Entrusting your child to a nanny or in-laws, accepting that someone else will take care of him, being separated from your baby for even a few hours – for some mothers, this is a reason to feel anxious (a little), guilty (a lot) and cry (quite a bit). Here are a few tips on how to make this delicate but essential stage less dramatic.
Table of contents
- The difficulties of delegating or separating
- When no one seems to be up to the task
- Not even the father
- Searching for one’s childhood
- And on the subject of the inevitable guilt of mothers
- Separation, essential for his autonomy
For some mothers, delegating part of their child’s care and education is tantamount to abandoning him. These women, who seem to be such influential mothers that they sometimes do not allow the father to take his place, suffer from the difficulty of not letting go. Their relationship with their mother and the guilt inherent in motherhood are possible explanations.
The difficulties of delegating or separating
I remember the summer when I entrusted my sons to my mother-in-law, who lives in Marseille. I cried all the way to Avignon! So Marseille-Avignon equals 100km. The equivalent of a hundred handkerchiefs! To tell the story of the first separations with her sons (5 and 6 years old today), Anne, 34 years old, chose humor. Laure, on the other hand, still can’t manage it. And when this 32-year-old mother tells how, five years ago, she tried to put her little Jérémie – 2 and a half months old at the time – in a crèche, you can feel that the subject is still sensitive. He couldn’t stay an hour without me, and he wasn’t ready,” she says. Because, even if I left him with my husband or my sister since he was born, he never fell asleep without me.” A baby addicted to his mother or rather the opposite? No matter for Laure, who then decided to take her son out of the nursery – she would wait until he was one year old to leave him there for good.
When no one seems to be up to the task
There are many painful memories when it comes to separation. Julie, 47, a nursery assistant, knows all about it. “Some mothers set up defensive schemes. They give us instructions to say, ‘I know,” she says. They get hung up on details: you have to clean baby with such and such wipes, make him sleep at such and such a time,” she continues. It hides suffering, a need to keep control. We make them understand that we are not there to take their place. For these mothers, who are convinced that they are the only ones who “know” how to feed their child, cover him or put him to sleep, delegating is a much greater ordeal than just crystallizing on the model of care. Because their need to control everything goes further: entrusting their child, even if only for an hour, to their husband or mother-in-law is complicated. In the end, they don’t accept that someone else is taking care of their child and doing, by definition, something different.
Not even the father
This is the case of Sandra, 37, mother of a little Lisa, two months old. Since the birth of my daughter, I’ve been trapped in a fundamental paradox: at the same time, I need help, but at the same time, I feel more efficient than anyone else when it comes to taking care of my daughter or the house,” she says, a little sad. When Lisa was a month old, I left her with her dad for a few hours to go to the movies. And I came back home one hour after the beginning of the film! I couldn’t concentrate on the plot. It was as if I didn’t belong in that movie theater, as if I was incomplete. In fact, to entrust my daughter is for me to abandon her. Anxious, Sandra is no less lucid. Her behavior is linked to her history and to separation anxieties that go back to her childhood.
Searching for one’s childhood
The difficulty in delegating depends in part on one’s relationship with one’s mother. This is why some mothers only entrust their child to their mother, and others, on the contrary, will never assign him to her. This goes back to the family neurosis. Can talking to your mother make things better? No. What is needed is to make an effort to question the reasons why you can’t. Sometimes it takes nothing to make things better. Sometimes it doesn’t take much. And if separation is impossible, you have to get help because it can have psychological consequences on the child.
And on the subject of the inevitable guilt of mothers
Sylvain, 40, tries to analyze what he experiences with his wife, Sophie, 36, and their three children. “She sets the bar very high for herself, both in her private and professional life. As a result, she sometimes tends to want to make up for her absences from work by doing all the work at home herself.” Sophie, who has been painstakingly self-employed for years, bitterly confirms: “When they were small, I even put them in the nursery with a fever of 38. I still feel guilty about it today! It’s all about work…” Can we escape guilt? “By delegating, mothers are confronted with the reality of their work-related unavailability – without even being careerists. This inevitably leads to a form of guilt,” comments Myriam Szejer. The evolution of morals is such that before, with intra-family delegation, it was easier. We didn’t ask ourselves the question; there was less guilt. And yet, whether they last an hour or a day, whether they are occasional or regular, these separations allow for a necessary rebalancing.
Separation, essential for his autonomy
The baby thus discovers other ways of doing things, other approaches. And the mother learns to think socially again. So how best to manage this obligatory transition point? First of all, you have to talk to the children, insists Myriam Szejer, even to the babies “who are sponges and who feel their mother’s suffering. Therefore, you must always anticipate a separation, even a minor one, and explain to them when you are going to leave them and for what reason. And for the mothers? There is only one solution: to play it down! And accept that the child they have given birth to escapes them. “It’s part of the “castration,” and everyone gets over it, reassures Myriam Szejer. We separate from our child to give him his autonomy. And throughout their growth, we have to face more or less complicated separations. The job of a parent goes through this until the day the child leaves the family nest. But rest assured, you may still have a little time!
Conclusion
For some mothers, delegating part of their child’s care and education is tantamount to abandoning him. These women, who seem to be such influential mothers that they sometimes do not allow the father to take his place, suffer from the difficulty of not letting go. Their relationship with their mother and the guilt inherent in motherhood are possible explanations.