Along with a sense of purpose experienced during holding, participants felt that they deliberately expanded what they were capable of in order to meet their children’s needs. Curiously, another experience of spontaneous expansion emerged as important for participants as they held their children.
During optimal moments of holding participants felt the boundaries between mother and child blurring or dissolving. The places where a mother’s experience of touch finished, and her child’s body began, were not as clearly defined. This feeling of oneness did not result in a loss of self or independence, but a momentary sensation of expansion and interdependence I describe as a feeling of the mother/child ‘us’.
As Leni said: “That’s how it feels…mooshy…lines blurred.”
And Kitty: “There’s a calmness and a oneness and sort of like a flow.”
Holding, even for only a few seconds, often forced mother and child to slow down, to be together and focus only on the present moment. Competing thoughts about getting the dinner ready or answering emails, the clothes beckoning from the wash basket or siblings causing mayhem in the kitchen, briefly dialled down. The space between mother and child, and the time demands of the everyday, stilled. Moments of deep connection through holding provided a pause in time and that pause drew attention to the simple, embodied act of holding. With our constant need to do and achieve it’s easy to miss what loving touch feels like as we get on with the next task at hand. Holding provides an opportunity to notice that loving touch.
These experiences of an expanded mother/child ‘us’, though strange and infrequent, were incredibly valuable and significant to participants. These “golden moments” as Kitty described them were like a reward for all the hard parts of parenting, a reminder, no matter how brief, of the special bond between mother and child.
Adrienne Lafrance (8 January, 2015, The Atlantic) wrote:
“The artist Sarah Walker once told me that becoming a mother is like discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live”.
As our sessions continued, participants deliberately paid attention to their holding experiences and noticed more of these moments of expansion. As Rosanna described, they embodied the: “Huge warmth of love”

The significance, value and strangeness of these moments drew attention to experiencing from a place of ‘us’ rather than ‘I’. Mothers had the opportunity to notice the health, wellbeing and state of their relationship with their child, the feeling of ‘us’. Increased awareness of a relationship promotes relational agency. For example, holding your teenager, you notice that you haven’t had much time together lately, you haven’t held them as much. You realise you feel a little sad and wonder how your child feels. Maybe you’d pulled back because of their changing moods, because they don’t want a cuddle before they go into school, because your relationship has changed. You decide that the next time you see them after school, you’ll step out of your habitual way of being with them and give them a hug and see how they respond.
Strange but valuable moments of expansion into the mother/child ‘us’ were significant and rewarding enough to warrant attention outside of our inquiry sessions. They captured for Leni the power of “just us” and for Kitty, “the bigness of love”.

The next time you hold your child or recall what it was like to hold them, pay attention to what it feels like, did you, for a moment, forget yourself, time or the outside world, did you feel bigger or smaller? We’d love to hear about it...
Ariel
This post is written by Dr Ariel Moy. She is passionate about developing mother/child relationships, is an academic teacher and supervisor at The MIECAT Institute and a Professional member of ANZACATA.
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