The Unique Challenge of Becoming a Mother for Intellectual Women

Your thinking won't save you here

The Left Brain Dominated Intellectual

As is well documented here on my Substack, the early days of motherhood have been challenging for me. It hasn’t quite been the easy, breezy, “natural” experience other women claim to have had. Although much of my struggle can be attributed to circumstance, it wasn’t until I listened to Dr. Allan Schore, a psychologist specializing in attachment theory, on the Huberman Lab podcast that it hit me— a lot of my struggle has to do with the fundamental way I approach motherhood, and life in general.

Schore explained how attachment between the mother and baby is formed in the first three years of life. In his research, they found that before the age of three, babies are primarily using their right brain— the side of the brain responsible for feeling and intuition. In those first three years, the mother (or primary caregiver) and the baby engage in a right brain to right brain communication, in which the healthy attachment of the baby is developed upon an in-tune synchronization and response from the mother.

The primary role of the mother in those first three years is to co-regulate with her baby, to feel with and intuit her baby’s needs and emotions.

Now, imagine, an intellectual women, who primarily uses the left side of her brain, which is responsible for logic and language, who makes sense of things through theories, through articulation. This sort of woman who over-emphasizes the left brain, while ignoring or repressing her intuition (the right side that is required for mother and baby bonding) was described in Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey.

The Intellectual & Control Seeking Woman

Murdock details the journey of a woman she describes as the “father’s daughter.” As a young girl, she may have had a depressed, repressed, or oppressed mother and so resisted an identification with the feminine, and instead identified with the father, the virile, ambition and intellect focused masculine. The masculine-identified intellectual woman has a fundamental rejection of “right brain” associated things, such as feeling and intuition, due to their negative association with the feminine and weakness.

For me, in early motherhood, this manifested in over-researching everything about pregnancy, birth, developmental milestones, etc. Then, when things didn’t go according to my research, I didn’t know what to do, and that “not knowing” made me feel massively uncomfortable, and because the unknown, the unarticulated was foreign territory for me— it felt wrong. To be made to feel wrong as a mother may be one of the worst feelings, because you care so much about this little creature you just made and brought into the world, you want to be able to do everything for them, and for me that meant knowing everything (I delve more into this journey in my blog post on Being vs Doing).

Alas, motherhood was not like the world I was used to, school, university, and work— where there was a right answer, and I always made sure to know it and beyond.

In Lane Scott’s Substack post about creating and maintaining traditions in motherhood, she mentioned how many of the associations that our children make with holiday traditions are centered around “creature comforts,” like feasting. This triggered in me a sense of how carnal motherhood really is. Literally growing your baby in your body, feeding your baby from your breasts, getting your circadian rhythms interrupted regularly. In the early years, your baby doesn’t necessarily require your mind as much as they do your body.

An overly-intellectual person can sometimes forget they even have a body. To them, everything exists in the head, and everything is malleable through thought and theorizing. They have such a strong grip on the reality they attempt to hold and manipulate, that when something from beyond happens, like motherhood, it can be hard to learn to surrender to it.

In My Brilliant Friend, Lila, a highly intelligent and agentic woman finally becomes pregnant after many failed attempts, and has a brutal delivery. The doctor later recalls the labor to her friend as, “a fight against nature, a battle between mother and child.” Lila is used to having such a grasp on reality to the extent that she is able to influence situations and people to get what she wants and needs out of them. In pregnancy and child birth, something beyond you is using and moving through your body in an entirely uncontrollable and unpredictable manner.

The Angst of the “Masculine” Striving Mother

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, also a highly accomplished intellectual like her husband, struggles with the transition into motherhood. They are isolated at Los Alamos while Oppenheimer is doing his own work in pushing the boundaries of intellect, while Kitty is at home with their baby. In one poignant scene, Oppenheimer comes home after another long day at work to the baby crying while Kitty is sitting in the kitchen with her drink. He asks if she is going to go to him, and she replies, “I’ve been going to him all fucking day.” She develops a drinking problem and eventually they have to give their baby over the to care of close friends for a while for her to get a grip.

Drinking and drug problems were quite common in housewives around the early to mid-20th century. It was still a time where women were expected to bear the entire burden of child rearing (without much choice of their own), and amid the rise of suburban living (and subsequent loss of familial and group associations), they faced isolation. For an intellectual women like Kitty, with all the horsepower in her head, the mundanity of the day-to-day chores of a housewife can be mind-numbing, and enough to drive a woman crazy when she has nothing else to aspire to or focus on.

One of the most unexpected emotions I’ve experienced in motherhood is Angst. At levels like never before, too. It’s an emotion most associated with adolescence, during which a child is becoming an adult and goes through intense physical, emotional, and cognitive changes. Things are happening to them that they cannot quite understand. That’s how motherhood can feel to a woman who is used to it being the other way around.

There is, in fact, an equivalent term for mothers I recently learned about: matrescence. The term was coined in the 1970s by anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the transformation a woman undergoes when becoming a mother, similar to adolescence in its profound identity shifts and physical and hormonal changes. This transition might be the hardest on women who have the strongest sense of self, the strongest superego.

We Cannot Survive on Intellect Alone

Jordan Peterson often warns about “Luciferian Intellect,” or the idea that intelligence as a single and highest pursuit leads to sin and ruin. In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the first ring of hell, or Limbo, is reserved for great thinkers, philosophers, poets, and individuals who lived righteous lives but were not baptized or lived before the advent of Christianity. The punishment in Limbo is the absence of God's light and eternal separation from His divine presence. This is often described as a sorrowful existence rather than active torment. It is portrayed as a serene yet somber place. It lacks the violent and grotesque torments of the deeper circles of Hell but carries a pervasive sense of unfulfilled longing. In Canto IV of Inferno, Dante writes:

“We are lost, and only so far punished,
that without hope we live on in desire.”

The egoic, intellectual mind infinitely craves understanding. When it comes up against something new, something indefinable, it is at risk of collapsing if not open to the possibility of something greater than itself.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegal the Elder

In the story of the Tower of Babel from the Bible, where humanity, speaking a single language, united to build a tower reaching the heavens and were condemned by God, seeing their pride and ambition, to be scattered across the earth, halting construction and creating different cultures with different languages. The story critiques human pride and the desire to challenge divine authority. The tower symbolizes human overreach and the consequences of collective arrogance. The story underscores humanity's dependence on God and warns against attempts to attain godlike power or immortality.

In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes,

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

In Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC, he writes a partially fictionalized account of the lives and struggles of scientists and mathematicians during the early 20th century, focusing on the moral and existential dilemmas they faced while developing technologies like the atomic bomb and early computing. Labatut delves into physicist Paul Dirac’s enigmatic personality, his almost machine-like intellect, and his struggles to reconcile human emotions with the abstract, often cold logic of his scientific pursuits. Here, he narrates Dirac’s descent:

“…the strange new rationality that was beginning to take shape all around them, a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter haunting the soul of science, which Paul could almost see as an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit hovering over his colleagues’ heads at meetings and conferences, peering over their shoulders, or nudging their elbows, ever so slightly, as they wrote down their equations, a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational, and though still fledgling and dormant it was undeniably gathering strength, wanting desperately to break into the world, preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control.”

Dirac would go on to kill his mentally challenged son and then himself in an extremely “rational” and well thought out manner (killing his son as to not leave a burden for his wife and other children). This part being very real and not fiction.

The Feminine Feeling

Emma Jung further elaborates on the connection between intellectual grasping in the masculine and the opposite feminine manifestation in her essay “Anima and Animus:”

“If we ask ourselves why second sight and the art of prophecy are ascribed to woman, the answer is that in general she is more open to the unconscious than man. Receptivity is a feminine attitude, presupposing openness and emptiness… the feminine mentality is less averse to irrationality than the rationally oriented masculine consciousness, which tends to reject everything not conforming to reason and so frequently shuts itself off from the unconscious.”

This is the very right brain use that Schore described in his research as necessary for the healthy attachment and development of babies. The right brain connection is not only natural for women, but necessary for our purposes of reproduction and child rearing. It involves an opening to possibility, to the unconscious. This aspect, although unspoken, is still a fundamental part of life as it is, and to deny it would be to miss the mark and live in a different kind of delusion.

Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse

Lila, the character from My Brilliant Friend, who is highly intelligent, yet removed from academia, gave her thoughts on Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall, much to the confusion of her highly educated, “intellectual” friends:

“There’s this character named Dan Rooney. He’s blind but he doesn’t care because he thinks life is better without sight. At a certain point, he wonders if he became deaf and mute, life would be even more life. Pure life.”

She points to this idea of the over-intellectualization of life, which can snuff out the very flame of life. When you have nothing to sense with, nothing to perceive and reason with, your eyes and ears can’t deceive you. You get to feel the undefined, unspoken parts of life, and simply be one with the river that is life, instead of a separate force attempting to capture it (a strange irony in that it can’t be fully understood unless actually lived out and felt).

Integration of the Opposites in Motherhood

Jordan Peterson spoke about the seduction of intellectual superiority and how to manage it:

“Intelligence is a tool, not a virtue. Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re wise. Wisdom comes from the integration of many modes of being, not the domination of one.”

Becoming a mother has added another entirely new mode of being for me. It has forced me to connect more deeply to my feminine side. I was suffering for trying to carry out a fundamentally feminine role in a masculine, intellect based manner.

At the end of the day what do my kids really need? Certainly not me pontificating about all the ways to be a 2% better mother if it drives me to misery seeing all the ways I’m inadequate. Sometimes I just need to turn my brain off and do the dishes. It’s so easy to get caught up in my mind and thinking about motherhood in all the ways you see me think as I write in this blog, that I forget to just pick up some dirty laundry, sit down and play with my kids and that’s it. Sometimes it’s just not that deep.

Having my daughters enriches my writing— it forces me to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground in the “mundane” tasks of motherhood. It keeps my brainiac self in the moment, in life itself, instead of getting swept up in whatever may come into my head at any moment. Only the best thoughts and ideas will survive because I have too many competing thoughts in my head, being in charge of my kids and the household and all the constant demands that come with that.

I can’t write as frequently as I want to, and that’s okay. The trade off is well worth it. I am intentionally sacrificing something I love, that is important to me, in order to be a mother to my girls. It deepens the meaning of being a mother. I’m not just doing this because I got knocked up and it’s some chill, easy gig to stay at home. There’s lots of women writing about femininity, but nobody can be a mother to my girls except for me. They are mine and I am theirs. This is the most important task, always and forever. That is the deep love of a mother, the sacrifice that motherhood requires.

No sacrifice comes without its fair burden of suffering. After not having time or energy to write a blog post for the past few months, I felt myself going crazy, starting to see my family as a burden and resenting my responsibility. It was a dark time, but I knew what I needed to do to get out of it. As all my ideas built up in me and started to rot, so I too began to rot. I had to get the words out.

The Nightmare by Johann Heinrich Füssli

For whatever reason, whatever potential “dysfunction” or not, an intellectual woman is an intellectual woman. She can do herself well by integrating the necessary feeling and intuition of her oft neglected feminine side, but she will always have the need to use her mind to the greatest possible extent.

That’s the beauty of the integration of the opposites. There is a time and place for using my mind in mothering, when my girls are older, they will have the privilege of having a mom they can actually talk to— not just some entirely right brained woman only capable of providing nurturing through meals. Likewise, using my emotion and intuition in my intellectual pursuits only enriches my writing and my ideas.

At the end of the day, it’s about being like water — moving through each one when you can, when the time calls for it.