Accepting Your Ambivalence
Many of the first-time older mothers I work with have a hard time admitting that they have feelings of ambivalence. Ambivalence simply means having mutually conflicting emotions, but in our linear society, it’s hard to understand that we can hold two seemingly disparate feelings at the same time. For instance, we love being a mother and miss our children after a two-hour separation, but we also remember our single days with longing. We adore the security and warmth of our family, even as we dream of taking refuge in a Buddhist monastery. Mothers who know that this will most likely be their only child not only feel required to “do it all,” but also to be unambivalently enthusiastic while they’re doing it. Doris, a forty-nine-year-old teacher who dotes on her nine-year-old daughter, wonders, “Am I the only one who wishes my child would dematerialize, get beamed up and away for the day, and return ready for bed?” Sherry, a forty-seven-year-old woman devoted to her two-year-old son, confides to our support group that she has fantasies of buying a red Harley and disappearing into a “witness protection program for older mothers.”
Does this ambivalence mean these women don’t love their children? Not at all. It means that after decades of cherished autonomy and independence, first-time older mothers find their previous lifestyle and all its freedoms altered beyond recognition. It means that this surrender of self-rule comes at precisely the time most midlife women with grown children are just beginning to reclaim their lives. To acknowledge the inevitable ambivalence that arises when the demands of putting another person’s needs first clash with the midlife call toward selfhood is not an admission of failure. It simply means you are human and are feeling more than one thing at the same time.
Suzanne, a forty-nine-year-old business administrator and mother of eight-year-old Sara, had the support group groaning and laughing as she described what happened the day before she was about to leave on a much-needed two-day weekend retreat by herself.
“Sara wanted to know why she couldn’t come with me,” she said, “so I had to explain about how I needed to take some time away for myself. But still, I was feeling pretty conflicted about it. So by the time she asked me to take her to the Laundromat to help her wash her giant quilt, I said yes. It had been an intense day at work and I was feeling pretty hormonal. I probably should have known better, but my guilt got the better of me. After two hours of sitting in this smelly Laundromat, watching really bad TV, with the bathroom out of order, she drags the damn quilt through an oil spill on the way to the car. I totally lost it and began haranguing her about how she needed to focus more. So then I got into the car and I proceeded to back up over one of those concrete row dividers they have in parking lots. Men came out of the Laundromat to watch me. Blessedly my daughter didn’t say a word on the way home. But while we were eating dinner my husband asked us how the day had gone, and of course she told him everything-how I had given her a ‘big old lecture on being focused’ while I was backing up over this thing, and how half the town had come out to watch me. So my husband put his fork down and said to her, ‘Honey, that’s why Mommy needs to go away.’”
Anna told the support group she felt devastated because, after spending thousands of dollars and three years undergoing infertility treatments, she was now feeling increasingly frustrated and impatient with her four-year-old daughter. “I’m forty-seven,” she began. “My periods are irregular, and sometimes I feel so hormonally out of balance and so desperate for time alone that I lock myself in the bathroom. Last week I yelled so loud my daughter burst into tears and said, ‘I want my real mommy.’ How could this possibly be me, the same woman who tried to have a baby for so many years? Sometimes I say I’m going to the store, but really all I do is just sit in the car in the parking lot soaking up the silence, knowing no one can find me and ask me for anything. My husband knows I need time to be alone and encourages me to take it, but I’m torn. I’m not going to have any more children, and if I leave, I might miss something precious. But when I stay, I’m crabby and I want to escape. I guess you could say I’m caught between a rock and a hard place.”
