Life: I can sort it out.
Plenty of people have told me that they envy this attitude I have. Now I see why.
As a mother, I find it exceptionally difficult to make a decision. Even when I think I know what I want, I find it very hard to figure out how to arrive there. I have difficulty sorting through which advice to heed and which advice to ignore. After making a decision, I question it constantly. I waver. I get irritated when other people question my decisions. When something I've chosen to do is successful, I worry that I'm helping Nora to establish a bad habit. I seem to be incapable of giving myself credit for things I have done well for more than one or two days. When something I've chosen to do is unsuccessful, I get upset with myself for not knowing ahead of time that it would fail. My husband must be wondering what happened to the woman he has been living with for the past 7+ years. I am wondering what happened to the woman I have been becoming for the past 29+ years.
At least I know what the problem is: I have a complete and utter lack of confidence in my abilities as a mother. I know there is no good reason for this. My baby is healthy, she is growing, she is learning, and most of the time she's even fairly content. She is comforted by my presence. Plenty of people have told me I am doing a good job, which is encouraging. But the thing I know about confidence is this: nobody can gift it to you. You have to generate it within yourself. You have to learn to be able to identify your own successes. You have to be able to forgive yourself for the ways in which you fall short by committing to improving upon them. When you make a decision that doesn't turn out the way you'd expected, you have to learn to stop focusing on the bad results long enough to identify the good that came from the decision, even if it is minimal.
I'm not there yet. I think all new mothers must feel this way, at least initially. I keep feeling like there is so much pressure on me all the time, but I realize that it comes from within. It's pressure I'm putting on myself because I've never wanted so badly to succeed at something. The stakes are high because there is another person's life involved. I think it has been particularly difficult for me to feel so helpless because it is such a vast departure from my normal state of being. This makes it easy to feel like I am worse off than a new mom who was never confident in her abilities in the first place. But I'm not. I know what confidence feels like, so I should theoretically know how to get back there. I did not make a new year's resolution, so perhaps a back-to-work resolution is in order:
I will work harder at cultivating confidence in my ability to mother my daughter.
You have a hard time making decisions because there are no "right" decisions when it comes to parenting. Things like whether she sleeps in a crib or in your room, whether she eats solids at 4 months or 6 months . . . those things don't really matter. You just have to follow your intuition and do what seems right for her and for your family at that time. What matters is the kind of person she becomes, and that is influenced by the kind of person you are. You've already got that part down. So don't worry about the rest. Follow your gut and everything will fall into place.
ReplyDeleteI've always had a hard time with motherly intuition (which, in my brain, feels synonymous with confidence). It is really difficult as a parent, and that insecurity was particularly salient when my girls were small. You feel like your inner confidence or intuition ought to guide you. But when the stakes are your child's health, well-being, or eventual personal worth, each decision feels really weighty and the results feel nebulous. The observable outcomes are short-term, so I found myself constantly fretting about everything and its opposite. But, with time, experience builds into confidence. You've had 29 years to learn Liz, and only a shade over three months to learn Liz+Nora. It will get easier, and the more decisions you are forced to make, the more natural the process and the outcomes will feel. You are doing a wonderful job and, like all things, it will all come easier with time.
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