system is on fire. The emotional brain will short-circuit the rational brain. Wait to talk till you’re both calm and can look each other in the eye while dialoguing. (Talking in the car or in your darkened bedroom is not as good as face to face.) Frame your speech with “I feel” instead of “You did.” Mirror what’s being said so your partner feels heard. Empathize with your partner so he or she feels validated. “You make sense, and I’d feel that way if it were me.” This technique works with children and colleagues, too. Mirror, validate, and empathize.
Even though we may be physiologically built for multiple partners, we’re actually happiest when we commit to one. For most of us, monogamy is hard, but staying with one partner for decades has innumerable benefits. Getting to truly know and accept someone, and being known and accepted, allows for tremendous growth, like budding flowers in the sunshine. Long-term love is the best environment for us to flourish and blossom. Cultivating and maintaining rich emotional relationships with family and friends is what life is all about, and it will feed your soul, or at least make you happier. The goal: making your spouse, who is the bedrock of your family, your friend.
Motherhood affects our bodies and brains in profound ways that stay with us for a lifetime. Like the massive neuronal reorganization that occurs when falling in love, in the early stages of pregnancy there are countless changes in the brain. Well, one number did come up in my research: neurons multiply at a rate of 250,000 per minute, as motherhood improves learning and memory. It’s true some women feel themselves getting stupid during pregnancy; “baby brain suck” can sap your concentration and ability to multitask. Simply put, your brain is being reorganized. The increased estrogen levels put neuroplasticity into overdrive in the brain’s memory center, the hippocampus, as new behaviors are prepared for, such as feeding, protecting, and caring for offspring. Our verbal and emotional memories need to be sharp to continue to catalog potentially threatening behaviors in our mates, like abandonment or violence, but spatial learning is particularly affected, as it’s important to recall where food was located when foraging. (Again, this is likely why mothers can locate missing things better than anyone else in the house; it’s left over from our days on the savanna.) Parental-induced neuroplasticity can last for years, possibly providing protection from age-related brain changes including memory deficits seen in dementia.
The hormone responsible for this neuronal reorganization is oxytocin. Monogamy, commitment, and child care are all driven by neuroplastic changes partially facilitated by oxytocin, the hormone that makes us cleave to our partners and devote ourselves to our children. During conception, oxytocin stimulates the uterine activity that helps guide sperm to egg. During childbirth, oxytocin drives uterine contractions to expel the fetus. During nursing, oxytocin helps to bring the milk into the nipple, called the letdown reflex. Oxytocin gets credit for solidifying the mother-infant bond, making us feel warm, fuzzy, and connected. But oxytocin isn’t about bonding indiscriminately. It helps us distinguish who’s in our tribe and who’s not. In some experiments, with extra oxy on board, people are even more harsh against those they feel aren’t in their group. Motherhood brings a whole new set of behaviors from those seen in other life phases. In the research setting, aggression is seen more commonly in female mammals that are lactating and protecting their young. So it may be that part of that mama grizzly protective aggression comes from the “hormone of love.”
The hormone of mother love could also be called the amnesic hormone, because it can erase learned behavior and replace it with new patterns. Sometimes existing attachments are supplanted by new ones. This may be part of the basis for falling in love with your baby at the expense of maintaining your attachment to your mate. Couples who raise children together are bonded as family, but they also face new obstacles.
From conception and pregnancy to birth and nursing and beyond, motherhood is a time of tremendous change. It is a magical experience for many, but it’s also draining, difficult, and demanding. Understanding some of the science behind different phases of life can help you to navigate the roller coaster, and maybe even enjoy the ride a bit more.
The Ticking Clock
Women are creators. We make order out of chaos, whether we’re cooking, folding laundry, or organizing our households. As creators, we make babies, and we produce milk. Not all of us choose to perform all of these tasks, but most of us do. Though we’re starting later (age thirty today, from age twenty-three in the 1950s) and having fewer kids (two instead of three), most of us (around 80 percent) are still opting into the mommy track.
The biological clock is no joke. In my twenties, when I would see the women of the Upper East Side with their strollers and baby joggers, I would practically sneer and say to myself, Not gonna do it (à la George Bush the first). But somewhere around age thirty-one or so, I’d notice a sharp heartache happening in my pelvis when I’d see a baby, and I found myself aching for one of my own. It was as if my body were using chemical warfare to trick me into reproducing. For many of us, this sensation that our ovaries are hijacking our brains is overwhelming. Estrogen and testosterone levels conspire midcycle to make us act like cats in heat, and it becomes harder with every passing month to resist the tug to breed.
In major metropolitan cities, the age for starting a family is higher than elsewhere. I have plenty of patients in their late thirties and even early forties who are still hoping to start a family. Many of us are getting our careers in order before we choose motherhood, something that was nearly always reversed just a few generations ago. The quality of eggs produced by the ovaries drops off substantially when you get to the early forties. Because of waiting longer to get started, many of my patients go from being on oral contraceptives for a dozen years or more to taking fertility drugs to help them get pregnant, barely stopping in between these two poles.
Fertility drugs can be hard on moods. Clomifene, a medicine used to encourage the ovary to pop out a few extra eggs, can trigger massive PMS-type symptoms, as can many other hormones and follicle stimulators being used today to help women conceive. Hot flashes, emotional lability, irritability, and depression are all possible. Rare cases of psychosis or mania have also been reported.
Nesting, the particular cleaning frenzy that occurs during late pregnancy, is a very real phenomenon. What’s less clear is whether there is some biological process that happens even before pregnancy to help us get our house in order. My sister got herself into fantastic shape before she got pregnant. She quit smoking cigarettes (no easy feat), stopped drinking, and lost weight, getting her body primed as a vessel for a fetus. I’ve seen it happen in my patients repeatedly. They want to go off their meds prior to conceiving and they do. Gynecologists will sometimes recommend that their patients stop their SSRIs, as serotonin increases prolactin levels, which can impair fertility. I also
