iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Abigail Tucker’s latest book is Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct.
That second midnight in the hospital, with my newborn daughter slumbering near her equally exhausted dad and my C-section wound feeling like I’d been doodled on with a blowtorch, somewhere in the back of my brain an alarm began to sound: Why would nobody tell me where I was?
This was certainly not the maternity ward. As a mother of three older children, I know those places like the back of my hand. But no sound of fellow mothers’ laughter or tears drifted from the mysterious hallway beyond my door, and no baby braying either.
It was April, 2020, and the pandemic was cresting in our Connecticut city. The masked nurses who wandered in seemed never to have been in this room before either. They had to walk a long, long way to get me the foil-covered cups of apple juice I craved.
While the day nurse nixed my request to crack open my chamber’s door and have a look around, the new night nurse on duty seemed a little fuzzier on the hospital’s shifting rules. Here was my chance to explore. On bare feet, I limped into the deserted, fluorescent-lit corridor beyond.
I told myself I’d sneak up and down just once, but soon I’d canvassed the hallway 20 times at least, peeking in windows, memorizing signs, my suspicions compounding with every circuit.
That loud fan-like machine down the hallway – that was one of those negative pressure units that I’d read about in the newspaper, wasn’t it? Why was I the only patient in the entire hallway? Was this the pandemic ward? Did I have COVID? Did my baby? What on earth was through those doors all the way at the end, plastered with “do not open” signs?
Back in the room with my daughter, pale pink and resplendent in her basinet, the shaking started – I felt like I might vibrate right off the edge of the hospital bed. But I wasn’t afraid. I was livid.
A wide-eyed nurse finally offered a few answers: Wards were being shuffled as COVID patients flooded the hospital, and while my area was just overflow housing for now, it was technically part of a special maternity unit set up to handle a wave of COVID-positive mothers that was expected any day.
Through the forbidden doors was the first such mother. Her baby had been taken away.
Loudly I began to talk – to rant, really – my voice rising by degrees. By the time the nurse manager in charge was summoned to my bedside, something like a roar was building in my throat. I dumped my wrath, like hot tar, onto this poor woman, who had risked her own life to be in the hospital with me, and who had a million other pressing concerns.
But while she did look a little worried as I raved, I also got the feeling from her patient manner that she’d seen creatures like me many times before, and that she understood that my explosive interruptions and flashing, wild-animal eyes were in some ways model behaviours.
Maternal aggression in reaction to a perceived threat is a trademark of new mothers, common across mammals, and probably dating back to our collective origins. These feelings I was experiencing were inconvenient to the nursing staff, yes, yet they were also highly adaptive, honed by evolution to help moms and our babies survive crises since time immemorial.
But more than a year into the pandemic, a new question has arisen: Can moms’ ancient instincts carry us through a 21st-century catastrophe?
Aggression isn’t the most famous maternal trait, but it’s an intriguing one. In my research about the science of the maternal instinct, I kept a whole file on furry moms gone ballistic: goat moms who head-butt wolves down mountainsides, walrus moms who attack naval vessels, mountain lion moms who bully terrified human joggers back up the trail. And human moms are no exception – we’ve even been known to take on those mountain lions, if they’ve got our seven-year-old in their jaws.
In one laboratory experiment, rat mothers were taught to associate a peppermint smell with a painful electric shock, and quickly learned to freeze in fear whenever they caught a whiff of the dreaded peppermint. But if the rats’ pups were present, the moms went into warrior mode instead, attacking the peppermint-spraying tube or trying to stuff it up with their bedding.
So what’s transpiring inside of these rat moms – or inside me, for that matter, as I quaked with fury in my hospital bed?
When mammals become mothers, one of the many neurological changes we collectively experience is the blunting of our stress responses. On ordinary days this preternatural sense of calm might help us complete those (let’s face it) boring newborn tasks, especially breastfeeding, that involve sitting still and staying quiet – or hiding, perhaps, in the dangerous prehistoric settings where our brains and bodies were forged.
But the blunted stress response also comes into play when the extraordinary strikes. Chilled-out new moms are inherently bolder – fearless, even. While most rats cower in the corners of an unfamiliar maze, new mothers brazenly explore it, much like how I cased out that alien hospital hallway. Things that might deter other people we moms gamely take in stride: If moms-to-be stick our hands in buckets of ice water, our saliva has less of the stress hormone cortisol compared with childless women. We are calmer than non-mothers during normally nerve-wracking events such as job interviews and even major earthquakes.
At the same time as our stress response is dampened, new moms are also unusually aware of our environments, becoming hyper-attuned to colours, for instance, and the expressions on strangers’ faces. All of these nifty superpowers likely help us monitor the state of our baby … and to mark any threats that might interfere with its cooing contentment.
This fateful equation – dampened stress response plus enhanced environmental awareness – yields maternal aggression. Moms are keyed up to notice threats – why the heck is this hallway so quiet?– and unafraid to face them – get me the nurse manager. Now!
Scientists aren’t precisely sure how this transpires on a cellular level, but the neurochemicals of birth are likely involved, such as oxytocin, associated with social bonding. If you block the oxytocin receptors in those peppermint-pummelling attack rat moms, their aggressive behaviour ceases. The chemicals of nursing are also key – in fact, researchers often use the term “lactational aggression” to describe feisty mom behaviour. Together, they help make new moms paragons under all kinds of pressures.
Yet under the crushing burden of this pandemic, nature’s gift turned out not to be enough.
That’s because maternal aggression is by and large a lightening-strike response to an acute environmental threat – a charging pit bull, a lurking stranger, an invading army, an avalanche. Many moms – myself very much included – experienced more aggression than usual in the early, panic-stricken days of the pandemic, and it served us well when it came to battening down the household hatches during early quarantine.
But in the long year since my baby and I checked out from the hospital, the dominant form of maternal stress has switched from acute to chronic, and in such conditions moms’ aggression fizzles. Nobody can wrestle a pit bull for a year, and while pregnant women hang tough in violent earthquakes, studies also suggest that new moms may yet crumble in the aftermath, if normalcy isn’t restored and the stress of the disaster drags on for months as opposed to moments.
Some of the most punishing stresses of the COVID era have been the lingering kind: closed schools, rocky finances, isolation from loved ones, a general sense of fear and uncertainty.
And especially for the newest mothers, under these circumstances the maternal brain changes intended to safeguard our babies can imperil our relationships with them instead. Our dampened stress response can morph into clinical depression. Our souped-up environmental awareness can transform into a pervasive anxiety.
In one grim study, researchers at Germany’s Goethe University isolated mother rats in a Plexiglas tube many times over several weeks, so that the harmless but jarring stress became part of daily life. Under chronic threat the mothers gradually started to lose their emboldened maze-exploring behaviours, with measurable changes to the structure of their maternal brains as well.
In another experiment with monkey mothers, scientists hid various amounts of monkey chow inside devices called foraging carts. The monkey moms who got predictably easy-to-find food remained steadfast. So did the moms with the hard-to-find food. It was the mothers who received an unpredictable mix of foraging carts – a simulation of feast and famine – over months who gradually became undone, their maternal behaviour deteriorating more even than those facing the spectacle of steady deprivation.
The darkest evolutionary theory about these sorts of changes is that they might help prepare females for the unthinkable: Some researchers believe that postpartum depression in response to dire environmental indicators may be a way of gaining emotional distance from our babies, in case we can no longer care for them.
Built for a crisis, mammal moms struggle in a quagmire.
If you want to watch this losing battle, just look around: After a year of unremitting chaos, moms’ depression rates are rocketing. We’ve forfeited more jobs than anybody else. We report rampant anxiety and insomnia.
All of this indicates that maternal behaviour, deep-seated as it is, is not a uniform script or somehow set in stone. Instead it’s highly responsive to our surroundings. Our famous capacity for derring-do, our hair-trigger tempers and mama-bear courage under fire, remain a quintessential part of mother’s nature. But the truth is that even Teflon moms are hard pressed to weather a long-term crisis without help.
As the pandemic continues to play out, moms need everyone – from partners to politicians – to recognize the complex interplay of maternal behaviour and environmental cues. In the face of chronic uncertainty, positive environmental signals matter to moms. This could mean everything from extra government money in the bank account to the mere presence and support of family and friends, which studies suggest can measurably reduce maternal stress levels.
Call a new mom. Drop off dinner unbidden. If you’re vaccinated, take her grouchy older kid for a bike ride around the block so she can focus on the baby or take a nap. Don’t count on her mama-bear instincts to magically carry the day.
Because moms do burn hot. But we can also burn out.
Keep your Opinions sharp and informed. Get the Opinion newsletter. Sign up today.