Claudia M. Gold
Multilayered Moments of Meeting
by Claudia M. Gold
Carla, a pediatrician who took a course I led in promoting healthy caregiver-infant relationships, was bursting to share a story. The occasion was a bi-weekly community of practice Zoom call with a wide variety of practitioners working with infants and parents who had taken a version of the course. “Do you remember that moment,” Carla asked me, “ when you interviewed that mom for our class?” She went on. “When she wasn’t sure, but then realized her baby was speaking to her?” “Of course,” I replied.” Witnessing a moment of meeting between an infant and caregiver with the sense of hope it brings, often in the midst of great turmoil, stays with you. Such moments provide the fuel that drives me forward when the world feels overwhelmingly dark.
Carla went on to describe her experience of witnessing my interaction with this mother her 6-week-old baby. “The mother was telling the group about the stress of separation from her own mother who lived just over the border in Canada but could not visit due to Covid restrictions. As she spoke, you said you thought the baby was moving her mouth in sync her mother. But the mother said ‘No, it’s just gas.’ You waited, not contradicting her but continuing to observe as mom pointed out the baby’s extended legs as evidence of her interpretation. After a short period of quiet observation, those of us watching from our boxes on the Zoom screen then saw a look of wonder and delight come across mom’s face. We could not see the baby on the screen as she was facing towards her mother, away from the camera. Again, you waited. ‘She’s imitating me!’ the mother suddenly exclaimed. We all felt that joy; the energy of connection.”
“That happened to me,” Carla said. She then shared her story with the community of practice group. In her clinic she was seeing a mom who felt overwhelmed and inadequate caring for her 3-month-old infant son and two older daughters under the strain of new Covid restrictions almost two years into the pandemic. Carla described her efforts to support mom, telling her that she was doing a great job but feeling that her words were not getting through.
Then Carla had to leave the room briefly. On her return, she witnessed from the hall through the still open door the baby lying on his mother’s lap with his feet towards her belly and head on her knees. The baby held his mother’s two index fingers in his grasp as she moved moving her hands in rhythm with her voice. “When she heard me enter the room, she took one of her hands away and looked up. That’s when I noticed.”
The pitch of Carla’s voice rose as she shared her excitement about what happened next. “ I just have to stop,” she had said, “and tell you what I just saw. As you took your hand away your baby immediately reached out for your finger. He told you he wanted more, and you listened!”
It happened so fast that had Carla not pointed it out, the moment would have gone unrecognized. But now mom looked down and saw her son lock eyes with her. His eyes widened and his mouth made an open “Oh” expression as she resumed the rhythmic movements and tone of voice. Mom’s face transformed with a huge grin.
“You know,” Carla then told our group, “That little interaction did more to energize mom and boost her confidence than anything I could possibly have said.”
In infant-parent mental health we often talk about parallel process in relationships; supervisor-clinician, clinician-parent, and parent-child. But the word “parallel” suggests that these experiences are somehow separate. As I try to capture the rich complexity of all these multilayered communications, I think more of a woven tapestry. That image in turn brings to mind W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece Of Human Bondage. The central character Phillip grapples with the meaning of life. Inspired by a gift of a Persian rug, he concludes that "as the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life [so that] it made a pattern out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts [so] he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated or beautiful".
Claudia M. Gold, MD
Claudia M. Gold, MD is a pediatrician and writer who practiced general and behavioral pediatrics for over 20 years and now specializes in infant-parent mental health. She is on the faculty of the Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Brazelton Institute at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is a clinician with Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires and director of the Hello It’s Me Project, a program designed to bring infant mental health principles to high-need, low-resourced communities. She has written 4 books: The Power of Discord with co-author Ed Tronick (2020) The Developmental Science of Early Childhood(2017), The Silenced Child(2016), and Keeping Your Child in Mind(2011.) She writes regularly for her blog Child in Mind.
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