You might wonder why I’d write about a phrase that on the surface appears to tell people to ‘just chill out’. These kinds of messages tell mothers who are struggling, with infants, toddlers, teens or adult children, that the problem resides in them and they can just choose to ‘get over it’. There’s more than enough of that kind of un-helpfulness around. That’s not what I mean by ‘calm the farm’; the clue is in the imagery.
If a mother is struggling because her baby won’t stop crying or her teenager scowls at her with what appears to be intense distaste, it’s incredibly easy to locate the issue within the mother or the child. She’s upset, she misses cuddles, she’s unrealistically expecting a rest. The child is distressed, they’re being bratty, they’re completely self-absorbed. But the problem doesn’t arise within the mother or child alone, it emerges from the mother/child relationship.
When the mother is upset her child is feeling something as well even if they may appear indifferent or dismissive as is often displayed in the teenage years. When a mother is quietly screaming as her baby wails, they’re both distressed. When she goes to speak to her adolescent and they don’t remove their headphones, the teen isn’t immune to their mother’s presence, they just ‘can’t deal’ with it right now, they may feel annoyed or pressured or frustrated. They’re still emotional human beings. They have a response, you’re just not privy to it.
What your child is feeling in that moment is not the same as what you're feeling but it does arise from the interactions (however brief or tense) between you both. This is where ‘calm the farm’ is particularly relevant. It’s not the individual chicken, horse, cow or farmer that is in pain or distress in this moment, it’s the farm.
It’s so hard in our culture to communicate what it’s like to experience within relationship, to experience from a place of ‘us’ rather than I and you. Our everyday language doesn’t cater for it. That’s why moments of holding can be so precious, you get a brief chance to notice what it’s like to experience from a mother/child 'us'. And that’s why seemingly irrelevant phrases like ‘calm the farm’ can be so helpful.
If you think about the mother and child relationship as a ‘farm’, you might get closer to the lived experience of feeling within relationship. Mothers and children both contribute to and are necessary for the farm, even if their contributions are different. The farmer and the farm exist because of the presence of one another just as the mother and child exist because of the presence of one another. Each has their own relationships and identities outside of the farm, but when together, as mother and child, they function from within the farm.
Can you think about your child without reference to your relationship? Do you know anything about your child that hasn’t arisen from your experience and knowing of them in your relationship? If someone tells you a story about your child, describes a behaviour you haven’t seen in them yourself, can you understand it without reference to your relationship? You might reply ‘oh no, that’s not what they’re like at all’ or ‘yes, I can imagine that’ but each response is only possible from within reference to your relationship. All you can know of your child arises from the mother/child bond. All they can know of you also arises from that bond.
If there’s a problem; you’re upset, they’re angry, you’re sad, they’re preoccupied, it’s the farm that needs calming, it’s the relationship between the two of you that is fracturing and requires repair. You’ll both likely contribute to that repair in a different way. As a mother, you come from a place of maturity, life experience and responsibility. You can’t expect your child to apologise as you might in a situation, or feel as you might, or have the same insight about something as you might, they’re not you and they’re not a parent. Similarly, you can’t understand all of what they’re feeling, you’re not them and your childhood experience was different if only for the reason that it occurred a good few years before theirs and they have you for a parent. But ultimately, in your relationship with your child, the farm will only continue running if you both find a way of repairing the fences that protect you both.
This repair might occur through a shared joke or a bit of time for you both to cool down, it might happen through sitting down and having a serious talk, through watching TV together or having a cuddle. There are many ways to ‘calm the farm’ but it can never occur without both members of the farm present and active.
This is another benefit found in the ‘farm’ imagery: nothing’s going to work, there’ll be no eggs to collect and fences won’t be mended if all of the farm don’t come to the party. What causes the problem is relational and what mends the problem is also relational.
The difficulty with being farm and farmer is that as an adult, it can often appear and feel as if you’re doing all the work. Maybe you accept this because you are after all the parent, so you squish down your grumbles and move on. Or you blow up at your child and then feel guilty. Or you go and debrief with a friend so that you don’t feel so alone.
But what if, when the dust has settled, and you feel you’d better start re-engaging with the farm, you reflect back on the interaction between you and your child. Is it really all their fault or your fault? What happened in that moment? You’re going to try and mend a fence but does your child maybe do some mending too? Do they ask you a question or lean their head on your shoulder, laugh with you, give you a begrudging grunt, show you what they’re interested in, fall asleep with a smile of exhaustion in your arms or simply ceasefire? In that moment of tension and then mending, your child, like you, responds; that response contributes to a change in the relationship.
Mothering is insanely difficult at times. There are so many things that can move your relationship with your child into drought or devastation. Quite often at the time of difficulty you’re enveloped in the feeling of it and accompanying catastrophic thoughts: it’ll never go away, it’s always going to be this hard, I’m a terrible mother, you’re a terrible child, the farm is in chaos and I am in this alone. Then when it’s changed for some inexplicable reason, you just continue on.
I suggest it’s worth paying attention to what happened in that moment of change when the farm, calmed. Can you figure out what you brought to that moment? What your child brought to that moment?
Paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1960) famously said: “there is no such thing as an infant” (p.38). What he meant was that without a mother, an infant won’t survive. Similarly, I come into being as a mother because I have or had a child. My experience as a mother is unique to that relationship and cannot be understood outside of it. There can’t be a farmer without a farm or a farm without a farmer.
When issues are sorted between you both, it’s doesn’t just calm your child, it helps you as well. There’s a certain gratitude and relief that goes with a calm farm. It won’t last, there is no perfect mother and child relationship because the farm is always changing. Being in a mother/child relationship can often be hard, hard work for a long, long time.
Naturally, this kind of thinking is much easier to do on reflection, when you’ve had a chance to cool down, rest, attend to some of your own needs; to sit on the back porch of your farm and take in your relationship or to graze lazily side by side in the pasture. It’s also easier to do in moments of affection, when you feel connected with one another and the usual day to day dramas of the farm are momentarily put aside. Either way, there’s no harm in indulging in a little thought experiment. You might feel less isolated and able to consider the pressures you and your child are under, even if those pressures are your baby’s trapped gas, your desperate need for adult company or your teen’s changeable moods. Your child might want to join in too. What kind of farm do you both make? I’d love to hear your stories if you’d like to share…
Reference: Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The theory of the parent-infant relationship. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (pp. 37-55). New York: International Universities Press, pp. 37-55.
This post is written by Dr Ariel Moy. She is passionate about developing mother/child relationships, she has a private practice as a creative arts therapist, is a Professional member of ANZACATA and is an academic teacher at The MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia.
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