August 19, 2025
Maternal Ambivalence with Dr. Margo Lowy: Podcast Episode #304
Margo Lowy is the author of Maternal Ambivalence: The Loving Moments and Bitter Truths of Motherhood. Kristin Revere and Margo Lowy discuss the importance of understanding that conflicting emotions don’t diminish a mother’s love but can instead be a source of learning and growth.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am thrilled to chat with Margo Lowy, PhD, today! She is a psychotherapist specializing in mothering and the author of Maternal Ambivalence: the Loving Moments and Bitter Truths of Motherhood.
Margo holds a doctorate from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she researched maternal ambivalence. Dr. Lowy is also the author of a previous academic book, The Maternal Experience: Encounters with Ambivalence and Love, and has spoken about maternal ambivalence at universities and in media interviews worldwide.
She is a columnist for Psychology Today, a member of Pen America, and a former advisor to the founder of the Australian Jewish Fertility Network. She is a mother to three children and is based with her husband in New York City.
Welcome, Margo!
Thank you! What a great introduction!
What an impressive resume – wow!
That introduction grounds me a bit, makes me think about what I’ve been doing for a number of years, for a lot of years, actually, so thank you!
I love how you really specialized your research and studies and your speaking engagements to this very important topic of maternal ambivalence and how it affects not only relationships with a partner and child but with everyone. Could be coworkers, friends, other family members. Let’s dive into it, Margo!
Sure! What I’ve really focused on is maternal ambivalence, but there is a difference between maternal ambivalence and ambivalence. And I think I’ll talk a little bit about ambivalence first. It’s a misunderstood word or term because people think maybe that it means a blending of feelings and not caring, and it’s often even confused with indifference. And actually, ambivalence is something that is a connecting force. And what I’m talking about is, ambivalence, when you’re a mother, which is maternal ambivalence, is very different to ambivalence in any other relationship because being a mother and being ambivalent is something that is taboo. And what my work does is it turns this whole idea upside down, and maternal ambivalence becomes a really important part of the maternal language because it’s something that’s been ignored and not drilled into. So that’s my work, to really use ambivalence as part of the maternal language and to see that it can be a very, very creative force.
And I love that you defined ambivalence because there are so many different interpretations of the feelings associated with it, and most people would view it as not caring or being disconnected. And moms have to wear so many hats, and we have these instincts to mother and to care for others, whether we are mothers ourselves or not.
Yeah. Okay, that’s right. And I just want to go back a little bit to really define how I understand maternal ambivalence. How I understand it is, it means we have to engage in all our feelings about our mothering and not split them off from one another. For example, mothering, as you just suggested, it’s got times that we’re really happy and we’re sad. Times that we care for our children, and sometimes we don’t want to care for them. And it’s times that we’re very loving and times that we’re bitter. And my work emphasizes the fact that we as mothers have all these emotions and feelings and experiences. We’re caring and we’re not caring. We’re loving and not loving. And we’re happy and we’re not happy. So it’s a very inclusive way of looking at mothering. And as mothers, we tend to disregard the difficult, dark parts of mothering. We don’t really want to go there. We don’t really want to examine it. And what my work does is I encourage mothers not to just live with the dark and difficult feelings, but to really understand them because there’s value in these dark, difficult feelings. And they actually help us to understand our souls and our mothering.
I can give you an example if you like. So the mother is in the mall with three of her children there, and she says, I’ve just got to check where we’re going. Just stay here; don’t move. So she’s looking through her Apple phone, and suddenly, instinctively, she turns around, and one of her children – just not there. As mothers, I think we’ve all had some kind of experience like that when our child goes missing. As the mom is gripped with terror – like, her life flashes before her eyes, and she’s feeling so angry because this child has disobeyed her, and she’s also feeling, what happens if someone has taken my child away from me? So she holds on tightly to her other two children, but she’s paralyzed. She doesn’t know whether to cry, to scream. She just doesn’t know what to do. And every minute is like an hour. She’s actually rooted to the spot. She doesn’t know what to do. She’s looking around, but she’s, like, tortured.
Anyway, after a few minutes, she sees her child happily skipping towards her with her best friend from school, and the mother is just – doesn’t know what to do with these feelings because she’s got an explosion of fury and love and those feelings of her life changing, disturbing her whole life. They just all come to her at the same time. And then she takes that child in her arms and those feelings all melt. The dark feelings all melt, and she’s overwhelmed with love. Her love is stronger. And then she’s ready to face the next day or the next minute.
And what I’m saying is we really need to regard these feelings, the dark difficult ones, because mothering is designed to have these feelings, to struggle with them, and this is so much part of our mothering experience. So it’s so important to realize that all our feelings are important, and that there is value in the difficult ones.
And then the mother holds her child tight and she has these overwhelming feelings, and I’m smiling as I say this, it’s almost like – I call it a melting moment. It’s that moment that, for a moment, you’re at peace with the world. You have your child back, and you can move forward. And I think all mothers have these moments, especially when we’re hands-on mothering.
Absolutely. And I feel like a lot of this topic is focused more on that immediate postnatal phase and related to potential perinatal mood disorders, postpartum depression. But really, we go through a variety of emotions throughout our journey into motherhood, even with adult children.
Absolutely. I talk about that a lot in my book because I think people really think that – or mothers think that once the child finishes school and has a relationship, that we’re off the hook. No. It continues.
I’ve got five grandchildren now, and I had my children, my first child in my early 20s, my next child in my early 30s, and my third child in my early 40s, with the same partner, but I had secondary infertility in between my first and second one, and then the third one is one of my gifts. She was a surprise child. So I’ve had a really elongated mothering experience, and the reason I started to study this is that I could kind of tell that there was something that I learned about my mothering that I now had time to put pen to paper because I could really see that my mothering had changed and adapted, but I couldn’t understand why, so I decided to write about it.
And what I figured out was my first mothering experience when I was, like, 23, I was quite lit myself. I didn’t have this – and there was no way that I was able to entertain the thought that mothering just wasn’t the greatest thing for me. There was no space for me to think about the difficult parts. I just couldn’t go there. And I think that I was mothering in a very rigid way.
With my second child, he was born after seven years of secondary infertility, so it was like such – all my three children were gifts, but once I had the second child after unexplained infertility for a long time – of course, once again, I wasn’t able to engage with anything except that this was wonderful and my child is wonderful and every day is wonderful. And once again, it was rigid.
When I was 41 and had my third child, who was a girl – well, she wasn’t going to put up with this. She questioned me and she really wanted to understand. She didn’t just take it if I said something. No. There was a whole discussion and dispute about it. But what that made me do, it made me realize that I actually had to flow with my mothering. I had to listen to her, that when I was rigid and not laughing or taking everything very seriously and sticking to plans so much – it just didn’t work. And so I really started to understand how important it is at any stage to be able to flow with mothering.
I think with one’s first child, it is really difficult to do that, and in any kind of hands-on mothering, timing is everything. I wrote a couple of articles, as you mentioned, in Psychology Today, and I wrote an article about how time and worrying about time puts so much pressure on us, especially as new mothers. And as mothers that are hands-on, because everything is to a time table. And what I discovered is the irony is if you let that go a little bit, then you can actually be more present, emotionally and physically present for your child. And it’s hard to do, but I really encourage mothers to try to understand what time means and to slow down a little bit and not to go on every after-school activity and not to put so much pressure on themselves. And this, of course, goes to the sense of pressure that is put on mothers because of the ideal about mothering, that we’re meant to be always there, always available, 24/7.
It certainly does, and I feel like parenting has changed over the years. My parents weren’t as involved as today’s parents are expected to be, to volunteer for every field trip, be at every sporting event. It is a different kind of pressure, and I feel like social media just adds competitive parenting layers that didn’t exist before.
You’re so right. When I think of my first mothering experience – my oldest son is nearly 45, and what we used to do in those days – there were no cell phones. And we used to have a play group once a week at someone else’s house, and it was very organic. We used to sit around, talk about our children, what they were doing, what they weren’t doing. But what we managed to do was we managed to develop a care and respect for one another, and there wasn’t a competition. We were just there trying to support and help each other. And I think a lot of this is has been lost now in social media.
I mean, don’t get me wrong: if it wasn’t for technology, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and it opens up a lot. But what I’m saying is I think as mums, we’ve got to be wary of what we see on social media. And I think what social media does, it splits mothers. It splits mothers into being the wonderful, full on, caring mother or the witch. And what I’m saying is we as mothers really need to admit to both. In any day, we are caring and loving, and we’re witches. And that’s okay. I want to normalize this for mothers, as well. To take away that pressure of being an ideal mother because it actually doesn’t exist. We’re actually human, and what I did in my work is I developed a few mantras which I think have really been helpful for me. And I think for mums to develop something for themselves that makes sense.
Like, what I write in my book is I wish when I’d been a first time mother, that I hadn’t had this ideal vision of what it was going to be like. I wish someone would have told me that mothering is messy and interrupted and loving because it is. That’s exactly what it is. It’s not clean. You can’t control it. It’s all those things, and that’s us, human as mothers.
I mentioned the word failure before, but mothering is an experience of making mistakes and learning from them, all the time. And when we were talking about older mothers – that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re learning, and this is the most wonderful thing about being a mother, that we’re able to learn from our experiences and maybe do it better next time. But be open to understanding that we do make mistakes. How else can we learn how to be a mother to this particular child if we don’t make mistakes and we don’t try to understand them? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve got more than one child –
I do, yes. I have two, and I also have a stepdaughter, so three total.
So you’ve got three totally different children. As we all know, we’ve got to adapt to each child. And then you’ve got the added complication and/or joy – probably and joy, of having a stepchild. And you really understand that you’re learning all the time and you’re kind of adapting all the time. And there’s some other sayings that I got from my research, which has been so valuable for me, that all mothers try to do their best. 99.9% of mothers do that. And what we’re doing is we muddle through. It’s exactly what it is. And in a sense, we need to be proud of that.
So what I’m doing is I’m disrupting that narrative that mothers are always there, they’re always caring, and they do things – they either do things right, or they do things wrong. No, we do things both. And we’re muddling through. And also, we’re teaching our children. We’re actually modeling to them that it’s okay not to know, and it’s okay to be uncertain, and it’s okay to open up about our faults. That’s how we learn. And this part of mothering – I go back to what we started with at the beginning. Mothering is different from any other experience, I believe. It’s just different. It’s just a different experience. And I’m not saying that fathering is any easier or harder. I’m just concentrating on what it’s like to be a mum. And there’s something either about birthing a child and adopting a child and in your case, being a stepparent – it just teaches you. And it’s hard and it’s wonderful, and I want to normalize that for mums. Take out that suggestion that we can be perfect and that we have it all together, because we don’t. If we can have it together enough of the time, we’re doing really well.
Right. I fully agree, and I am thankful for a lot of the movements like Brene Brown and vulnerability and showing the messy side of parenting on social media. Even some influencers, that’s their focus versus the curated perfection on Pinterest and Instagram. And I did want to circle back to what you had stated earlier, that there is essentially no manual for parenting, and every child is a unique being, and we need to parent them differently. So we learn from our mistakes, but what we may have learned with our first child may not apply for the third child.
And it doesn’t! You know, I’ve got such an interesting recollection. I think my first child was about – probably about 18 months or 2 years old. I can’t remember exactly. And I distinctly remember saying to myself, this child is not me. He’s different from me. But what I was really saying to myself is, I actually have to respect that he’s different. But learning to respect and to understand that your child is different from you is such a difficult lesson to learn. Well, it was for me, anyway. Because I saw him as an extension of myself. When I was pregnant, I thought, this child is going to complete me in some way. And yes, of course he did complete me in some way, but there’s always the other part of it, and it was learning that yes, he completes me, and I enjoy him, and there’s the other side, that he’s different and he’s going to be defiant and he’s going to have his own mind, and actually understanding about that and understanding that he will have his own mind and how I felt about that, that that is difficult and it’s also wonderful. And that’s what mothering is. These instances when one gets these flashes of light that make you really understand what mothering is. And I think when you’re actually in it, it’s so difficult to get it right and to understand it.
I talk in my book about the sense of rhythm, and I think rhythm is such a great word because I think – I don’t know if you’ve felt that, but I’ve felt in my mothering that sometimes I’m really in rhythm with my child. It’s like a beautiful sense of being in tune of understanding. And then I’m not in rhythm.
Like a sleep regression with an infant. You think you get it down, and then all of a sudden, it changes and you need to adapt. The formula is not the same. And teenage years! I’m navigating the teen years right now.
That’s a real time of learning. In my first book, I wrote a lot about those years and about how difficult – I mean, of course. Also, mothering as I see is a process of adaptation, as you say, and also it’s multiple losses and multiple griefs that we have to go through all the time that we keep moving through. What I’m saying is, you have a child at one month, and then you lose that child because the child is two months. And you’re always growing and adapting. And when the child hits puberty and they hit, like, 13, 14, 15 – it’s like a shock because they’re not the same person. They’re not our little child that we thought we could control. So we need to adapt to that, and we need to, in a sense, really pull ourselves together and to believe in them, of course to look after them, but also to trust them. And how do we do that, and what messages are we giving them? And it’s also – I write a lot about how we’re separating from them and how we feel about that. Because of course as they grow older and, say, the first time that they get into high school – as mothers, we’re going to have thoughts about that. That we’re happy about that, and we’re losing our younger child because we know that once they’re in high school, they’re exposed to so many influences that become more important than us. And how do we get through every day? And what do we say? It’s a challenge.
And what I’m saying is, I think we need to be so open about the fact that it is difficult for us, and it’s difficult for them. And it’s also about being able to listen to ourselves and listen to them. And it’s like – it’s a juggle. And we’re muddling through. There’s no other way to describe it. And when we make one of our mistakes with a teenager, it’s different from a younger child. How do we manage it? How do we apologize? Do we apologize? It’s all these questions that we have to ask ourselves and that we have to sometimes share with them because they’re growing up. And what gifts do we give them when we give them their freedom? That is something that’s so difficult to grapple with, how much freedom do we give them. We think it’s hard when we’ve got a newborn; we’re woken up at night by a newborn. Of course, that’s difficult, and how difficult it is when we’re waiting up for our 15-year-old child to come home. It’s almost like you have a déjà vu of being woken up, and this time, now you’re also being woken up. The parallels are the same. It’s unbelievable. The early experiences are often a metaphor for the more difficult times getting through those teenage years. It’s a struggle, and it’s wonderful.
Yes, to let go and to give them the independence that they crave – it’s challenging, for sure.
It is. The independence and knowing, with their independence, they’re also a dependence still, and getting that balance right. Not giving them total independence straight away because they also have to know that we’re there for them. Again, it’s this “and.” Let’s not flip between, “I’m only doing it this way.” Let’s think about all the alternatives. And this is also where my notion of ambivalence comes in because what do we do with our difficult feelings, and how do we manage them, and do we make use of them?
I talk about how a mother feels about her child staying out for the first time overnight, maybe with a partner, when they’re young. How do we manage this? And what are our feelings? Not to just be, whether shocked or angry, but to think about all of those feelings. And really, if we’re able to think about them all, we can access our own judgment because that’s the rigidity. When we’re rigid, there almost has to be an alarm bell there. When we use the word “should” or when we know we’re being judgmental, we really need to think about that and try to turn it around and somehow go with the flow and the rhythm of our mothering, and it’s so hard when one has a teenager. And it’s also hard when we’ve got a newborn. It’s also hard when we’ve got a toddler. But this is where the gems of mothering come in. This is where we can really learn and maybe try to get it right. Even if we get it wrong nine times, if we get it right the tenth time, let’s pat ourselves on the back. And as mums, we’re not good at doing that, either, at patting ourselves on the back.
So any final tips or gems of advice for our listeners, Margo?
I really like the title of my book: Maternal Ambivalence, Loving Moments and Bitter Truths. It goes to the essence of what I’m saying, that it’s both, and this is how we learn. We need to open ourselves up to both because that’s what keeps our mothering flow going, our rhythm going, and not give up. We have to keep at it because what I talked about before, indifference, we really have to be weary to keep engaged with our mothering, and that’s what the ambivalence is. And we need to really appreciate those moments when we melt and our love is overwhelming. And we really need to understand that mothering is messy and interrupted and loving. I think it’s important for mums to get some sayings for themselves and to stick to them. They’re almost like a comfort.
Mantras, essentially?
Yes, yes, that make sense to us. And just one more thing that we haven’t covered here which I really want to mention. And this is probably my final word: how important it is to surround ourselves with people that support us and care for us. It’s so important in every aspect of our life, and I think as mums, we’ve got antennas, and we know the people that don’t give us energy. We need to know that we’re supported by the right people because they will help us get through every day. I’m not saying people – I’m saying people that can challenge us, but they have to have our backs. It’s so important.
Yes, because we give so much of our energy to our partners, to our children. If we have others around us – friends, for example – that drain us of that energy, it’s not worth the effort.
And this needs to be something that’s so evidence, that we really need to be aware of. It’s not something that we can put to the side. It’s so important.
Agreed, it is everything. So how can our listeners connect with you, Margo, and of course, find your book?
Okay, they can go on my website and find me there, and that will lead you to my book. Someone called it a companion for mothers. It’s very conversational, and what it does is it connects us with all our own mothering experiences. When I give an example, what I’ve found is mothers who have read it – and actually, it’s for everyone to read to try to understand mothering – it reminds them of other parts of their mothering. And that’s what’s so wonderful about it, and it’s easy to read. And if anyone wants to connect with me on Instagram – I’m very much on Instagram – I’m really happy to reply and just to learn about everyone else’s experience with mothering.
I love it! Well, we’ll have to have you on again. You are inspirational, and I appreciate the work that you’re doing, Margo!
Thank you so much. It was so great to see you, to meet you, and I’ve got so many other parts of my work that I’d really love to share with you.
Yes, we’ll have to have you on in the future! Thanks again!
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