A Mother's Guide to Health in Body, Mind, and Intimate Relationships

Mother Nurture
by Rick Hanson, Ph.D., Jan Hanson, M.S., L.Ac., Ricki Pollycove, M.D., M.H.S.

Chapter 1

Refilling Your Cupboard

A baby is an inestimable blessing and a bother.

— Mark Twain

Nothing changes your life like a child, and there's really no way to prepare for it. Suddenly you're working all the time, hitting the red line on stress, and you look around and wonder, where's the support? In our practices, we see mothers every day who feel frayed around the edges, let down by their partners, and worn out-or worse. Some have developed serious physical or marital problems since becoming mothers. Many women feel that it's their fault or that they must be the only one who can't handle the strain. They figure that feeling thoroughly overwhelmed just comes with the territory.

Well, we're here to tell you that you're not to blame and you're not alone. What's more, there are plenty of practical things you can do that will help you feel better and bring more teamwork and closeness into your relationship with your partner.

In this chapter, you'll read about three women who came to us for treatment and exactly what they did to improve their health and well-being. Just as we hope to do for you over the course of this book, we helped each one of these mothers to

1. Lower the demands on her
2. Increase her resources
3. Build up her resilience

That's mother nurture.

And you are entitled to it. With what you give to your children and others each day, you more than earn the right to take good care of yourself. This time with your little one (or two or more) is very special, never to be repeated, and you should be able to enjoy it fully.

Further, taking care of yourself is not selfish at all. It's what you need to do in order to be at your best with your kids and still have some energy left over for your relationship with your partner. Just like in an airplane, you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you can help anyone else.

Again and again, we see a minor miracle when a woman makes some simple changes in such things as what she eats, the way she thinks about stress, or how she talks with her partner. It's not complicated or esoteric. In the chapters that follow, we'll show you easy ways that work together and add up over time to nurture your body, mind, and marriage.

How Your Cupboard Can Become Bare

The first step is to understand exactly how raising a family has affected you personally. That will give a foundation for using the tools provided in the rest of the book.

Growing Demands upon You

As demanding as parenthood has been for your mate, it has likely had even more impact on you. For starters, if you gave birth, you had the extraordinary task of building the most complex organ the body ever grows, using up to 80,000 extra calories to make your baby. If any nutrients were missing in the foods you ate, they were extracted from you and given to your child. When your baby was born, your placenta-which was a huge hormone factory during pregnancy-was dropped into the doctor's bucket, and within days after childbirth, your estrogen and progesterone dropped to a tiny fraction of their previous levels, gyrating the hormones that regulate everything from your mood when you wake up to how well you sleep at night.

If you breast-feed (about half of all mothers do-and we generally recommend it for its benefits to both you and your child), each day you use about 750 to 1000 extra calories: like running seven to ten miles day after day. Breast milk is rich in nutrients such as essential fatty acids, which are essential for your baby, but you need these, too, for a healthy body and positive mood. If you are not getting enough of these nutrients in your regular diet-and few moms with infants seem to have the time-your bodily reserves are drained every time you nurse.

Plus, as one mother put it, Real labor begins after birth. Each day, for twenty-plus years, you do several hundred specific child-rearing or housework tasks, from reading Winnie the Pooh to doing the dishes, and you probably go to bed wishing that somehow you could have done more. The more committed you are to being sensitive and responsive to your child, the more work there is. One mother told Rick: The biggest change was my sense that I had to always be present for and attentive to someone else, that I could never let down. I feel I am on call all the time.

Besides being time-consuming, the work of mothers is uniquely stressful; the comedian Martin Mull once joked, Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. Your body has been on a roller coaster, from the first changes of pregnancy to the impact of childbirth and its new shape after you've become a mother. Breast-feeding rarely proceeds without one troublesome hitch or another, especially in the beginning. You're constantly interrupted and pulled in a dozen different directions, you feel responsible for everything, things keep changing, worries gnaw at your mind, and something upsetting happens several times each day. Any wobble with your children wears on you further. You are probably the one, not your partner, who stumbles down the hall at night to tend to a baby with an ear infection, deals with child care hassles, settles most squabbles between siblings, or worries about how to handle a preschooler's tantrums. As a result, mothers consistently report more stress than fathers, or women not raising children-especially if a child has any special needs, like colic, an illness, a disability, or a challenging temperament. And, of course, the more kids, the more work and stress.

Adding to the demands upon you, there's a good chance that you've got to juggle home and work. Over half of all mothers today will return to work before their baby's first birthday-yet doing so while raising an infant increases their risk for health problems, especially if they're already stretched, such as by being a single parent.

From Mother Nurture by Rick Hansen, Ph.D, Jan Hansen, La.C., and Ricki Pollycove, M.D. Copyright © March 2002, Penguin Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist who works with couples, individual adults, and children. He has written and lectured extensively on parental stress and depletion, ways to nurture mothers and fathers, and how a couple can be both strong teammates and intimate friends while raising a family. A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, Dr. Hanson did management consulting before earning his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute. He has been President of the Board of FamilyWorks, a non-profit agency serving families in Northern California. His personal interests include meditation, rock-climbing, and having fun with his kids.

Jan Hanson, M.S., is an acupuncturist and nutritionist whose private practice focuses on women's health and on temperament problems in children. In addition to developing protocols for preventing and reversing maternal depletion, she has written articles and presented workshops on family health and on holistic approaches to childhood illnesses. While working in the Neurochemistry Research Laboratory at the Veteran's Hospital in Sepulveda, California, she co-authored a study that was published when she was 18 years old. She went on to receive a B.A. from UCLA and an M.S. from the Academy of Chinese Culture and Health Sciences, in addition to taking many courses in clinical nutrition, homeopathy, and laboratory assessment. She and Rick have been married for over twenty years, and they have a teenage son and pre-teen daughter.

Ricki Pollycove, M.D., M.H.S., is the founding director for Education and Program Development at the California Pacific Medical Center Breast Health Center, and a past chief of the Division of Gynecology there. She is a fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, a member of the North American Menopause Society, American Society of Reproductive Medicine, the American Society of Breast Diseases, and past editor in chief of the San Francisco Medical Society Magazine. She appears regularly as a medical expert on television and radio, and is the women's health expert for MedicinePlanet.com. A mother for over eighteen years, she enjoys cooking, baking, and gardening with her daughter, Leah, with whom she also sings and plays viola.