What if I’m not a better mother? – 04/08/2024 – Vera Iaconelli

Around the age of three we realize that it was our parents who brought us into the world. Then begins the saga to find out where babies come from, whose ultimate purpose is to discover what desire engendered us. Parents often struggle to answer questions about the mechanics of sex and reproduction. But the embarrassment about “what goes into what, and then comes out of where” serves to offset the embarrassment about the question about desire.

No parent will be able to give the answer to their satisfaction, neither for their offspring nor for themselves. Unable to do so, we spend our lives creating myths about this unfathomable fact. “I really wanted a girl/boy”, “I really wanted to be a mother/father”, “I wanted to have a family”… these are phrases as opaque and as unsustainable as any others. The girl/boy you want cannot be the one who arrives, otherwise it would be delusional. We will only know if we wanted to be a father/mother after we are one, given the impossibility of foreseeing the experience. Family is a broad concept that can fit almost everything. In the end, the children, parenting and family you obtain are unpredictable.

I helped a young woman who was having difficulty bonding with her newborn baby. Contrary to any expectations, she had to recognize that unconsciously she had never imagined that she could be the mother of a beautiful and healthy child.

The promise we make to ourselves when we discover that parents are responsible for the arrival of babies is that, just like them, we will also have children. This aspiration is due to two motivations. Out of love for his parents, seeking to be like them, but also out of envy, hoping to dethrone them.

It turns out that the babies we dream of in childhood do not always need to materialize in the flesh, and could very well be born from other projects in the world. Creating and achieving is not restricted to producing children.

Parental models —loved or hated— haunt our expectations and fantasies when we decide to follow in their footsteps. It takes time for us to admit that parents are people who had children, not beings evolved through parenthood. This is a necessary but painful discovery that leads us to the promise of being better parents than they were for us.

The more we blame the caregivers we had, the more we run the risk of betting excessively on the chance of overcoming them. The reparatory promise that exists in every parenting is an important motivation for having children and a considerable weight to be carried with their arrival.

We soon discover that between expectation and deed there is the abyss of reality. We can even offer something better than what our parents offered us and, generally, reflecting on their mistakes allows us to gain some awareness. But we can get it right where they got it wrong, do the same and still get it wrong where they got it right. In general, it’s a little of both.

Even when it becomes clear that a better relationship has been built than what we received, something always escapes us. And, depending on the level of expectation —which nowadays is astronomical—, the feeling of failure and guilt can be overwhelming. Not only because there is a brutal difference between our childhood promises and life as it is, but also because we live in a moment in which it is believed that raising children could happen without any edges, without any leftovers.

The mourning for the impossibility of realizing the child’s ideal as father and mother is constituent. But to this necessary elaboration are added the current false expectations of parenting — positive, guaranteed and controlled. They give a clue as to why mothers and fathers today feel so devastated.

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