Ambivalence

A while ago, I didn't know what this word really meant. Now I can't get it out of my head.

Ambivalence. From the Latin ambi, both, and valentia, strength. The state of holding two opposing feelings at the same time, with equal force. Not indifference. Not confusion about which one is real. Both, fully, at once.

For mothers it takes a particular shape. The psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker named it in Torn in Two: the love and the resentment, the tenderness and the longing for space, sitting side by side in the same body on the same ordinary afternoon. Her argument was that this is not a flaw in mothering. It is part of mothering.

I feel it most in the gaps. I'm on the floor playing, and half of me is already three steps into tomorrow's deadline. Then I'm at my desk, finally in flow, and a quiet ache arrives because I've missed another bath, another bedtime. Not present enough there. Not free enough here. Divided between two worlds, and somehow not quite enough in either.

I could read that feeling as proof I was getting it wrong. Failing at work. Failing at home. What Parker offers, and what occupational psychology supports, is a different reading. The discomfort isn't the problem to be solved. It's the cost of caring about more than one thing that matters.

So what actually changes? Rarely the circumstances. The deadlines stay. The kids aren’t going anywhere! What can change is your relationship with the pull itself.

That's where coaching earns its place. It doesn't make the ambivalence disappear, and it shouldn't try. What it does is give the feeling somewhere to go.

It starts with naming. Putting the word to it, ambivalence, moves the experience out of the private category of personal failing and into the shared, human one. Shame loosens the moment something is named.

Then there's listening to what the pull is telling you, because it's rarely random. The tug towards your child and the tug towards your work are usually both guarding something you value: connection on one side, contribution and identity on the other. Coaching slows things down enough to hear that, instead of rushing to resolve it.

And because guilt isn't only a thought but a felt sense, something that tightens the chest or sits heavy in the stomach, the body matters too. That morning on the mat, the thing that pulled me back wasn't a clever thought about priorities. It was a breath. Learning to notice and settle that response, rather than be run by it, is often where the real shift happens.

The goal was never a tidy resolution where you finally feel one clean thing. It's the capacity to stay steady while holding both. To be where you are, more fully, because you're no longer spending half your energy resisting the fact that you'd also like to be somewhere else.

Less "how do I stop feeling torn." More "how do I carry this well."