MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood: Excerpt
Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood by Margo Lowy PhD
Maternal Ambivalence is a groundbreaking examination of the myriad complex emotions that accompany motherhood for so many women. Dr. Margo Lowy tackles the dark and shameful feelings associated with this long-misunderstood and taboo topic, offering the reader genuine self-acceptance and a transformative approach to mothering.
Picture yourself as a young mother with a three-year-old daughter and a newborn at the playground. In the moment you’ve turned to the diaper bag, your toddler disappears—at first, all you can feel is terror, and then instinctively you look up—and there she is at the top of the slide, looking so proud of herself. At this moment, you might find yourself deluged with conflicting feelings, including anger and relief and resentment and gratitude and fear and even flashes of hate—you told her to wait for you before running off. You’re overwhelmed by these colliding feelings—including the waves of guilt and self-blame you feel for all the fuss when everything has turned out just fine. This is the experience of maternal ambivalence.
In Maternal Ambivalence, Dr. Margo Lowy explores the complex emotional landscape of mothering and the taboo issue of maternal ambivalence, arguing that it’s actually these darker feelings that most powerfully fuel our love for our children—in fact, they are the key to being a mother. Confronting the many moods of motherhood, using them to understand ourselves and our children better, and learning the language of ambivalence strengthens our love and leads to its own reward: maternal wisdom.
Throughout her narrative, Dr. Lowy offers case studies from her professional practice, cultural examples from classic and contemporary literature and film, and anecdotes from her own experience of mothering children born over three separate decades. Maternal Ambivalence both overturns the long-held, secretive misunderstandings of mothering, and reshapes the maternal language of love and self-acceptance with a transformative, invaluable new point of view.
Excerpt from MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood (Post Hill Press) by Margo Lowy, PhD. On sale March 25, 2025
The Paradox of Motherhood
There’s the paradox that mother and child continually lose and find each other in their search for physical and emotional connection. Every mother is entrusted with holding the tension that surfaces as she and her child discover and learn from and about each other, as she continually claims and reclaims her child, and a circular flow is set up between them. Mom is responsible for shielding her children from that outright aggression or pain that their development incurs, while paving the way for them to learn to acknowledge and process feelings for themselves. As part of that dynamic, mothers and children shift between losing and finding each other. Mothering is a lifelong experience of continually claiming and reclaiming, losing and finding the baby, toddler, child, teenager, and the young and not-so-young adult. In the losing, the mother experiences a renewal and a change as she seeks to find her child, and when her expectations shift, she may find her child a different person from the one she had imagined.
One of the earliest and most powerful demonstrations of the mother and child losing and finding each other is often also the most terribly fraught: the early weeks or months of feeding. A mother prepares a safe, comfortable space to ensure the best opportunity for the baby to find her food and a connection with her mother. At this stage of infanthood, milk represents nourishment, warmth, and security. When it flows, there is satisfaction (physical and psychological) and connection; the baby is full and content. But when the stars don’t align—and on many occasions they don’t—the infant resists the food. The ensuing distress and disturbance means the connection at this point is lost between them.
In most cases, the mother identifies the problem, the feed is restored, and the mother and baby find each other. She makes sure that the baby is latching onto her breast or a bottle and that her breathing isn’t blocked. If the baby is screaming, squirming, and whining, the connection is momentarily lost; they both focus on finding it through the milk. In most instances, the mother works out a way for them to find each other. The mother learns about her infant through the contented faces he makes, including reflex smiles and wavering eyelids that follow a good feed. In both bottle and breast, when the feed is complete and the baby is satisfied, the mother has had an experience of finding an emotional connection between her baby and herself.
But most of us know that feeding a baby—in any way—can at times be a painstaking, heartbreaking task, even if a short-lived one. Finding each other can be difficult sometimes. As long as it happens enough of the time, a mother can feel confident and able to establish a connection with her infant, and her baby will feel claimed. So many raw life lessons unfold as a mother continually loses and finds her child.
Losing and finding one’s child is a journey of discovery and a constant struggle. It is so tremendously important that these dynamics unfold in a stable yet fluid atmosphere for both mother and child. This requires the mother’s self-awareness and ability to recognize, repair, and learn from her mistakes without judging herself or her child.
A patient, whom I’ll call Rose, recounted a story to me almost a year after our lives had been turned upside down by the global pandemic. Her daughter reminded her every day that her birthday party the previous year in New York had been cancelled because of COVID. This one, she was told, needed to be bigger and better.
“Bigger?” she said to me. “Two things crossed my mind: she has fewer friends since we’ve moved three times in eighteen months, and…we’re still in the middle of a pandemic!”
I asked her how she was planning to manage her daughter’s expectations. Rose’s reply: “I desperately wanted to give it a shot! We have a new backyard in our house in California, so I knew we could have a bit of fun. The theme was Candy Land, and I invited literally everyone I knew. Even the cake was an explosion of candy and color. Pure drama, bigger and better everywhere you looked.
“My daughter had a blast—until the last guest left, and then she cried and cried and cried. ‘Why the tears? It was perfect! You had so much fun!’ I kept saying. But nothing I said could break her sadness. The rest of the day she was miserable.
“I’d poured my heart and soul into making this birthday one she would never forget. Instead of running to me with open arms, saying, ‘Thank you, Mommy,’ I was being told it was the worst day ever. Rose was nearly in tears herself while describing the scene to me. She went on: “Weeks have now passed…last night we were looking for a book to read and came across her yearbook from her previous school in New York. As we looked at it together in bed, a wave of emotion came over her, and she started sobbing. She hadn’t cried like this since her party. It took her a while to utter three words: ‘I…miss…my…’ My heart sank. And it suddenly dawned on me. As perfect as the party seemed, it wasn’t perfect at all. It was filled with so many friendly faces, but to her it was empty.
“I didn’t need to hear the rest of her sentence. She misses so much. Her friends, her family, her life before. All this time, it was me. I was the one who didn’t understand.”
Rose’s story is a reminder that we all need, and yearn for, the right environment in which to interact, to accept, and to grow. As mothers, we’re always looking for a way to soothe or fulfill our children’s wishes and desires, though they’re not always adept at expressing them accurately. Giving ourselves the space to communicate gently yet consistently with our child allows us to find them again and again more easily, and allows us to forgive ourselves and to be kinder and gentler with ourselves when we miss the mark, which inevitably happens again and again.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margo Lowy, PhD, is a psychotherapist specializing in mothering. She is the author of MATERNAL AMBIVALENCE: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood (Post Hill Press) and holds a doctorate from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she researched maternal ambivalence. Dr. Lowy is the author of a previous academic book, The Maternal Experience: Encounters with Ambivalence and Love, and has spoken about maternal ambivalence at universities and in media interviews worldwide. She is a member of PEN America and a former advisor to the founder of the Australian Jewish Fertility Network (AJFN). She is mother to three children and is based with her husband in New York City.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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