Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Barbara Almond: The Hidden Side of Motherhood

So tonight we are here to celebrate the publication of Barbara Almond's book, "The Monster Within: The hidden side of motherhood." And I cannot think of a more appropriate person to introduce Dr. Almond this evening than her own son, Steve Almond. Many of you may know Steve as he is one of Boston's favorite local authors. His mother has much to be proud of as he's a creator of countless articles, reviews and books. Among his books, "My Life in Heavy Metal," "The Evil B.B. Chow," "Candy Freak" and "Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life." He's also published not one, not two, but three books on Harvard Book Store's own book-making robot which I encourage you to check out after the talk. Again everyone, thanks so much for coming out tonight. Please join me now in welcoming Steve Almond. [Applause] Hi, is everybody comfortable or as comfortable as they can be? And if not try to, because we're going to go to about midnight. My Mom just parties. And it's crazy. Um, yes. So, um, all right I'm going to do a formal introduction here of

a woman for whom I literally could never have delivered this introduction without her help--without whom! Thank you, Mother. [Laughter] You wouldn't believe it. That's the first time she's ever corrected me. So we're here to celebrate "The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood," and it's a book that my Mom has been at work on in some sense since the day I was born. It's about women's fear of giving birth to monsters. She's also the author, with her husband Richard Almond, um, this little piece of arm candy right here, ladies, of the therapeutic narrative which is a remarkably incisive examination of how the most enduring fictional, most enduring of our fictional relationships function as a form of therapy. And I have stolen from it often and generally in an unattributed manner when I want to sound erudite. Right. Let's see. I'll say

just to state the obvious that I wouldn't have become a writer without the support, and before that, the example of my parents who are my favorite sort of people on Earth, which is to say they're passionate readers. I love you both very much and feel very lucky that I, just in the genetic lotto, that's who I got. Before you accuse me of bias, a few other accounts of the book. This is from The New Yorker, a place where I have never been reviewed. "Vampires, incest, babies, and infanticides--oh my! Barbara Almond's spooky new book is just the thing for a gray and drizzly autumn afternoon. Drawing on her 37 years of practice as a psychoanalyst, as well as her own experiences as a mother, Almond leads an adventurous tour through the shadowy secret parts of the mother's psyche. Almond's theories are fascinating to read." And Carolyn See, writing for The Washington Post, had this to say: "First let me recommend this engrossing study to every new mother, old mother, good mother, and bad mother. Husbands, ah sons, husbands, dads, and lovers might profit from reading this too. 'The

Monster Within' addresses what everybody knows but almost nobody talks about. Even the best mothers among us will be or have been tormented from time to time by strong feelings of dread, fear, hatred and even revulsion at the whole process of motherhood, as well as experiencing downright murderous feelings toward our children." That's true for I'm sure, not my mother but I've heard from others, and I'll just conclude with a little visual aid that was handed to me um. These are Barbara's monsters in question 42 years ago. Yeah. So, I'll hand this around and ah everybody can, you know, no, well, if you want to take a look afterwards if you buy a book. Please welcome Barbara Almond. Well, I'd like to ah start by saying that I never thought I would be here or at any other bookstore, reading this book because I never thought it would get published. I was told over and over again that it's too

disturbing a subject, and um, probably 40 publishers later, the University of California Press had mercy on me and ah decided to publish it. So I'd like to start by reading some segments from the book and then I think there will be not only a lot of questions but probably a lot of comments from the audience, seeing that it's about 90 percent women and that every one of you looks like a reader to me anyway (laughs). The title of the book--I'm I'm often asked about that. The book really began as part of a ah paper that I had to produce in order to graduate from the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. And it was a book that was based on a woman who I saw in analysis who was afraid to have a child and never did have a child. And it was ah really an eye-opener for me in many ways. And she was

afraid, among other things, that her child would be a creature-- or a monster. I was going to write a book about ah figures of monstrous infants and children in literature, a book that probably would have sold about 25 copies [laughs] based on the last book, that we did together. But this book slowly [laughs], this book began to morph into um a study of women's ambivalent feelings about their children. Um and that's really where it ended up. And um, the monster within, therefore, is not a fantasy monstrous baby but women's feelings about their own mixed feelings about their children, their fears that it's monstrous that they have sometimes mixed feelings about, you know, ah about their young. So let me let me start um,

I'll see if I can even read this, by reading something from from the preface to the book. This book developed from two primary sources: my own experiences, struggles and anxieties as a mother; and my clinical work with patients in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis over the course of 38 years of practice. Having gone through medical school thinking I would become a pediatrician, I became a mother first. And once I was a mother I found it too disturbing to imagine taking care of ill and sometimes dying children. I decided to pursue instead further training in adult psychiatry and, eventually, to psychoanalysis. The work I do with my patients, whether psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, is based on the premise that what you don't know CAN hurt you. Our

personalities are deeply connected to our experiences in early life, most of which we have forgotten. However, these experiences and relationships live on in our unconscious minds. They're brought to life in the talking therapies, during which they are relived, hopefully, between patient and therapist, and subsequently understood. In my own work I treat out patients, people who do not need to be hospitalized but who suffer from neurotic problems and personality disorders, often a mixture of both. Neurotic disorders are characterized by symptoms, in particular anxiety and depression, and inhibitions in work, love, and creative endeavors related to unconscious feelings, impulses and fantasies, thoughts and memories. Much of the suffering of people with neurotic problems is internal. Neurotics tend to take out their misery on themselves. Personality disorders are somewhat more severe. People who suffer from them

behave in characteristic maladaptive ways that cause much interpersonal difficulty and anguish. And I should say that neither of these things ever appears in pure form. Nevertheless, um people with such disorders also grapple with painful moods, difficulty achieving goals, and disordered relationships but they act them out behaviorally. They do not suffer in silence. For most of my professional life I've treated more women than men. These women came to see me because of dissatisfaction, depression and anxiety connected with their work and their intimate relationships. As I grew older, my patient population aged. I saw more and more women with children and some without children, either by choice or failure to conceive. I began to tune in more to women's fears surrounding their reproductive activities: pregnancy, childbirth and, most of all, mothering. I

believe my sensitivity to these issues increased as I got older and as my own children grew up. I no longer had to deny out of anxiety, shame and guilt, my own and maternal ambivalence and shortcomings. Furthermore, it became increasingly clear to me that the shame and guilt that my ambivalence engendered had made it extremely hard for me as a young mother to come to terms with my limits. And it's not so easy as an older mother either. But it was very, very difficult at that time and I began to see that this was true for most mothers. In my situation, I was deeply conflicted about how much time to devote to my mothering, versus my profession. My children were born when I was in my mid-20s before I had completed my psychiatric training. I feared if I waited too long to return, I would lose confidence in my role as a professional. But there was a truth even harder to face. As much as I loved my children,

they were demanding and exhausting and my work, although also demanding and exhausting, was often a respite. I made an important compromise in arranging to do my residency part time, taking five years to complete a three-year training program. For many years after I began my private practice, I tailored it to the school schedule. Nevertheless, when I was at work my children were often on my mind. The first day of my psychiatric residency was also the first day of nursery school for my two-and-a-half year old son. Not this one--his older brother. When I left him at school he was crying, and by the time I got into my car, I was in tears also. Unable to concentrate on my work, I called the head teacher at least three times that first morning. Finally, she tactfully suggested that I have my husband bring him to school in the future. This this solved

the immediate problem of my son's crying but not the chronic problem of my guilt and anxiety about my children and my mothering. During the mid-nineties I happened to be treating, all at once, several women who were conflicted about whether or not to have children. Having wanted children myself is a much younger woman, [cough] I had not thought much about this issue. I assumed all women wanted children and, if they were not aware of this, therapy or analysis would put them in touch with this wish and, if it was not too late, lead to motherhood. As it turned out, this assumption was wrong. The fears and conflicts some women feel about motherhood are so strong that treatm,ent cannot tip the scales in favor of having children. I came to realize that all my female patients, past and present, had been

or were, at least part of the time, dealing with guilt and shame about the quality of their mothering or their avoidance of motherhood. And this was true even if they were devoted and conscientious mothers. It gradually became clear to me that fears about adequate mothering span a spectrum in time, beginning long before the prospective mother's decision about childbearing, and extending throughout her life as both a mother and a daughter. These fears often manifest clinically in disguised forms, such as rationalized deferments of pregnancy, often until it is too late, poorly understood abortions, or in direct form, difficulties mothering or difficult feelings about mothering. The first theme that engaged me, because it appeared in the treatment of several women during the same period, concerned the fear of bearing or creating monstrous offspring. Thinking about this fear from a psychological point of view, I began to speculate about the meaning of

monsters and our fascination with them in literature and popular culture. This was in the first ah plan for the book. Every Halloween I can count on Young Frankensteins and Draculas appearing at my door. along with ghosts, witches, bats, black cats, pirates, other icons of horror. True, princesses and fairies and butterflies and an assortment of other benign animals also appear, but monstrous figures far outnumber them among the young supplicants who ring my doorbell, hungry for sweets. Why Frankenstein and why Dracula? And why have the grim novels from which they sprang remain best sellers for more than a hundred years? They must speak to very basic human psychological issues. One of the reasons we read is to find out more about how others deal with the conflicts that consciously and unconsciously trouble us, to understand how their stories play out, how they deal with

closeness and distance, love and hate, damnation and redemption. As I reflected on the subject of monstrous offspring, my thoughts gradually turned to a more general issue. Women's difficulties dealing with the negative side of maternal ambivalence through all the phases of child-rearing, what I think of as the dark side of motherhood, and as a result, as the hidden side of motherhood, the central subject of this work. Conflict is the bedrock of human psychology and has always manifested in some form of ambivalence--the word we use for feelings of both love and hate towards the same person, goal, or desire in our lives. It is a completely normal phenomenon. What we love can disappoint us. What we love we can also lose, and what we lose causes us pain. That mothers have mixed feelings about their

children should come as no surprise to anybody. But it is amazing how much of a taboo the negative side of ambivalence carries in our culture, especially at this time. I believe that today's expectations for good mothering have become so hard to live with, the standards so draconian, that maternal ambivalence has increased, and at the same time become more unacceptable to society as a whole. I feel very strongly that women suffer unduly from the anxiety and guilt that their ambivalence engenders in them and the disapproval that it engenders in others. Ambivalence needs to be understood as a phenomenon that can be both constructive and destructive. Constructive when it leads the mother to think creatively about her difficulties mothering and they can be managed--how they can be managed. And destructive when it leads to hopelessness, intractable guilt, self-hatred, shame, anxiety

and punitive behaviors. Now that's all of the preface that I'm going to read at the moment. Ah, the book as a whole is made up of my own observations, clinical observations, and theories about the scope and results of maternal ambivalence. I use a lot of clinical examples disguised and, generally in the past, not of patients who I'm currently seeing, the experiences of relatives, friends, strangers, and occasionally myself--even better disguised than the ones of my patients. And ah dramatic examples--I feel dramatic examples from literature, where authors may be able to say what patients often cannot say. The shape of the book is, to begin with, explanations of ambivalence, mother love, fears of pregnancy and childbirth and then the spectrum of ambivalent feelings. Among them the too-good mother who

doesn't recognize her ambivalence at all, the ambivalent mother who internalizes her feelings and feels guilty and blames herself, and also women who externalize their ambivalence and blame their children, and feel punished by even being mothers. And I'm going to read two brief passages, one about the too-good mother and one a little bit about a mother who internalizes--just to give you a flavor of ah what I mean by these things, and then we can go on to have some questions and discussion. But before I do that, um I want to read a passage that has to do with what probably somewhere was the beginning of this book a long, long time ago, and since I see in this audience some of my classmates from Yale Medical School, I wanted to talk about a study that I did during that time.

Yale Medical School didn't feel it was enough for you to go through medical school to achieve an MD. You had to write a final paper and um it had to be a research paper, like a mini-thesis actually. So at those many years ago in my early twenties I had the opportunity to observe the passionate bonding between mother and child in the earliest days of life. As a medical student at Yale University, I did a research thesis on social class differences in sources of information on infant care. In the course of this study I interviewed 20 first-time mothers in their first few postpartum days. These were 20 mothers, most of them about my age at that time. Um, most of them were blissful and delighted, happy to be through their childbirth, and convinced that their babies were beautiful and special. But two were not. One of the unhappy women was a

graduate student who had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She knew in advance that she she would be having twins and when I interviewed her three days postpartum she was talking about the girl as "my baby" and the boy as "my husband's baby." Overwhelmed and frightened at the prospect of caring for two children, she didn't want to nurse the little boy. She was, however, quite distressed at these feelings and some "emergency supportive psychotherapy," which actually was the interview I did with her, which went on for several hours, apparently was very helpful to her because when I saw her a few days later she had decided that she didn't have to nurse both babies entirely. She could supplement each of them with a bottle and she was already noticeably calmer and more attached to the little boy. Her husband's willingness to participate actively in infant care was also helpful to her in regaining her

balance. This was a situation worth noting. A potentially harmful degree of ambivalence was arrested by a combination of crisis intervention therapy and spousal support. I believe the brief "therapy" was helpful because her feelings were treated with respect and understanding rather than the condemnation she expected. The ensuing relief of her anxiety and guilt allowed her to solve her dilemma with practical measures that were previously unacceptable to her. Sharing the nursing between the two babies and using supplementary bottles and such and such. I did not get a chance to follow up her situation but it wouldn't surprise me if she became gradually able to nurse both babies fully and, if she didn't, it didn't matter at that point. Her confidence in her motherhood was not derailed at this crucial early time. The second situation--this is two out of 20. The other 18 no problem. That situation seemed much more ominous. The mother, an 18-year-old married

woman, was so upset and anxious I could barely interview her and she barely would agree to an interview. Ah what her sources of information on infant care were seemed highly irrelevant. She wanted nothing to do with the baby. He frightened her. She talked of the difficult birth and implied that he would be very hard to take care of. He was peacefully asleep during the entire interview. I found myself feeling very alarmed. It was clear that this woman's mother and large extended family would, in effect, care for the child. The study did not involve later follow up but, in retrospect, thinking about it in current years, I realized I was witnessing the development of a monster baby in the mind of the mother, and unlike the mother of twins. this woman had no interest in psychotherapeutic intervention. She wanted out of a situation she found intolerable, and I don't know why. I just knew that that was the way she felt. I should add that there didn't seem to be

any relationship between reported difficulty of childbirth and enthusiasm for the infant in the other 19 women. This patient was disturbed and unprepared for motherhood in any form. So you could say that um things sort of started there in a way. The next thing I wanted to do--if I have time is I [pause] Well, I don't know that I have that much time. Maybe I'll just read this one, this one vignette and then we can we can go on to um [sniff] questions, discussion, opinions. This is in a chapter called "The subtle ambivalence of the too-good mother." Um this is the story of Tanya, the daughter of a friend of an acquaintance of mine, and it's one that's typical of too-good mothers of a certain type. These mothers are convinced that doing the right thing would protect their children from all

sorts of future emotional, behavioral and learning difficulties. This belief in the right thing can be a rationalization for a kind of fanaticism [sniff] that is often deeply rooted in their early experiences. Now in Tanya's case these experiences involved having been raised in a family of religious fundamentalists. In her family, if one believed something, this alone made it right. I'm comparing their way of looking at the world with a more empirical and scientific view. That is, if something is proven right, it is then believable. As an adult, Tanya was close to her family, but distanced herself from their religious fundamentalism and political conservatism. But as so often happens, this discarded fanaticism appeared in a different form. Tanya became an atheist, politically left wing, and a deep believer in alternative medicine and child-rearing practices. [sniff] These convictions and

practices were right because she believed in them. OK, now at risk of offending some of you I'll give you something of a description of her. Her three children were home birthed. This was not a problem with the second and third children but Tanya's first delivery was a nightmare. The second stage of labor was protracted and extremely painful, ending up in an emergency trip to the hospital.There, reluctantly, she accepted an epidural and delivered the child within the next hour. Tanya viewed this birth as a failure on her part. Although she loved her son dearly, her childbirth wasn't NATURAL. [Um] Her later success at home delivery, with the easier labor she had with her two smaller daughters, alleviated her guilt about her son's birth. But why should she have felt guilty in the first place? Tanya nursed all her children in an equally fanatical way. It was only her exhaustion from long sleepless nights and her need to get

out and see friends once in a while that induced here to permit her husband to give the babies an occasional bottle of pumped breast milk. If they hadn't, it is not clear when or if Tanya would have weaned them. She did not believe in vaccination or other forms of modern medicine except in dire situations. Her children were not given painkillers or antibiotics. Their food was one hundred percent organic and mostly vegetarian. Sugar was carefully proscribed. Tanya's husband went along with his wife's convictions when it came to child rearing but he was more relaxed about the entire project an, as a result, he seldom intervened. Tanya's sense of rightness went beyond the physical care of her children. The family did not have a television set and until they were older, the children were allowed very limited time on the computer. Tanya believed that screen time interferes with brain development and it well may but you know... Toys were made of wood, never

plastic, and had to be educational as well as fun. The family lived in a city with good public schools. Tanya did not push your children about their school performance which was fortunate because her son had a lot of trouble with his verbal skills for several years. He especially minded the absence of computer time and he later turned out to be a natural at computer work. Both her children, her daughters, did well at school and were generally more compliant with the rules of the home. Now one could ask where the hidden ambivalence was in Tanya's maternal behavior. Most mothers worry about doing the right thing and tend to follow the class-related popular cultural practices of their time. And Tanya was certainly an involved and loving mother but she pushed her beliefs too far. She was subtly inflexible. A story she told me illustrates this inflexibility. Because her first child weaned himself once he began to eat solids. she was worried that her nursing had been inadequate.

It was especially important to her that she nursed her second child adequately. This little girl was a frequent and lusty feeder and it was hard for Tanya to keep up with her especially now that she had two children. One afternoon when Tanya was just exhausted. her mother urged her to try giving her baby some rice cereal. Reluctantly, Tanya agreed. The baby, then seven months old. ate it avidly. Tanya began giving her solids regularly but again felt she was a failure as a mother because no food is the equivalent of mother's milk. But Tanya did exhibit exhibit a particular kind of ambivalent behavior that was striking because it was so different from her usual concern about her children's welfare. She would make dates with friends or plan short vacations without adequately preparing the children for her absence. She would then let them know she she would let them know that she would be gone but often she did not give them enough time to take her

absences in, and she was not entirely reliable about when she returned. Since her children were all deeply dependent on her, it was very destabilizing. As the children grew older, they had trouble with separation, both from their parents and from each other. I believe Tanya's erratic behavior with regard to separations revealed her unconscious ambivalence as well as her unconscious worry about harming her children. The harm was projected into the wrong foods, the wrong practices, and the wrong toys, all of which she avoided and could control, but surfaced in her mistakes surrounding separation. Of these mistakes, fueled by ambivalence, she was unaware. I'm sure some of it could. [audience background voice] Oh, repeat the question. Okay. The two, the two of postpartum babies whose mothers were having trouble with them - this woman would like to know how much of that was attributable to hormones and chemical changes. Well I don't know for sure. I mean some of it well might have been. But then

what do you do about the others who I'm sure went through baby blues? You know when you when you interview someone the second day in the hospital you may catch them before some of that depression that comes when you when you go home. But this went way beyond that, especially the last woman that I described. I just don't think she was ready and I don't know what the circumstances were under which she got pregnant which might have had something to do with it but that wasn't part of the study. The question was: Is there any relationship between this study and Adrienne Rich's work in her book, "Of Woman Born"? There certainly is and I quote her and I read that book. I remember reading it when my children were much, much younger and I thought, oh my god--I'm not the only one! [laugh] It's very, very striking. [Sniff] There are several vignettes in there and some larger parts of the book that refer to me in disguise

form. Okay. And I'm not going to tell you what they are. They have to be able to stand on their own feet. You know, they won't be unfamiliar to you when you know when and if, as it were, the people I see and the people I associate with are largely middl-class, educated people. And um so that's my sample. I mean I'm aware that, for instance among working class women, um some of the forms that ambivalence takes are certain kinds of laziness, not being careful about diet, and some of these are economically, you know, using television as babysitters, not to say that this doesn't happen to middle class women. Corporal punishment, at times. I mean there was a time when, you know, when I grew up you got spanked if you were naughty but I mean that's, that's a no-no now. But I do acknowledge in talking briefly about these women that this is

really more hearsay and not, not something I'm, I'm familiar with. I mean I got interested in this whole subject through my work with this patient and um you know it just, it just went on from there. And I wasn't about to write about something I don't know about um. Lower class women, working class women don't have the luxury of feeling terrible about going to work because their kids are going to die if they don't. You know, so it's a whole, whole different kind of situation. It's not a, it's not a self-help book but I hope it's helpful. You know, I think, I think it's meant to be reassuring. The last chapter deals with, you know, what you can do. Ah and the point I make is that therapy and analysis may be very, very helpful, particularly if problems are fairly severe, but that women um need to talk to each other about

these things more honestly and, and they don't. I actually quote a member of this audience in my book and I'm not going to say who she is, who told me on reading, I think, the first chapter that her mother's group had once taken up the whole subject of negative feelings towards their children and been quite forthcoming about it. And then all felt so ashamed they could never go back to it again. And ah this is not good. I don't think, anyway. I don't think the feminist movement um brought to bear these kinds of standards and rules, and what's good and what's bad. I think the whole point of that was that they felt women could both work and raise children, and there was no reason to not do both. And as it turns out it's very, very difficult to do. Um and I would be lying if I said otherwise. But I think this, um if I had to lay blame anywhere, I think I

probably lay it on the baby boomers. I mean well well-to-do young people who--I don't know where these new standards came from -- but they certainly developed out of much more forgiving standards when for instance 40 years ago or more I was raising my children, you know. Um on the other hand there are many things about today's standards that-that are, that are quite admirable. Um but I just think it goes too far and it's, it's, you know, I do talk, I do talk about child murder. But the point that I make is that I think based on the cases that I've read about, which is obviously not all the cases there have been, um these women are generally either psychotic or badly dissociated at the time of the murder. And I talk about Andrea Yates, which is a quite a tragic story. She was the woman from somewhere in the Southwest who drowned all five of her children.

She'd had repeated post-partum depressions. And I think it's a very rare as, as these things go, a very rare.... Well it depends on how hard you shake the baby, doesn't it? [laughter in background] You know? No, I don't think so. I think that, that um, that there's a, there's a little piece by Anne Lamott in one of these chapters in which she talks about how much she loves her son and how there are times when she'd just like to throw him at the wall and you know she's never going to throw him at the wall. And you, you understand what it's like to have a colicky baby, be raising him by yourself, you know, awake every night and loving him during the day time and just, you know. I would also now say [there is] more awareness of the kind of precious rules that, that surround raising children these days. I mean that's the only word I can use for it.

Tanya is not such an unusual example. I mean I presented it with some hesitation because, you know, I'm, I'm [unintellible] any I'm not to many of you. I'm no, you know, I think you're right. I'm I'm not from the south. And so I wrote, I really wrote about a population I know. Fortunately they read. I mean, that's another thing, [chuckle] but this doesn't surprise me and I'm sure it's not just in the South, you know, There must be parts of the.... And it may be partly a class thing and it may be a religious thing also. But I can't speak with any authority about that. I say this somewhere in the book--I'm I've never been a father. I'm not a man. I'm writing from my point of view. I-- my guess is that mostly men are not as ambivalent but I'm sure they struggle with it also. And there's another book out there waiting to be written by someone who's,

who's motivated to do that. But the the job of the father really, most of the time, is, is to, is to provide a structure for the mother and child even if the mother works too. But the father isn't expected to be responsible for the children in the same way that mothers are. I mean I know there are exceptions and that sort of thing but so I do talk about father/son but I don't, I don't, you know, speculate too much about them. This lady is a nurse and a doula and she has been, she has been, um she's commenting on the changes in the expectations for both childbirth and early child rearing that she sees and feels that there are helpful support groups around. I'm, I'm very glad to hear it. I don't hear about it too much from my from my patients. I should say that um yes, there are differences in the kinds of things my patients tell me now than there were 20 years

ago but I'm also more interested in it now. You know, this was not so much a subject that I had gotten my teeth into at that time. So it's, it's a little bit hard to say. Um I think women always follow whatever the fashion is, you know, and the fashions were, were more forgiving 20 and 40 years ago. I think, you know. The point I'm making in my last chapter is that unlike animals who breed and have young, women know they're doing it and they know what the dangers are and, you know, they have consciousness of what they're getting themselves into. And I think it breeds enormous worry. And women who are used to being very perfectionistic in their lives period--it doesn't change when they, when they have children and that's ah what I meant about the baby boomers without, you know, being too precise about it. Does that answer the question?

Um of the women that I have talked about in the book, none of them were homosexual and I don't think I've had homosexual women in my practice but I don't think I've had any who've had children. If I were seeing someone now I think I would be more likely that they would than when I started out. So I can't help you with that one. [Sniff] Cynthia's asking whether things between daughters and mothers can and tend to get better when the daughters have children. Without having any hard evidence on this, I gotta say yes. You know, because I just think that being a grandparent is so much easier and you know it's so easy to be wise and patient and, you um know, not all mothers get along with with their daughters better once the daughters have children but I bet some pretty good percentage do. I don't have figures on this but but that's my.... Because I think that

actually one of the cases I go into in depth in the book finds a mother--this woman finds a mother who she had many, many doubts and frustrations with, to be a wonderful grandmother, you know, and very, very helpful to her and I think that is not an unusual experience.