Slaves to Love | The Point Magazine

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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Seeking reassurance during that first year of parenting two, I turned to the work of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the “good-enough mother,” the caregiver who, through sometimes failing and frustrating their child, ultimately facilitates the development of the child’s ability to co

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