The Sunday Times of October 16th carried an article by Emily Rapp-"Notes from a Dragon Mom"-about her young son, a toddler, who has Tay-Sachs disease. This is a nasty genetic condition for which there is no treatment and which inevitably leads to death, usually by the age of three. His parents know what he has and what will happen to him. Right now he looks like a normal little boy as he sits on his mother's lap and she cuddles with him.
      The article is written from the mother's point of view. As someone interested in the vicissitudes of maternal ambivalence, I found her story very moving. For this mother, most of the issues that interest and plague modern parents have fallen by the wayside. What school he goes to is irrelevant. Developmental landmarks are irrelevant. All that is relevant is to love him and make him comfortable, to relate to him in whatever time he has left.
       Every breath is precious to this mother. She is aware that if he were a child with a normal life-span, she would be involved in what nursery school he gets into, what his future holds in terms of education and success as so many middle and upper-class parents are these days. She devotes herself to his comfort day by day.
       As a psychiatrist, I have treated a small number of women who have lost children due to illness or accident. These children were between five and fifteen years of age. The little boy with Tay-Sachs disease has less time than that. These losses are the most painful I have seen patients endure. Inevitably, the parents blame themselves. "What if" I had been more careful, had seen the symptoms sooner, had not done such and such?"
For, this isn't supposed to happen. Parents are supposed to die first! This mother is packing into three years the love of a lifetime and all the perfectionistic and competitive issues that plague modern middle-class mothers have fallen by the wayside.
       Is there something today's self-criticizing and self-punishing parents can learn from this?