On Trying to be a "Good Enough" Mother

So I made a bone-headed mistake in my last post (which is now fixed). The last two essays were adapted from a longer draft I wrote last spring, and a lot of material was removed because I was trying to keep the posts reasonably not-insanely-long. One of the cut pieces discussed how Alice Miller and Gabor Maté both discuss in their books how they weren’t particularly good parents themselves, largely because of their own childhood traumas and exposure to what Miller calls “poisonous pedagogies”, and how learning about the toxic history of child-rearing in the West helped them understand both their own pain and the pain they passed on to their children.

Gabor Maté’s son, Daniel, co-authored The Myth of Normal with his father, and the book contains multiple examples of how Maté’s parenting hurt his family. Alice Miller’s son, Martin Miller, who was around thirty when his mother published her first book (1979’s The Drama of the Gifted Child), published a testimony about the abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of his mother and father, and became the subject of the 2020 documentary, Who’s Afraid of Alice Miller?

I found both Miller and Maté’s books to be immensely valuable when working through my own childhood and preparing to become a mother myself. I admire both for acknowledging fault and attempting to help others learn from their mistakes.

The too-long version of the essay contrasted Miller and Maté’s examples with those of Erica Komisar and Darcia F. Narvaez, who I read as being fairly good parents writing about parenting from a science-based perspective. Komisar is a parent, and discusses how the research she found on the importance of parent-child attachment was so overwhelming, she put writing her book about it on hold so she could focus on being present for her own children while they were young. Her example is an interesting contrast to Gabor Maté’s self-admitted workaholism.

When I removed all the above material from the last essay, I forgot to remove a line about Darcia Narvaez being a mother … the problem is, she doesn’t have any children. I made a mistake when sourcing biographical information about my sources and failed to catch it when I was looking over my work.

The thing is, I found Narvaez’s Moral Landscapes column so compelling, I think I wanted her to be a mother. I wanted her advice to come from a place of personal experience, and I wanted a role model I could follow. And so I made a dumb mistake and didn’t check it. This is a great example of why editors are so important, but the only person reading these over before I publish them is my husband and he, like me, focussed on checking the science and clarity, and did not notice the mistake either.

Anyway, I apologize for this, and will be more careful in the future.

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I began researching these topics in 2019, before I met my husband, married him, and became pregnant (all three of which happened in 2020, it was a wild year). I was terrified to become a mother; while researching, I had realized that I fit the stereotype of the kind of woman who might have been described as a “refrigerator” in the 1960s. I am, to quote Leo Kanner, “strongly preoccupied with abstractions of a scientific, literary, or artistic nature”, “obsessive”, and had a reputation as an Elsa-style ice queen in my late teens and twenties. It runs in my family; my father’s mother is often described as “cold” by my father and his sisters, and my mother, despite generally seeing her adoptive parents through rose-coloured glasses, admits that her mother rarely hugged her, something which I also experienced as a small child who stayed at her parents’ house frequently. I’m still an awkward hugger, despite trying to exposure-therapy myself into being more physically affectionate for over fifteen years now.

I was terrified of passing my own mental health problems down to my daughter, and when I realized I was pregnant I dove into research on parenting with an even greater intensity (some might say, obsessively). By that point, I had a long mental list of things not to do (thanks to authors like Alice Miller), but very little idea of what to do. While I found books by attachment-parenting advocates such as Dr. William Sears to be helpful, Darcia F. Narvaez’s column became my parenting bible.

I’m sharing this because I’m very aware that the last post could be interpreted as “mom-shaming” (which Erica Komisar, Gabor Maté, and Alice Miller have all been accused of) and that’s not where I’m coming from at all. Most days I feel like a hot mess of a mother, but learning the history of toxic parenting ideas in the West and how other cultures raise their children gave me a framework to at least mitigate the damage my overly-cerebral, prone-to-dissociation, left-hemisphere-tilted, obsessive, ice-princess self could do to my child.

Together, my husband—a clinical counsellor who works with people with addictions, who comes with his own significant intergenerational traumas—and I decided on a handful of strategies to nurture the right hemisphere of our daughter’s brain while she is a baby and toddler.

We let her sleep in our king-sized bed with us instead of using a bassinet, and did not sleep-train (so, yes, she’s still in our bed, and only slowly transitioning to her own now), we carried her everywhere in a wrap instead of using a stroller, I breastfed exclusively until we introduced solids around five months, and still breastfeed her before naps and bed. When we introduced solids, we avoided all processed “baby” and “kid” foods and instead fed her pieces of whatever we were eating off our plates. For the first four years, we’re focussing on right-hemisphere development; lots of music and singing, lots of dancing, mommy-daughter yoga (she has transitioned from being a weight to doing a pretty impressive one-legged downward dog herself), lots of play, socializing, cuddling, and as much time outside as our rainy climate reasonably allows. Developing non-verbal communication skills, and helping her develop a healthy relationship to nature, to food, to other people, and to her own body. No left hemisphere tasks pushed prematurely; no flashcards, no attempt to teach her to read or to do simple mathematics before she’s ready (obviously, we read to her every day, but that is different than trying to teach her to read herself). Screen time limited to music videos (kid stuff but also performance videos like Tiny Desk concerts), musicals, and animal documentaries, and I ban any content that’s too high-stimulation or addictive (she will survive without listening to that “Baby Shark” song, I think).

We also try to include her in our lives as much as possible, which has meant letting her have a later bedtime (we all go to bed at the same time, around 9pm most nights) so she can stay up with us and spend more time with my husband after work. The later bedtime, and the flexibility of our routine, also means we usually bring her with us when we go out for dinner or go to parties or social gatherings, even if she’s the only kid there and even if it means she goes to bed closer to 11pm. She still gets her 11-14 hours of sleep per day between one nap and night, but wakes up later than a lot of young kids (between 9am-10am most days). I haven’t spent a full night apart from her since she was born.

To be clear, absolutely none of these ideas were my own; they all came from various “attachment” parenting experts and from Moral Landscapes; with the exception of the dietary stuff, which was mostly inspired by Dr. Robert Lustig’s work.

So are these strategies working? So far, they seem to be; she’s happy, confident, “unusually chill” (in the words of several of my family members), high energy, rarely gets sick (despite a rough start and a four-day NICU stay after she was born), and eats a varied and healthy diet. I think our approach has made parenting a lot easier overall, but she’s still a toddler. Co-sleeping has not stopped her from refusing to go to bed most nights, eating the same food as us and avoiding processed foods and refined sugar has not stopped her from sometimes refusing to eat most of her dinner, and a big downside to taking her to parties is that she will try to steal sips from unattended beer bottles if we’re not careful.

That all being said, she’s not even two and a half yet, so there’s plenty of time for (more) problems to emerge. Grain of salt.

Just over a year ago, I was with a friend, an older writer who has mentored me. She told me, bluntly, that I was trying too hard to be “some sort of Earth Mother” and suppressing my natural tendencies. “You have the brain of a writer,” she said. And she was right (after all, I read too much as a kid).

As much as I admire Erica Komisar for putting her writing on hold (for nearly a decade!) to focus on raising her children, not writing isn’t good for me, and neither is trying to change who I am because I think I would make a better mother if I were a different person.

As I’ve slowly started to organize my research, write, and begin this blog, I’ve spent less time with my daughter (the slack being picked up largely by my husband but also by grandparents and step-grandparents), and I’ve been distracted more when I am with her. It’s not ideal, but I do feel better getting the words out instead of letting them circle and tangle in my head.

I recognize that I will never be a caricature of an “ideal” mother, and that’s okay, A “good enough” mother is good enough. I don’t need to become a beacon of warmth, it’s good enough that I’ve thawed enough to be physically affectionate (my daughter, unlike me, has zero issues with hugging) and reasonably patient.

I also wouldn’t have been able to do as well as I am without support, from my husband, both of our families, and all of our friends who don’t mind when we bring our kid along to a party or birthday dinner (etc). So when I bring up topics like the history of “poisonous pedagogies” or research on brain development, attachment, and the importance of parent-child bonds, my intention is not to “shame” parents … instead, I think if we want to improve child well-being in our culture, the first thing we need to do is support parents better, both at a familial and societal level. The point of my last essay was that parenting wisdom has been corrupted for a long time in the West. The fault doesn’t lie with individual parents; if anyone is to blame, it’s the “experts”, and a culture that devalues both mothers and childhood.

Thanks for reading. I’m working on an essay about “gifted” children right now, which should be ready to share in a couple of weeks.

~ Meghan