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Depleted Mothers

Growing Demands upon You
As demanding as parenthood has been for your mate, it has likely had even more impact on you. For starters, if you gave birth, you had the extraordinary task of building the most complex organ the body ever grows, using up to 80,000 extra calories to make your baby. If any nutrients were missing in the food you ate, they were extracted from you and given to your child. When your baby was born, your placenta – which was a huge hormone factory during pregnancy – was dropped into the doctors bucket, and within days after childbirth, your estrogen and progesterone dropped to a tiny fraction of their previous levels, gyrating the hormones that regulate everything from your mood when you wake up to how well you sleep at night.

If you breast-feed (about half of all mothers do – and we generally recommend it for its benefit to both your and your child), each day you use about 750 to 1000 extra calories: like running seven to ten miles day after day. Breast milk is rich in nutrients such as essential fatty acids, which are essential for your baby, but you need these, too, for a healthy body and positive mood. If you are not getting enough of these nutrients in your regular diet – and few moms with infants seem to have the time - your bodily reserves are drained every time you nurse.

Plus, as one mother put it. Real labor begins after birth. Each day, for twenty-plus years, you do several hundred specific child-rearing or housework tasks, from reading Winnie the Pooh to doing the dishes, and you probably go to bed wishing that somehow you could have done more. The more committed you are to being sensitive and responsive to your child, the more work there is. One mother told Rick: The biggest change was my sense that I had to always be present for and attentive to someone else, that I could never let down. I feel I am on call all the time.

Besides being time-consuming, the work of mothers is uniquely stressful; the comedian Martin Mull once joked. Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. Your body has been on a roller coaster, from the first changes of pregnancy to the impact of childbirth and its new shape after you've become a mother. Breast-feeding rarely proceeds without one troublesome hitch or another, especially in the beginning. You're constantly interrupted and pulled in a dozen different directions, you feel responsible for everything, things keep changing, worries gnaw at your mind, and something upsetting happens several times each day. Any wobble with your children wears on you further. You are probably the one, not your partner, who stumbles down the hall at night to tend to a baby with an ear infection, deals with child care hassles, settles most squabbles between siblings, or worries about how to handle a preschooler's tantrums. As a result, mothers consistently report more stress than fathers, or women not raising children – especially if a child has any special needs, like colic, an illness, a disability, or a challenging temperament. And, of course, the more kids, the more work and stress.

Adding to the demands upon you, there's a good chance that you've got to juggle home and work. Over half of all mothers today will return to work before their baby's first birthday – yet doing so while raising an infant increases their risk for health problems, especially if they're already stretched, such as by being a single parent.

Thin Soup of Resources
If the demands on a person grow, her resources should grow as well. We're sure that one sort of resource has increased since you had children: the emotional fulfillment of being a mother. But otherwise, have your resources grown since your baby was born? Probably not. We're not talking about money here, but things like a good night's sleep and healthful foods and strong support from your partner. For instance, the typical mother of a young child gets about six and one-half hours of sleep a day rather than the eight or more hours most adults need – losing over five hundred hours of sleep per year – plus she rarely gets a chance to sleep as deeply as she needs to. This diminishes the neurotransmitters her brain needs to regulate her mood and other physiological functions.

You're probably not eating all that well, either; according to studies, less than half of the mothers of young children get three solid meals each day. It's hard to find time to exercise with little ones around. And whether you're going off to the workplace or staying home, when you've got a young family, pleasures fall away, old friends drop out of your life, and you never seem to have any real time for yourself. Even if you're ill, you usually get little chance to rest. One mother told Jan this story: I was reading a nursery rhyme to Julie, the one about Mother Hubbard, and I had to sigh because that's how I was starting to feel: my "cupboard" was constantly being emptied and not enough was getting put back on the shelves.

Has your partner jumped in to fill this vacuum? Maybe. Some dads are great: committed to parenthood and skillful with the kids, they do their fair share around the house and are sympathetic and supportive. But let's face it: many are not. Numerous studies have shown that the average mom works about twenty more hours per week, altogether, than does her partner, regardless of whether she's drawing a paycheck – and a mother's stress jumps and her mood drops when teamwork with her partner breaks down. You probably also handle more of the high-stress tasks, like dressing a resistant two-year-old, and carry more of the "executive responsibility" for the family by being the one who worries, plans, and problem solves. And if you're raising your children essentially alone, as does one in five mothers, you're getting little to no help from a partner at all.

Even if your partner is a strong teammate, much research has shown that the arrival of children commonly leads to a dramatic decrease in positive interactions and marital satisfaction – especially for mothers. There is so little time or energy for conversation, fun, or affection that there's a good chance your relationship no longer recharges your batteries or offers a safe haven. As one mother commented to Rick: My husband and I work together well in terms of taking care of the kids and the house. But I don't know where he and I are when were we're without them. I feel lonely inside my own marriage. It's no wonder that couples with children report less satisfaction with their relationship than couples without kids.

Children are meant to be raised within a strong community, but compared to the times in which most of us grew up, relatives live farther away, neighbors are less neighborly, there are fewer kids nearby, and the average adult is affiliated with just one community group as compared to five in our parents' day. Compounding the problem, fathers have not entered the world of family to the extent that mothers have gone into the world of work, leaving a kind of vacuum, so there is less of the glue that once held neighborhoods together. As a result of all these factors, you're likely to have much less of the social support that could have provided practical help, lowered your stress, and buttressed your health.

In short, things have really changed, both in your own life once you became a parent and in the culture since you were a child yourself, and chances are you simply aren't getting the full support you need. Vulnerable Spots in Your Armor of Resilience
In a perfect world, you could cope with all the demands upon you or with scarce resources by being Supermom. Yet that's not real. Each of us has some vulnerabilities that lower our resilience, the way a wound on a finger creates an opening for bacteria. Like a small cut that makes little difference until you do the dishes, a vulnerability may not matter much before children arrive. But then it begins to exacerbate the effects of the demands upon you; for instance, an immune system weakened by chronic stress is less able to defend you against the germs brought home from preschool. And any vulnerabilities lower your ability to handle shortages in the resources you receive; for instance, if you are even a little anemic when you enter motherhood – as ninety percent of women are – your nutritional reserves will be even further eroded by the typical low-iron diet of a mother.

Please see if any of these vulnerabilities, common among mothers, apply to you:

• Having children at an older age. In the last two decades, the birthrate of women over thirty has increased by about one-third, and the rate of first births for women over thirty-five has nearly doubled. Older mothers are less able to weather a pregnancy, are more prone to fatigue and illness once children arrive, and have less time to restore a hormonal equilibrium before menopause.

• Nutritional deficiencies. About nine mothers in ten have not consumed the U.S. government recommended amounts of minerals and vitamins before conceiving their first child. Nutritional deficiencies are cumulative, and since about 40 percent of all pregnancies are unplanned, there's often little time to remedy them before the demands of bearing and raising a child gather a full head of steam. And even if you start taking supplements, it often takes months or years to restore healthy levels of nutrients in your body.

• Genetic predisposition. Your relatives may have had illnesses of the endocrine system, obstetric complications, or other conditions that raise your risk for similar problems.

• Prior health problems. Women are more likely than men to enter parenthood with preexisting gastrointestinal, hormonal, or auto-immune conditions.

• Postpartum depression (PPD). At least one mother in ten will have an episode of PPD, which can increase her risk for hormonal or mood-related problems a year or two later. If you did suffer from postpartum depression after your first baby, your chance triples of having PPD again with another child.

• General history of depressed mood. Some women have a tendency toward depression, and this can be intensified by the hormonal fluctuations of motherhood.

• Temperament. Raising kids is likely to be more stressful if a mother has a high need for control or orderliness, or it she tends to be anxious or irritable.