Highlights
In a recent essay for The Atlantic, Sarah Levy described a mother named Taylor Mitchem, who brought her baby home in March 2020, to a world that had just shut its doors and left parents like her with no village, no visitors, and a husband too frightened of the newborn’s fragility to share the load. By the time her child was two and a half, Mitchem had settled into a daily ritual she calls “gardening”: a morning smoke to make the long afternoons with a toddler bearable. A decade ago, the same role was filled by rosé, “mommy juice” for the “wine mom.” The substance has changed. The structure has not.
In my practice, I have spent decades listening to what children need and watching what happens, in adults, when those needs go unmet. So when I read Mitchem’s account, I felt no judgment; only grief. Not for her use of weed, which is a symptom, but for the wound beneath it.
It’s important to note that not all mothers are struggling. Married mothers, in particular, report significantly higher levels of happiness than unmarried women, per recent IFS research. But some are struggling, and we have sold an entire generation of mothers the same quiet proposition: that the way through the difficulty of raising a young child is to feel less of it.
Our public conversation, as usual, splits into two camps, both of which miss the point. One blames the mothers and their fragility and their purported failure to simply buckle down. The other blames the system and treats a mother’s inner life as beside the point. In my experience, it is one because of the other, and until we say so plainly, we will keep misdiagnosing both.
A Generational Wound
Mothers are not careless or indulgent by design. Most are carrying the most isolating version of early motherhood we have ever arranged. Some, like Mitchem, are alone in a home all day without a village, without enough sleep, help, or leave. Many face the opposite, and it is no gentler: pushed back into work before they or their babies are ready, asked to labor as though they are not mothers and as though they do not work. Either way, the result is a woman stretched past what anyone can bear. Wine and weed are not the disease. They are the dressing our culture handed her for a wound it refused to treat.
But there is something about that wound we tend to skip. In the Atlantic article, Mitchem notes that her anxiety predated her child, as if that settles the matter. It does not. Motherhood is not simply a stressor laid over a pre-existing condition. In the first years of life, a mother and her baby do developmental work together, and that work reaches down, below conscious thought, into her own infancy. A woman who was securely held as a baby tends to find these moments, however exhausting, anchored by a sense that distress passes and that she is equal to it. A woman raised by parents present in body but absent in attention finds something else rising up during these times of stress: her child’s need reactivates her own unmet need, and feelings dormant since her childhood arrive precisely when she has the least capacity to meet them.
Wine and weed are not the disease. They are the dressing our culture handed her for a wound it refused to treat.
This is why so many struggling women tell me they did not know they were this anxious, this angry, this fragile—until they became mothers. They are not weak. Motherhood did not create the fault line. It ran the current through it.
Now hold those two truths together, because they are the same truth one generation apart. The mother “present in body but absent in attention” was very often a mother with no choice—sent back to work too soon, with no leave, no village, and no partner who counted her caregiving as real. The daughter’s insecurity is the fingerprint of the conditions imposed on her mother. We are not looking at a chain of fragile women. We are looking at a society that has disinvested in caregiving for so long that the wound now travels down the generations on its own.
I want to be clear, because this is the part both camps refuse to hear: secure attachment is not a soft sentiment. It is biology. An infant’s nervous system is literally built into relationships to an attuned adult. This is not an ideology; it is developmental science. But that science comes with a condition. Attachment requires time, proximity, and a present adult who is not herself running on empty, and you cannot will those into being in a culture engineered to make all three scarce.
Where the Conversation Should Begin
That brings me to the hardest question, the one the wine-mom and weed-mom jokes flatten entirely: where is the line between avoidance and treatment? In my practice, it is rarely obvious. A mother with real, diagnosable anxiety, failed by a medical system that dismissed her postpartum, who finds that a little cannabis quiets her enough to get on the floor and play with her child, may be doing something closer to self-treatment than self-erasure. But there is a tell, and most mothers know it. Treatment increases your capacity to be present with your child. Avoidance decreases your need to be. The same edible can serve either; the difference lies not in chemistry, but in what it is asked to do: to clear a path back to your child, or to build a soft wall between you and a discomfort no one taught you to survive.
A mother who is held by her partner, her community, and her society is a mother who can hold others.
This is not a debate about working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers, or liberal mothers versus conservative ones. It is about centering the child in the years when the child is most vulnerable and building a society that makes that possible rather than impossible. That means paid parental leave, flexible and humane work, fathers who treat this developmental season as the essential work it is, and a culture willing to call caregiving real work in policy and not merely in sentiment. Women can have it all, but, as I have written before, not all at once. Real life is seasonal. There is a season for slowing down and being present, and another for re-entering the world with renewed purpose because your child’s inner world is secure.
Our culture has left women like Mitchem alone with their newborns and coping products, then blamed struggling women for using them. A present, attuned mother is not a luxury for a child; she is a developmental necessity. And a mother who is held by her partner, her community, and her society is a mother who can hold others. We have simply forgotten to hold the mothers. That is where the conversation should begin, and from there work outward.
Erica Komisar, LCSW, is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and parenting expert with over 30 years of experience in private practice. She is the author of Being There, Chicken Little: The Sky Isn’t Falling, and A Parent’s Guide to Divorce. She is also a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Institute for Family Studies.
*Photo credit: Shutterstock
