Let's compare two women in the earliest stages of motherhood and see how this can play out. Donna loves the feeling of having a child growing in her womb. She relishes the opportunity to create a healthy and loving environment for the growing fetus, and diligently and healthfully "eats for two", while abstaining from smoking and drinking. Uncomfortable pregnancy-related symptoms, such as morning sickness and exhaustion, are experienced by her as reassuring signs that the baby is growing and doing what he needs to do. Foods that she used to enjoy but that now taste funny or create indigestion she somewhat reluctantly, but without significant resentment, gives up.

As Donna starts to show, she delightedly shops for maternity clothes that colorfully call attention to her growing belly. She has a pet-name for the fetus: "Big Guy", which was also the nickname of her father, a former professional football player who is now a college coach. "Come on, big guy, settle down", she says, laughing, when she first starts to feel him tumbling and rolling inside of her. "Big Guy's thinking about Pralines and Cream, tonight," she advises her husband before he heads out for the nightly ice-cream run.

Donna and her husband enthusiastically enlist in a childbirth education class, and regularly practice their breathing exercises in preparation for labor. She prepares her employer for the three-month maternity leave that she plans to take, and dutifully takes her temporary replacement at work under wing, showing him the ropes.

Labor is long and her contractions painful, but the pain is mitigated by her awareness that with each contraction, she is closer to a meeting with the beloved child who, up until now, has remained invisible. When the baby is born, she sees not the blood and mucous, the splotchy skin and the misshapen head, but her beautiful, beloved son. His insistent howls of shock arrive like the melodies of Mozart to her eager ears.

When the baby is nursing, Donna feels both relaxed and stimulated, confident in her ability to supply her son with what he needs, overjoyed by the limitless abundance of her milk. When he repeatedly cries out for her at night, she welcomes the opportunity to be of comfort to him, and because of this is able to temporarily override her own exhaustion and depletion, and nurture him successfully. She wishes that he would begin sleeping straight through, as some of her friends' infants have, but she also speaks with a lactation consultant, who reassures her that nursing babies sometimes take a little longer to string together a full-night's sleep.

When, during teething a few months later, he bites her breast while nursing, she howls and yanks him off in disbelief, but then quickly smiles as she acknowledges another sign of his healthy development, and docks him back onto her breast with a playful warning: "Better not try that again, buster!" Naturally, it happens a few more times, but eventually he gets the message, and she helps him learn to soothe his sore gums with pacifiers and popsicles.

When he pokes her painfully in the eye while reaching out to her from his crib one morning, she winces, but is pleased with his vitality and lovingly grabs him up anyway: "You couldn't wait to get a hold of me, could you, big guy?" she tells him, chuckling, as she carries him on her hip while going to get a cold rag for her eye.

Donna has decided ahead of time, without necessarily being conscious of this, that her baby will reinforce and please her. Even when he doesn't do so in a particular moment, such as when labor is long and hard or when he won't sleep through the night or when he bites her breast or pokes her in the eye, she is able to reframe these encounters in a way that is consistent with her belief that the baby is good for her, and that she is good for the baby. Every thing that he does is defined by this assumption, which is why their relationship at this point is so positive, why he, for now, is the prototypical good-enough child.

Such a baby experiences what psychologists call "a secure base", a trusting environment in which he can depend on his needs being met in a way that enables him to feel physically and psychologically attended to. This frees him to propel himself forward into the world, and to master the age-appropriate tasks necessary to his feeling competent and whole.

Another mother, however, may have a very different response to a similar pregnancy and early childhood. Maura and her husband decide, after ten years of marriage, to start a family, but it is with great ambivalence that she begins gestation. She feels that her body has been hijacked by the fetus, that an intruder has taken over her insides and is parasitically going to deprive her of all of her precious resources.

She alternately binge-eats, stuffing herself because she is terrified that the fetus will take everything that she has, and starves herself, hoping, at some subconscious level, perhaps, to neutralize or counteract his unstoppable expansion. She drinks constantly, as if to flush out the baby's waste products before they completely pollute her, and has to urinate frequently, interfering with the possibility of a good night's sleep, and making her irritable and impatient during the days.

Maura interprets her intermittent flatulence and heartburn as manifestations of the baby's malignant presence, weapons in a murderous battle for who will claim ownership of her body. Every physical symptom that she encounters during these turbulent nine months, even those that may have little or nothing to do with being pregnant, are interpreted as dangerous components of her baby's full-scale assault on her.

Feeling under attack, she fights back, keeping up her cigarette habit despite her obstetrician's warnings about its impact on fetal health, yet simultaneously stepping up her exercise routine at the gym as a way of burning off what refuses to stop growing, to the point where one day she passes out getting off of the Stairmaster.

She, like Donna, comes up with a pet-name for the fetus, one that carries with it an assigned personality: "The Spy". The name suggests that the baby is somehow eavesdropping on her, privy to internal knowledge that she is trying to keep hidden from everyone else. "It's enough, Spy," she complains one night when his intrauterine activity is interfering once again with her sleep. "If it wasn't for The Spy, I wouldn't be going through this," she thinks to herself as her dentist fills a couple of newly developed cavities one afternoon in her first trimester.

Maura lets no one at work know that she's expecting, and takes great pains to dress in such a way that her pregnancy is hidden from view. When her boss finally learns, by accident, that she is due in three months, she refuses to discuss any contingency plans, insisting that she'll be back at work "in no time". Her boss, the father of two small children himself, fortunately recognizes how unrealistic this is, and convinces her to take six-week's maternity leave, with the invitation to contribute to projects that she has a hand in when she has the time to do so from home.

She and her husband enroll in a Lamaze class at the hospital where she'll be giving birth, but she sits and listens doubtfully, distractedly, and doesn't bother practicing: "If it gets bad, I'll be asking for drugs," she informs her sister one afternoon, explaining away her apparent indifference.

Labor and childbirth go quite smoothly, but the baby is born with jaundice, convincing her that the baby had somehow decided to exit prematurely, before his liver could function more efficiently. Meanwhile, the episiotomy that was required isn't healing very quickly: it burns when she pees, and her bowel movements are accompanied by the (unfounded) fear that her stitches will tear. All of this further supports the internal belief that she and the baby were, and are, "bad" for each other. She tries breast-feeding but it goes poorly, and her son's inability to quickly take to her nipple results in her feeling snubbed, rejected: "He's punishing me for not taking better care of myself during pregnancy," she speculates to herself, and moves right into formula feeding within a few days after birth. .

The baby turns out to be quite well-regulated. He gains weight nicely, and is sleeping through the night by the time he is four weeks old, but Maura becomes very focussed on the fact that he doesn't nap much during the day, giving her few breaks to get back to some of the work projects that she had hoped to reclaim during maternity leave.

His cries from the crib during naptime feel accusatory and critical, as if he knows she'd rather be working than mothering. She partially blames herself for his refusal to nap, wondering if her hectic, relentless schedule while he was in utero had somehow "taught" him not to slow down during the daytime, and if he's "getting back" at her now.

Maura also begins to notice that some of her peers' children are beginning to smile, while her son, pleasant as he is, does not. Rather than seeing him as simply lagging a bit developmentally, this data, too, gets factored into her belief that he's angry with her, and that he is expressing this anger by witholding from her.

When the baby accidentally knocks her glasses off one day while she is changing his diaper, she quickly slaps his hand, and after a moment of confusion, he begins to cry, and so does she. One day when she is trying to get some work done at the computer with the baby on her lap, he accidentally falls forward, and his head bumps down against the keyboard, erasing what she was working on. She yanks him back up and screams at him, demanding to know why he can't take naps like the other kids do so that she can finally get some work done. "Why are you doing this to me?" she pleads, holding him tightly against her while they both sob.

The rapidity with which she characterizes his actions as aggressive or demanding or intrusive without seriously considering more benign (and accurate) interpretations suggests strongly that she has foreseen that she will be, and perhaps deserves to be, the recipient of such treatment.

Not surprisingly, Maura's tendency to react to her son with sudden rage leaves her feeling guilty all the time. Because of this, she finds it difficult to set appropriate limits with him as he moves into toddler-hood. Falling into an "all-or-nothing" regime, she alternates between smacking his hands and hollering at him for the slightest mishap, such as a dropped fork or a crayoned wall, and indulging or ignoring the typical toddler behaviors that deserve a teaching response or some consequences, such as refusing to sleep in his own bed at night or calling her bad names when she won't do what he wants her to do. Without limits being set, he doesn't learn as quickly as he should what is and isn't acceptable for a child his age.

Unless the behavior pattern between Maura and her baby changes, he will, over time, come to internalize his mom's belief that he is out to punish her, and find that, without even knowing how and why, he does so. For various reasons that as of now remain out of her awareness, she has cast him in the role of her victimizer, a role that was assigned to him embryonically, before he could even think about it, but that both are contributing to his fulfilling.

Her need to see almost every departure from what she wants him to do as a symbolic statement of his need to rebuke and discipline her will lead to their having great conflict, but in reality he is behaving, and she is seeing that he behaves, in the way that she has insisted that he behave, from the moment of his conception, if not before. By not being good-enough, he is, in reality, satisfying a deep, albeit tormented, need of his mother's.

So, do Donna and Maura remain locked forever into these early-established patterns of interaction? Will Donna always be the model parent of the model child, waltzing serenely through parenthood's breezy meadows, while Maura is consigned to trudge through a desultory swamp of despair?

Of course not. While investing our children with a distinct set of personality characteristics is a part of every family process, the dynamics of this process are never static. Like the tiny bits and shapes in a rotating kaleidoscope, these characteristics are constantly in movement, creating new narratives, new stories, and new dramas as development unfolds. With every turn of the life cycle, another configuration presents, or re-presents, itself.

Children are not wax tablets upon which their parents can write their stories, but active participants in the co-creation of the narrative of which the entire, multi-generational family is a part. Their innate characteristics, tendencies, and vulnerabilities are crucial determinants in the role that they wind up performing. They may vigorously refuse to "say their lines" and sabotage the intended production, they may enthusiastically learn and cooperatively vocalize their parts, or they may come up with some compromise or combination of both responses as a result of the complex chemistry that bubbles between and within the generations.

Let's jump ahead a few years, to the point at which Donna and Maura, both with toddlers, contacted me for help, and see how these playwrights were doing.

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