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For some mothers, delegating part of the care and education of their child amounts to abandoning it. These women who seem to be in the maternal power to the point sometimes of not letting the father take his place suffer from this difficulty of not being able to let go. Their relationship with their own mother as well as the guilt inherent in motherhood are possible explanations.
Difficulties in delegating … or in separating
I remember the summer when I entrusted my sons to my mother-in-law who lives in Marseille. I cried all the way to Avignon! Or Marseille-Avignon equals 100km… the equivalent of a hundred handkerchiefs! “To recount the very first separations with her sons (5 and 6 years old today), Anne, 34, chose humor. Laure, she still does not succeed. And when this 32-year-old mother tells how, five years ago, she tried to put her little Jérémie – 2 and a half months at the time – in a nursery, we feel that the subject is still sensitive. “He couldn’t go an hour without me, he wasn’t ready,” she says. Because in fact, even if I left him since his birth to my husband or my sister, he never fell asleep without my presence. »A baby addicted to his mother or rather the other way around? What does it matter for Laure, who then decides to withdraw her son from the nursery – she will wait until he is 1 year old to leave him there for good.
When no one seems up to it …
Memories that hurt, there are many when you approach the issue of separation. Julie, 47, a childcare assistant in a crèche, knows something about it. “Some mothers set up defensive schemes. They give us directions to mean “I know,” ”she says. “They cling to details: you have to clean your baby with such wipes, put him to sleep at such and such a time,” she continues. It hides a suffering, a need to keep a stranglehold. We make them understand that we are not here to take their place. For these mothers convinced that they are the only ones who “know” – how to feed their child, cover it or put it to sleep – delegating is a much larger test than just crystallizing childcare. Because their need to control everything actually goes further: to entrust it, even if only for an hour, to their husband or their mother-in-law is complicated. In the end, what they don’t accept is that someone else takes care of their child and does, by definition, do it differently.
… not even the dad
This is the case of Sandra, 37, mother of a little Lisa, 2 months old. “Since the birth of my daughter, I have locked myself in a real paradox: both I need help, but at the same time, I feel more efficient than anyone when it comes to taking care of my daughter. or from the house, she says, a little dejected. When Lisa was a month old, I gave her daddy a few hours to go to the movies. And I came home an hour after the movie started! Impossible to concentrate on the plot. It’s as if I didn’t belong in this movie theater, that I was incomplete. In fact, confiding my daughter is for me to abandon her. Anxious, Sandra is nonetheless lucid. For her, her behavior is linked to her own history and to separation anxieties that go back to her childhood.
Look to his own childhood
According to the child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Myriam Szejer, this is where we have to look: “The difficulty in delegating depends in part on his link with his own mother. This is why some mothers only entrust their child to their mother and others, on the contrary, will never entrust it to her. It goes back to family neurosis. Can talking with his mother help matters? ” No. What is needed is to make the effort to question the reasons why we are not succeeding. Sometimes all it takes is nothing. And if separation is really impossible, you have to get help, because that can have psychic consequences on the child, ”advises the psychoanalyst.
And on the side of the inevitable guilt of mothers
Sylvain, 40, tries to analyze what he is going through with his wife, Sophie, 36, and their three children. “She sets the bar very high, both for her private and professional life. Suddenly, she sometimes tends to want to compensate for her absences from work by doing all the chores at home herself. “Sophie, who has been laboriously self-employed for years, bitterly confirms:” When they were little, I even put them in the nursery with a fever. I still feel guilty today! All this for work… ”Can we escape guilt? “By delegating, mothers face the reality of their work-related unavailability – without even being careerists. This inevitably leads to a form of guilt, comments Myriam Szejer. The evolution of manners is such that before, with the intra-family delegation, it was easier. We didn’t ask ourselves the question, there was less guilt. And yet, whether they last an hour or a day, whether they are occasional or regular, these separations allow an essential rebalancing.
Separation, essential for its autonomy
The baby thus discovers other ways of doing things, other approaches. And the mother is relearning to think about herself socially. So how to best manage this obligatory crossing point? First, you have to talk to children, insists Myriam Szejer, even to babies “who are sponges and who feel the suffering of their mother. We must therefore always anticipate a separation, even a minor one, through words, explain to them when we are going to leave them and for what reason. »What about mothers? There is only one solution: to play down! And accept that the child they have given birth … escapes them. “It’s part of the“ castrations ”and everyone is recovering from it, reassures Myriam Szejer. We separate from our child to give him autonomy. And throughout its growth, we have to face more or less difficult separations. The job of parent goes through this, until the day when the child leaves the family nest. But don’t worry, you may still have some time!