Daughter, mother, wife: Transitions from ideals to the real family

Abstract

This paper describes the impact of the birth of the first baby on a mother's identity during the first year of the baby's life and the psychic and external adjustments that the woman has to make to accommodate the baby. It describes a white, middle-class woman's struggle with her own baby feelings evoked by intense contact with her baby. This was particularly painful during the time of weaning, experienced perhaps for a mother as a profound loss of an exclusive relationship with her own mother. For the mother described here, one way of coping with the pain of this was by trying to deny the uniqueness of the baby's relationship to the mother, a relationship that cannot be replaced by something else. The paper finally describes the slow process of letting go of an ideal mother and ideal baby and being able to tolerate more difficult, ambivalent feelings and painful realities of family life.

Keywords:

• Difficult birth
• identity
• adolescent states of mind
• mothering and ambivalence