Mother brain, p.1
Mother Brain, page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Henry Holt and Company ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For my boys.
PREFACE
What does it mean to become a mother?
Certainly, every person’s experience is different. It is shaped by one’s circumstances, and those circumstances can vary in infinite ways, even from the very start, depending on whether a pregnancy is planned or not, agonized over or agonizing to discover, undertaken with or without a partner, begun with a donor, with assistance, or with ease. But parenthood in general, and motherhood in particular, is viewed often as something hyperpersonal. A mother is sacrosanct, love embodied. Motherhood is too precious to look at directly, to dissect. Instead, we see it sideways. We celebrate the transformative power of a child—“Having a baby changes everything,” according to Johnson & Johnson—without really naming what is changed.
For many women, the question feels dangerous. To answer it directly would require us to acknowledge just how we are changed by motherhood, altered from the person we were before and distinct from those who do not have children. Distinct from men. Different, in this context, has most often meant lesser. Forgetful. Frazzled. Consumed. Hindered by our own biology, perpetually at the edge of moral delinquency, and certainly less interesting. Better not to consider it.
In the forty or so weeks of pregnancy—many more if you account for the months spent attempting conception or struggling with pregnancy losses—birthing parents are bombarded with information about what pregnancy means for our body, our breasts, our hips, our waistline, our cardiac function, our pelvic floor, our sex drive. We are overwhelmed with guidance about what our behavior will mean for our children, how the choices we make will affect their developing bodies and their lifelong physical and mental health. How little we learn about ourselves. Even less about our partners. Among all the information we take in during the run-up to motherhood, what do we learn about how parenthood changes us, our inner lives? What does it mean to become a mother?
For nonbinary parents, fathers, or same-sex partners, the question—what does it mean to become a parent?—might seem unacknowledged, their stories treated like footnotes to a “truer” narrative about the transition to parenthood, the distinctly maternal one. Science has given us a whole new way of answering these questions, of asking them, even.
The first time I tried, I was four months postpartum and sitting in a tiny windowless room at the newspaper where I had recently returned from maternity leave to my job as an editor. I had just pumped a measly two or so ounces of breast milk that, with two more trips from my desk in the newsroom to this closet—which had a table and a chair and a scrawled “do not enter” message on the door but no lock—would become just one of the two bottles I needed in order to feed my infant at day care the following day. I had reporters to meet with and deadlines to manage, and the clock was ever ticking toward the precise minute by which I needed to leave the office to fetch my baby from day care. But as desperate as I was for more time in my day and fewer things on my to-do list, I was desperate for information, too.
I wanted to understand what I was experiencing as an anxious new mother. I was sure there was far more happening in my brain and my body than what I had learned over the months when I was reading books and taking classes that I thought would prepare me for this time. So I turned off the wah-whir-wah-whir of my breast pump, dropped the milk into a cooler, opened my laptop, and called Peter Schmidt.
Schmidt has researched the influence of hormones and reproductive state on a person’s mood and mental health since about 1986—when misogynistic doctors thought postpartum mood disorders were simply further evidence of women’s impairment by their reproductive system, feminists worried (not without cause) that male researchers were pathologizing their normal biological processes, and Schmidt’s peers in science viewed these conditions as “soft quality of life issues” rather than a real public health concern. When I talked to Schmidt in July 2015, those barriers to studying the parental brain had begun to fall, and he was now chief of behavioral endocrinology at the National Institute of Mental Health.
Schmidt was the first person I heard describe new motherhood as a distinct developmental stage with long-lasting effects, in which each of the body’s systems thought to regulate social behavior, emotion, and immune responses—“all of those things get drastically changed.” Schmidt affirmed what I was feeling, that the way we talk about postpartum experiences is really limited. Making postpartum depression a mainstream concern had taken so much effort. Next, he said, the challenge was broadening the understanding of just how much change a person goes through when they become a parent and what’s at stake in the process.
This was revelatory to me then, though to be honest, I barely knew what he meant. This book is the result of my effort to figure it out, through interviews with dozens of researchers and nearly as many parents, with a deep dive into the research on the human parental brain and the foundational animal literature, and by taking a critical look at the stories we live with about parenthood and how they came to be.
I had thought I would write an essay about my own realization of motherhood as a developmental stage and how expectant mothers deserve a more complete understanding of how the postpartum period could go for them. And I did that, but then I got hooked. The more I learned, the bigger this science felt, capable of changing not only our individual experiences but also how we view and talk about parenthood overall and so much of what it touches—sex and gender, work, equity in science, social policy and politics, the time spent engrossed in our children and the time spent apart from them.
This is a book about the parental brain, but you should know that I am neither a “parenting expert” (whatever that means) nor a neuroscientist. The expertise I bring to these pages is twofold. First, I am a journalist with nearly two decades of experience translating complicated topics for readers, with a particular focus on health care. And I am an expert at parenting my two particular children with their particular needs alongside my particular husband in our particular time and place. I’ve tried to make sense of the science in the context of my own life as a parent, with the hope that what I’ve learned will be meaningful to others, too.
In the years since I interviewed Schmidt from that lactation closet, the number of neuroimaging studies focused on the parental brain has grown significantly, as has scrutiny of the technologies and the methods of analysis used in those studies, particularly regarding functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Mindful of these criticisms, I’ve aimed to highlight findings that hold up across disciplines or have been replicated, and to be transparent about the places where the research is thin or conflicted.
Science is not static. The parental brain has been neglected as a subject worth studying for a long time. The story it tells today is well worth exploring. But in truth, this research is just getting started. The findings here will change—already are changing—and will raise new questions. I’ve tried to point in the direction those questions might lead.
For now, this research is still overwhelmingly focused on cisgender, heterosexual women who are gestational mothers. This is changing, too, but slowly. In writing about specific studies, I’ve deferred to the authors’ description of study participants. Otherwise, I’ve used inclusive language to describe parents, because it is most accurate. Transgender men and nonbinary parents who don’t identify as mothers give birth, and their brains change across pregnancy and the postpartum period, too. And importantly, it’s not only gestational parents who experience profound neurobiological changes, but rather anyone who is deeply invested—with their time and their energy—in caring for children.
The “mother brain” is not synonymous with the female brain nor with the birthing brain. Rather, it is the brain that is “earned by care,” as feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick might have described it. It is the one engaged in the life-supporting practice of mothering, which “is older than feminism,” as Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. “It is older and more futuristic than the category ‘woman.’” The capacity for this kind of connection is a fundamental characteristic of our species—and others—possessed by all. The development of that connection is the thing that defines parenthood in practice. This book is an exploration of the neurobiological mechanisms and the lived experience that makes it so.
To new or expectant parents reading: if you are struggling in any way, please get help. The brain goes through a massive change in pregnancy and new parenthood. Struggle is common, and it is normal to need support. Seek it out from your doctor, online, or in your local area. (Postpartum Support International—www.postpartum.net, 1-800-944-4773—can be a good place to start.)
Finally, this book will not offer advice about how to care for y our child or about what kind of parent to be. It may not answer any of the questions recurring in your Google search history about sleep or day care or how exactly to get your preschooler to put on his snow boots without anyone in the room losing their cool. I hope this science will help you, as it did me, to understand what kind of parent you already are and the one you are becoming. We are not hardwired for this work, but must grow into it. How does that happen, and why, and what does it mean for our lives today and in the long term?
We owe it to ourselves to consider those questions with all the information available to us. We owe it to one another.
CHAPTER 1
At the Flip of a Switch
Year after year, a nest appeared in early spring, tucked inside a wreath on the front door of my childhood home. The mother robin didn’t seem to mind that I would peek at her from just inside the glass, inches away. At least, I didn’t think so. After all, she kept coming back. And I was glad. She was a marvel to watch, tireless as she set twig to twig, layering in mud and then fine grass to make a safe space for those beautiful, fragile blue eggs. Her devotion to her scraggly, gape-mouthed chicks seemed complete. She was alert and vigilant, patient and selfless. She knew just what to do to care for them, to protect them, as mothers are supposed to.
That’s what I thought. Because that’s how the story goes, the one told across time and through generations, carried forward in fable and in myth until it becomes a part of how we measure the world around us, how we see ourselves. We are the dedicated mother bird, the story tells us, guided by a maternal instinct perfected through the ages into something solid and certain, like a smooth red marble hidden beneath a feathered breast. We nest. We nurture. We defend. Naturally.
Then something happens. We have a baby of our own. And we realize, that sweet story line that seemed full of truth and beauty—it’s bullshit. Broken. Either that, or we are.
* * *
FOR SO MANY OF US, maternal instinct doesn’t show up, at least not in the ways we expected it to. Caring for a newborn does not feel innate. There is no switch that flips when we become pregnant or when our baby arrives. Too often, we don’t question the narrative, the one that says we should know just what to do and how to feel. The one that discounts how parenting requires a whole set of practical skills that we may or may not already possess. The one that omits the facts and circumstances of our individual lives before pregnancy and afterward, that says we will transition seamlessly (but for a bit of sleep deprivation) from a person committed first and foremost to sustaining our own survival to one who is now also entirely responsible for a tiny, nonverbal creature that depends on us for their every need. Instead, we question ourselves.
That’s what Emily Vincent did.
Vincent had been certain, as the end of her first pregnancy approached, that she wouldn’t want a full twelve weeks of maternity leave. She loved her job as a pediatric nurse. By eight weeks, she figured, she would miss her coworkers and her patients. She would be lonely with all that time at home. Then baby Will arrived, and she couldn’t imagine being apart from him. Eight weeks came and went, and she didn’t want to go back to work full-time, not yet and maybe not even after her twelve weeks were up. She worried about day care. Would he be safe there? Would his caregivers pace his feedings correctly? Would they leave him to cry for too long? Would he be OK outside the cocoon of protection and care that she and her husband had woven for him, with love, yes, but also with urgency and with worry? Those are common concerns for a new parent. But for Vincent, they felt like a symptom of something bigger. Her work had been her identity. That identity was in crisis.
It wasn’t just about Vincent’s job, either. There was also Dawn, the baby from the movie Trainspotting, whose image—one particular image—kept popping into her head, though she hadn’t seen the movie in at least a decade. If you’ve seen the film, you know the one I’m talking about, though Vincent had urged me not to watch it. She didn’t want it to live in my head as it had in hers. (Watch Bao instead, she told me—“with tissues”—referring, as if it were an antidote, to Pixar’s Oscar-winning animated short film that imagines a boy as a plump dumpling with an overprotective but loving mother.)
Dawn and Will have nothing in common except that they are both babies and, by nature, vulnerable to their circumstances. Fictional Baby Dawn died neglected in Edinburgh, the adults in her life lost in the abyss of heroin addiction. Will is lovingly cared for at home in Cincinnati by parents who have the means to commit themselves to raising him. Still, the image of Dawn lying motionless in her crib was there in Vincent’s mind when her son napped during the day or as she lay in bed in the wee hours of the morning after feeding him, telling herself over and over, “He’s fine. He’s in his crib. He’s fine”—a mantra of truth against her worst fear. She couldn’t explain it.
“I felt really silly for being so upset about that movie scene,” she told me when Will was nearly six months old. “I felt really silly about suddenly not wanting to go back to work full-time.” She felt afraid of how she was feeling, she said, of what it meant about her ability to be a good mother and about her sense of herself.
Alice Owolabi Mitchell questioned herself, too.
She had prepared for many possible outcomes of her daughter’s arrival. She was acutely aware of the fact that, as a Black woman living in the United States, she was at considerably higher risk than a White expectant mother for suffering complications, including fatal ones, through pregnancy and the postpartum period. Her own mother had died of cardiac arrest two weeks after giving birth to a son when Owolabi Mitchell was a teenager. That baby boy had grown into a fourteen-year-old whom she and her husband were raising. Her mother’s story and her own—they were a lot to carry. While pregnant, Owolabi Mitchell had started seeing a therapist and enlisted the help of a group of doulas. She made plans to go to a diverse mothers’ group in nearby Boston, as well as one close to her home in Quincy.
Then, Everly was born early, about a month before her due date. Owolabi Mitchell didn’t have a chance to make final preparations for leave from her job as a fifth-grade teacher or to say goodbye to her students. She felt she hadn’t fully been able to shift her frame of mind to focus on her baby’s arrival. Days after Everly was born, shelter-in-place protocols began to roll out across the United States in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Owolabi Mitchell’s breast milk was slow to come in, and she and Everly struggled to get the latch just right. She worried about whether Everly was eating enough, about whether her own stress was hampering her milk supply, about the myriad threats the pandemic posed to her family. In-person support groups were canceled. With doctors’ offices mostly closed, six weeks—then seven and eight—passed, and Owolabi Mitchell wasn’t able to see her ob-gyn for her standard postpartum visit.
In those first weeks, one worry seemed to surmount them all: Why didn’t she feel connected to her baby? She had anticipated a flood of warm emotions when Everly was born. She expected she would fall in love at first sight with such force that it would sustain her through those disorienting first days and make her forget about the pain of her own recovery, even carry her through the turmoil of a pandemic. “I was expecting that automatic switch, and that didn’t happen,” she told me. She wondered, “Am I already a bad mom because I don’t have this?”
My experience of brand-new motherhood was different in the details, but so much about Owolabi Mitchell’s and Vincent’s stories, and so many that I’ve heard from other new parents, is familiar to me. Our expectations of ourselves did not match reality. In the days and weeks after my oldest son, Hartley, was born, I felt joy and awe. But I did not feel any sort of natural calm, no sense of certainty or clarity in my thoughts or actions. Instead, I felt a kind of roiling, a constant, unfamiliar motion. Each of us had stepped through the portal of childbirth and were startled to realize that the topography of the map we had been given to guide us in unfamiliar territory barely resembled what we found. Where we expected land, there was water, and we were unmoored.
