My Missing Maternal Instinct – Newsweek

As the ambulance left, I grabbed my car keys and drove the 10 miles to the hospital’s emergency center. A place I could drive to on autopilot, my almost second home for the previous two years. The place where I endured endless rounds of chemotherapy, emergency room and clinic visits. The place where people routinely stopped to ask me for directions because I looked like I belonged there.

I wished then, more than anything else, I were going back there for myself, as a patient instead of a parent. I loved my child more than anything in the world; I just did not trust myself to be her best advocate.

After years of fertility treatments, when I was finally pregnant at 33, I felt the last missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle of my life had clicked into place. I had married my college sweetheart, we had opportunities to travel around the world, and my career was on the right trajectory.

When our daughter was born, I assumed, based on what I’d read in the online baby forums, that mothers have a natural instinct to know when babies need food and sleep, and that babies, in turn, come equipped with rooting and sucking reflexes and maternal preference. Soon, as we brought our beautiful baby girl home, I learned that instinct and competence were two different things.

We had a perfectly good bedroom upstairs, outfitted with a crib and almost all the paraphernalia Babies “R” Us brochures told us we must have. We eschewed all that in favor of undeniably poor sleeping arrangements, plonking ourselves in front of the fireplace: me on the leather couch, my husband in a recliner, and our child in a bassinet, at arm’s reach from both of us for 10 days. We were too afraid to embrace the new-baby normal, to go back to our bed, worried we might drift off to our pre-child ways and sleep in and starve her if we got too comfortable.

As we tinkered with the fireplace, wondering if it was too hot or too cold, our child seemed to stare back at us, despite her eyes still not knowing how to focus.

“You fools. Get it together. You are the adults. You’re supposed to know how this works.”

I felt guiltier than my husband did. As a mother, I was starting to fail already.

I rationalized that it may have been an older-parent thing, this overthinking. My paati (grandmother) had popped out eight children before she reached 34, the age I was then. I bet she didn’t have the time, resources or even the strength to consider alternative living arrangements, take Lamaze classes, or make notes in the margins of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I doubt she imagined all the scenarios that could go wrong with her children.

Then, when our child was 3 months old and just as I was beginning to make sense of motherhood, it felt like the universe bumped my carefully crafted jigsaw puzzle, breaking it apart along its fault lines. Even before my stage IV cancer diagnosis was confirmed, she was on formula as my breastmilk was considered too toxic, thanks to the many contrast dye injections I’d received during CT and MRI scans while the medical community wrestled with the puzzle of what exactly was wrong with me. By the time I started on chemotherapy just after her six-month birthday, I wasn’t feeding her…or burping her, or bathing her, or changing her diapers much by that point. I had become a MINO—mother in name only.

Over the next few months, as we had our parents and a nanny help out with childcare, I did my best to do some mothering. I took our daughter out in the stroller for walks around the neighborhood whenever I had the energy, or wheeled her through the aisles at Target. I couldn’t help but notice the lingering and pitying glances from other shoppers. Maybe they saw the scarf covering my bare scalp, my thinning eyebrows, my pale skin, and then looked down at the healthy baby in the stroller. It definitely didn’t fit. The world had gotten the order of things wrong.

While I felt comfortable deciding whether to dress her in a romper or a dress, and whether her hair needed a black or a blue bow, I left decisions of any consequence, such as what solid foods to start her on, how to treat a cold, or how to handle late-night terrors, to my husband, seemingly the only adult in the house. Cancer had pulled me away from the day-to-day work of parenting, but I suspected it exacerbated something already at play during my early days as a mother: a missing maternal instinct.

I felt guilty at pediatrician appointments when the nurses would ask specific questions about her sleep and diet, and I’d have to turn to my husband to answer. I soon convinced myself that maternal instinct was like a muscle that requires exercise; if you don’t use it often, you lose it. I spent the night sobbing over my theory.

When my child turned one, in a twist that surprised both my entire medical team and myself, my 14 rounds of chemotherapy seemed to work, and some semblance of normalcy returned to our lives. As she grew, I tentatively began to assert my mominess, like deciding when and how long a timeout was appropriate for a toddler tantrum. I’d started running and told myself if I could make my body go from loving the couch for 37 years to running a half-marathon, I could reawaken the dormant maternal instinct.

Over the years, I made many parenting decisions in my attempt to strengthen my maternal instinct muscle—whether or not to pull a loose tooth, if basketball or gymnastics was the right sport for our daughter. Sometimes I was content with my choices; sometimes I wished life would allow me a do-over. But I always felt like an impostor, worried I’d get called out for not being a natural mother, something I assumed every other mother was.

That scene with the paramedics remains seared into my memory, which is hardly surprising: Science tells us that stress and strong emotion intensify how memories form and consolidate.

Perhaps it wasn’t just the terror of watching my child have a seizure, which the doctors told us was a result of a sudden rise in body temperature. They assured us that most children outgrow febrile seizures by six, which my daughter did too. A relief; we wouldn’t have survived if the news had been worse.

I suspect the reason I can still hear the ambulance siren, the thud-thud of the paramedics’ boots on our tiled hallway, and recall the clinical smell of disinfectant also has to do with what I perceived for many years as my failure. At the one job that matters most, the one role I instinctively should know how to do: being a good mother.

While the sting of that perceived failure has faded, I doubt it will disappear entirely. Guilt’s one redeeming feature is that it keeps nudging me to be a more present parent, to keep flexing that parenting muscle.

Not that long ago, when my daughter asked me if she was making the right choice by choosing a college on the other coast, while her entire high school friend group was applying in-state in California, I talked her through her fears and hopes, her anxieties and dreams, sharing my own far-from-home college experience, welcoming her to adulthood. When our conversation ended, I felt like it was my fears and anxieties that had quelled somewhat. It was this realization that maybe maternal instinct isn’t quite steady like a North Star, but instead like a lighthouse beam that sweeps in and out of sight, but circles back when needed.

Aruna Gobalan is a mom, software engineer, cancer survivor and 26-time marathoner, currently working on her memoir. She writes weekly at partably.com.

All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

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