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Psychotherapist and author Margo Lowy discusses her article, “Maternal ambivalence: the side of motherhood no one talks about.” She explores the often unspoken emotional complexities of motherhood, where love and frustration coexist. Margo delves into the concept of maternal ambivalence, a term that acknowledges the full spectrum of emotions mothers experience, including joy, guilt, resentment, and even fleeting moments of hatred. She explains how naming and accepting these emotions can foster resilience and deepen maternal wisdom. Tune in to learn why normalizing these feelings is essential and how embracing maternal ambivalence can lead to greater self-awareness and fulfillment in parenting.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today, we welcome Margo Lowy. She’s a psychotherapist, and she’s the author of the book, “Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood.” There’s an excerpt from that book on KevinMD. Margo, welcome to the show.

Margo Lowy: I’m so happy to be here and good to meet you, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: All right, so briefly tell us a little bit about yourself, and then go into the excerpt about KevinMD for those who didn’t get a chance to read it.

Margo Lowy: OK, a little bit about myself. I’ve been studying this part of mothering for about the last 15 years—maternal ambivalence. Before that, I did—I’ve done some research on infertility. And somehow, it got into this; it got into the area of mothering. And how it happened was my youngest child was doing her final exams at school, and I thought, I’ll stay, I’ll be around, and I wanted to do a PhD. So I decided to do that, and that’s when I started exploring. I wanted to explore something unusual about mothering that had probably been silenced. I’m really intrigued by taboo areas. So I ended up looking through a lot of work on mothering because the actual area of mothering is quite saturated. I wanted to find something different. And I found a book by a psychoanalyst called Dr. Rosika Parker, and she was talking about maternal ambivalence. Interestingly, her first book was called “Mother love, mother hate,” and then it was called “Torn in two,” and that says a lot about the taboo area of my work.

Kevin Pho: All right, so let’s just start by getting everyone up to speed. Tell us about what maternal ambivalence is, and then go into the excerpt for those who didn’t get a chance to read it.

Margo Lowy: Maternal ambivalence is the mother’s ability to hold together all her different feelings. They’re often conflicting feelings like the love and the resentment, the hope and the hopelessness, the exasperation and the happiness, and the bitterness and the love, which goes back to my book. What mothers tend to do is they tend to disregard these dark, difficult parts of mothering because they’re just too painful. So we kind of gloss over them or we ignore them. My work is about bringing these feelings out into the open, looking at them—because we all experience them—looking at them, thinking about them, and actually normalizing them for us as mothers. I want to create a conversation around this.

The other part of my work is to show that these dark feelings actually transform us. I want to give you a little story that all mothers have probably experienced in some way: You’re in the mall, and you’re with your two children, and suddenly one of them has disappeared. You’re filled with terror. You don’t know what to do first. You’re paralyzed. Then you start thinking, oh, that little so-and-so, they went off without telling me, and how is my life going to change if my child doesn’t come back? That’s what happens: you’re totally panicked. Suddenly, you see your child skipping along with a friend. And that’s the moment when you melt—you have pity, compassion, relief—but equally, you had all those dark feelings. So maternal ambivalence comes in when you melt and your love is renewed and restored. That’s really what maternal ambivalence is: a force, an energy that transforms and changes you and renews your love.

Kevin Pho: Why is maternal ambivalence such a taboo topic?

Margo Lowy: It is taboo because we don’t want to talk about our dark, difficult, disturbing feelings. We’d rather leave them alone. That’s really why it’s taboo. It’s also connected with these illusions about mothering—the ideals that the mother is traditionally selfless, only concerned with her child, putting the child first all the time—and that is not reality. What I’m doing is disrupting that ideal mothering, that concept that we as mothers also collude with: that we are perfect. We’re not perfect, and we can’t ever be perfect. Even if we were, it wouldn’t be human, and our children pick up on our feelings. So that’s really why it’s taboo and why it’s silenced: because society has expectations about mothers, and we don’t reach them, and we collude with that.

Kevin Pho: I’m sure a lot of mothers, when they process these conflicting feelings, aren’t saying, “I have maternal ambivalence.” So tell me, as a psychotherapist, how do they present? What are some of the things they say that suggest maternal ambivalence?

Margo Lowy: I’m really glad you said that, because part of my work here is to actually name it as maternal ambivalence. There’s a whole part of the maternal conversation that’s left out because we don’t understand what ambivalence is and what maternal ambivalence is. I’ll just go back a second to what ambivalence is, because you’ve probably heard the saying—it’s holding two opposing ideas or being able to hold two opposing thoughts together at the same time. That’s what it is, and to be able to do that is not an easy experience, because we have to take away the judgment about the dark feelings and be able to really think about them and give value to these dark feelings. That’s a very difficult thing to do.

Mothers often don’t think about it. I think when they have difficult feelings, they can’t see any value in them. That’s what I’m trying to say—to encourage mothers to be able to sit with these feelings and find some value in them and to see that they can renew us. It’s very paradoxical.

Kevin Pho: So tell us the process of unpacking some of these feelings and taking away some of the taboo, and you said earlier on, normalizing some of these feelings. Tell me the process of going about that.

Margo Lowy: The process of unpacking them is a big topic, but I’ll try to reduce it for you. The way I’ve unpacked it myself is by looking at my own experiences, my own past experiences, and rethinking my mothering. I’ve done this over a long period of time. Like many mothers, I was never really told the truth about what mothering holds. Mothering is really a messy, interrupted experience, and in mothering, you need to flow; you can’t be rigid. If you have too many expectations, you’re rigid. Mothering is also an experience of making mistakes and repairing them—making them and repairing them.

Then, we all have a chain of mothering behind us. Mothering is passed through the generations, and generally we mother the way that we were mothered. Another part of this is to look at the way we were mothered and think about the parts we like and the parts we don’t like, to admit that to ourselves, and also to have a conversation about it. That’s really quite difficult. It also involves going through what triggered you when you were being mothered and what triggers you about your child. It’s a difficult process, but these experiences will help us.

What I’m really talking about is getting mothers to have a more human and personal way of mothering, not just to adapt to what society—including social media—says, but to be critical of whatever’s around us and to think about it. I know, especially when someone is a new mother, it’s really difficult to do this. It’s also about believing, as a mother, that you actually know what’s best for your child. I believe that all mothers, inside, know what’s best for them. We have to think of the outside noise as not really knowing. Sometimes it’s really difficult, and I think that’s where the partner, a close friend, or a mother—whoever it is—comes in to help you unpack this, someone who can give you the belief, or help you believe in yourself, to have a conversation. This is really difficult, especially as a first-time mother.

I have three children, born in three different decades of my mothering with the same partner—one in my mid-twenties, one in my thirties, and one in my forties. I can see now what I learned, and what I really learned is how to embrace these difficult, dark moments. In my first experience, I was so young, I pushed them away. I wouldn’t even think about having any dark, difficult feelings about either my mothering or my child. With my second experience, it was after a sustained period of secondary infertility, so that made it more complicated and I still wouldn’t entertain it. When I had my third child, she just made me entertain it—there was no turning back. She was so open and in my face, and she challenged me. Even though it was difficult, she was right to do that because it helped me be more fluid in my mothering. It helped me enjoy my mothering. It helped me laugh a lot more. It helped me slow down in my mothering.

I think about the experience, for example, of bath time. Sometimes it’s such a drag—you’re tired, you’ve done a lot, you’re working or at home—but when you think about the notion of giving a bath, it can be so much fun. There can be bubbles, there can be toys, there’s water, there’s flow. It’s a great opportunity for the mother to slow down and to enjoy this time. That’s what I’m saying. These moments can renew us, but it is a matter of being able to flow with it and not to have so many expectations of yourself. These days, of course, there are so many time constraints: you have to be here at this time, you’re on a schedule. What I’m saying is, if a mother can slow down and think that it doesn’t really matter if dinnertime is ten minutes later or bath time is five minutes longer, it’s actually a gift.

Kevin Pho: You mentioned earlier about the role of the partner. What are some of the things they can do to better support the mother?

Margo Lowy: That’s an important part of my work. What the partner can do—whether it’s the partner, a mother, a friend, whoever—is try to understand where the mother is at that time and have a truthful conversation about it, as well as be present. Really, one of the most important things is not to undermine her experience and to understand what her life is like. You’ll often hear someone saying, “What have you done today? You’ve been home all day,” and that’s not a good approach. A better approach is to realize that mothering is a struggle: it’s sometimes tedious and often thankless, and yet it is such an important role. It would be beneficial for the partner to come in from that approach—to try and understand that what the mother is doing is so important—and then to offer whatever help they can. These days, parenting is really shared, and the father is expected to do more, but even in that, there can be tension. It’s really important for the father to understand and not necessarily to try to replicate a home day with the child—because you still don’t understand the long-term nature of it—but to really be open to the mother, to be present, and you know what else? To listen and to hear what the mother is saying, and to allow the mother to have her own voice. This is really what I’m talking about: it reflects the whole maternal conversation, allowing or helping the mother to have her voice.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Margo Lowy. She’s a psychotherapist, and she’s the author of the book, “Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood.” Margo, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Margo Lowy: OK, the take-home messages—first of all, I want to go back to the title of my book, “Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments & Bitter Truths of Motherhood,” because that really says so much about my work. My take-home message is that you can buy my book and think about this title, because it says it all. There are loving moments and bitter truths. We have to engage in these, try to understand them, and not neglect the bitter truths. We need to flow with our mothering, forgive ourselves, have compassion. This is a really important part of my work because we are so hard on ourselves. Self-compassion—if we give ourselves compassion, we’re more likely to give our child compassion.

If I want to end on anything, it’s that the mother and child relationship is the child’s first playground, and they are the first couple in love. That’s what we have to understand.

Kevin Pho: Margo, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Margo Lowy: Thank you, Kevin.