Verified by 
“I want more time with the baby, but also more time alone.”
“My children bring me so much joy, but they also make me crazy!”
“I’m so grateful for my husband—he does a lot around the house, and he listens when I’m upset. But I get angry with him for how calm and content he seems!”
So many of the women who come to me for therapy are tormented by their own ambivalence. Words like these fall from their mouths, and not with neutrality or benign curiosity; varying degrees of frustration, confusion, and even anguish accompany these declarations of mixed emotion. “I’m losing my mind,” they sometimes say. But in actuality, they have found their minds; they have found crevices and corners they didn’t know existed and hadn’t planned to visit. The same is true of their hearts. This is the essence of how motherhood transforms us. It is, for most women, an entrance into a fuller, messier array of experiences than we’ve ever before known.
The trouble is, the human mind is poorly equipped to handle ambivalence. It hates uncertainty and protests the dissonance that arises when two seemingly opposed thoughts or feelings exist at once. That dissonance can be so unpleasant that we’re likely to engage—often without much conscious awareness—in all sorts of strategies to get rid of it. In many respects, this serves us well; the world is an overstimulating, potentially overwhelming place, and our brains are designed to filter, reduce, and simplify. But when it is our own internal experience our brains are attempting to simplify, we put ourselves at emotional risk.
In the realm of motherhood, especially, paradoxes and mixed feelings abound. The same little people who hamper our freedom and spontaneity are also the ones who compel us to savor the present moment. Although parenthood makes us slaves to schedules and planning, it also necessitates extraordinary flexibility and affords new opportunities for unexpected, unbidden joy. Even as they exhaust us beyond compare, children can revitalize adult life; we see through the eyes of our children, and the world becomes more tantalizing again. One minute, we are crying in hopeless frustration. The next, we are feeling surges of love and affection deeper than we’ve ever known.
These ambivalent states are not only inevitable, but they’re also not inherently problematic. The problem arises from our intolerance for ambivalence. We are afraid that if, for example, we give voice to the darker, less acceptable facets of our experience as mothers, this will somehow render the prettier, acceptable facets untrue, or at least obscure them from others’ view. We feel we must we preface our expressions of frustration, fatigue, loss, and anger with expressions of love: “I love my baby, but she exhausts me”; “I love my baby, but sometimes I just can’t handle how needy he is.”
We do this with our relationships, too: “I love my husband, but he is so oblivious sometimes.” As women, we are expected to be unwaveringly nurturing and loving; to waver in those regards is to risk being seen as a lesser kind of a woman. For fear that we will be shunned for voicing a difficult truth about the way we sometimes experience the ones who matter most to us, we package that truth in sentiments of love and fondness. Though this is better than never voicing the difficult truth at all, I often wonder what it would be like if it were taken as a given that the feelings of love and fondness always exist. How much suffering would that alleviate when the not-so-loving and not-so-fond feelings rise up?
A lot, and here’s why: Without realizing it, with these “I love my spouse/child, but...” statements we put ourselves in a bind. We are essentially saying, These two things don’t go together, so which of them wins? Which of them will I deny, minimize, banish from consciousness? What can I do to resolve this contradiction?
What we actually need to do is embrace the contradiction. We need to learn to ride the waves of our changing emotions and perceptions. One of the most powerful ways to do this is with a simple shift in language. It’s called the “And, Not But” shift. When we use the word “and” instead of the word “but,” we make room for all emotions. There is no competition between love and hate, no tension between exhaustion and invigoration, no mutual exclusivity between the grief of lost personal freedom and the joy of caring for a child we love more than we ever thought possible.
Imagine, for example, that you’ve been troubled by your partner’s quiet nature, perceiving that other couples out to dinner are more engaged, their conversations more intimate and lively. You say to yourself, “I feel like we have a good marriage, but s/he is so quiet when we get time together.” The words put you in a worried, unresolved place. Do we have a good marriage, or not? Does his/her silence mean something bad? Am I wrong about our strong connection? When instead you say, “I feel like we have a good marriage, and s/he is so quiet when we get time together,” the feeling in the air is altogether different. One does not negate the other. Your partner or spouse is allowed to be a quiet person without this having any bearing on the quality of your marriage. And when you untether your partner’s behavior from the quality of your relationship, you see the issue more clearly—you see that you simply long for more of a window into your partner’s internal world. Rather than ruminate about the strength of the marriage, you begin to conjure up some creative ideas for how to feel more connected. The perplexed feeling, the pent-up tension stemming from the “but” language, dissipates.
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has suggested we hold our thoughts and feelings like a mother would hold her crying baby. It’s like asking with compassion, “What’s going on here?” rather than asking with judgment, “What the hell is going on here?” Something significant happens when we gather up seemingly opposing thoughts and feelings into our arms and just let them be. Maybe even rock them a little and lovingly tend to them: “I love my daughter, and she also makes me madder than I’ve ever been”; “My partner is so supportive, and he also lets me down.” There are no dilemmas to resolve or apologies or justifications to be made. There are no angsty questions lurking, like, “How is this possible? What am I going to do about this? Which of these realities am I going to choose as righter or truer?” There is also no shame. There is only the full catastrophe—the cherishing and the resenting, the fulfillment and the disappointment, the pleasure and the pain—where shame finds no home.
Facebook image: Haurashko Kseniya/Shutterstock
