Changing identity in becoming a mother: the role of the extended family in internal and external reality

Becoming a mother for the first time profoundly affects a woman’s sense of who she is. She must deal with emotional demands of her baby, adjust to changes in her relationship with the baby’s father and wider family, and integrate competing desires for or pressures to resume paid work. The experience of the transition varies for individuals, but particularly across cultures, historical epochs and economic circumstances.

This paper presents findings from six psychoanalytic infant observations made during a research project aimed at understanding social and psychological processes involved in becoming a mother in a culturally and ethnically diverse Inner City London borough. Funded by the Economic Research Council, UK, the study involved interviewing twenty White, Bangladeshi, African or African Caribbean first-time mothers. Two Bangladeshi, two White, one African and one African Caribbean mothers were also observed weekly with their babies for one year by child psychotherapists, using the infant observation method developed by Esther Bick.

A recent Special Issue of the International Journal of Infant Observation, edited by myself, has presented a full account of how the observation method was used in research and some preliminary findings, including articles by the six observers (International Journal of Infant Observation, 2007, Vol. No3). The present paper focuses on tracing themes that emerged as significant across the whole sample and illustrates how becoming a mother involves reworking relationships with internal as well as external family members. This reworking is itself influenced by cultural expectations affected by wider social factors. For example, in traditional Bangladeshi families, it is expected that the young mother would be given considerable support by extended family members who would live close by or in the same household. What happens to the mother’s coping capacities when traditional patterns of family relationships are disrupted by contemporary living arrangements, or when mothers and daughters live in different continents?

Surprisingly, perhaps, despite contrasting family structures and cultural assumptions, common features emerge that illustrate how the young woman is required to reposition herself in relation to her own mother both as another ‘mother’ and as a ‘daughter’. Relations with siblings also have to be reworked, internally and externally. Becoming a mother involves mourning losses as well as recognising gains. All the mothers in this group experienced periods of what we have described as ‘existential loneliness’, as they dealt with losses of situation or independence prior to feeling confident or competent in their new roles. While these losses may have some basis in external reality, infant observation material illustrates the psychic conflict a mother must deal with as she experiences her own baby’s emotions as if they are those of a competing sibling. The extended family in external reality can help with bearing feelings of displacement. In the Bangladeshi families, for example, an apparent free and easy interchange between a mother and her sisters in managing childcare can ameliorate effects of rejection or isolation. The extended family or groups of friends, such as other mothers with small babies, are equally important for the White mothers brought up in in nuclear families, containing parts of the self while the development of the personality is in flux. The active involvement of extended family and friends in childcare can be associated with a diffusion of generational differences that is apparently marked in the Bangladeshi families. However, in all cases the mothers’ relationships with their own mothers were crucial in managing the psychological transition to becoming a mother. Particularly important to the mother’s sense of identity is the development of attachment behaviour in the baby as he or she begins to signal the mother out for special attention, marking the significance of the relationship. This confirms her in her new identity as ‘mother’. Conclusions stress the importance of understanding both the specifics of cultural difference and also the implications of an internal extended family that may be universal.