#229 Can Maternal Anxiety Be Useful: Interview with Yael Goldstein-Love
Are there any anxious mothers out there? Have you ever been shamed for being an 
anxious mother? Well, I definitely have been an anxious mom, just ask my daughter. Actually, I have never met a mom, especially a mom of a teen who hasn’t had to deal with anxious thoughts. Moms are going to worry. the challenge is making anxiety useful and not being a constant source of agony. In this episode, we talk about how to get curious about anxiety and learn from it.
Joining us today is Yael Goldstein-Love. She is the author of the novels The Passion of Tasha Darsky, described as “showing signs of brooding genius” by The New York Times, and The Possibilities, forthcoming in July. She also practices psychotherapy, with a particular interest in the transition to parenthood, and is working toward her doctorate in clinical psychology. Her dissertation research focuses on how mothers experience their anxiety for the unknown futures of their children. She is a graduate of Harvard University and currently attends The Wright Institute. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal Speakeasy Blog, The Atlantic online, The Forward, Commentary, and other places. She lives with her six-year-old son and a very patient cat in Berkeley, CA.
Here are a couple of quotes from Yael’s article on maternal anxiety.
“There is a mismatch between the primal maternal drive to protect our offspring and our knowledge that we’re largely powerless to do so, and this gap between what we long to do as mothers taxed with seeing the next generation in, and what we can realistically do as human beings, is one of the more brutal gifts of evolution. No wonder anxiety is such a fundamental part of motherhood.”
“We don’t often think about the sheer existential heft of caring for a child, and how anxiety is baked right into it. To honor this aspect of mothering would be to look head-on at realities we all find harrowing: that life is fragile, we never know what’s coming next, we suffer, and in the end we die. Maternal worry gets at the heart of what is terrifying about being alive, and about loving.”
Learn more at: https://www.yaelgoldsteinlove.com/