“Every birth and every transition is a separation.” A thoughtful contemplation about what it means to separate from your child, one that contends that relationships actually deepen when children have more of a sense of their individuality…
by: Tracy Sidesinger
My firstborn has left home.
He’s gone through that unique separation that eventually, almost every mother and child will face: entering college. My son is now in his second year. I’ve weathered the early growing pains and had some time to adjust to our new rhythm of coming and going. In this time I’ve also watched the confusion of other sets of parents and young adults. Most of us entered unprepared for how to navigate the relational aspects of this transition, acting as if this is the end while knowing it can’t be so. Some meddled and outfitted dorm rooms more intricately than a first home, as if a tight tether could be the solution. At the other extreme are those who cut off contact, or maybe just finances, so their kid could figure out how to be on their own.
All of this compelled me to ponder what it means, to separate?
The colloquial definition is a harsh one: to “force apart,” to “dissociate, split, disconnect, detach.” To “remove or sever from association.”
Psychologists, too, have had a lot to say about separation. I myself am a psychologist, but I preface that identity with the intersectionality of also being a feminist and a mother. From these identities, I see the word “separation” more like a tell of the profession’s patriarchal roots than a description of what actually happens at any stage in healthy development. At least, that’s the way I see separation under this false definition as a disconnection. In truth, separation is inseparable from attachment and relatedness. That link was crucial for developmental psychologist Margaret Mahler who originated the theory of separation-individuation. She watched toddlers develop a sense of their own identity and saw that it was relative to the security of their attachment with caregivers. She also saw that relationships actually deepened when children had more of a sense of their individuality. It turns out, separation is the most relational thing you can do, because it allows you to see another person as their own and not just an extension of you.
However, in practice, a psychology susceptible to an individualistic culture emphasized the split and didn’t care enough about nurturing the ongoing but changing relationship between children and their caregivers. “Separation” became the shorthand, a severed concept to mimic the severing of relationship it came to stand for. I’ve now participated in my son’s transition into this world, to kindergarten, then taking the subway on his own, choosing the right specialized high school in New York City, and now leaving home to begin college. I’ve watched my friends and patients endure this last transition as if it is the final one, and they are absolutely gutted. They know the relationship is still there, but they don’t have a frame for their experience because they’re told to just accept that this is the end. It’s time to correct the record.
When Thomas made me a mother, I didn’t care what any profession had to say about our experience, mine included. We were separated too soon. Every gesture I made thereafter was to honor the needs of our connection in real time.
My water broke spontaneously the night before he was due. Contractions began the next morning, and I called my mother from states away. “It’s happening,” I told her, “I’m in labor.” It was a strange impulse to call her. I had been clear during pregnancy about my wishes for birth. She could come see the baby after he was born, but I needed to be alone with my doula, my midwife, and my partner for the delivery. I knew from a long history with my mom that the only way to make decisions for myself was to keep a large distance between us.
But birth opens up our most radical longings for connection. Some part of me wanted my mother to be there. I longed for her to be the person I needed. Instead, Thomas’s birth was inflected with his maternal lineage, my lineage, my mother’s perpetual confusion over staying and leaving.
My mother called back five hours later to say she had already sped through Ohio and Pennsylvania trying to make it in time for the birth. She was in New York. I froze. Labor stalled. Minutes after she arrived, she turned around and left, feeling that she was not welcome or wanted. She was still practicing as a nurse, but she didn’t ask what I needed. She didn’t ask what the baby needed. When I reminded her that I wanted her to wait outside until after the delivery, she only felt her own exile. Separation as severing. So, she abandoned us. She didn’t answer my phone calls, and when Thomas’s father ran after her she didn’t even turn around to look at him. I feared what she might do when she left. Thomas’s heart rate skyrocketed. My cervix went in reverse. My body couldn’t birth a child like this.
On the third day of labor, by some miracle, my son and I dilated and contracted our own dance to his birth. The first two hours of his life were bliss. I don’t remember much except being in a sterile, small hospital room and the feeling of holding him. Likely, he had been washed and weighed, and we had already started to nurse. Mostly what I remember is the holding and gazing.
In the third hour, a male resident told us that he needed to take my baby away to be checked. I refused. “You’re mistaken, the other doctors already looked him over,” I said. “He’s been cleared.” But he was persistent, and nurses came to take my baby away. It didn’t take long for me to become furious, inconsolable. They explained repeatedly over the next few days that there was a catch in Thomas’s breathing. It was subtle, so no one noticed at first, but an X-ray showed that one of his lungs was entirely clouded with pneumonia. He was taken away from me to the euphemistic sounding Special Care Nursery. There, he was placed in an enclosed incubator and attached to oxygen, bilirubin lights, and numerous monitors without my consent. How could I have given consent in a mad time like that? “Ma’am,” one of the medical team said to me in a moment of peak confusion, “you need to understand that your baby could have died.”
All I knew — and by “I,” I mean the sheer force of my body in the now invisible connection to his — was that I wasn’t ever leaving him. At the moment of his birth my mother had already left us. And by the mercy of others watching, my son lived. That’s where the generational curse of false separation would stop.
After I was discharged from my hospital room, some kindly hospital staff realized I was definitively not going home without my son. They offered me a small, secret closet where I could stay. The closet consisted exclusively of a door, a chair that reclined, and a telephone that could receive internal hospital calls. Every time my son woke, a nurse from the Special Care Nursery called me. I woke, shuffled down the hall, past the refrigerator where I collected the tapioca pudding that sustained me for days, and reunited with my son. I could nurse and hold him in those brief minutes after his waking. Then, after what felt like no time at all, he had to be put back into his incubator. I watched his body covered in sticky circles connected to medical monitors and the numbers on a screen that indicated his oxygen level, these images peppered with unintelligible discussions by medical staff in the background. Or maybe it was the foreground, conversations with me directly. What I do know is that this repeated as a pattern every few hours for ten interminable days.
When Thomas was eventually cleared, we both went home. The crib that was set up in another room migrated to our bedroom. Then, before even a night passed, I decided not to use it. From there on out, we co-slept. We nursed on demand. I didn’t pursue a career path that would have taken me away from him more days than not. I opted to see psychotherapy patients in private practice so that I could still spend most of my time with Thomas. As he grew, we read stacks of picture books daily. We planted a garden where Thomas picked radishes straight from the soil and called them “Spicy!” I cultivated space for his imagination, and he drew for hours every morning. We stopped going to my parents’ house because they had loaded firearms that were kept out for what they referred to as our “safety,” and I couldn’t risk that kind of danger for my child. Thomas made me a mother. Specifically, our separation in those first ten days of his life brought out in me a hyperattuned connection, and I vowed to never leave him. But as it was written in our birth story, things could never be so simple.
I left Thomas’s father when he was eight years old, and his sisters were even younger. It had to happen. I would have been a shard of myself had I stayed married to his father. Thomas and I both needed the space to let other models of masculinity in. But as a result, I also did what I said I’d never do, and I did it repeatedly: for the final ten years of his childhood, every two or five days, I left Thomas.
There were hard times at first, but over the years, our repeated merging into a boisterous shared apartment and then parting again became normal. Thomas deepened his lifelong love for math, and made intelligent, diverse friends who shared similar interests. In his last year of high school, he diligently applied to colleges he chose, and I could see him moving into his own contained, buoyant social bubble. All the while, we were dreaming up ways to get through this rite of passage called leaving home.
In the summer between his graduating high school and starting college, the two of us went on a 10-day guided trip through Ecuador. It had been years since we spent that many consecutive days together. Those ten days in Ecuador were one bookend to his childhood, matched at the other by those fated days in the hospital.
Though I might try, I can’t ever give Thomas back the physical touch and quiet constancy of my gaze that was intercepted at his entry to this world. I can’t reverse time, choose not to tell my mom I was in labor, and see if her absence meant things progressed normally, maybe stave off the infection that landed him in Special Care and out of my arms. I can’t give him the stability of a unified family. By now, I’ve learned that no matter what I did, some of what we’ve been through couldn’t have been prevented. Every birth and every transition is a separation.
In these rites of passage we circle back to the age-old question of separation and connection. To be an individual doesn’t mean your relationships stop mattering. Going to college isn’t the end of a child’s bond with their mother.
There are many things that are no longer mine to do for Thomas. Time and development change things like that. But what I can do is see him through this next opening of his life. He’s taken on a larger share of the work of dilating and contracting himself out into the larger world. Still, it remains a shared effort, and we both know we’ll always be a part of each other’s lives.
Now, it’s Thomas who’s leaving, and it couldn’t be more right. We’ve learned together that love doesn’t mean you never leave. Leaving, though, isn’t the same thing as a severed relationship. A better word for this is expanding. In the little corner of the world that is our attachment, I have the honor of holding open its doors for my son to enter the vast ocean of life. I will always be in this ocean with my son. I’ll always take him back to my shores when that’s what he needs. But I also know that he’s ready to swim, deeper into the mystery that has been holding both of us all along.
Tracy Sidesinger is a psychoanalytic psychologist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her psychological writing which address transgenerational aspects of the lost feminine has been published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Journal of Mother Studies, and elsewhere. At midlife with an accumulated mass of mythical and human stories, she is emerging as a literary writer. Her creative nonfiction has been published in So To Speak Journal. A divorced mom caring for three teenagers and a dog who looks suspiciously like a wolf, she loves to challenge social norms and find joy along the way.
