Month: June 2025

Be gentle with me

‘Changing your mind is one of the most difficult feats of living. Easier to change your nose.’ Niall Williams

I was looking forward to watching a documentary featuring the lives of three newborn babies in South Africa until it began. The first sight of those tiny helpless beings situated in the chaos of their lives, with loving parents and in two cases nearby siblings who wanted to be in on the act but the younger they were the more troubled they seemed at the arrival of the newborn. In one family, the child was white, and her black nanny appeared. She, the nanny, perhaps the most loving of all caregivers.

As the film progressed and we watched the babies from ten days then weekly for a period, leaping to three months and then six slowly over the course of the film my nerves settled, and I recognised my apprehension as linked to the struggles of babies and parents during those first critical three months of life when anxieties and vulnerabilities are at their height.

I will never forget one of the doctors who delivered the third of my babies telling me in the days after her birth, the first day of your life is the most difficult. He told me this in the context of my recent concerns.

During my two days stay in the hospital following my daughter’s birth I shared a room with another mother who came in for a caesarean.

When they wheeled this woman away for her caesarian after she first settled into a bed near mine she told me this baby should never exist. She was conceived during an acrimonious struggle with her now ex-husband, the woman said, and now this baby was the one condition she had to that failed marriage. She wanted her baby desperately, but the circumstances were tough.

She went off for her caesar and came back triumphant, her baby a beautiful girl. I cannot remember her name, but I shall call her Amy. Amy’s mother that first day seemed manic. Over abundant visitors in the evening such I pulled the curtains round my bed and tried to block out the noise. 

This during the mid 1980s when mothers typically stayed overnight and for several days in hospital. Babies stayed beside their mothers in separate cribs by day but at night after a final feed the nurses wheeled the babies into the nursery to let mothers have a good night’s sleep before returning home. 

This night I had fed my baby and handed her over to the night nurse who ushered out the last of my fellow roommate’s visitors then handed over her baby for a final feed.

When she returned sometime later to take Amy to the nursery Amy’s mother wanted to hold her longer. The nurse complied and left. I fell into a light sleep and what seemed like hours later heard magazines dropping onto the floor from the hospital tall bed. There followed a thud and clunk and the wail of a baby.

In an instant I heard Amy’s mother grab up her baby and rush from the ward.

I lay in bed shell shocked. My imaginings. I waited for another hour until I saw light creep in under the blind and realised it was morning or near enough. I padded into the corridor in search of a nurse.

‘Is the baby okay?’ I asked the sister at her desk.

‘They’re running tests now,’ the nurse said. ‘She should be okay.’

I never saw Amy or her mother again. And decided to end my hospital stay early. Something about the experience had punctured holes in my confidence. Something complex in my head about whether I was safe. Was my baby safe?

On our first visit to the doctor after delivery he weighed my baby, checked out her small for and pronounced her fit. He checked me out too and when I told him Amy’s story he was non-committal. ‘Things like this happen,’ he said. 

‘Hopefully the baby will be okay.’ I wrote a letter to the hospital asking if Amy was okay and they wrote back several weeks later as the memory of this fall smoothed out in my mind. 

As my own baby grew beyond those first several dangerous days into a bubbly bouncing little one. The hospital admin reported the baby was fine. No brain damage. They were sorry for my experience.

To this day I wonder about little Amy. What her life beyond this fall has consisted of.

My own daughter only three weeks ago gave birth to her third child and is going through those harrowing weeks of life with a newborn.

I say harrowing because riddled as they are in anxiety about vulnerability. The apprehension when your baby cries. The worries in the middle of the night if the baby sleeps too long between feeds: Are they still breathing. Then the exhaustion when they cluster feed and wake almost on the hour. The sheer struggle of it all. Softened by whatever hormones course through the body of each mother of a newborn to help her ride the waves of fear and love. 

The resentments that can creep in when baby cannot give space enough. Worse still when this baby is not your first. The struggle of managing the emotional roller coaster of the other little ones who must now adjust to the reconfiguration of their family. The one ahead no longer the baby must adjust to a feeling of being supplanted, as did the one ahead of her. And so it goes up the line.

My mother and a baby who might well be me or my sibling. We shall never know for sure.

In the South African documentary my heart thudded almost to a halt when the small boy, maybe two or three years older than his tiny baby sister of some five six months, rolls around and over her, pulls her into position and blows endless brutal raspberries onto her feet.

Like imitations of the father who blew raspberries onto his child to her delight. But this brother is almost spitting at his baby sister and as the footage goes on, she shifts from pleasure to distress before a parent finally calls her brother away for a bath. Then thanks him for looking after his sister. 

Moments like this in the film sent my mind into that state I often feel when watching documentaries of newborns. It calls up some type of punitive force in my head that insists the baby is cared for well. Maybe I’m identifying with the infant. Look after me well, my mind says. Do not leave me at the mercy of my tormented older siblings who hate me for my existence.

Please hold me and be gentle with me. I cannot get into life unscathed if you do not offer me all the gentleness of a mother bear from children’s nursery rhymes. I need gentle care holding and food. 

And please above all, do not expect too much of me at this moment. I am only now in the cold air of this world. My digestive system is immature. It cannot cope well with those first onslaughts of milk into my belly, much as it needs them. Please help me through my anxieties by containing your own. And I will reward you with smiles when I can first manage them and love you to bits in return.

On binaries and the impulse to impose order

When my youngest daughter was three, we visited friends who were older than us, childless and without the usual cohort of toys available in other people’s house. To while away the time my daughter took to tipping over a jar of buttons my friend kept on her sewing table. Then she sorted with vigour, first in colour lots, the greens, blues and whites, then in order of size, finally she tackled shapes though most buttons were round. 

My daughter spent hours at this task which gave her all the pleasure of a game, a form of playfulness where she was able to create a sense or order out of this disorder.

I think of her now at play when I consider our human impulse towards classification and order. A strange leap to another passion of mine, one I think can be dangerous, including the therapeutic nihilism that comes out of labelling people who do not fit the acceptable norms of behaviour into categories such as borderline personality disorder, the so-called personality disorders of the DSM-5, which to my mind can be used as an attack on a person’s credibility.

When we claw back the features marking a person as borderline, a person deemed to fit somewhere between the medical categories of neurosis and psychosis, Freud’s classical nosology of the basic human condition, I’m into one of those misleading and artificial binaries that entered the psychological world.

When I began my training as a psychoanalytic therapist my teachers assured me, almost everyone is neurotic. The basic human condition, no matter how well raised, how well analysed, no matter how well we manage to deal with our troubled souls and weird ways of being, our bad habits, most of us are at heart neurotic. Or so the early Freudians argued

But for some of us, some whose minds get unhinged, typically through extreme levels of trauma we copped the glorious label of psychotic. In simple words we were mad.

There’s the mad and the sane. 

In my thirty fifth year I spent a year visiting Heatherton psychiatric hospital in Cheltenham one day a week for the purpose of understanding more about psychosis. I went as part of my training to become a psychoanalyst. In those days the prevailing belief was that psychosis was untreatable by conventional therapeutic means, with few exceptions. The preferred treatment for such souls was medication. 

Then in line with the gradual intensification of the medicalisation of states of mind as erupted in the early 1900s when another binary erupted between these men in the helping professions, beginning with Freud who wanted to turn states of mind into aspects of the body, propelled by his drive theory. 

For Freud we are all motivated by basic physiological drives for sex and food, these drives fuel our behaviour, whereas others preferred to adopt a morel chemical approach to our minds, our brains.

The mind body binary erupted into the psyche soma division that fed into arguments of therapy as a science in need of medical techniques. Think of lobotomies – taking out part of a person’s brain to quell their unruly emotions – versus, the mind as more complex and multi layered. 

Antonio Damasio writes about awareness, and the folks I studied in my PhD exploring the nature of the autobiographical impulse we learn from earliest days. 

Everywhere I look I find the binaries, beginning with the genders, the impulse to categorise as male or female, fat and thin, tall or short, ugly or beautiful, and all the in-between or mixtures fall to the way side like my all daughter trying to make some sense of the vast sea of buttons on the floor scattered around her small form.