Erik Erikson’s 7-Stage theory of psychosocial development is one of psychology’s best known models of personality development. Stage 6, Intimacy vs. Isolation, involves a person’s ability to form close, affectionate, committed relationships and is predicated on success in Stage 5, which is Identity vs. Confusion.
Having written this much, I am reminded of Daniel Day Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance in My Left Foot, the true story of Christy Brown, an Irish writer and artist with cerebral palsy who had use of only his left foot to produce his art. One of the most memorable exchanges in the script occurred when Brown (played by Lewis) asked his companion, Mary Carr, to light his cigarette:
Christy Brown: I need a light.
Mary Carr: Don’t go thinking I’m your mother now, just ‘cause I’m takin’ care of ya.
Christy Brown: I don’t need a [expletive] psychology lesson. Just get me a [expletive] light.
I don’t want to provide a psychology lesson, either. But I do want to shine some light on the issue of the intimacy involved in mothering children. And since the relationship between mother and child is intimate, it effects the identities of both mother and child.
Erickson’s Stage 6 refers to the intimacy sought between consenting adults. Motherhood involves neither consent (a child has no say in its birth) nor two adults. Mother/child intimacy grows, like connective tissue, between an unwitting, newly-created person and a woman much older than he or she. But I am here to argue that it can be among the most intimate relationship(s) a woman can form. And it is, like I’ve said before, a relationship that serves as a bullet-proof vest around her heart armoring her from a sense of isolation.
In writing, the rule is to fully involve all five senses in order to render or recreate experience as fully as possible. Motherhood also involves all five senses, and even serves to heighten some of them. The more a relationship engages all five of our senses, the more deeply we experience that relationship.
I know that my sense of smell, for example, has been heightened to rival that of a Silvertip Grizzly (another mother bear) due to the number of years my nose provided me essential information about my children; everything from the condition of their diapers to whether or not they had a sinus infection. Gross, maybe, but intimate for sure.
On the most primitive level, I am connected with my children by the smell and feel of their bodies, hair and breath. When you are in charge of people down to the level of their bodily emissions, you develop a pretty strong connection with them, sensually.
Beyond this corporeal connection, moms are also intimately involved in their children’s lives, first ensuring their physical survival but over the years expanding to incorporate their emotional, intellectual, social and even spiritual growth and health.
As I mentioned, Stage 6 Intimacy vs. Isolation presumes that an individual has successfully resolved the conflicts presented in Step 5, Identity vs. Confusion. Yet Stage 6 supposedly occurs between the ages of 19-40. How many people have solidified their identities by the time they’re in their 20’s? And what a coincidence that these are the years most women become mothers. We become intimate with our partners, which produces our children, and now we’re intimate with the whole gang.
So another aspect of my theory is that women are intimately involved with their children at the same time they are solidifying their own identities. And they are working with their children to help them form their identities. Being responsible for this important work can make a woman realize how able and necessary she is.
As mothers, sometimes it feels like we’re living multiple lives at once. We’re living our own lives, but our intimate involvement in our children’s lives blur the boundaries between us and them, and this way of living while holding other lives so close stretches us.
I have felt stretched to both the depths and the heights of myself through mothering. I have been taken to the bottom edges of my strength, knowledge and patience, for instance, but I have also been exalted realizing the selfless, generous acts I’ve been capable of through mothering.
Once Sophie leaves, I’m afraid I’ll feel like a person who’s lost 300 pounds, and whose psycho-emotional skin that once contained all these lives now hangs on them like loose drapery. What will I do with all this stretched-out management ability and compassion?
This post feels like a mess; not for lack of conviction about the points I’m trying to make today, but because I am actually in pursuit of a new theory about what makes leaving this active mothering stage feel so damn frightening, threatening and severing? Erickson’s theory took him decades to refine. You can’t expect me to develop mine in one morning. Psychoanalysis wasn’t built in a day, either.
But this is what is on my mind today. The fear that once my final (inti)mate flies the coop, that daily intimacy will be gone and a sense of isolation will rush in to fill her vacated spot. As often as well-meaning folks try to assure me that she will always be in my life–I’m not worried about her leaving my life–she will no longer live in my house. And truth be told, I don’t want her to live here forever. I will be thrilled when she takes her developmentally-appropriate flight, but I will feel her absence with my five senses.
As with all fears, these are not rational grapplings. They are much more slippery, hard to get-a-hold of, emotional opponents I’m wrestling with. And today I’m not in the mood to be tidy about it.
As far as I’m going to get today is to elaborate on Erickson’s model and claim that, in general, mothers form intimate relationships not only with their partners, but with their children. They may feel their children’s leaving closer to the bone than their partners do, especially if they’ve been the primary caregivers for the kids.
The enormity of the job of caring for kids, in addition to all the other responsibilities moms have, can reflect a mother’s skill and capacity back to her in a way that makes her feel powerful, alive, complete (and also exhausted, guilty, depleted, self-doubting–but we’ll save the dark side for another post!) and even magical. I will miss the daily intimacy and the reflection of my fullest self that my kids have provided me during these past, and best (so far) almost 25 years of my life.
If I’ve made a mess here–if I’ve been inconsiderately unsettling and nonsensical– please forgive me. I would stay and clean up, but I have a proposal to write for a class I would like to teach in the youth program at The Loft this summer. This theorizing I’ve started will have to be continued. Breaking ground, even inside my head, is a dirty job.
expecting to fly 