GOOD ENOUGH MOTHERING

I saw a recent Facebook post by a young mother. It was an article talking about how hard it is to parent these days. The culture offers us minute by minute advice on how to raise strong, healthy, creative, sensitive, thoughtful, intelligent, athletic, well-rounded children. The stress can be overwhelming and the guilt can be debilitating.

When I read the article I was reminded of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott who studied child development. He believed that central to the health of a child is the way she is held.  The mother’s holding is important in that it creates a warm and safe place in which the child might navigate the changes in her life. He calls this “good enough mothering.”

Jacqueline J. Lewis interprets Winnicott this way: “[A] mother creates a holding environment for the child as she cradles him in her arms and creates a safe place for him to grow. This holding environment is increased with time and space; it becomes a cradle, a playpen, the next room, and eventually the weekly phone call between a parent and an adult child. Thus the arms-around feeling of the holding environment becomes the transitional space in which a child develops; transitional space is also the space for adult living, learning and playing. It is the space in which art, creativity and religious experience occur.” (The Power of Stories)

There are many things that our culture offers our children and so many of the young parents I know work really hard to make these available to their off-spring. But, I sometimes wonder if the stability of a holding space isn’t the most important. Parents, whether men or women, create a container to help children hold their energy and spirit so that they can work out how to live in the family, the neighborhood and the society. Children, regardless of our ages, need people who can help us hold what is sometimes the chaotic emotions of growing and changing.

So parents, hold on and stay present. Our children need the “arms-around” feeling that can help them discover their own way, their own strength and their own direction.

POSSESSIVE LOVE

I don’t know about you, but when I love someone or something, I want to hold on to it. I want to protect it. I want to nurture the relationship so that I can continue to love, but just as importantly, so I can continue to receive the love I feel from the other.

But, sometimes loving another this way assures that we will lose that love. For if we try to keep getting the love we want to hold on to, we are inclined to keep seeing the other as they were when we got the love we wanted. A possessive love assumes that love is available only as we have known it and only from the person as they are.

This possessiveness is grounded in a sense of scarcity. When I don’t think there will be enough to sustain me in the future, I hoard that which I have. If I am afraid that there will not be enough love to sustain me in the future, I will want to store up as much of it as I can so it is there when love runs low. 

But, from what I have learned in living, those who believe that there is love enough to nourish a needful soul, discover that indeed there is plenty. When we live in the fear that we won’t have enough, we hang onto what is and there is no room for another kind of love to enter our lives. When we define love as one thing, we miss all the other experiences of love that are there to be received. 

And when we believe there is enough love to sustain us, we will also give love away. What we have received will be made available without reserve to others with whom we come in contact. It may indeed to be more blessed to give than to receive, but maybe that is because when we give love freely, we simply open ourselves to receive the blessed love of others.