The Ambivalence of Parenthood
Feeling conflicted is not only normal, but healthy.
Friday was one of those rare special days when I felt like the universe was communing with me. Over the past few months, I’ve felt pulled in eight million directions but unable to fully commit to any one of them. I’ve been unfocused and listless and confused about what I’m doing. On a whim, on Friday morning, I sat down and started reading a book that a friend lent me, Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key. I didn’t have any idea what to expect, but after just a few pages I felt my brain and body relax. The book is all about finding inner stillness — drowning out the noise and zeroing in on what’s important. In other words, it was precisely what I needed but didn’t know I needed. I gobbled the book up.
Later that day, for this newsletter, I had plans to interview psychoanalyst Stacey Rubin, who writes the wonderful Substack
Dr. Rubin has studied ambivalence in motherhood and regularly works with mothers who feel role conflict. I had set up the interview knowing that ambivalence was something I wanted to explore, but I hadn’t yet connected with the idea on a personal level.As I sat down to brainstorm questions for my conversation with her, my brain essentially exploded. It dawned on me that one of the reasons I’ve been so distracted is because I’ve felt overwhelmed with ambivalence about many things in my life over the past few months. I even said to my therapist (who I also saw on Friday! What a day!) that I sometimes literally feel like I am two different people inhabiting a single body.
I’m thrilled to share Dr. Rubin’s wisdom here today. As she explains, ambivalence is perfectly normal and leaning into it can actually be a good thing. Here’s our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity. I hope you get something meaningful out of it, too.
Dr. Rubin, would you mind first defining ambivalence? I ask because I actually looked up the definition of the word today, and I realized I've internalized some connotations that aren’t accurate.
Ambivalence started off as being about mothers and their feelings towards babies — how you can, at one point, love something, and then at another point, resent it. It was Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst, who really started talking about ambivalence. Now I think it has become more of a general word, and it means having conflicted thoughts or feelings about one thing. Now I'm curious — what you what you think the word meant?
I had thought of it as feeling disinterested — like that the conflicting feelings average out into basically not caring anymore. But I resonate much more with the definition of it as having two different feelings about something at the exact same time. When I looked it up, and I realized that's what the definition was, I was like, wow, I feel that all the time. To the point where I had therapy earlier today, and I literally started out the session saying, “Today, I feel like I'm two different people inhabiting a single body.” And I realized, oh my god, that's because I'm feeling ambivalent. Is ambivalence normal and common among parents?
It is so normal. In our culture, there’s intensive parenting, this idea of doing everything — but I’ve seen adults who had quote-unquote selfless parents and that didn't go so well. You need to actually have a real parent who's a whole person. It doesn't feel good for a child to have someone who doesn't take care of themselves at all. We have this idea in our culture that you have to kind of forego all your needs — and I do think that's changing some — but it needs to go away.
It makes sense that we have multiple identities within us. We're parents, but we're so many other things, too. And some of these will have conflicting priorities. You have to feel ambivalent if you've got these different personas, different identities within you, that all want different things.
Yes. And then the question is: What do you do with it? I think it’s sitting with it and being like, “It's okay.” I am a person who has needs, and I love my children. Sometimes you’re pulled in two different directions, and that's okay.
I often am ambivalent about how to handle situations with my kids, too. Like, yesterday, my 12-year-old wanted to go into our small town after school with his friends. There was a part of me, as a mom, that was like — yes, like, I want to give him independence. I know that's good for him. He has great friends and it's a safe place. I should let him do this. And then, the other part of me was worried. Was it okay to let him do this? Should I be checking in with him every 20 minutes? Those two desires were conflicting.
One thing I would put out there is that when we're in that ambivalent place, to try to stand in the middle of those two sides — the “Let him go” and the “No, he’s not going” — and say, where are these two parts of me stemming from? The part that says, “He shouldn't go” — is that from an anxious part of me? Or is there something I'm really picking up on about the town [and his safety]? Try to get into that part of your psyche, where that thought is originating from.
The psychoanalyst Marian Tolpin came up with [the idea of] a leading and trailing edge: That all of our behavior, on some level, and in different amounts, has a leading edge component of it — that’s our healthiest self — and that sometimes the reasons we do things have a more of a trailing edge, coming from our less mature, less developed self. So when we're thinking through decisions or actions, we can ask: Where is this coming from? What is this rooted in?
So sometimes you can say, “Oh, that's rooted in fear in a way that's not productive or warranted.”
Right. And play it out. There's research suggesting that, for instance, expert firefighters make such quick and good decisions because they're actually playing it out in their mind — walking through imagining themselves in that burning building, and trying to figure out which way to go. It's an incredible the use of our imagination, to play things out.
Do you have suggestions for when you're ambivalent about something and it's taking over everything, so you can't focus? When the ambivalence just feels overwhelming?
This is going to sound really very concrete, but make a pro / con list. That's one way to bring your logical self to it. And really try to step back from the chaotic swirl of ambivalence. Think about: What are the two sides of this? What am I really worried about here? What is it that I am drawn to? What am I repelled from? Am I overemphasizing the size of this decision? What can really happen here? And what are the upsides? A lot of times we overestimate the downsides.
Are there things you’d warn against when it comes to managing ambivalence?
If people are ambivalent, but they don't want to deal with it, it’s easy to jump to one side and jump hard. Like if there’s a mom who is really like, “Oh, gosh, I really miss work,” but then just dives into being an overbearing mother that gets everything perfect — that’s really about feeding her own ego and needs, but it's under the guise of, “Oh, I want to make the perfect school party.” When you don't own the ambivalence, and you jump to one side of it and ignore the other side, then you get into this way of being that is extreme, and not really authentic.
We see that a lot in our culture right now with momfluencers. There's no ambivalence there. Their babies are perfect. They're perfect. Motherhood is perfect. There’s no room for one little sliver of ambivalence. So it kind of sets up this false ideal of what motherhood is — and then people are like, “Gosh, well, my baby just spit up on me, and I didn't make a green smoothie this morning — what's wrong with me?” That is an example of not really living with the natural ambivalence that comes with motherhood.
So when it comes to living with our ambivalence — is the ultimate goal to work through it so that it subsides, or should we learn to live with ambivalence indefinitely?
That's a really great question. There's a lot of things you can be ambivalent about. You can be ambivalent about a decision, but the decision needs to be made. So you kind of have to sift through and figure out the best decision. But when it's emotional ambivalence, like motherhood versus ambition, those are more complex. And I don't think we have to jump to one side. I think at different times in our lives, we may have different solutions for that type of ambivalence. But I think what's more important is accepting it — like, here's my ambivalence. What's it telling me? What hurts is either ignoring it, or beating ourselves up for it and feeling guilty about it.
That really resonates. I recently wrote a story about research suggesting that how we react to our emotions has a more powerful effect on our psychological wellbeing than the emotions themselves. The take home was that it’s best if you don’t fight your emotions, but instead accept that they're there and listen to what they're telling you about what you might need or what you might really care about.
Yes. I can't emphasize enough the importance of knowing that it's so okay to be ambivalent, no matter what it’s about. It’s totally normal. To really let yourself feel those feelings and make sense of them is going to be better for you and your kids than trying to ignore them.
It's like saying to yourself: “I feel this way. And it makes sense that I feel this way.” Validating your own feelings is so important. The things we won't allow ourselves to feel, to name, to integrate, will just get acted out, and probably in ways we don't want.
Related posts:
And now for today’s Parenting Advice Hot Take!
Today I’m commenting on this Instagram post that @themotherhoodprojectnz shared a couple of days ago:
Here are my thoughts.