'The 7 Stages of Motherhood'

May 9, 2005 — -- Ann Pleshette Murphy taps into her experience as "Good Morning America's" parenting contributor, 10-plus years as editor in chief of Parents magazine, and, most important, her own experience raising two children in her book, "The 7 Stages of Motherhood: Loving Your Life Without Losing Your Mind."

Murphy differentiates herself from other authors by focusing on the development of the mother rather than the child, as children grow from babies to teens.

You can read select excerpts from "The 7 Stages of Motherhood" below.

Stage 3

Letting Go: The Toddler Years, One and Two

Unlike the first three months, which one mom described as a time of "total caregiving with no return," the four-to-twelve-month period is often the "falling head over heels in love" phase. Looking at photos of Maddie when she was five, six, or eight months old (of which there are several trunkfuls), I'm reminded how her body had a kind of delicious ripeness, like a spanking new pillow, creamy and cool and soft. After her bath, I would put my terry-wrapped beauty on the bed and lie next to her for hours, admiring the formation of her ears or the perfection of her tiny wrinkled toes or the soft sound of her burbling voice.

We had made the transition from a stage when Maddie's relentless neediness elicited a kind of primal pull to soothe, feed, and hold her to a phase choreographed around a much more reciprocal dance. Coming into her room in the morning, I experienced the helpless bliss of watching a frown of frustration melt into a gummy smile. At the sound of my voice, joy animated every fiber of her body; no matter how rough the previous night had been, no matter how wasted I felt when I dragged myself out of bed, her beaming face washed away the fatigue.

As my three-month maternity leave galloped to an end, I experienced moments of sheer panic. I had missed the daily challenges, mental stimulation, and rewards of my job, but the image of handing Maddie over to Ana, the Filipino woman we had hired to care for her, sucked the energy out of me.

Feeling torn between your baby and your job is one of the universals of this -- and practically every other -- phase of motherhood. In a recent poll of working mothers, Parents found that 99 percent of them said they felt "stressed some or most of the time." Most of us assume this stress could be alleviated by improved child care or more flextime or a more involved spouse -- and all those things would help. But we also need to accept the fact that ambivalence is a fact of life postbaby. And that sometimes the tension we feel between our working selves and our mothering selves can be energizing and creative.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of research tells us that child care does not hurt kids -- assuming that that care is consistent and nurturing -- there isn't a mother alive who doesn't feel guilty and conflicted as she heads out the door. The truth is, you'll never know for sure whether the decisions you make today are the ones that matter the most down the road. All you can do is accept what research and common sense confirm: Being true to yourself is paramount. A child at home with a depressed or frustrated mom is going to suffer more than a child whose mother nurtures herself -- through work or other activities -- and is, therefore, replenished and ready to give when she's home. Babies need and love their moms, but they certainly don't need to be with them every minute of every day. They also thrive when they have a chance to interact with other loving adults.

Ahhh, but there's the rub. How does one find "other loving adults" -- even one other loving adult? Quality, affordable child care ranks with the Holy Grail in terms of accessibility. Understandably, we often make the mistake of looking for child care that is all about our baby's needs. We want a surrogate mom, or a group of surrogate moms in a wonderful child-care center. But one of the keys to making this transition from home to work is having someone or a group of someones who are there for you. This means a woman who supports working mothers, really believes that you've made the right choice. If your baby is in center-based care, then you want a place that regularly provides information about what your baby has been doing, not because it will necessarily help the baby but because they know you want to be in on her day. They should also welcome your occasional surprise visits. A child-care provider who seems judgmental, arrogant, or so obsequious that she would obviously never tell you the truth is not the person to hire. A center that holds a dim view of parents who question, call regularly, or stop by is not the one for your baby. In order to forge the kind of partnership that makes everyone happy, it's also critical that you do your part. Don't micromanage. If you're constantly second-guessing what your child-care provider is providing, you're going to drive her nuts -- and perhaps out the door. On the other hand, a good child-care provider, one who has had experience not only with newborns but with new moms, knows we're all a little nuts in the beginning and doesn't get defensive. One of the mistakes I made with Ana, who worked for us for five years, was that I rarely scheduled times during the week to sit with her and talk about Maddie's and Nick's development, any problems that had bubbled up, or to simply see how Ana was doing. Too often, we had these conversations on the fly, as I was rushing in at the end of the day and she was rushing out. Your goal is not to become your child-care provider's new best friend; after all, you are her boss. But every employer-employee relationship depends on good communication. If you're not clear about her job responsibilities or if she's reluctant to voice a complaint, then you're going to have a hard time working as a team.

The Chore Wars

For many of us, the chore wars are, in fact, a battle with ourselves, an internal struggle over how much control we want, how much authority we need in order to feel like good-enough mothers. We're usually much more willing to relinquish the housework than the child care, eager to have a partner in the kitchen washing up after dinner but more competitive when it comes to bonding with the baby. What's really "fair" has to be evaluated not only in the context of your marriage but in terms of what you really want for yourself. If your dream is to be home full-time with your baby but your family depends on your income, you may find yourself putting in a second shift in order to feel as connected as possible with your role as a mom. If mothering 24/7 leaves you drained and unfulfilled, then your resentment of your husband's freedom to "go about his life just like before" (as one mother told me bitterly) is guaranteed to rankle.

Of course, it's incredibly hard to sort out the complex and conflicting feelings of this stage. We're apt to give mixed messages to our husbands because we rarely have the opportunity to sit back and evaluate exactly what we want and what has to change. When Maddie was a baby and Steve and I were both working full-time, it was hard enough to finish a sentence, let alone find the time to contemplate whether or not I liked my life. It was far easier just to plow ahead, joking about or quietly grumbling over who did the laundry more often.

Several moms shared the sense I had during the first year of Maddie's life, that fatherhood, though profound and thrilling, didn't shake their husbands' basic priorities or expectations. For Steve and me, the challenge to embrace a new definition of we mirrored our individual struggles to accept a radically altered sense of ourselves. Maddie's first birthday was a celebration of the longest year ever to whiz by; so much had happened in so little time, yet I could readily recall nights early in her life that I thought would never end and long, exhausting days. As a mother I had come so far, discovered vast reservoirs of energy and hidden strengths. There were even occasions when I experienced what Tibetan Buddhists refer to as my lungtha -- a feeling of being on the top of my game, a Wind Horse Mama, no longer straining to maintain my seat.

Of course, the year had also forced me to face my share of demons, to accept that I had a long way to go before I would feel totally in balance -- at home, at work, in my marriage, and in relation to extended family, friends, colleagues. I had learned that, as Daphne de Marneffe writes in Maternal Desire, "motherhood puts women in a different relationship to themselves...not as some sort of pale 'shifting of priorities,' but as a new relationship to experience." To survive this first, dramatic year, I had had to let go of the expectation that my days would ever be completely my own; to accept that life with a baby rarely goes as planned, that the tension between the love and the anger we feel toward our babies could bend steel, and that unless we nurture ourselves, we cannot possibly summon the reserves we need to care for them.

Stage 4

Trying To Do It All: The Preschool Years, Three to Six

"During this phase of motherhood, one adds to the jobs of caregiver, playmate, and disciplinarian the talents of professor, coach, social secretary, short-order cook, wardrobe consultant, negotiator, and shrink. It helps if you can bake, sew, sing, act, draw, and wrestle a screaming thirty-pound dervish into a booster seat. But you can't possibly do all of these things perfectly. You can't even do them half as well as your neighbor, who boasts an immaculate house, well-tended garden, and exciting social life. "How does she manage a job, kids, church choir, and dress the way she does" you ask yourself whenever you're on the ledge. If your answer is "She's just better organized than I am" or "If I only got up a little earlier, I could do more" or "She's a much better cook," then you're stepping into a trap baited with BS and guaranteed to bite you in the ego.

I was hardly immune. Maddie phoned me at the office to announce that she couldn't bring the three dozen oatmeal cookies I had miraculously remembered to bake for snack day because the theme for that particular Wednesday was Sweden. "We have to be making something from there," she said firmly. "Like what?" I asked, stopping short of barking, "Herring? A delightful smorgasbord for twenty-three?" "I don't know, Mama," she said softly, anxiety building in her reedy voice. "But we have to."

"Okay, sweetheart," I relented. "I'll figure something out."

It was, of course, pouring rain when I left the office, and past closing time at the gourmet food store in our neighborhood. I was forced to dash from one late-night deli to another in search of Ry-Krisps and flavored cream cheese. I spent at least two hours spreading the latter without shattering the former and another half hour convincing Maddie that this was a genuine Swedish treat.

Why, you may ask, did I not tell Maddie that oatmeal cookies were a national Swedish dish? Or, better yet, just say that Swedish Day was next month and that tomorrow was, in fact, High Fiber Day at her Montessori school? For one thing, Maddie had reached a point in her development when following the rules and worshipping one's teacher (in her case a lovely SWEDISH woman named Kirsten) were paramount. I had reached a point in my development when proving to myself and to my preschool daughter that Mama could do anything were paramount, that Mama would never let her down, that even though Mama had had to work late two nights that week, she would make it up to her by racing around to find Ry-Krisps for Swedish Day."

One of the mistakes I made with Maddie was to confuse a calendar choked with classes, concerts, and culture with "quality time." Standing on line during my lunch hour to buy tickets to a children's concert may have allayed my guilt about working late that day, but by the time the event rolled around, we probably would have had just as much fun hanging around in our PJ's and going out for breakfast at McDonald's.By the time Nick hit the preschool years, I was better able to reconcile my need to fill his day with activities and his need to hang out with no agenda.

Having learned the value of routines and the uselessness of trying to hurry along a dawdler when Maddie was a preschooler, I was wise enough to build plenty of markers into Nick's days. If we had to get out the door by 8 a.m., I actually set a timer and put him in charge of telling me when it went off. And when something unexpected squeezed our time together even more, I tried to abbreviate certain rituals rather than eliminate them altogether.

One of the realities of this stage of motherhood is that we can't fulfill our children's every need. Nor should we want to. As difficult and painful as it is to make our preschoolers unhappy, it's far worse to indulge their every request. A child who is told no may rant and rave, but when she calms down, she's been given an invaluable gift -- the experience of knowing she can handle frustration, weather an emotional storm, and wander back into her mother's loving arms.

Stage 6

Living in the Gray Zone: The Preteen Years, Ten to Thirteen

Depending on how you look at (and live) them, the preteen years can be either the shortest or the longest chapter in your mothering story. "There is no such thing as a preadolescent," an editor friend of mine declared when I asked her about life with her ten-year-old son. "Ten is the new teen! He started fifth grade and it's as if he's plunged into high school. It's such a radical change from fourth grade. Oh my God!"

During this stage of motherhood, the progression-regression dance our children perform daily can throw into question not only practical concerns like rules and routines but more profound issues like trust and boundaries. The challenge to know when to be your child's pal and when to assert yourself, when to push and when to protect, forces many mothers to question with renewed intensity their roles at work, their involvement in their child's school, and their connections with other parents, with their husband, and, of course, with their child.

It takes an ego of steel to navigate the preteen years, because one day your kid is going to wake up uncomfortable in her own body. And when she stands with one foot in childhood, the other in early adulthood, and struggles to maintain her balance, the person she will grab onto with a desperate, clawing intensity is you. Sandra, a single mom with two daughters, compared her eldest's fifth and sixth-grade years as "living The Exorcist." Shaking her head, she seemed to marvel at the fact that she and her daughter survived it at all. "I mean, I just felt as though Christa -- who had been my sweet, obedient little girl -- suddenly woke up with her head spinning around. I just wasn't prepared. Not at all."

In addition to the "velocity of change," there's often a volatility and intensity mothers say they associate with the toddler years. I spent much of Maddie's preadolescence with my shoulders tensed up around my ears and my antennae quivering in anticipation of a major mood swing. When your daughter freaks out because the shirt she's "gotta, gotta have right now" is still in the washing machine, or your son rants and raves when he realizes at 11 p.m. that his French quiz is demain, not next week, you're likely to blame those "raging hormones."

And certainly the approach of puberty brings about dramatic changes in a child's endocrine system, changes that profoundly affect his ability to regulate his emotions. But it may actually be your preteen's brain that's short-circuiting, simply because the area that helps control emotions and make judgments (the prefrontal cortex) isn't as developed as the limbic system, where emotions originate. The wet shirt throws her into a tailspin because she can't stop and say, "Okay, this isn't the end of the world. I have a drawer full of other shirts." And while you may be tempted to use your own superior prefrontal cortex to offer solutions, don't. Any attempt to proffer advice during the heat of a meltdown will be about as effective as banging your cerebral cortex against a wall.

It's also crucial at this stage to let your preteen fall on her face once in a while, to muscle through a problem without a guaranteed bailout from Mom or Dad. Natural consequences are rarely easy to enforce, but they can work wonders during this critical time in your child's life and foster a sense of mastery and responsibility. Even as I write this, I'm well aware of how abysmally I failed in this regard, how often I leapt to the rescue when Maddie or Nick was teetering on the edge of a cliff. Sometimes the cry for help was fairly minimal ("Mom! I left my math homework on my desk. Could you please, please drop it off at school?"), but on other occasions my rescue effort led to late-night "helping" with an English paper and the midnight thanks followed swiftly by "I suck at writing. I could never have done this without you."

The problem, of course, is that when we help too much, we deprive them of a sense of mastery, of truly owning what they produce or create. On the flip side of the overinvolvement coin is a reluctance to let go, a deep ambivalence about everything from physical separation ("Can I walk to school by myself?") to emotional independence ("That's private, Mom!"). One could argue that every stage of motherhood is characterized by the conflicting desire to push and to coddle, to give our kids wings but clip them ever so slightly. But during their preteen years, our awareness of childhood's end is always present. It's like the fortieth-birthday card I received that read, "Turning 40 isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there."

From "The 7 Stages of Motherhood: Loving Your Life Without Losing Your Mind" by Ann Pleshette Murphy. Copyright © 2006 by Ann Pleshette Murphy. Reprinted by permission of Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Available wherever books are sold. For more information visit www.annpleshettemurphy.com.