I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood

And that’s the first reason Winnicott gives for the mother’s “hatred” of the child: “the baby is not her own (mental) conception.” On the one hand that is what makes a child so genuinely amazing: their potential to surprise us with their development, their unfurling beyond what we know or could imagine. It is also what makes the child infuriating:

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But just as surely, another part of me wanted to manage the threat of  his  potential independence by subsuming him into myself. It was tempting to treat the baby as a prop for my own narratives of motherhood rather than as an independent person in his own right. But babies give no quarter to our preconceived ideas of what mothering them

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I could not look forward to the moment that might have been, the baby that might have been, but instead felt touched by an entirely new sort of loneliness, which pinched me when I wasn’t looking. But I had Jimmy, so I blinked at him, and smiled when I opened my eyes as he patted his palms on my face, squeezing my grief back into myself and squashin

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