Maternal Mirroring: Beyond the Mother-Infant Dyad

It was a Tuesday, almost two months into my motherhood journey, I looked at Arafat and I remember feeling like I have known him my entire life. The feeling was strong, unshakable, unexplainable. I knew it did not make any sense and credited it to exhaustion and the new bond we were developing as a new family. It persisted, and I found myself at times going beyond with my attempts to explain this experience.

A sense of strange familiarity started to settle a few weeks into meeting Arafat, almost as if he has always been with us. It was a little postpartum fatigue, and a lot of whatever parental hormones were rushing through Khalid & I. You see, while the first weeks of meeting Arafat were mostly overwhelming with new experiences, emotions , etc, things started settling down eventually. Relatively. Arafat was blossoming & getting introduced to a whole host of emotions and experiences. None of which he had any idea how to process and identify & to do so, he needed the help of his new Mama and Baba. The tricky thing, though, is that in these first few weeks postpartum, we were are also getting introduced to new routines, responsibilities, experiences, and EMOTIONS. In our case, I am the primary caretaker of Arafat and I spent those days managing the great shift into motherhood and everything that cam after.

Learning to sort our emotions

There were many moments when I would feel extremely overwhelmed and it took me a while to realize that Arafat was in turn emotionally mirroring me. Of course as an infant of few weeks and a barely developed capacity to process and express emotions, Arafat just cried. I remember struggling a lot with this in the first few weeks, until once, in a moment of complete exhaustion and desperation, a crying, almost screaming, Arafat would not even settle down on my chest to feed, I gave him to Khalid and told him I just need 10 minutes. I took my 10 minutes and exercised some quick self care, took a quick shower had a cup of coffee and a cigarette and then I went back to them. Arafat was still feeling irritable, but I had gathered myself. Or at least I was not an emotional mess anymore. I held Arafat to my chest and he proceeded to slowly calm down as he was feeding. I was shocked! & the more Arafat continued to calm down, the more my emotions settled as well. I saw, through this, how Arafat’s emotional state is almost in direct response to mine, almost as if he was mirroring my emotional expression. We did this frequently in the first few weeks when I was feeling overwhelmed most days, often finding myself a disheveled emotional wreck needing space to care for myself at random moments during the day.

Things calmed down as the weeks went by, I learned to prioritize my emotional needs and in turn I found that Arafat was getting irritable less frequently. He was essentially mirroring my emotional state, or at least deriving emotional security from me.. I saw that my attempts at consciously managing my emotional state reflects on him, or perhaps actively works to help him sort out his own stream of human emotions, still largely unfamiliar to him. I am sure there are many other reasons as to why Arafat tends to be a (relatively) quiet baby, one of which is the presence of Kaya in the house, a topic I will discuss in my next post, but I have certainly noticed a direct relationship between my emotional wellbeing and his.

If you are a mother reading this, I want you to know that this was not easy, it took weeks to master. Becoming a Mama means another being becomes your priority: the priority of your thoughts, actions, capital, everything. I was lucky to have had a strong support system during those days that allowed me to take the time to negotiate these emotional shifts, but it certainly came at the cost of being unable to maintain all relationships in my life at the time.

A new Mama & her smiling mirror

Weeks go by, and Waleed, my brother decides to dig up some old photos when he finds this little gem!

This photo suddenly became my favorite baby picture.

All this time I was just looking at myself, and it did not stop there, I kept seeing myself more and more in him. Seeing my emotions in him, my reactions, my little tiny meaningless gestures.

This feeling of familiarity and likeness (for the lack of a better term) has overshadowed my motherhood journey so far, with this just being one of the more striking examples.

I later became familiar with the term Maternal Mirroring, referring largely to the a child’s responsiveness to their parent’s facial expression and, in turn, mirroring them. The term itself, I believe is coined as such due to the dominating narrative of mother’s being the primary caretakers of children thus solely responsible for their emotional development as well, but the process itself hold true to both mothers and fathers. We know mirroring in one of its popular forms, when a baby hits their head and you smile in tun pretending its okay, and at more times than not this will work in preventing a crying baby.

In the beggining we saw Arafat mirroring our behaviors in two main ways: when he was essentially absorbing our emotional state of being, and when we would grab his attention with our face, making silly faces, notices gestures, etc. Later, we noticed our relationship with food was also being mirrored by him wherein he started reaching for whatever we were eating and later accepting to eat pretty much anything showing great enthusiasm for the act itself. We often joke about how this is the result of us ALWAYS having him on the table with us at dinner early on, I am talking about eating fajitas at the kitchen table while breastfeeding a week into my postpartum recovery. Honestly, we had no idea what were doing at that point and essentially tried to go back to living our lives, just with a baby that we carried everywhere. Perhaps I am stretching the term a bit, but I have most definitely experienced and witnessed strong moment of reciprocity and connection.

Dyad Care

As I was writing this entry, I stumbled upon an interesting notion: Dyad Care, a term “developed as a way of promoting evidence-based clinical practices of caring for the baby with the birthing parent in the immediate hours after birth.”

I started to consider these little events as a continuation of the dyad created by Khalid, Arafat and I months earlier, or rather the system of dyad care we unknowingly adopted during birth were we nurtured so much intimacy and contact, especially skin-to-skin, at the first few hours of birth. We had no idea what we were doing at that point, but I am glad this is one of the things that played in our favor in the long term.

Mirroring & socialization

In these coming weeks, mirroring will take on a more agentive role with me trying to actively encourage it as it helps develop infant self reflection. Further readings highlight a strong relationship between mirroring and social bonding, noted through the observation of rates of nondistress vocalization in infants. The theory is that maternal mirroring allows infants to “readily notice the relation between their own behavior and those of their mothers, which may enhance infants early understanding that they can be active agents in instigating social interaction.” How interesting! I chose not to delve any further into this now as I am trying to hold off on creating spaces of comparison and in turn, expectation but this is where we are now & we love it!

More Resources

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/infa.12221

http://www.daniellemaxon.com/blog/2016/4/6/mirroring-your-childs-intense-emotions

https://havingababy.co/understanding-dyad-care

https://psychcentral.com/lib/child-development-the-first-mirror#1