Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution

“A SEMINAL PIECE THAT DRAWS A LINE IN THE SAND ON WHAT MOTHERHOOD SHOULD BE ALL ABOUT. It is a statement that has the potential to realign motherhood, and is so intelligently written. [It is] to motherhood what Germaine Greer was to womanhood.”

– Dr. John Irvine, founder of the Read Clinic, best-selling author and child psychologist

“Motherhood is not only the root for the survival of our species, but also lies at the core of all human functions – biological, social, cultural, spiritual, economic, educational, artistic and every other aspect of human existence. In the context of our post-modern society, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution is UNDENIABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF THE 21^st CENTURY. It explores, with exquisite beauty, a magical and mysterious world of motherly being, fascinating and filial aspects of femininity, the developmental impact of being Daddy – for him and his child. The dysfunctions of our world emanate from the disastrous consequences of devaluing mothers and motherhood, sacrificed for sexual satisfaction, material benefits, and corporate profits in a male-dominated world. And thus, ritual replaces faith, tweets/text messages displace conversation, skimming or surfing the web substitutes for a depth of understanding, and a ceaseless chatter supplants the comfort of a loving silence. Humanity decides, often in retrospect, that ‘civilization’ or ‘progress’ were not all that they were made out to be, perhaps a return to our innate nature and natural ways may serve society better. Now is one such moment in time. Mama sounds the clarion call to return motherhood to its former glory, preserved for millennia but recently wrecked by the senseless onslaught of materialism, modernism and media.

“I could not have predicted the profound impact of Mama. While making rounds in the Paediatric ICU after reading it, I insisted that the entire team go into the patient’s room, so that the mother did not have to leave her child’s bedside. Later in the morning, I became irritated when a senior ICU nurse interposed herself between a mother and her baby – obstructing the mother’s attempts to calm her baby down during the removal of a breathing tube. Clinicians like me have consistently disarticulated the mother–infant dyad, dismembered the family dynamic that is crucial to healing and health, and imposed inviolate rules and policies to justify this insanity. No more of this, at least in my practice, will be tolerated.”

– K. J. S. Anand, MBBS, D.Phil., FAAP, FCCM, FRCPCH, Nils Rosén von Rosénstein Laureate 2009, Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Anatomy and Neurobiology

“ANTONELLA RAISES TWO REALLY IMPORTANT IDEAS. Firstly that we need to become an attachment society, so that the role of mothers especially becomes an easier one. And that we need to depolarize the thinking about attachment parenting, so that everyone can find themselves free to move on that continuum.”

– Steve Biddulph, Professor of Psychology and #1 bestselling author of Raising Boys

“Love is the essence of life, the essence of flourishing and connecting, the essence of human growth and flowering. MAMA IS A LYRICAL ODE TO THE NEED TO LOVE AND A GUIDEBOOK ON HOW TO EMBRACE LOVE. This deeply inspiring and informing book about the empathic connection between mother and child reminds us of how much we need to nurture both mothers and children in their crucial roles of advancing humankind.”

– Peter R. Breggin MD, psychiatrist and Director, Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, and bestselling author of Toxic Psychiatry and Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal

“Part memoir, part social deconstruction, Mama at once embraces and wrestles with the phenomenon of modern motherhood, every second chapter or so seeing Gambotto-Burke rumbling with one of ten renegade experts who form a disturbing chorus. To suggest a patriarchal plot is not to be a fringe conspiracy theorist. In his 2012 book Sex and Punishment, Eric Berkowitz argued convincingly that ancient lawmakers, spooked by what they saw as the possibility of blokes becoming biologically redundant, had created a society that would condemn motherhood to little more than a masculine factory in which women laboured. This society exists today, motherhood still regarded as a temporary vocation for which one must seek ‘leave’, presumably from something more important than the raising of emotionally nourished human beings. Together, the voices in Mama push this same barrow, and it makes for an arresting argument. The author herself brings the mystery of motherhood up close and personal. Having lost a brother to suicide and her mother to a ‘corrosive relationship’, Gambotto-Burke watched her own daughter marvel at her first dawn and found it ‘the most exquisite moment of my life’ ... this is the experience of motherhood: PERSONAL, MAGICAL, SUBLIMELY POWERFUL, and medical jargon can take a hike. Gambotto-Burke’s point is that the shared experiences of mothers are of a value no PhD can match.”

“What would a celebrated writer known for tackling themes as dark and intriguing as suicide, addiction, sexuality and celebrity culture make of something as supposedly tame and ordinary as motherhood? Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s latest book, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution, is part advice for new parents, part a call to arms for change and part memoir. In essence, though, it’s about intimacy. A BOOK LIKE NO OTHER, it prepares the reader for an entirely new encounter with intimacy, that with their baby. It recognises not just our vulnerability around intimacy but also the ways in which intimacy calls upon our unresolved pasts. Mama is a celebration of attachment and our drive to overcome obstacles in the pursuit of closeness with our child, and shows why parental intimacy is neither tame nor ordinary.”

First published in 2014 in Australia as Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love by Arbon Publishing Pty Ltd.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Credit: Catherine Barnett, Chorus from The Game of Boxes. Copyright © 2012 by Catherine Barnett. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade and otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book has been printed on paper that is sourced and harvested from sustainable forests and is FSC accredited.

For Bethesda, forever suspended in the space between my heartbeats: this book was named for your first word.

So who mothers the mothers
who tend the hallways of mothers,
the spill of mothers, the smell of mothers,
who mend the eyes of mothers,
the lies of mothers scared
to turn on lights in basements
filled with mothers called by mothers in the dark,
the kin of mothers, the gin of mothers,
mothers out on bail,
who mothers the hail-mary mothers
asleep in their stockings
while the crows sing heigh ho carrion crow,
fol de riddle, lol de riddle,
carry on, carry on –

ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE’S GUIDE TO MOTHERHOOD

1.Cherish your child. You could drop dead tomorrow. Chase them around the house and kiss them. Cuddle them. Write them cards. Draw them pictures. Tell them they make you happy.

2.Unplug the antenna. Use your television set only for DVDs and when your baby/toddler is asleep. Never, ever listen to the radio or loud music when your baby/toddler is around. Watch less TV, curb Facebook and stop tweeting. Why? Because nobody really cares.

3.Take your child for walks. Without your mobile. Without your iPod. And talk to them. Tell them about flowers and bugs and trees and clouds and sky and sea and your childhood. Be present. Connect.

4.Always always always hold your child’s hand, even if it means wearing Birkenstocks. I wore Birkenstocks for six years. And maxiskirts. Walk slowly. Forget the rest of the world.

5.Be as fat as you need to be when your child is young. Do not listen to anyone who makes you feel bad about your weight. You can lose it when they’re at school; I did. Eat cake.

6.Dance with your partner. In the kitchen. In the hallway. Especially in front of your child. The very best kind of dancing is when there’s no music playing. Cut loose. Be free.

7.Avoid stressful people. This includes family and old friends. You have my permission. And if tempted to feel guilt, remember the impact of maternal stress on children: very, very bad.

8.Lie with your child in the dark after reading them a story. Talk about their day. Really listen. Don’t stop reading and listening and talking in the dark just because they can read. Then push the blinds aside and look out at the stars together in the dark. And as you do, think of all the mothers who have lost their children and how fantastically lucky you are.

9.Start baking. There is no wound that a cake doesn’t go some way toward salving. Banana, coconut and rum cake with cream cheese icing is the answer to just about everything. Truly.

10.Make friends with mothers in your neighbourhood. Find one that fits. Some are deeply peculiar but then you’ll meet one who makes you laugh as she drives you to your first colonoscopy.

11.Buy or make bunting, and invest in sparklers. Love is a privilege, so celebrate!

The passion Antonella feels for her daughter is the golden thread that runs through every one of these pieces.

A French newspaper recently mentioned a project for reconsidering the vocabulary related to the national school system. The author of the article was analysing the reasons why the term “école maternelle” (school for children aged two to six) should be replaced by the term “école première”. The vocabulary that has been used for nearly a century is suddenly deemed sexist, since it suggests that a young human being needs first his/her mother. On the same day, I read about the recent announcement of US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that lifts the prohibition of women and mothers serving in combat. From now on, women and mothers are given the permission to kill, like men.

It is in this context that I began to read Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution, Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s anthology of essays and interviews about femininity and motherhood. Through her transgenerational perspective, Antonella has found the most eloquent and concise way to be critical of our unisex society: we have, as she writes, reached a phase when “the denigration of femininity [is] everywhere”. A gifted writer, Antonella needs only a few lines to turn our attention toward the essential. “Our culture”, she writes, “is now one of masculine triumphalism, in which transhistorically feminine expressions – empathy, sweetness, volubility, warmth – are seen as impediments to a woman’s professional trajectory”.

Antonella brings an unusual slant to the subject: an essayist, critic and journalist, she is also an attachment parent. Having decided to sleep separately, she then co-slept with her daughter until her daughter turned four. Warned that hers was the experience of birth associated by specialists with impaired attachment and postnatal depression, Antonella writes, “The possibility no professional volunteered was that through parenthood, my husband and I would experience the kind of romance that, for years, endured as bliss”. After the birth, Antonella was wheeled, holding her newborn daughter, “past trees laden with baubles – it was the night after Christmas – and into a new universe that defied every law”. Fascinated by this new universe, she interviewed me, Gabor Maté, Sheila Kitzinger, Laura Markham and others. She wanted to understand what motherhood means.

The passion Antonella feels for her daughter is the golden thread that runs through every one of these pieces, a love sourced in her own feeling for her “compassionate, emotional, gentle” grandmother, a woman whose talents, from the perspective of Antonella’s peers, were “wasted”.

And I can echo Antonella’s words because I belong to the generation of her grandmother.

I have learned, from my own transgenerational perspective, that our cultural conditioning related to the men–women relationship can fluctuate at a high speed, like fashions. Let us illustrate from an example the speed of such fluctuations. Women who gave birth (at home, of course) around 1920 or 1930 used to say, “I cannot imagine my husband watching me when I was giving birth”. They were thinking in terms of sexual attraction afterward. Some decades later, their granddaughters were saying, “I cannot imagine giving birth without my husband/partner”.

Today, the basis of our cultural conditioning is that women can do all that men can do, and vice versa. Focusing on the differences and on the complementarities of men and women is “sexist” (pejorative). Scientific perspectives are becoming the best allies of common sense to neutralize the fast fluctuations of cultural conditioning. This is what I am learning from seminars and workshops for health professionals involved in childbirth.

The reactions of participants when I describe a situation usually associated with an easy birth are telling: what happens, I ask, when there is nobody around a labouring woman apart from one experienced and silent midwife, perceived as a mother figure, sitting in the corner of a small, warm, dimly lit room, and knitting? This apparently simple scenario is unknown and culturally unacceptable in the context of the twenty–first century. I have the authority to describe its effects because I spent six months as an “externe” in the maternity unit of a Paris hospital in the early 1950s, before the advent of theories that are the bases of modern schools of “natural childbirth”. A common reaction of participants is that promoting knitting is “sexist”: knitting is supposed to be female. Other common questions are, “What about the father?” or, “What if the midwife is a man?” All these reactions are expressions of that which Antonella calls the “denigration of femininity”. In general, my attitude is not to argue or to answer directly the questions; rather, I interpret this situation in the light of the latest physiological discoveries.

There are physiologists who are studying the effects of repetitive tasks such as knitting. We learn from them that knitting is a way to reduce the levels of adrenaline. Why is the level of adrenaline of the midwife important? An emerging discipline – the exploration of the “mirror neuron system” – is using sophisticated methods to demonstrate how contagious emotional states are, including emotional states associated with high levels of adrenaline. In other words, the knitting midwife is helping the labouring woman to maintain her own level of adrenaline as low as possible. This is essential since it is well known that the release of hormones of the adrenaline family inhibits the release of oxytocin, the key hormone during the birth process. All factors that can influence the level of adrenaline must be taken into account. The temperature of the room is one of these factors. When the midwife has good experience and is perceived as a mother figure, it is probable that the mother-to-be will feel secure – the prerequisite to avoiding an increased level of adrenaline.

Human beings are special where childbirth is concerned, because they have developed to an extreme degree the part of the brain called the neocortex – the brain of the intellect. An involuntary process such as the birth process can be inhibited by the activity of the thinking brain. This is why a labouring woman needs to be protected against stimulation of her neocortex. I referred to the silent midwife: language is the main stimulant of the neocortex. When we feel observed we have a tendency to observe ourselves: the neocortex is stimulated. This is why I mentioned a scenario with one midwife: it is much easier to have a feeling of privacy when there is only one person around. In many traditional societies they had proverbs claiming that when there are two midwives the birth is difficult. For the same reasons, we visualized the midwife sitting in a corner of the small, dimly lit room, rather than staying in front of the labouring woman and looking at her.

Such physiological interpretations of the effects of a situation offered as an example – not as a model – can easily lead the participants to comment on a paradox. Today, it is politically correct to be critical of doctors who prescribe too many drugs and perform too many caesarean sections. At the same time, situations that might make a birth easier are not culturally acceptable.

There are many ways to illustrate the current collusion between science and common sense. When I was a medical student in a Paris hospital around 1953, I had never heard of a mother who would have said, immediately after giving birth, “Can I keep my baby with me?” The cultural conditioning was too strong. All mothers were convinced that a newborn baby urgently needs “care”: the baby was immediately given to a nurse. While staying in the maternity unit, babies were in a nursery. Mothers were elsewhere. Nobody had thought that they might be in the same room.

It is in such a context that we suddenly learned from scientific perspectives that a newborn baby needs its mother. What an important discovery! Some scientists introduced the concept of critical period for mother–baby attachment. Others looked at the behavioural effects of hormones that fluctuate during the period surrounding birth. Others looked at the contents of the colostrum. Others found that a human baby is able to find the breast during the hour following birth. Others studied childbirth from a bacteriological perspective and came to the conclusion that, ideally, the newborn baby’s body should be immediately colonized by microbes transmitted by the mother.

Interestingly, even during the twenty-first century, there are still women who don’t need the justification of sophisticated scientific perspectives to rediscover common sense. This is the case with Antonella, the mother of Bethesda, the little prodigy who could say “mama” at the age of four months. An opportunity to keep in mind that the Latin word “mamma” (“teat”) has inspired the classification of Homo sapiens among “mammals”, species characterized by the complementary roles of females and males. Babies can also help us to reintroduce common sense.

“I look at her, my heart everywhere”, Antonella writes of her daughter. “Inviolate softness, made holy by capacity for feeling. This, then, is femininity, I think … Just this: a little girl, her mother, and the wind rippling through poplars.”

Common sense is only one of the many reasons Antonella’s writing about parenting has been published around the world. The depth of the devotion she feels for her daughter reminds us of what it is to be human mammals.

Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation.

Like almost every other woman I know, I once perceived motherhood as the consolation prize for women who didn’t have what it took to make it in the workplace. In her mid-thirties, a girlfriend – now, ironically, a family-cultivating politician – dismissed mothers as “drudges” and “breeders”. To us, being a mother was acceptable only if motherhood was not one’s raison d’etre. As a sidebar mention, it passed muster; as a passion, it indicated only a paucity of capacity and imagination.

In the West, this perceptual template is now near-universal. The nurturance of a child is considered a squandering of the educated and the elite. Female high-achievers now hunger for “challenges” in place of connections. British economist Alison Wolf reported that women now make up the majority of undergraduates in the West. “There are now four women graduating with bachelors degrees in the US for every three men,” she wrote. “In the UK, almost 60 per cent of students, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, are female.” An American study of Harvard and Radcliffe graduates demonstrated that women “increasingly delayed marriage as the decades progressed, and nearly 40 per cent of women in all three groups never had children at all.”

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer recently referred to mothers raising their own children as a “lifestyle decision”, as if it were on a par with nudism or polyamory. This perspective is reinforced by the behaviour of women we admire. A week after giving birth to her third son, Cate Blanchett – the most celebrated actor of her generation – was addressing a summit. Rachida Dati, a minister in former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s cabinet, returned to parliament in heels five days after a caesarean, a procedure now classed as major surgery. And actor Halle Berry, pregnant with her second child, said, “After giving birth I will go back to work as soon as possible. When I got Nahla I took time off for almost four years. But now that job-wise everything is going so well, I definitely want to keep on working.” (Her depiction of babies as impediments to a woman’s primary purpose is made clear by a related headline: Halle won’t let baby stop her.)

Singer Lily Allen was similarly frank about her desperation to return to the unthreatening world of praise and objects. Of her two daughters, then under three, she said: “I love my children, but I’m a very impatient, busy person naturally so two babies, neither of them can talk, it was quite boring! … I missed the positive feedback about my music from my fans. I missed the rush of performing. I missed the free clothes and handbags and the good tables in posh restaurants. I did!’

Such responses are unsurprising given the menial status of motherhood. Our cultural take on both success and heroism – the ideals of any civilization – reflect a prejudice that is staggering in its latitude. Throughout human history, heroic conduct in particular has almost exclusively been attributed to men; women are generally only considered heroic in the context of wartime and even then, in token numbers. Despite the fact that heroism pivots on courage, self-sacrifice and the preservation of other lives, the billions of mothers who died in childbed have been forgotten.

Despite the mortal risk, there is no gravity attributed to motherhood. Instead, it continues to be almost universally disparaged by feminists and sentimentalized by men. In 2013, four times as many women died giving birth around the world than there were casualties in the Syrian Civil War, and yet there were no headlines, crisis bulletins, aid packages or expressions of public outrage. The 293,000 women who die in pregnancy and childbirth every year (and the seven to ten million who suffer severe or chronic illnesses caused by pregnancy-related complications) do so without public recognition of any kind. There is no statuary. There are no wreaths, medals, processions.

It would be considered demeaning to present a veteran of war with bows and candy to commemorate his service, but women who have almost haemorrhaged to death, whose sexual organs have been irreparably damaged through episiotomies, whose bladders are perforated during c-sections, who have been rendered incontinent, paralyzed by epidurals, suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after botched c-sections or spiralled into an incapacitating postpartum depression in the service of their families are presented with similarly infantilising tributes by their partners every Mothers’ Day. (For those who consider such situations exceptional or outlandish: the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that 94 per cent of American women who gave birth in 2008 had “some sort of pregnancy complication” resulting in an expenditure of US$17.4 billion).

The seriousness of childbirth on every level – emotional, spiritual, physical – for mothers is not only ignored, but effectively derided. “Congrats! You’ve had the baby … now what?” Fitness magazine trumpeted, before suggesting that “the general rule of thumb is to head back to the gym six weeks after birth”. Implicit in advice like this – and it is everywhere – is the understanding that having a baby is an event like any other (“now what?”), that a mother’s instinct to place her infant’s needs before her own is old hat (“the general rule of thumb”), and that it is not only acceptable but correct for a mother to separate from her baby. The extent of this disconnection is made clear by the popularity of 000-sized onesies printed with the words, “Get off Facebook and feed me!”

Maternal–child attachment is mostly eroded in increments. The separation begins in hospitals, where mothers are not only made to feel inferior to medical professionals in relation to their infants, but regularly separated from their infants for examinations, bathing and so on. One mother I know remains traumatized by her experience of giving birth in an elegant private hospital. “My son’s Apgar scores were actually very good,” she said, “but he was immediately whisked off to NICU without me even having had a chance to greet him. They did wheel him past me on the way out so that they could tick the box that I had seen my son. While being stitched up, I thought: ‘I feel like I have had my appendix out, not a baby.’ I didn’t get to experience my baby at all.”

She was told that she wouldn’t be able to see her premature baby again until the next day as they had no-one to wheel her to NICU. Despite having had a c-section, she was determined to spend time with her newborn son and, against all advice, staggered three floors down. “I just sat there talking to him and trying to touch him,” she remembered. “I was forbidden from holding him. They repeatedly told me that I wasn’t permitted to hold him because he was too fragile and it it was too much trouble to move all the equipment. And, as my son had no suck reflex, I was made to feel redundant by the staff. I was a nuisance; I got in the way of them performing their jobs. Bonding, love and warmth had no value to them at all.” She wept as she recalled watching as a nurse almost ripped a strip of skin from her son’s face as she removed the tape for his breathing tube.

Shamefully, human beings are the only mammals to separate mothers from their infants. Dr John Krystal, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, described the impact of maternal separation on the infant as “profound”, citing the recent discovery that the autonomic activity (heart rate and other involuntary nervous system activity) of two-day-old sleeping babies is 176 per cent higher during maternal separation. “We knew that this was stressful but the current study suggests that this is a major physiologic stressor for the infant,” he concluded. The association of maternal–infant separation with developmental havoc is not new. Scientists have, for many decades, separated newborn animals from their mothers to study the resulting damage to the evolving brain. And yet despite the evidence, little difference has been made to the way mothers and babies are treated, both by hospitals and by society at large.

This separation has a trickle-down effect, resulting in a disastrous chronological apartheid. Children are placed in care and then in school (in Britain, policy wonk Paul Kirby has gone so far as to suggest extending the school day from nine until six); adults work themselves into cardiac arrests alongside their coevals, and the old are stored in aged-care facilities until their expiry dates are up. That which is lost in the wash is love. There is a world of difference between the experience of “care” – the wiping of a bottom, the bathing of a body: basic biological obligations – and the intimacy that makes us want to live. Willingly, we are scripting simple happiness out of our lives.

Arguably the most destructive facet of this attitude is our cultural repudiation of maternal sensitivity, a quality that can only evolve through quiet, calm, sustained proximity to one’s baby. The very matrix of our ability to love and bond in later life, maternal sensitivity – or lack thereof – also determines cultural tenor. Throughout history, the most brutal cultures have always been distinguished by maternal-infant separation. And yet how can maternal sensitivity develop when we effectively bully mothers into returning to the workforce before their uteri have even had time to shrink? This bullying takes various forms, from shaming – some of it disguised as concern (“Aren’t you worried that you’ll lose your place on the ladder?”); some of it indirect (“What’s your post-baby body plan?”) – to financial manipulation (“Surely you want your child to have the best?”).

Two working mothers I knew – warm, vital, exhausted – were discussing mothering children under five. “I feel terrible admitting this,” one exclaimed, “but looking after the children just isn’t enough.” Intrigued, I asked if she felt that motherhood was in itself insufficiently stimulating or whether she felt dispirited by the social response to motherhood. My question surprised her, and she paused. “Everyone thinks you’re boring if you talk about children,” she savagely said.

In Erin Brockovich, the 2000 biographical film that won Julia Roberts an Academy Award for Best Actress, the protagonist, a harried, working-class single mother of three, is asked why she won’t quit her improbably demanding job. “How can you ask me to do that?” she asks. “This job – for the first time in my life, I got people respecting me. Up in Hinkley, I walk into

a room and everyone shuts up just to hear what I got to say. I never had that. Ever. Don’t ask me to give it up.”

American director Brad Bird concurred with this damning analysis. Of the reaction to his editor wife’s decision to dedicate herself to their children, he recalled: “When you’re talking about work, everyone could connect with that – everyone GOT it, but once she said she was a mother, that she worked in the house, their eyes glazed over, and they kind of dismissed what she did.”

Such dismissals are a form of bullying with which all mothers are familiar. Intimidated, we reframe our vulnerability into socially acceptable formats. Under the heading, “When is it appropriate to leave newborn to return to work?” a frightened new mother implored the internet: “The thought of it makes me want to cry my eyes out, but I can’t take any more depending on my hubby and family for everything! It makes me feel completely miserable! I was always the type of girl to work for her money so I could buy what I want without anyone telling me otherwise!”

Using money as a metaphor for mastery over her world – the postpartum body is also a popular metaphor – this woman reached out to a universe of similarly overwhelmed strangers to no avail. What she really needed was tenderness and guidance to help her connect with her baby; what she got was glib replies about women easily leaving newborns and emotionally frozen complaints about “boredom”.

At the most vulnerable time of their lives, mothers are repeatedly failed by the community.

The post-partum confinement period – a 30 to 40 day tradition throughout China, Greece, India, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam – is necessary not only to allow mothers to recuperate from the almost incomprehensible energetic expenditure that giving birth to a child entails, but to adjust to motherhood at a pace conducive to maternal-infant bonding. Hurried through the process – often in the unfamiliar environs of a hospital – women in their millions are failing to give birth without intervention and to breastfeed. The magnitude of the childbirth experience has been minimized for economic purposes, blighting an experience that could otherwise be infused with the purest bliss.

Our cultural de-emphasising of joy and pleasure in relation to the maternal–infant bond has numerous ramifications. As the relationship that determines our ability to accept ourselves in all of our flawed humanity is weakened, so is our ability to accept others in theirs; in that, a lessening of our capacity to love and to be loved. For what is the unhurried love of a mother if not complete acceptance of our ineptitude, of our fragility? Only maternal love can create that sense of security.

Michel Odent, the architect of water births, believes that our oxytocin system – oxytocin being the hormone of love, fundamental to birth and bonding throughout life – is growing weaker, and with catastrophic results. Our culture has come to be defined by adrenaline. In every area of our lives, we are jump-started, from the way in which we awaken (strong coffee, blaring alarms, television, radio) to the way in which we mate (Tinder, Grindr, Blendr, Tingle and so on).

The Google doctrine stipulates that, “[f]ast is better than slow,” but the veneration of acceleration is one of the greatest obstacles to intimacy and, perhaps, the most toxic in terms of parenting. An accelerated existence not only allows no time to consider either priorities or choices, but precludes deeply caring about those priorities or choices. Life just comes at us, and we react. The bar is now set by technology: jarring, bright, near-instantaneous. Intimacy, on the other hand, is quiet, slow

Attachment is the sum of repeated exposure, vulnerability, the consolidation of trust. There is no expediting love. And it is precisely at this point that our culture has started to fall apart. The fact that there is a need to specify attachment in relation to parenting tells us everything we need to know about the rupture between twenty-first century man and his heart. Emotion is no longer placed at the centre of human identity, which puts the very value of humanity at risk.

Professor Bruce Perry, the renowned child mental health researcher, stated that the most important property of humankind is the capacity to form and maintain relationships, which he sees as “absolutely necessary for any of us to survive, learn, work, love and procreate.” This capacity is, he carefully explained, “related to the organization and functioning of specific parts of the human brain. Just as the brain allows us to see, smell, taste, think, talk and move, it is the organ that allows us to love – or not. The systems in the human brain that allow us to form and maintain emotional relationships develop during infancy and the first years of life.”

Researcher David Metler agreed, finding that while there are almost no universal theories in Human Development and Family Studies as each depends on context and culture, there is something “very special” about attachment theory: supported by a substantial number of important empirical studies across various cultures and contexts, “the theory seems universal for humans.”

In essence, attachment theory began taking shape during the Second World War, when Anna Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology (and Sigmund’s daughter), observed that children who had been separated from their families for safe-keeping during the Blitz were suffering developmental issues. Despite the sometimes superior physical and intellectual ministering they received, these children were subject to fits of aggression, emotional withdrawal, head-banging, bed-wetting and soiling, tantrums, regression and other behavioural disturbances. They were, Freud realized, reacting to the disruption of their attachments, and she wrote movingly of the lack of adult appreciation for “the depth and seriousness of this grief of a small child.”

Freud laid the groundwork for psychiatrist John Bowlby’s exploration of the issue. In 1951, Bowlby, now known as the father of attachment theory, changed the landscape of developmental psychology with his powerful monograph for the World Health Organisation. In it, he emphasized that it is “essential” for the mental health of the infant and young child to “experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment. Given this relationship, the emotions of anxiety and guilt, which in excess characterize mental illness, will develop in a moderate and organized way.”

In short: Germaine Greer’s assertion that “[b]ringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not” could not be further from the truth. Parental devotion has an irreversible impact on children. Only 20 to 25 per cent of the brain is complete at birth, and even then, only in terms of autonomic function (heart rate, breathing, etc.); the rest of the brain is literally formed by the infant’s experience of love or by its absence. Newborns have been shown to be so vulnerable that they are now referred to as “external foetuses”; in evolutionary terms, this allows babies to be “customized” to enable adaptation to their environment and circumstance. The first three years of life in particular are critical in terms of shaping both the capacity to form loving relationships in adulthood and the stability that makes happiness possible.

“Empathy, caring, sharing, inhibition of aggression, capacity to love and a host of other characteristics of a healthy, happy and productive person are related to the core attachment capabilities, which are formed in infancy and early childhood,” Perry noted.

Given that this is the case, the current epidemic of disconnection makes it clear that our current child-rearing methods do not equip us with the capacity to sustain intimacy.

Certain biochemical systems – the stress response and emotional systems among them – can be set in what psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt describes as “an unhelpful way” if a child’s early experiences of care-giving are inconsistent, insensitive or indifferent. Gerhardt added, “Even the growth of the brain itself, which is growing at its most rapid rate in the first year and a half, may not progress adequately if the baby doesn’t have the right conditions to develop.”

To be abandoned by mother in infancy – the neonatal brain is wired by evolution to interpret being left even only briefly as abandonment – not only damages our ability to connect with others (expression of need equals abandonment), but creates the sense of self-loathing that can destroy a life (through substance abuse, depression, anxiety disorders). Concomitantly, the World Health Organization reported that suicide rates have increased by 60 per cent since 1945.

In such a climate, is it surprising that the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that the rate of face-lifts – the reconstruction of the identity we present to the world – has increased by 50 per cent? The media has been the fall guy for what is really a First World epidemic of self-loathing.

When mothers find themselves in the suburbs, isolated from status – and from partners forced to work hours historian Stephanie Coontz describes as “insane” – they can feel as if they’re drowning. Because effective mothering requires not only a sustained investment of energy into the child by the mother, but an equal investment of energy into the mother by her partner, family and community.

The change we need demands a revision of priorities. We need to decide what constitutes a good life, and then adjust our lives – and policies – accordingly. As palliative care worker Bronnie Ware noted, one of the top five regrets of the dying is working too hard (“[People realize that they] missed their children’s youth”). To achieve change, we need to start at the beginning. We need to rally around mothers on an individual and a cultural level, enabling them to bond with their babies so that the next generation does not suffer the wounds that have made ours so dysfunctional. Maternal vulnerability is neither indolence nor a sexist myth, but a normal response to our most sacred duty. Critically, we need to redefine our understanding of importance to include love, and to understand that far from being drudges, mothers are, in fact, creating the very tenor of our future.

Up until I asked my husband about the most romantic moment in his life, I’d never really considered the issue. I was just curious, I think, in the way that every woman sometimes is for a glimpse into the internal world of the man with whom she shares her life.

“When we had Monkey”, he said. “The first three years”. His reply shocked me. I had expected a resurrection of preadolescent ardour or thwarted love. But when he, in turn, asked the same question, I could think of no period that even approached the disorientating rapture of those years, a time often presented as an exodus from selfhood, a kind of hazing, or rite of initiation: something to be endured.

Together, we remembered my being wheeled to the maternity ward with our jaundiced baby after seventeen racking hours of labour, a rogue cannula that broke loose and splashed my face with blood, two and a half epidurals, morphine-induced nausea, second-degree internal tearing, and a sustained asthma attack on first standing. I was wheeled past trees laden with baubles – it was the night after Christmas – and into a new universe that defied every law. My husband and I were warned that mine was the experience of birth associated with impaired attachment and postnatal depression. In combination with my family history, it didn’t look good.

The possibility no professional volunteered was that through parenthood, my husband and I would experience the kind of romance that, for years, endured as bliss.

In etymological terms, the roots of the word romance lie with the concept of chivalric adventure, and this was also my understanding: as a stylised distraction or escape spurred by disconnection. I subscribed to the notion of high romance – to the same picaresque instincts and exaggerated emotional investment responsible for the enduring popularity of Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice and the controversial Lolita; to the same reckless abandonment of self-consciousness facilitated by opiates. Poetry, which is implicit in romance, was the counterpoint to an existence that lurched from crisis to duty.

The poetic gesture was, to me, essential; the feeling behind it, less so. Even now, I find myself grading adolescent infatuations on the basis of their ability to make a lyrical experience of life – the boy who pressed that poem by Rilke into my fist as I disembarked from the school bus; the man who kissed me as ‘Coney Island Baby’ played, spring rain falling on the magnolia petals in the grass outside; that droll and modest lover who, in a black frock coat, walked with me most every day through the barley fields outside Oxford.

These and other recollections are the stars by which I navigate my past and, like stars, their light continues long after love’s extinction. The boy who copied Rilke was expelled, and we lost touch. The Lou Reed fan became violent, necessitating police intervention. And, in the same way water is strained through muslin, the man in the black frock coat left my life.