questions weren't nearly as disturbing.
Now, going into psychoanalysis was my way of doing it.
But there are others,
and you deserve to find your own reflective space
with someone who can truly hear your stories.
This will reward you with some clarity and ownership,
and like that smartphone, free up space,
but this time, between you and your kids.
Because as confronting as being a mother is,
it's actually a unique opportunity
to understand how beautifully complicated you are
in the most ordinary of ways.
Because raising a family is also about raising yourself all over again
and embracing the understanding
that nothing about being a mom is straight-forward.
In fact, like a nesting doll, it's inside-out.
(Applause)