Note: In November of 2019, I wrote an essay as a part of an online developmental psychology course about a time the I went through a developmental change in my life. I chose to talk about my transition into motherhood. As you read the following text though, you will likely be able to replace mother with “father” or “parents” in many instances, especially in the introduction. I don’t mean to minimize the role of the father in the fourth trimester, but I think what I found most surprising about this trimester in my case was how much the baby still needed me, her mother specifically. The following is a significantly modified version of the essay I wrote for the class. I wanted to make it sound more like a blog, add some explanations for the terminology used, and provide further reflections on what “The Fourth Trimester” was like for me.
If you ask the average person on the street, especially one who has no children, how many trimesters there are in pregnancy, many people would likely answer three. Before reaching my third trimester, I would have answered in the same way. It was only in my third trimester that talk of a fourth trimester came up. Karp (2015), in his book The Happiest Baby on the Block, argues that babies really need an additional trimester in the womb to be truly prepared for the world. However, a baby at that point would be too big to deliver through a pelvis that must be at a width to accommodate walking. As such, we end up delivering babies too “early,” and they need their mothers in those first few months as much as they needed her in utero.
Drillien’s studies in the 1950s and 1960s (as cited in Bronfenbrenner, 2001) highlight the importance of maternal response in children’s future behavior. To address these needs, mothers go through significant emotional, physical, and mental changes which Raphael (1973) termed “matrescence” (as cited on Athan, 2019). This fourth trimester or process of transition into motherhood is an important time in any woman’s life; however, it is rarely discussed. This often leads new mothers to doubt that they are “up for the job,” assuming that they should have some maternal instinct that makes new parenthood more “natural” than it feels. This disparity between expectations and reality can affect the physical and mental well-being of many new mothers. As such, I have chosen to discuss this transition in my life utilizing the process-person-context-time (PPCT) model (Bronfenbrenner, 2001). It is my hope that the challenges I faced during this time might offer other new mothers insight into why the transition into motherhood is so difficult and help them realize that their development during this time is likely within the realm of “normal.”
Process-Person-Context-Time
Before I talk about the process, person, context, and time model, I’ll provide a little more explanation. Developmental psychology looks at how people develop or change at different points in their life. One of the major developmental leaps people know about is the transition to adolescence and the transition to adulthood. However, there are many more developmental changes that occur during one’s life. Alaya went through four developmental leaps during the fourth trimester (approximately 4.5 months for her), by the end of which, she was more aware of her surroundings and more human in her behaviors. Unlike the saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, humans maintain the same potential for development throughout their lifetimes. However, the ways in which they can develop change. For instance, in the first year of life, an infant can learn to produce any of the sounds in any language around the world that they are exposed to. At this time, though, they are not as good a learning new words. However, during toddler-hood, they become better at storing new vocabulary than at distinguishing individual sounds.
The process-person-context-time model revolutionized developmental psychology because it argued that how people develop isn’t just a factor of the context, for instance. It’s not simply about whether or not a person is poor or educated or born in the 1950’s. It’s actually a result of several factors. The process focuses on your meaningful relationships and how they change as you develop. The person focuses on how individual differences can lead to different outcomes. The context speaks somewhat for itself, relating generally to the environment and society change is taking place in. Finally, the issue of time is also considered. What it means to be a mother in the 1980’s, for example, is different from what it means to be a mother in the 2010’s.
Process
Beginning with the process, the most significant relationship during my transition to motherhood was my relationship with my daughter, Alaya. This relationship became increasingly complex as days, weeks, and months passed. This increasing complexity is an important factor in the “process” part of a developmental change. Relationships must be dynamic not static in order to inspire a significant change in a person. For instance, at first, Alaya seemed to only have three basic needs. She needed to eat, sleep, and be clean. However, as she became more aware of her surroundings, she began to desire to be entertained and carried. With an increasing number of reasons for her crying, I had to be more “open and sensitive to [her] agenda” (Sprott, 2013) and respond accordingly.
However, this was not the only relationship in transition. My relationship with my husband and his parents were also changing. My husband got a promotion at the same time he became a father. It’s important to note that they didn’t find a replacement for his position until 8 months after he started his new role, so he had to wear two hats until they found someone to replace him. The stress of so many responsibilities made him insecure in his position at work and jealous of the relationship I was building with my daughter. He stated that he sometimes felt left out, and we had to work through the inequalities in our relationship to our daughter that were a result of nature. For instance, I had a nine month head start on bonding with her. My body also continued to provide her sustenance as I spent hours everyday breastfeeding her.
It’s important to note here that the inequality in our relationship to our daughter went both ways. Ben may have felt left out, but I felt it was unfair that nature required so much of the mother. I had carried my daughter for nine months, and now I was still responsible for her sustenance and sense of security. There were so many times when she would only stop crying when I was holding her or breastfeeding her. It also felt that the structure of society put an uneven burden on the mother when Ben was only given two weeks paternity leave. This was not nearly enough help and support for our transition into parenthood. I get that people do it all the time because it is what is required of us, but I think our children would greatly benefit from having both mother and father home for at least the first six weeks of a child’s life, if for no other reason than it takes many mothers that long to really recover from labor and delivery. In fact, I would recommend both parents be home for as long as 4.5 months, or approximately the end of the fourth leap or fourth trimester. So a longer leave would be granted to those whose babies were born prematurely. This is when I had to go back to work, and the transition was so much easier because Alaya was developmentally ready to be left in the care of loving others, like her grandparents.
Besides my daughter and husband, I had a new relationship with my in-laws. Since my husband and his parents are Chinese, the tradition is for them to move in with their son and help take care of their grandchild. After giving birth, I was suddenly living with four other people when it was just my husband and I before. This changed the nature of my relationship with my in-laws in ways that I will discuss further below.
Person
In terms of person, I will first discuss the resources I had available to me. Being a lecturer at a university, I have practice employing the experimental method to learn about a new topic, or in this case, about my baby. I began asking questions like, how long will she stay in the swing without crying on the first setting? What about the second? What if I use the swing and the mobile together? Over time, I slowly learned the difference between her yelling out loud just to test her voice and her yelling to be picked up. As I got more accurate in my responses, she cried less and “spoke” more. Sometimes, even just seeing my approach would calm her.
I am also fairly good at utilizing logic to express myself, and I was able to utilize this skill in helping my husband see that he was holding himself to higher standards than anyone could attain. By asking him to present evidence that he was not competently performing his job or being a father, he began to see that he was suffering from “imposter syndrome” (Hendriksen, 2015), and it helped him as he struggled with paternal postpartum depression. My relationship with my in-laws was also mediated by my use of logic to explain my parenting practices. Fortunately, they are willing to listen to logic and research-based evidence; they also saw themselves that Alaya was developing well both physically and mentally. However, my “force” or “the way [I] actively engage and initiate interactions” (Sprott, 2013) did make the transition to living together harder. I am, for example, an introvert. Suddenly living with so many people was exhausting for me, and I felt I could not recharge in my own home. Also, I wanted to avoid conflict with them, which often lead me to talking so far around my requests that sometimes they were not heard or understood.
In fact, I found it easier in the end to not live with my in-laws. While they would listen to my logic, read the research I showed them, and nod their head in agreement with what I was saying, the next day they would simply do what they thought was right. Being a new mom was hard enough, I didn’t have the mental capacity to also teach my in-laws how to help me and how to take care of their granddaughter. The truth was that they didn’t have much experience taking care of an infant, and any experience to speak of was from 35 years prior. However, they did love Alaya, and I was able to put aside our differences on most things, as long as they changed her diaper regularly, fed her no more than I had allotted for the day, and didn’t cause her to overheat from too many clothes or blankets during sleep. Most importantly, they went “home” (to an apartment I rented for them) when I got home, allowing me time to parent Alaya in the way I wanted to.
Context
The context for my transition to motherhood was also challenging, as I became a mother outside of my home country. The microsystem, which refers to the environment I encountered on a day-to-day basis, I was living in at the time consisted of my daughter, my husband, and his parents in our 4-bedroom apartment. Beyond the microsystem are the systems that impact my life, even though I don’t directly encounter them. This would include workplaces and schools. As I mentioned above, Ben went back to work after two weeks, and this affected our lives as it impacted how much time and energy he had available for his family. My parents-in-law’s home in a nearby city also impacted our lives as their neighbors shared many opinions about parenting with them, which they shared with us. It sometimes felt as though I was living with even more than 5 people, as I was hearing so many opinions about what I should and should not do as a new mom. At the macrosystem level, the government’s maternity and paternity leave policy also impacted our family life. I wanted my daughter to be as close to her father as she was to me, but that was not possible given that I had carried her for 9-months, and I was now able to spend another 4-months with her full-time. Finally, the difference between US culture and Chinese culture in parenting and living with one’s in-laws also lead to arguments that were based on concepts of face and misunderstanding.
The context was very important for becoming a new mother because I came to realize that in China, no one expects a new mom to take care of her own child. When I was considering other care options for Alaya beyond Ben’s parents, I found a nanny to see if that option would be better. It wasn’t. I think this was partially the particular person, but I also think it was about the culture. When I was looking for an apartment to rent for Ben’s parents, my agent and the landlord of one apartment complimented me on my ability to take care of my daughter. You see, I had taken Alaya with me in the carrier to look at the apartments. This simple act of taking my young daughter with me to run an errand was viewed as a “miraculous feat.” Both agent and landlord stated that they had relied entirely on their respective mothers-in-law to take care of their infants. I was amazed. Ben’s parents and this nanny (which I politely fired only 1.5 days into our 3-day trial period) expected to take care of Alaya for me. I was simply supposed to sit back, rest, work, or do anything else. That I wanted to hold, feed, and care for my child was viewed as politeness or a lack of trust in their ability to care for my daughter. “It’s nice of you to offer to hold your baby, Maxi, but we’ve got it. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her.” I kept being reassured that it was okay to give the baby to them. Even when she was screaming at the top of her lungs, my father-in-law would say “She’s fine. She’s fine. Eat your dinner.” How was I supposed to eat comfortably when my child was clearly in distress and wanted me to comfort her?
Time
The time is also relevant to the context as I became a mother to my first child and my in-law’s first grandchild. China’s previous one-child policy—which has now become a two-child policy—meant a generation of only children followed by a generation of one grandchild. In a society as family-oriented as China, it is easy for that grandchild to become the “treasure” of the family. Furthermore, with only one grandchild, it is entirely possible for the grandparents to take over as primary care givers. There is a joke that in the US, the elderly raise pets, and in China, they raise their grandchild. Coming from the US where I expect becoming a parent to be a difficult transition with many challenges of time management and diaper explosions, I was overwhelmed by the help my in-laws were offering. They came to our home expecting that it was now time to give up their lives of travel and leisure and take on the duties of cooking, cleaning, and raising a child. This clashed with my expectation of what it meant to be a new mother, further complicating my transition into motherhood. How did I explain to my in-laws that being loving, doting grandparents was good enough? I didn’t want them to be our live-in cook, housekeeper, and nanny.
Overall, I am still in this stage of transition and development as my daughter approaches her tenth month of life. As she continues to grow, our relationship will only continue to complexify and change. My relationship to my husband will also continue to change and expand as we find ways to help him feel like he’s not an outsider to the relationship Alaya and I have. For instance, now that she’s eating solids, Ben’s heavily involved in preparing and feeding her food. He also reads to her every night before she goes to sleep.
Finally, I am not sure when I’ll go back to China, but I will need to apply more force, despite my introversion, to set boundaries with my in-laws. It’s still up in the air whether or not we’ll live with them upon our return or again rent them another apartment. I have a feeling that they will want to live with us even more this time because they’ve missed so much time with Alaya. Also, they know about Ben’s depression, and I have another feeling that they think they can fix it by taking over the housework, food prep, and childcare. It is hard to tell people to stop “helping” you without seeming ungrateful or causing them to lose face. It’s hard to explain to them why doing everything for their children can’t fix what’s wrong. How do I express that Ben’s depression isn’t because his parents need to do more for him? (In fact, I think they may have done too much.) After 9 months of being parents, it’s clear that Ben needs to build up his grit and resilience, and I need to learn how to stand my ground. Now that we’re parents, it’s imperative that we learn these skills quickly.
References
Athan, A. (2019). Matrescence. Matrescence. Retrieved from https://www.matrescence.com/
Bronfenbrenner, U. (2001). Growing chaos in the lives of children, youth, and families: How can we turn it around? In J.C. Westman (Ed.), Parenthood in America (pp. 197 – 210). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Hendriksen, E. (2015, May 27). What is Imposter Syndome? Scientific American. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-impostor-syndrome/
Karp, Harvey. (2015). The happiest baby on the block: The new way to calm crying and help your newborn baby sleep longer. Bantam Books: New York.
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