I read a thread recently where a mother had referred to her 14 month old as a “bully” for not being able to go to sleep without nursing. How she’s “so over it” but will reluctantly continue because the threat of her baby bullying her is just too great. (Okay, I might have embellished the last part, but you catch my drift). This created a visceral reaction in my body akin to tires screeching pavement on a dime stop. Once the wince wore off of my face, the rush of heartbreak awaited to be felt. I say heartbreak, not because I’m a queen of drama, or hoping to win an oscar, but because I take great pride in my ability to feel things deeply. A quality, that unfortunately in today’s world, is not the sought out experience.
The consequence of feeling deeply means that I actively allow my heart to break open in response to seemingly “miniscule” issues. Some might label this as a problem, nuisance or a “mountain out of a molehill-itis”. This is to be expected in the echoes of a numbed out society, because when we are severed from our true feeling state, access to our instincts are blurred creating an optical illusion where the big ruptures are seen as miniscule. And this woman calling her baby a bully (even if sarcastically) is anything but miniscule. Let me try and paint this picture for you, so that you might see the mountain too.
Imagine all access to your words and self-sufficiency escape you, and you have no way of communicating your need for safety, comfort, or nourishment other than body movements and sounding. Now imagine that an unstoppable force–a primal urge–surges up through your body, propelling you toward the only source in existence of those aforementioned needs. This urge is so powerful that you’ll stop at nothing in order to feel safe and satiated. The stronger you propel, the stronger the resistance gets, and all of sudden you have the thought “I might not get what I need to survive!”. A spiral of fear flushes your entire system, pulling you down into a dark tunnel of panic while your amygdala sends you into autopilot alarm–with the only way out being the very source that sent you into the spiral in the first place. Finally after what seemed like fighting for your life, you attach to this one source with a sigh of relief, and are met–reluctantly–with the energetic tone of annoyance, disgust, and perhaps even being called a bully.
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One can only assume that it wouldn’t take very long to associate “my urgesare annoying, disgusting, and bullying” with “I am annoying, disgusting, and a bully” because I do not yet understand that my primal urges are distinct from “me”. That they are not simply “good” or “bad” but merely an instinct to survive. Over time this dissonance plants seeds of distrust, and the invasive vines begin to grow out of control, coiling around, suffocating, and ultimately injuring your instincts, and access to your authentic feelings all together. But it’s totally okay, because you’ll have your mother’s, father’s, teacher’s, lover’s, neighbor’s, and society’s approval instead. *Winks in sarcasm*.
According to neuroscientist Dr. Kirshenbaum, our babies are exposed to emotional experiences that change their epigenetics and gene expression at two specific times in life: early development in utero, and in infancy (first 3 years of life). She explains that stressful experiences (such as the aforementioned scenario) during early development actually changes mental health genes in a baby’s DNA; and that these early experiences may increase susceptibility to both mental wellness and unwellness. Aka, nurturing our babies is a revolutionary act, and ultimately works as a cycle. We may inherit legacies of trauma, violence, poor mental health, and low nurture DNA, but we are not completely powerless against genetics, in fact, we have more power than one may think. When we learn to nurture ourselves and our babies, we are nurturing the future health of humanity and the planet. Do you see yet, how this mountain is anything but a molehill?
To undrained eyes, It might seem like I am pointing my keyboard-warrior finger at this mother who called her baby a bully. That I’m shaming her in the proverbial streets like ‘Cersei’, shouting “Shame!” as I metaphorically throw rotten tomatoes at her head, remaining completely blind to the pain and hardship of how she might feel being a mother (especially a nursing one)in today’s world. But that’s the thing about optical illusions, they are never quite as they seem.
Would you believe me if I told you that I consider this woman a beautiful muse? That I deeply care for this woman, and women like her? That I’m grateful she chose to–knowingly or unknowingly–project her unresolved trauma onto her baby, so that her words might find their way to me and I could bring them to light? Would you believe me if I told you that I’ve grieved for the babies who ever felt that their needs were a nuisance? That I’ve sobbed for the babies that cry for their mothers at night that never come? That I cry for the mothers who were once babies themselves, and never knew what it was like to feel unconditionally loved?
And would you believe me if I told you that in order for me to see this woman through a lens of compassion that I’ve had to grieve my own ruptures with nurture? That I’ve had to feel my own pain, and the pain that has been passed onto me through genetic lineage? That the cracks in my heart I so willingly allow to remain open; usher in grief so that I may feel compassion over dogma? I believe shame is an inside job, that no one can place shame “onto” someone else, and once we can learn to nurture ourselves, we can then build the capacity to be with the shame or any and all of the emotional spectrum discomfort.
This world would be a vastly different place if we saw babies for what they were: the most intelligent ones in the room, that their connection to their instincts is to be modeled and gleaned from. So let us pause before we call a baby a bully. Let us soften into the beauty of their neediness, the sacred wisdom of their instincts, and the wild holy cry for connection that lives in all of us. Let us remember that every demand for closeness is really an invitation to return home to nurture ourselves. Because when we choose to tend to the places within us, that once felt like too much, we no longer see need as a nuisance. We see it as an opportunity. Not to fix, shut down, but to love deeper. One cry, one feed, one cuddle at a time.
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