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I was sitting in the window seat, homebound for Thanksgiving from SFO to BOS, thinking about how dramaturgically confusing it is that Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again uses some but not all of the same songs as the original Mamma Mia, when the kid sitting in the middle seat turned to me with panic in his eyes. “Can you help me?” he asked. I blinked at him, confused. “I took an edible,” he sputtered, “and I am too high and I am FREAKING out.”
Without thinking, I sprung into action. Looking in his eyes, I said, “Hey, you’re safe. You are not in any danger. I just need you to breathe with me, okay?”
And so went the rest of the flight. (At one point, I suggested he try listening to some calming music, but he told me his music was stressing him out. I asked what he was listening to, assuming it was, I don’t know, club bangers. He told me it was James Taylor. I was like, “oh boy, if James Taylor is stressing you out, music is not for you right now.”)
When the flight ended, I walked with him to baggage claim. I saw a woman eagerly waving to him. “MOMMY!” he called out. I slunk into the shadows of the baggage carousel and disappeared.
This experience made an impression on me, though probably not for the reason you expect. At the time, I was deeply ambivalent about having children. I primarily worried that I did not have the “motherly intuition” you hear so much about. I would freeze up when friends handed me their babies. How do you hold these wiggly little guys? What if I accidentally hurt them?
But here, look! Irrefutable evidence that I did possess some level of maternal instinct. This kid needed me and I stepped up to the plate. I didn’t even need to think about what I was doing, it just came naturally to me. Surely that’s some Grade A Motherly Intuition.
Except, it wasn’t. It had nothing to do with mothering. Minus the drugs, I’d been in this exact same situation before. One of my best friends from high school suffered from terrible panic attacks. I was with her when she had one mid-flight, coming back from vacation. Fortunately, she has always been a strong mental health advocate (more on her down below, she rocks). She taught me everything I needed to know to support someone through a panic attack: how to focus them on their breath, how to reassure them that they are not going to die.
The reason I did not have to think about how to respond was not because I had some innate truth deep inside of me. It was a skill I had learned and practiced!
I think about intuition a lot: what it means, how we talk past each other on it, and why it can counterintuitively undermine our confidence in our own judgement.
You hear it used it two different, almost opposite, ways.
First, there’s the more feminine-coded version of intuition. A mother’s intuition, trust your gut, “follow your heart mama!!” and all that. This idea that if you tune out the distractions of the world and connect with the light within, you will simply know what you need to know.
And then there’s the more...maybe not more masculine-coded, but at least more professional-coded version. Think about “product intuition,” essentially the ability to predict how users will behave, or someone who has good marketing, technical, or hiring instincts. They may start out with some natural aptitude, but it’s understood as a skill that gets stronger with reps. In this framing, you develop good intuition by taking action: run experiments and update your judgment based on what you learn.
The problem is that we conflate these two things. People who have honed their judgment over time tell others to “trust your intuition,” because their intuition is reliable. But it’s reliable because they built it! And so people on the receiving end of this advice (often women, tbh) end up believing they’re lacking some important part of themselves. Something that should be guiding them, but isn’t.
This is a real bind. You feel lost, but you also have no framework for figuring out when you should trust your gut and when it might lead you astray. So instead of trusting yourself to figure things out, you just end up trusting your internal critics, who can be quite loud. And mean!
I felt this myself, feeling like my lack of natural “baby skills” was some kind of sign that perhaps motherhood wasn’t for me, rather than a perfectly reasonable result of being the youngest sibling and cousin in my family, who simply never spent enough time around babies to figure out their wiggliness. And I also see it everywhere, particularly on the various mom Subreddits, which are awash with women who have convinced themselves that their inability to correctly guess what their baby needs implies some fundamental failing that reveals they never should have had kids in the first place.
While I was writing this post, I happened to read Allison Bornstein’s latest post about starting her denim collection over from scratch postpartum. (I genuinely cannot imagine a topic more squarely pointed at my current interests). She talks about trying her old jeans on, and while they technically started fitting her again, certain pairs did not work for her new body. She refers to this process as “intuitive”: “I mean when you put something on your body, you immediately know whether it works or not. I think when we need to hem or haw, we are actually often trying to talk ourselves in or out of what our gut is telling us. Even though I felt a bit unstable in my body, I still have that intuition of what feels right to me.”
I don’t want this to sound like a criticism, because, there is literally no reason she needs to dissect the precise meaning of words (that is my job, apparently), and also her writing is excellent and I recommend it! But even in this very piece, she acknowledges that she worked as a “Fashion-with-a-capital-F” stylist for 10 years before moving into normal people fashion styling six years ago. I have no doubt that she started out with an above-average aptitude for fashion, but that’s a lot of reps! That is an extremely honed and practiced intuition!
So, yes. It’s intuitive in that she does not need to think about it. She “just knows.” But her gut is going to be a lot better at this than my gut. (I know for a fact, because my gut is also trying on jeans in a new postpartum body, and I have searched my soul, and there are no answers to be found.)
Denim issues aside, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed early postpartum days with my son, given my lack of skills. But I shouldn’t have been. I love being really bad at something and then rapidly getting better. I am at my best when scaling a steep learning curve. (I also like writing little songs where I change the lyrics of existing songs to be about having a clean butt, which was at least 30% of it.)
I was genuinely amused by how wrong my instincts could be. Like, how do you get a newborn to go to sleep? I don’t know... tuck him in with a bunch of stuffed animals? Nope, that could not be more wrong / illegal! But we tried things, we learned, we gradually got better, and our confidence improved. That was super empowering.
So, yes. “Follow your heart, mama!” and all that. But beware of how this advice can be a little misguided. It tells you to trust something you haven’t built yet, which can make you feel broken when it doesn’t work. The most useful thing someone could have told me before I had a baby wasn’t “trust your instincts.” It was “you don’t have instincts yet, but you’ll build them.” That would have freed me from years of wondering what was wrong with me. “Trust yourself” is good advice, but it’s the end of a process, not the beginning. It only makes sense once you’ve done the work of being wrong and noticing.
xoxo,
hils
p.s. what if instead of “follow your gut,” we said, “follows your guts”? I don’t think that would have caught on, lol.
p.p.s my friend Sami who taught me how to help someone through a panic attack is now a star clinical psychologist. You can check out her site here. When I sent her this piece, she told me, “I love this piece because it reminds me of what I try to help my clients build. So many of them don’t trust themselves and think that they automatically should even though they’ve been subjected to traumatic environments or chronic and validation are both. So a lot of my job is just helping them, build the skill to actually learn how to trust their gut or their inner wisdom which is exactly what you and many other women have to do as moms. This is voice to text so there may be some typos.”
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I am *loving* your writing Hilary. So good on so many dimensions. Also the “maternal instinct” is something we talk about on Startup Dad and it comes up regularly from Dads that they were worried they couldn’t do it or that they’d be a bad father bc they’ve never liked babies/kids or been around them. And then they thrive.
Somehow, not surprisingly, much more acceptable for a man to say out loud than a woman.
Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud :-)
Loved this one - I also had this feeling too before coming a parent, but there’s also nothing that gets me more pumped than starting up from the bottom of a learning curve: “I felt this myself, feeling like my lack of natural “baby skills” was some kind of sign that perhaps motherhood wasn’t for me, rather than a perfectly reasonable result of being the youngest sibling and cousin in my family, who simply never spent enough time around babies to figure out their wiggliness.”