By Dr. Robert Naseef, Psychologist
Through the tangled mysteries of love and biology, a man and a woman make a baby together. What’s less obvious is how that one small person turns around and makes two parents. The moment your child is born, you become a mother or a father, and a brand new identity starts to take shape right alongside your baby’s. This is birth of a parent
For most of us, nine months of hopes, dreams and worries build to a rush of love that hands you a drive and an energy you didn’t know you had. You’re wired to protect and care for this new person. Both parents are changed forever, the mother who carried the pregnancy and the father who walked beside her the whole way, each stepping into the role of primary caretaker for the first time.
My Story
I still see the night my son Tariq was born like it happened yesterday. Labor had gone on for more than twenty four hours. He looked around the delivery room before his body had even fully arrived. Without thinking, I jumped from behind the delivery table and ended up standing right next to the doctor, knees wobbling, heart pounding. The doctor, a man who’d delivered hundreds of babies, told me how alert my son looked.
Right away I noticed his head was shaped just like mine. I counted his fingers and toes and felt myself relax once I knew everything checked out. The nurse cleaned him up and wrapped him in a flannel blanket while I watched, and there he was, this perfect newborn. I’d hoped for a boy, and I still love telling this story. It’s one of my warmest memories.
Holding your baby for the first time feels like nothing else. When the nurse placed Tariq in my arms I felt it instantly, that jolt of electricity. He was so soft and so delicate against my fingertips. I pulled him close to my chest. The possibilities felt endless and the responsibility felt enormous, all at once. His brown eyes were big and round, looking up at me. Was he looking inside me? Was I looking inside him? It was one of the most exciting moments of my life, and it changed how I see the world ever since. I found a whole new respect for what a woman’s body does to bring a child into the world, and for every mother’s part in that partnership. I thought about my own mother, who raised eight healthy kids, and my father pacing outside the delivery room. It felt like a new chapter opening up in how I understood life.
A New View on Motherhood
The book The Birth of a Mother, written by psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern, pediatrician and child psychiatrist Nadia Bruschweiler Stern, and journalist Alison Freeland, digs into exactly this shift. What makes it stand out is that it doesn’t shy away from the extra challenges of bonding with and raising a child who has special needs. At its heart, the book describes the psychological birth of a mother in the months before and after her baby arrives.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and decades of clinical work, the authors show how completely a woman’s inner life changes once her baby shows up. She shifts from being a daughter to being a mother. She joins the wider community of mothers. She watches her husband become a father, and the two of them form a new triangle with their child. Every sight, sound and smell starts to mean something different. Add in the modern juggle of career and baby, plus finding a new role inside her own family, and you can see why a mother starts marking time by her baby’s age and milestones instead of the regular calendar.
The authors lay out the shift in three stages. The first, preparing to be a mother, happens while her body is growing the baby and her mind is preparing for the identity shift. She’s full of hopes, fears and fantasies about who this baby will be and what kind of father her husband will become. Once the baby arrives, the real child comes into focus, though she’ll keep viewing him or her through the lens of those hopes and fears for a while. It’s natural to want to redo or repair pieces of your own childhood through your kid, but a science fair trophy or a ballet recital isn’t always your child’s idea of a good time. Learning to see your baby as their own person, separate from your old wishes, is the real work of this first stage.
The second stage, a mother is born, comes through the daily grind of feeding, soothing and caring for a newborn, which locks in the new identity of motherhood as much as anything else. Building real closeness with a baby is unusual because it all happens without words at first. Questions about loving and being loved play out through how mother and baby learn to read each other. Mistakes happen and get corrected along the way. A mother’s own unfinished business with her own mother often surfaces here too, and she has to work through it in her own way, deciding how much of that relationship she wants to pass along and how much she wants to leave behind.
The third stage, a mother adapts, covers career decisions, premature babies, kids with special needs, and the changing partnership with a father. One chapter takes on what happens when a mother learns her baby isn’t completely healthy, and it’s a gut punch of a read. That diagnosis takes away her ability to picture her baby’s future as a preschooler, a teenager, an adult, maybe a parent of their own. As the Sterns put it, the birth of a baby with a serious developmental delay or disability stops time in its tracks. The future turns unpredictable and hard to even imagine, while the past, full of pregnancy hopes and daydreams, suddenly feels too painful to think about. Parents get stuck living only in the present.
The Agonizing Process
The authors map out a path through that trauma toward an uncertain future. It starts with learning every detail of your baby’s diagnosis, then learning to see past the disability to the actual baby in front of you. If you find out about the problem before you’ve had the chance to bond, it’s even harder, and it can lead a parent to pull away from their baby. A healthy birth builds a woman up as a mother. A birth that isn’t easy can knock her down to her core.
It’s a brutal process, and plenty of parents dealing with a child’s diagnosis know that firsthand. A lot of the time, nobody, not even the doctors, can tell you how your child’s story is going to unfold. That uncertainty can make a whole family feel stuck and isolated. The authors of The Birth of a Mother suggest parents talk through these painful experiences, lean on other people who get it, and see a counselor when they need one, so they can move past the pain and get back to living in real time. Their real message is that parents can learn to love their child in ways they never imagined were possible.
You don’t want to give up hope, but you also have to make peace with your child’s reality. That’s a hard line to walk. I had no idea that the perfect baby I held on November 29, 1979 would grow into a young man with autism. I couldn’t have imagined that he’d never speak, read or write. And yet I’ve learned to accept him completely and love him for exactly who he is. He’s the one who taught me that. Working with him and with other families raising kids with special needs pushed me to spend my career helping other parents walking this same road.
If a diagnosis is still fresh for you, I wrote more about that first stage of grief in Healing Broken Dreams, and you can hear directly from 62 parents who’ve walked this road in You Will Dream New Dreams. Sometimes helping someone else is the best way to help yourself, and connecting with other parents raising kids with disabilities can make all the difference in feeling less alone.
Every parent of a child with special needs lives somewhere on this same wide spectrum of the parenting experience. No child is perfect, in the end, and it’s the bond between parent and child that gets a family through the long haul. How that bond forms looks a little different for every family, whether your child is developing typically or living with autism or another disability. In every case, the baby you’re holding is never quite the child you pictured in your head. Reconciling those two pictures is work every parent does, which means none of us are as alone in it as we might feel.
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