Is there a perfect mother? The mothers I have met are good mothers. True, they are not perfect. No one is.
Mothers who turn to a professional because of their child’s stuttering are, without exception, good mothers. They are so because they love their children and are concerned about an obvious phenomenon that impedes communication. They would like to help but do not know what to do and how to proceed.
They are frightened and scared. Very often they are despairing and feel guilty.

What happened? “Something happened,” they say. Sometimes they name what it was, sometimes not. Their narratives have one thing in common. The child for quite some time – to the greatest delight of everyone – has been talking completely fluently and well. And then “something happened.” Speech, for others this natural and automatic everyday process, fell to pieces, broke apart, cut up into spasms, didn’t work. It was awful to listen to.

Multilingual environment. Enikő’s husband István was the director of a Swedish corporation and the young couple lived there for years. When they left [Hungary] they already had two children. Anna (5 yrs,) and Miklóska (2.5 yrs.), who had started to speak fluently not long before. The young woman herself found it difficult to adapt to the new environment. Although she spoke English quite well, she did not know Swedish and so began studying the new language. The two children soon went to nursery school, where English was spoken to them. Miklóska began stuttering a few months later, then simply stopped talking entirely. In his mother’s opinion it was because he was at wit’s end trying to decide which of the three languages to choose. Swedish, which he heard on the street, in shops, on public transportation and television; English, spoken at the nursery school and frequently at home with them by the parents in the company of guests; or Hungarian, which he learned first and spoke almost well.

Self-blame. Mothers suffer as a result of stuttering. Many among them go through their first self-analysis at this time, “What did I do wrong? What did I ruin?” And because they too are not perfect they invariably find one or two situations where they are uncertain they went about things the right way or consistently. Perhaps they behaved hastily at times, in a “selfish” way possibly, looking out for their own interests as opposed to the needs of their children in trying to get some peace and quiet and satisfy their own needs.

Enough Good? Good Enough? Something like the above has probably occurred in everyone’s life, so these mothers are no different from the average. They are good mothers. Perfect and good – can these two words be used as synonyms for each other? In a certain context yes, but it is not really recommended to apply it to ourselves or to human relationships. D.W. Winnicott introduced the expression “good enough mother” into common knowledge of psychology, while – correctly expanding the concept to fathers as well – B. Bettelheim followed with the idea of “good enough parent.”

The modern parent is very well informed as to what he should worry about as he deals with the developing child! And, unfortunately, worry he does.
Given these doctrines, and given the fact that most people as youngsters have had no firsthand experience with raising children, it is little wonder that the conscientious parent becomes anxious failing as a parent and fears that he may harm the child he loves. But parental anxiety – while understandable – does a great deal of harm both parent and to child. Winnicott, whose concept of the good enough mother I mentioned initially when explaining the book's title, says about the good enough mother that the infant, as he looks into her face, sees there himself – or one might say, finds there himself – because the good enough mother, owing to her deep empathy with her infant, reflects in her face his feelings; this is why he sees himself in her face as if in a mirror and finds himself as he sees himself in her. The not good enough mother fails to reflect the infant's feeling in her face because she is too preoccupied with her own concerns, such as her worries over whether she is doing right by her child, her anxiety that she might fail him. The infant who does not find himself reflected in the face of such a mother responds instead to her being worried, and becomes worried about himself. Worse, he sees the face of a stranger where he should find what is most familiar, so he feels lonely rather than deeply connected, as the infant does who finds himself reflected in his mother's face in a positive way.
It follows that to be a good enough parent one must be able to feel secure in one's parenthood, and one's relation to one's child. So secure that while one is careful in what one does in relation to one's child, one is not overanxious about it and does not feel guilty about not being a good enough parent. The security of the parent about being a parent will eventually become the source of the child's feeling secure about himself.   Bruno Bettelheim: A Good Enough Parent. A Book on Child-Rearing, Vintage Books, New York, 1988, pp. 12-13

Nevertheless, when a child stutters they are the parents in whom self-blame soon manifests, “perhaps it is my fault,” “perhaps I am not a good mother.” Even if their words are not always expressed openly, nonetheless, the unspoken thought lies dormant between their sentences. At times I can feel it palpably, they expect and fear that I will be the one to say it out loud, to “read them the riot act.” I never say such a thing because simply, it is not true.

Do you love your daughter? I do not say so even when throughout our first conversation a mother, Zsófi, criticized, scolded, and put down her little girl, Viola. “Her histrionics all the time! Howling, never being able to know why. She cannot say. She behaves like a complete idiot. Horrible! And now, this stuttering on top of it all! Unbearable!” At the end of our hour-long conversation, for the first time in my life (and until now the last) I asked the mother, “Zsófi, do you love your daughter?” The reply was, “When she behaves in such a stupid fashion, I cannot stand her. But when she is sweet and obedient, I love her.”
Zsófi was an intelligent young woman with limited schooling, an impulsive temperament, and rather loose in her choice of words but “at least candid,” as the saying goes. With this surprising declaration it was possible at least “to start somewhere.” The therapy was based on trying to teach Zsófi to be able to accept Viola when the young child did not behave as she expected.
It was a joy to observe how the young girl’s pale little face, seemingly without character, slowly took on color, expression, vitality. Her bursts of rage subsided quickly. She came to therapy for two years. I met up with her not long ago, she is an attractive, self-confident teenager. Her speech is completely fluent.

It is difficult to love. The situation is more complicated if the mother’s relationship with her child is ambivalent (burdened by inner conflict). It can happen that for some reason it is difficult for a mother to love her child, but it is all the more difficult to admit it even to herself. For this reason the ambivalence frequently stays buried, hiding beneath the surface it exhibits its effect on the consciousness surreptitiously and without control. Kathleen Kelley-Laine writes in Peter Pan: The Story of Lost Childhood that it is not easy for a parent to maintain a constant position. There are those who do not even attempt it. When their child is born, they regard her or him simply as a new playmate. These parents are called “liberal,” however, they are mothers and fathers who have never been able to outgrow their own childhood.

Obstacles to acceptance. Ambivalence is awful and often barely endurable because two diametrically opposed feelings are present simultaneously. In a mother-child relationship it means that the mother, according to social expectations and her own best awareness loves her child. The difficulty in acceptance buried in the background relates most frequently to the child’s gender, appearance, or temperament already evident in the earliest part of life. Any one of these reasons may elicit a strong feeling of helplessness in the mother.
It is possible for a sharp temperamental woman to give birth to an introverted quiet child who is incapable of keeping up with the mother’s pace and hot-bloodedness, or just the opposite: a serene mother inclined to introspection and meditation brings an active, loud, talkative whirlwind of a child into the world.

Differences in temperament. Anna’s child, Bálint, barely reached the third year of his life when they came to us because of the little one’s stuttering. The little boy embraced the well-dressed refined woman tightly, and held this body contact throughout the initial meeting. By comparison, the complaint the mother voiced seemed almost unbelievable. Her son’s willful, almost unmanageable conduct, impulsive, unpredictable behavior could have possibly caused her more despair than the speech defect. I soon learned the following from her.
As far as she could recall she was an obedient good little girl in childhood. Her parents discussed everything with her, they explained the necessity of rules and prohibitions, and she understood and accepted them. Preserving her gentle peaceful nature as a mother she would have liked to use similar methods with her little boy. Bálint, however, being an active willful child in constant motion soon declared his counter opinion on numerous matters. Anna insisted on her original intentions and continued to try to enforce her convictions. Slowly, the situation developed whereby getting dressed some mornings could take several hours because Bálint always wanted to wear something other than his mother envisioned, or ran away to go look at something time and again, to play, draw, or eat. After a time this ceremony expanded to every act of care-taking or joint endeavor. Anna did not have a single free minute left, a large portion of their day consisted of her attempts to convince, and her son’s in carrying out his mountains of ideas, at variance from hers. The situation was exacerbated by a difference of opinion and arguments with her husband about the situation, which had become a daily habit.

Ambivalence is similar to a two-pronged fork. One is positive: I love, I want; the other prong is negative: I do not love, I do not want. To recognize the negative tine, especially if it pertains to one’s child, requires great courage and self-awareness.

 The source of unresolved tension. One reason is probably because we in our Western culture find two contradictory simultaneous truths extremely unusual and very difficult to comprehend, and for this reason to accept. We are accustomed to things being black or white, good or bad – after all, we had already been raised on this in children’s stories. There is no other alternative. In addition, our ethical sense dictates that the good will receive its just reward and the bad its appropriate punishment. Answers to our questions are satisfactory only when they can be limited to yes or no. If the answer is: also, it is tantamount to an “x,” a tie game in football pools. Unresolved matters often carry seemingly unbearable tension. The saying in Hungarian, “even specific malady is better than uncertainty” reflects this.
The other reason actually lies hidden in the first. If we were to recognize and admit to the negative side of our reaction to a particular situation, person, or feeling, it would call into question the other positive side, disperse it into nothing, or at least diminish it. As though one were to extinguish or “overwrite” the other.

I can almost hear the counter-argument: “All this may possibly be true. But what is the solution? I should acquiesce and declare out loud that I do not even love my child? Because it is impossible to change her or his gender, appearance, or temperament. In addition, I have to face this and struggle with it daily. Furthermore, what would others say, first and foremost my partner, if I were to one day announce that one thing or another is difficult for me to bear in our child? I would immediately be branded with the stamp of “bad mother” and be happy if it is only that and not, “vile villain.”

The first step: admitting. Naturally, the first half of the counter-argument is true. Nothing changes simply by admitting what is difficult, what one cannot accept or finds difficult to do so in another (her/his child). Nevertheless, this first step is a great one and always the most difficult. Despite this, the second step usually comes a long time afterwards: the answer to the question, why is this so? What is its cause? Where is this cause? If I recognize that it is possibly within myself, how then to proceed? Who or what does this peculiarity or characteristic resemble or remind me of, why don’t I like it, what is it that prevents me from it? Anger? Fear? Shame? Envy? Is it possible that this child resembles me the most? What shall I do if I recognize the faults I believe to have been nearly conquered in myself magnified in my child, my negative traits that I have almost succeeded in forgetting?
And once I know all this, what action to take?
We try to find answers to these and similar questions together in parents groups. Granted, we make much slower progress taking rather tiny steps but there is a great advantage to a slower pace in that the results are experienced much more deeply and everyone can feel the discoveries as their own. Éva Ancsel has once written that the ability to love, although whether we master it depends neither on our mind, nor industriousness, we nevertheless learn in the beautiful chain reaction of reciprocity.

Is it possible to learn? Upon encountering it for the first time perhaps it is difficult for many to admit that love also needs to be learned and that we are capable of doing so. After all, the newborn babe who comes into the world was not “made to order.” Even those in love must hone themselves to each other, to compromise and become accustomed to each other’s habits, desires, and pleasures. Only the exceptionally lucky do not need to go through these initial difficulties. (There are also quite a number of those for whom these problems represent a task and situations that require daily resolution not only in the beginning phase of a relationship but throughout a lifetime.) Why should it be any different with a newborn or a small child?
The child is somehow, is the way she or he is. It is our task to discover their true self, its movement and dynamic with attentiveness and curiosity.

The mother’s face as mirror. …

All of us must struggle to understand ourselves better, not the least because our efforts to achieve grater clarity about ourselves make it possible for us to achieve clarity in our relation to our child, with a consequent enrichment of our life. Such understanding of ourselves around some issue of child-rearing cannot be handed to us by someone else, no matter how great their expertise may be; it can be achieved only by ourselves, as we struggle to remove whatever has obscured this understanding from our consciousness. Only our own efforts to achieve such higher comprehension lead to permanent personal growth of both parent and child. (Bruno Bettelheim, op cit., p. 32)

When a child stutters the mother is often overcome with despair and dismay. As a consequence, uncertainty and anxiety hang in the air, even though unspoken. Frequently, the “role dilemmas” or “role disturbances” standing in the background represent such thoughts as: “Am I unsuitable for motherhood? Am I possibly not a good mother?” Sometimes even, “perhaps the child’s stuttering somehow reveals my own deficiency?” Rejection, rage, aggression often manifest. “Why mine particularly? Why specifically with us?”
When I discover such, my first task is to comfort the parent(s). In each instance I say from my heart and conviction, “You are a good mother. Proof of this is that you have come here.  You are here because you wish to help your child. We shall attempt to do so together.”