មាតិកា
Being a good mother would be possible when you have had a toxic mother yourself
My mother gave birth to me, it’s the only gift she ever gave me but I’m a resilient one ! For me, she’s a non-mother, because she brought me up without any sign of affection or tenderness. I hesitated for a long time to have a baby, given the creepy mother I had had, I thought I was devoid of maternal instinct compared to other women. The more my pregnancy progressed, the more I was stressed. Hugs, kisses, lullabies, skin to skin, heart filled with love, I discovered this happiness with Paloma, my daughter, and it’s so awesome. I regret even more that I did not receive maternal love as a child, but I am making up for it. “Élodie is one of those young mothers who have not had the chance to have a caring mother, a” good enough “mother, according to the pediatrician Winnicott and who, suddenly, wonder if they will succeed in being a good one. mother. As psychiatrist Liliane Daligan * explains: “A mother can fail on several levels. She may be depressed and not bring her child to life at all. It can be physically abusive and / or psychically abusive. In this case, the child is humiliated, insulted and systematically devalued. She can be completely indifferent. The child does not receive any testimony of tenderness, so we speak of a “bonsai” child who has trouble growing and accumulates developmental delays. It’s not easy to project yourself into a fulfilling motherhood and into your role as a mother when you don’t have a positive mother model to identify with and refer to.
Be the perfect mother that we didn’t have
This anxiety, this fear of not being up to the task, does not necessarily manifest itself before deciding to conceive a baby or during her pregnancy. As the psychologist and psychoanalyst Brigitte Allain-Dupré ** emphasizes: “ When a woman is engaged in a family project, she is protected by a form of amnesia, she forgets that she had a bad relationship with her mother, her gaze is more focused on the future than on the past. Her difficult history with a failing mother is likely to resurface when the baby is around. “This is indeed what happened to Élodie, mother of Anselme, 10 months:” I vaguely felt that something was wrong with Anselme. I was putting myself under impossible pressure, because I always told myself that I would be the irreproachable mother that I did not have! My mother was a party girl who went out all the time and often left us alone, my little brother and me. I suffered a lot and wanted everything to be perfect for my sweetheart. But Anselm cried too much, didn’t eat, didn’t sleep well. I felt like I was below everything! Women who have had a failing mother often consciously or unconsciously take on the mission of being an ideal mother. According to Brigitte Allain-Dupré: “Aiming for perfection is a way to repair, to heal inside oneself the wound as a mother. They tell themselves that everything is going to be wonderful, and the return to reality (sleepless nights, exhaustion, stretch marks, crying, a libido with the spouse not at the top…) is painful. They realize that being perfect is impossible and feel guilty for not matching their illusion. Difficulties in breastfeeding or quite simply the legitimate desire to bottle-feed her baby are interpreted as proof that they cannot find their place as a mother! They do not take responsibility for their choice, whereas a bottle given with pleasure is better than a breast given “because it is necessary” and that if the mother is more reassured by giving the bottle, it will be hard. good to her little baby. Psychiatrist Liliane Daligan makes the same observation: “Women who have had a failing mother are often more demanding of themselves than others because they want to do the opposite of their mother who is an“ anti-model ”! They wear themselves out trying to be the ideal mother of an ideal child, they set the bar too high. Their child is never clean enough, happy enough, intelligent enough, they feel responsible for everything. As soon as the child is not on top, it’s a disaster, and it’s all their fault. “
A risk of postpartum depression
Any young mother who is a beginner encounters difficulties, but those who lack maternal emotional security are very quickly discouraged. Since all is not idyllic, they are convinced that they were wrong, that they are not made for motherhood. Since everything is not positive, everything becomes negative, and they get depressed. As soon as a mother feels overwhelmed, it is essential that she does not stay with her shame, that she talks about her difficulties to those close to her, to the baby’s father or, if she cannot, to the caregivers of the baby. the PMI on which she depends, to a midwife, her attending physician, her pediatrician or a shrink, because postpartum depression can have serious consequences for the baby if it is not treated quickly. When a woman becomes a mother, her complicated relations with her own mother come back to the surface, she remembers all the injustices, cruelty, criticism, indifference, coldness… As Brigitte Allain-Dupré emphasizes: “Psychotherapy makes it possible to understand that their mother’s abuse was linked to her story, that it wasn’t meant for them, that it’s not because they weren’t good enough to be loved. Young mothers also become aware that mother / baby relationships were less demonstrative, less tactile and often more distant in previous generations, that mothers were “operative”, that is to say that they fed and fed them. care, but that sometimes “the heart was not there”. Some also discover that their mother was in postpartum depression and that no one noticed it, because it was not discussed at the time. This putting in perspective allows to put at distance the bad relations with his own mother and to accept the ambivalence, that is to say the fact that there is good and bad in each person, including in themselves. They can finally say to themselves: ” It excites me to have a child, but the price to pay is not going to be funny every day, there will be positive and negative, like all mothers in the world. “
The fear of reproducing what we have lived
Besides the fear of not insuring, the other fear that torments mothers is that of reproducing with their babies what they suffered from their mother when they were children. Marine, for example, had this angst when she gave birth to Evariste. “I am an adopted child. My biological mother abandoned me and I was extremely afraid to do the same, to be an “abandoner” mother too. What saved me was that I understood that she had abandoned me, not because I was not good enough, but because she could not do otherwise. “From the moment we ask ourselves the question of the risk of replaying the same scenario, it is a good sign and we can be very vigilant. It is more difficult when violent maternal gestures – slaps, for example – or maternal insults return in spite of oneself, when we always promised ourselves that we would never do as our mother! If that happens, the first thing to do is to apologize to your child: “Excuse me, something escaped me, I didn’t want to hurt you, I didn’t want to tell you that!” “. And to prevent this from happening again, it is better to go talk to a shrink.
According to Liliane Daligan: “The companion can also be of great help for a mother who fears a passage to the act. If he is tender, loving, reassuring, if he values her in her role as a mother, he helps the young mother to build another image of herself. She can then accept the movements of fed up with “I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take this kid anymore! ” that all mothers live. ” Do not be afraid to ask the dad from birth, it’s a way of telling him : “We both did this child, there aren’t too many two of us to take care of a baby and I’m counting on you to support me in my role as a mother. And when he invests himself with his child, it is essential not to be omnipresent, to let him take care of his little one in his own way.
Do not hesitate to get help
Asking your baby’s father for support is good, but there are other possibilities. Yoga, relaxation, mindful meditation can also help a mom who is struggling to find her place. As Brigitte Allain-Dupré explains: “These activities allow us to rebuild within ourselves a space of our own, where we feel safe, peaceful, sheltered from childhood traumas, like a cozy and secure cocoon, when his mother did not. Women who are still anxious about being silent can turn to hypnosis or a few sessions in a mom / baby consultation. “Juliette, she relied on the other mothers of the parental nursery in which she had registered her daughter Dahlia:” I had a bipolar mother and I did not really know how to deal with Dahlia. I observed the mothers of the other babies in the nursery, we became friends, we talked a lot and I drew on good ways of doing things that corresponded to me in each of them. I made my market! And Delphine de Vigan’s book “Nothing stands in the way of the night” on her bipolar mother helped me understand my own mother, her illness, and forgive. Understanding your own mother, eventually forgiving what she has done in the past, is a good way to distance yourself and become the “good enough” mother you want to be. But should we move away from this toxic mother in the present moment, or get closer to it? Liliane Daligan advocates caution: “It happens that a grandmother is not as harmful as the mother she was, that she is a“ possible grandmother ”when she was a“ impossible mother ” ”. But if you are afraid of her, if you feel that she is too invasive, too critical, too authoritarian, even violent, it is better to distance yourself and not entrust your baby to her if you are not the. “Here again, the role of the companion is essential, it is up to him to keep the toxic grandmother away, to say:” You are at my place here, your daughter is no longer your daughter, but the mother of our child. . Let her raise it however she wants! “
* Author of “Feminine violence”, ed. Albin Michel. ** Author of “Cure of his mother”, ed. Eyrolles.