Chapter 1

“Will I spoil my baby?”

Your baby started crying—and your hand is already reaching out.

It happens by itself. Before you even have time to think.

Your body knows the way to your child before your head does—this is ancient, this is right, this is built into you.

And then, from somewhere over your shoulder, someone else’s voice: “Don’t get the baby used to being held. You’ll spoil them.”

And you freeze halfway.

Between love and the fear of doing it “wrong.” Your hand is outstretched—but inside an argument has already begun: go to them or hold out? Pick them up, or “let them get used to it”? And there you stand over your own crying child, not trusting yourself.

I know that freeze down to the millimeter. I’ve stood like that myself—hand outstretched, someone else’s voice in my head.

This chapter is about getting that trust back.

About the very first, the most common and the most unfair fear a mother has.

“Will I spoil my baby?”

“Don’t get the baby used to being held”—where this fear came from

This voice is heard in almost every home.

Sometimes it’s the voice of a mother-in-law. Sometimes a neighbor, a friend, a woman in line at the store. And most often—our own, because we heard it so long ago and so often that we took it for the truth.

“They’ll never let you put them down.” “They’ll wrap you around their little finger.” “Spoil them now, pay for it later.”

Where does this come from in us?

It’s an inheritance. From times when children were raised differently—strictly, by the clock, at arm’s length. When people believed that character is tempered by going without, and that warmth spoils it. When the “easy” child was the one who didn’t bother anyone. Didn’t cry. Didn’t ask.

Our grandmothers didn’t raise children this way out of coldness. They raised them the way they knew how, in the conditions they had—and many of them longed for the warmth they couldn’t allow themselves to give.

I don’t judge those times. But I know one thing.

What was once called “spoiling,” today we call something else.

We call it attachment.

What attachment really is

Let’s keep it simple. No complicated words.

Attachment isn’t about a child “getting used to it” and “wrapping you around their finger.” It’s about how a little person answers, for the first time in life, the most important question.

Can this world be trusted?

Your baby doesn’t ask it in words—there are no words yet. They ask it with their body, their skin, their crying. And they get the answer not from our explanations but from our response. From what happens each time they call.

They call—you come. They cry—you pick them up. They get scared—you hold them.

And somewhere very deep, at the very core of a growing person, a quiet conclusion takes shape: “I am heard. I am not alone. The world is reliable.”

That is the foundation.

The British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who in the last century was the first to describe attachment as a living human need, and his colleague Mary Ainsworth spoke of the mother as a “secure base.” Not a cage. Not a habit. But a dependable home base you can always return to.

And here is what matters in this observation—the thing that turns the whole fear of “spoiling” upside down.

The more secure a child’s base, the more boldly they venture away from it.

Dependence or support? It’s not a cage. It’s roots

It seems to us the other way around, doesn’t it?

It seems that the more you carry a child in your arms, the more “clingy,” dependent and weak they will grow up. That independence is taught through distance. That you need to hold back warmth now so the child “doesn’t get used to it.”

But look at a tree.

The deeper its roots, the higher and freer its crown reaches. A tree without roots isn’t “more independent.” It simply falls in the first wind.

It’s the same with a child.

A baby who knows for sure that Mom is near, that they can always come back to her, is not a baby chained to their mom. It’s a baby who has somewhere to set out from. They crawl a meter away, look back—you’re here—and crawl on, more boldly. They explore the room because they know their back is covered.

But a child who isn’t sure anyone will come for them won’t go far. They have no energy left for the world. All their strength goes into one thing: checking whether you’re still there.

That is the truth that was hidden from us.

Attachment is not dependence. It’s a launch pad.

It’s not a cage you lock your child in with your own hands. It’s the roots from which someone very free will one day rise.

You are not tying your baby to yourself.

You are giving them support to push off from into their own life.

And—yes, one day they will push off. They’ll leave. That is the secret hidden by the fear that the child will “cling forever”: those we let go of most surely are the very ones we held tight. Like the little boats we set on the water—so that they can sail.

Why “let them cry it out” costs more than it seems

But they really do stop. They cry—and then go quiet. Doesn’t that prove the “method works”?

Let’s pause here, honestly and calmly.

Yes, a baby who isn’t picked up goes quiet after a while. But there are different kinds of quiet.

There is the quiet of peace—when a need has been heard and met. And there is the quiet that comes when there is no point in calling anymore. When a little person reaches their first bitter conclusion: “No need to cry. No one will come anyway.”

This doesn’t teach self-control—for a baby, drop by drop, it is the beginning of mistrust.

I say this gently—because here it’s very easy to slide into scare stories and guilt, and I don’t want to frighten you or judge you. In the science of attachment there are no verdicts like “you didn’t come once, so you’ve broken your child.” That’s not how it works. Children are sturdier, and a mother’s love is more reliable than any single mistake.

It’s not about one single time. It’s about the message that builds up through repetition.

A baby’s crying is not manipulation. They simply can’t manipulate yet: that takes calculation, and there is none in their little head. Crying is the only language they have for now. Not “willfulness.” Not “naughtiness.” It’s a request, made in the only way they can.

Behind crying there is always a need. Not a whim—a need.

And when we respond, we don’t “reinforce” the crying. We answer them in their own language.

And one more thing, quiet and important. If responding is so hard that you have no strength left—if the crying echoes inside you as pain, if it’s dark and empty, if you’re frightened for yourself or for your baby—this happens to a great many mothers, and it is neither weakness nor anyone’s fault. This chapter is support, not medical advice, and it does not replace help from real people. Asking for it—from those close to you, from a doctor, from a psychologist—is nothing to be ashamed of, and if you’re frightened for yourself or your baby, don’t put it off: do it today. That is the same care. Only now—for yourself too.

And here I’ll say something that didn’t come easily to me either. Loving yourself is not a luxury a mother earns last of all. It is the base from which everything else grows: the strength to go to your baby, the tenderness in your hands, the calm in your voice. You can’t keep pouring from an empty cup for long. When you care for yourself, you are not taking anything away from your child—you are filling the source they drink from.

What you build every time you answer their call

And now—the most freeing part. The reason this whole chapter was written.

In the first months, attention and responsiveness are not spoiling.

This isn’t my bold opinion. Attachment specialists agree on it: a baby under one year old can’t yet “use” you or “wrap you around their finger”—they don’t have the maturity or the cunning calculation we attribute to them. By answering their call, you are not reinforcing whims.

You are laying down basic security.

And here is what lifts one more heavy stone from your shoulders—the stone of perfectionism.

Responding quickly matters more than responding perfectly.

Security isn’t built on never making mistakes. You don’t have to guess on the first try what your baby wants. You will get it wrong—offering the breast when they’re tired, rocking them when they’re hungry. That’s normal. Psychologists who have observed babies and mothers noticed something encouraging: for a warm bond, what matters is not flawlessness but the ability to come back to the child after a misstep. You got distracted—you came back. You didn’t understand—you tried again. It seems it is precisely this readiness to repair the connection that means more than round-the-clock “straight-A” presence.

Do you hear what this means?

You don’t need to be perfect. You need to be someone who comes back.

I still repeat this to myself—on days when it seems I’m doing everything wrong. And do you know when clarity comes back to me? When I quietly ask myself: if it were love speaking in me right now, not anxiety—what would it say? Love almost never tells you to “hold out and stay away.” It tells you to go to them.

And one more thing, quiet but important. You are not the only one who can be a secure base for a child. A dad who picks the baby up in his own way; relatives in whose arms the baby feels calm—these are not “extra hands.” It means the little person has not one but several sources of support. That doesn’t make the base weaker. It only makes it more reliable.

So every time you pick up your crying baby, you are not spoiling them.

You are telling their whole being: the world is reliable. You are heard. You are not alone. And something else simple and wonderful happens: when a mother and child are close, in warm, calm contact, their bodily rhythms gradually begin to adjust to each other. Your calm becomes their calm too.

From your arms—to their trust. From your warmth—to their courage. From your reliability—to their freedom.

You are not spoiling.

You are building.

A story that repeats itself

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen so many like her, and maybe you’ll recognize yourself in her too.

She came in with her baby in her arms and a guilty look on her face.

“I think I’ve already ruined everything,” she said, almost in a whisper. “My baby won’t come down out of my arms at all. Everyone says I’ve spoiled them. But I can’t bear hearing my baby cry—it tears me up inside. Still, I’m only making it worse, aren’t I?”

I asked: and what happens when you pick your baby up?

She thought about it.

“They… go quiet. Snuggle up to me. And look at me as if… as if everything is all right now.”

There, I said. There’s your answer.

That’s not a spoiled child. That’s a child who has found their support and is holding on to it—exactly as it should be at that age. They aren’t “wrapping you around their finger.” They are coming in to moor—the way boats pull in to shore in a storm—not out of weakness, but to catch their breath and head out again.

Time passed. That little one who had been “spoiled by being held” grew up—and turned out not clingy but surprisingly brave. One of those who confidently toddle off to explore the world and only now and then turn around: is Mom there? She is. And off they go again.

Because they had somewhere to set out from.

That mom didn’t ruin anything. She built.

It’s just that the foundation can’t be seen—it’s laid at the very bottom, underground. You don’t show it to guests. But it’s what holds up the whole house.

One small step

Don’t try to change everything at once. Don’t make yourself vows like “from now on I’ll always go to them.” Big promises are frightening, and we abandon them.

Keep it simple.

Today—just once—answer your baby’s call without arguing with yourself inside. Without “what if I’m spoiling them.” Just go to them. Pick them up. Be near.

And silently say one short phrase to yourself:

“I’m not spoiling them. I’m building them.”

Once. That’s enough to begin.

And then, in the quiet, gently ask yourself:

Whose voice is it that speaks in me when I reach for my child and suddenly stop—and does it really wish us both well?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself is already halfway to freedom.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when you hear “you’ll spoil them” again:

A mother’s arms don’t spoil. They hold.

You are not getting your baby used to you—you are teaching them to trust the world. You are not growing weakness—you are growing someone who will have something to lean on. Every time you answer their call, you lay one more invisible stone in the foundation on which a whole person will one day stand.

So the next time your hand reaches for your crying baby—don’t stop it.

It knows what it’s doing.

Trust it.

And from this day on, may your home have one fear fewer—and one more pair of calm, loving, unafraid arms.

And when you hear that same “you’ll spoil them” over your shoulder again, just listen for whose hand and whose heart is answering the call right now.

Yours.

And they are not wrong.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 1 →

Chapter 2

What’s happening in your baby’s brain and body

You’ve been rocking your baby in your arms for twenty minutes already.

They’re crying. You’re tired. And somewhere inside rises a quiet, guilty irritation: “How much longer? I’m right here, I’m holding you, I’m doing everything—why can’t you just calm down?”

And in that moment it is so easy to believe they are doing it on purpose. That they’re being fussy, manipulating, testing you.

I thought so myself—more than once. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I did.

But your baby simply can’t do otherwise.

Not because they don’t want to. But because their little body doesn’t yet have that quiet hand that calms the storm from within. The one we grown-ups have long had of our own.

For now, that hand is yours.

And this chapter is about what is really happening inside them. So that you can stop demanding the impossible of them—and breathe out yourself.

A house built from the ground up

Imagine that your baby’s brain is a house that has only just begun to be built.

And it isn’t built all at once, as if by magic. It grows from the ground up—floor by floor, year by year.

First the ground floor is laid—the one responsible for the most essential things: breathing, eating, sleeping, feeling. The floor of survival and feelings. It is switched on from day one—because without it, life isn’t possible.

But the upper floor—where self-control lives, and patience, and the ability to tell yourself “easy, everything’s okay”—that floor is only just being laid. Its walls aren’t up yet. The windows aren’t in. The lights haven’t been wired.

And this is not a delay. This is the natural order of things.

Nature builds a person slowly and wisely—from the ground up, from simple to complex. First the foundation, then the roof. There’s no other way.

So demanding a grown-up’s self-control from a one-year-old is like expecting fruit from a sapling planted this spring. And it isn’t your baby’s fault. The house is simply still being built.

And so is your baby.

Why your baby can’t “just calm down”

Here is what’s worth understanding about your baby—and right away it will be easier to breathe.

We grown-ups have something like brakes inside. Something that helps us come back to ourselves after a fright, after tears, after a world that is too loud, too bright, too big. We know how to breathe out and tell ourselves: “okay, calm down, you’re safe.” And actually calm down.

But a baby doesn’t have these brakes yet.

Or rather—they are only being built. Quietly, slowly, in these very first years. And while they are being built, a baby simply can’t do what has become habitual and invisible for us.

They can’t settle themselves.

When a storm rises inside—from hunger, from tiredness, from too long a day—they have no button to switch it off. They are all storm. No shore, no way out, no quiet hand inside.

And so they call out. In the only way they have—by crying.

Early-development researchers note that the ability to soothe oneself is not given to a baby at birth—it gradually matures, and calm closeness with a grown-up plays a big role in this. There is a beautiful image people often turn to: as if there were a special “calm system” in our body—the one responsible for rest, for recovery, for “it’s okay to relax.” In a baby it is still immature. It still needs to be tuned, if you like—the way a new instrument is tuned. And it doesn’t tune itself on its own, but next to you: through your rocking, your voice, your steady rhythm, your warmth.

I’ll be honest about this, as I usually am.

For now this is more a beautiful and plausible image than a mechanism proven down to the last screw. Scientists are cautious here—and we should be cautious too. We don’t fully know how exactly these “inner brakes” mature. But on one thing specialists agree: a baby really can’t soothe themselves yet—and learns to do it in close, calm contact with a loving grown-up.

Which means everything else in this chapter is not about “something’s broken in them.”

It’s all about “they’re still growing.”

It’s not fussiness. It’s overload

And now—the most important consequence, the one that made all of this worth saying.

What we call fussiness is most often not fussiness at all.

Your baby bursts into tears out of nowhere. Won’t let you take a single step away. Cries when you leave the room and cries when you come back. And it seems they are testing your patience, pushing boundaries, trying to get their way.

But look at it differently.

This is not a breakdown in behavior. It’s the overload of a system that is still being built.

Too many sounds. Too much light. Too long a day, guests who are too loud and lively, too-new surroundings. A little nervous system simply can’t cope with the flood—and overflows, the way a cup overflows when you keep pouring and pouring.

And then it spills over the edge—as crying.

They’re not being naughty.

It’s hard for them.

These are different things—and a great deal depends on the words you use in your own head for what is happening. “They’re manipulating me”—and anger rises inside, resentment, the urge not to give in. “Right now this is unbearable for them, and they can’t yet cope on their own”—and your hand reaches out not to punish but to hug.

The same child. The same crying.

But what a different mom.

While their brakes are still growing, you are the brakes

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen many like her, and perhaps you will recognize yourself in each of them. I recognize myself in her too.

She came in with her baby in her arms and with the same question that was driving her crazy: “Why won’t my baby calm down? I’ve tried everything. I’m starting to get angry at my own child—and I hate myself for it.”

I asked: and what do you do when your baby cries?

“I try to make it stop,” she said. “I rock, I coax, I pop in a pacifier, I distract—anything to make the crying stop sooner. And it’s as if my baby senses that I’m at my limit and cries even louder.”

And there it was.

The baby really did sense it. It wasn’t reading her words—it was reading her state. Her tight shoulders, her quick breathing, her inner “oh, just be quiet already.” The baby was reaching out to borrow calm from her—and there was no calm there.

I suggested something very simple. At the next hard moment—don’t start by soothing the baby. Soothe yourself.

One deep breath in. And a slow, long breath out.

She tried. Uncertainly at first, hardly believing it. And then I saw her shoulders drop. That hunted look left her face. She stopped fighting—and simply became quiet.

And the baby in her arms quieted down too.

Not right away. Not by magic. But the baby did quiet down.

“I thought I had to fix my baby,” she said later. “But it turned out I just had to stop panicking next to them.”

That is the whole truth about the first years.

Until your baby has inner brakes of their own, you serve as their brakes. Not in place of theirs—but until their own grow strong.

From your breath—to their calm. From your steady heart—to their quiet. From your hand—to their shore.

You are the quiet hand that calms their storm.

One small step

Don’t try to change everything at once. Big promises frighten us, and we abandon them.

Keep it simple.

The next time things get hard—don’t rush to “switch off” the crying first. First, for one single breath, give yourself back your calm. Breathe in—and breathe out slowly—a long, unhurried breath. It’s said that an unhurried out-breath like this helps the body shift into calm all by itself—gently, without effort.

And only then turn to your baby.

And if you feel you’re at your limit yourself and one breath isn’t enough, lay your baby on their back in the crib and step out for a couple of minutes: to splash your face, to breathe by the window. That’s allowed: nothing will happen to your baby while you get your calm back. And one rule—no exceptions: never shake a baby, not even a little.

A calm grown-up nearby is exactly the missing shore your baby doesn’t have yet.

And if anxiety or tiredness doesn’t let go day after day, breathing may not be enough. Then it’s worth leaning not on a minute of quiet but on a real person: someone close to you, a doctor, a psychologist. This is not weakness. It is care—for your baby and for yourself.

And then quietly ask yourself—not sternly, but the way you’d ask someone very dear:

What if right now my baby needs not my perfect answer, but simply my calm rhythm—the very thing they can’t yet give themselves?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself is already halfway there.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any hard day when it seems again that your baby is doing it on purpose:

Your baby isn’t being naughty. They just can’t soothe themselves yet.

Inside them is a storm they didn’t choose and can’t yet handle alone. And beside them—you. And while they are learning to be calm, you are their calm.

This won’t make you a perfect mom. There are no perfect moms, thank God. But it will make you a mom a child can grow up beside.

And you know what? To be that kind of shore, you don’t first have to become flawless. The calm you give your baby grows not out of perfection—it grows out of warmth toward yourself. First a little gentler with yourself—then gentler with your baby too.

Their storm isn’t forever. One day they will build their inner house all the way up to the roof and learn to settle themselves. And in the foundation of that house will lie these breaths of yours. These arms of yours. These quiet minutes of yours beside them when things were hard—and you stayed anyway.

May you have enough tenderness in the hard hours—both for your baby and for yourself.

You are already giving them the most important thing.

You are near.

And that is enough.

And what will the quiet hand inside you whisper today—to your baby and to yourself?

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 2 →

Chapter 3

“The eight-month storm” and other leaps

Just a month ago, your baby smiled at everyone.

They reached out to Grandma, cooed at a neighbor in line, stayed calmly with Dad—and you were so glad to see what a sunny, easygoing little person was growing up. And then—it was as if a switch flipped.

Now Grandma only has to hold out her arms—and your baby bursts into tears. Hides their face in your shoulder. Clings as if you were leaving forever, when you only took a step toward the door. At night they wake again and again, although they had long been sleeping through. And during the day—they won’t let you take a single step away.

And you get scared.

“What did I do wrong? Maybe I spoiled my baby. Maybe something broke.”

Stop for a second. Breathe out.

You haven’t done anything wrong. Quite the opposite—something very important has just switched on inside your baby. Something that wasn’t there even a month ago.

This isn’t a malfunction. It’s a growth storm.

“It’s like someone swapped my baby”—recognizing the storm

It happens to almost everyone. Around eight or nine months—and then again more than once, at other milestones in the first and second years.

A baby who was so even-tempered and sunny until now suddenly becomes different. Fussy for no visible reason. Fearful where yesterday they were curious. Clingy, weepy, unwilling to let you go even into the next room.

Moms describe it in almost the same words: “It’s like someone swapped my baby.”

And the first thought that comes is the most frightening and the most unfair to yourself: I’ve ruined something.

I have heard this phrase so many times that I think I could finish it for a mom before she does. And every time I want to do this—take her hand and say: listen, here is how things really are.

These hard weeks are not a glitch in the program. They are the program itself. Not a step back but a leap forward—it’s just that a leap always comes hard. Something big inside a baby always arrives together with a storm on the outside.

This isn’t fussiness. It’s growth that, for now, can only express itself through tears.

What has switched on in their mind: Mom is there even when she can’t be seen

Here’s what happened.

In the first months, the world is simple for a baby: there is only what they can see right now. You left the room—and you no longer exist. Not “you left and will come back,” but simply gone, vanished completely. This is both unsettling and merciful at the same time: no mom—but no fear of losing her either.

And now—somewhere around eight or nine months—a new, enormous thought is born in their mind.

Mom is there even when she can’t be seen.

This ability of a child’s mind was described back in the last century by the Swiss researcher Jean Piaget—he called it object permanence. A baby begins to understand: what has disappeared from sight has not stopped existing. For some it ripens a little earlier, for others a little later—but sooner or later the thought comes to everyone. Mom hasn’t dissolved. She is somewhere out there, behind the door.

You’d think this would be a joy. But along with this knowledge comes a new pain.

Because your baby can already understand that “Mom is somewhere”—but can’t yet be sure she will come back. They know you haven’t vanished. But they don’t know whether you’ll return. And this gap between “she exists” and “will she come back” fills up with fear.

Hence the tears when you leave. Hence the fear of a stranger’s arms. Not because your baby has changed for the worse.

But because they have learned to love you so much that they are afraid of losing you.

It’s not a malfunction. It’s maturity

I want you to hear this clearly, because it turns the whole fear upside down.

Fear of strangers and anxiety when you leave are not a step backward. They are a sign that development is going the right way.

Think about it: it’s the opposite that would be worrying. If a baby at this age calmly went into the arms of any passerby, smiled at everyone the same and didn’t notice when you left—that would deserve attention. But the fact that they have singled you out from the whole world, that it is you they reach for and you they miss, means that the main bond of their life has taken hold.

They have chosen you.

Out of all the people on earth—you. So strongly that a stranger is now frightening, and your leaving causes real pain.

It’s not fussiness—it’s love that doesn’t have any other words yet.

John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, whom we talked about at the very beginning, called the mother a secure base—the support a child pushes off from to explore the world and returns to when frightened. And here’s the thing: for a child to find the courage one day to step away and go discover life, they first need to believe with all their heart that there is somewhere to come back to.

This difficult age is the birth of that belief.

Why “five minutes” means “forever” to your baby

There is one more thing that is hard for us grown-ups to truly feel.

A baby doesn’t have a sense of time yet.

When you tell yourself “I’m just going to the kitchen, for five minutes,” you know what five minutes is. You know they will end. You have a clock inside.

Your baby doesn’t have that clock yet.

For them, “just a minute” and “forever” are one and the same. They can’t wait, because they don’t know that waiting has an end. So your short step out the door is not a pause for them. It’s a real loss, crashing down right now, all at once.

That’s why they cry as if disaster had struck. For them, it has.

And that’s why what seems like a small thing matters so much: coming back. Again and again. So that out of many little “she left—and came back” moments, a calm knowledge gradually gathers inside them: Mom always comes back.

Every time you come back, you lay a brick in their future confidence.

Not with words but with what you do, you tell them what will one day become their inner support: I am not abandoned. I will wait—and I will be found.

From your leaving—to your return. From anxiety—to trust. From “Mom disappeared”—to “Mom will always come.”

When the storm comes at night

Often, in these same weeks, sleep falls apart too.

A baby who was already sleeping in long stretches suddenly starts waking in the middle of the night again. Looks for you. Cries until you come. And many moms think in despair: it’s all gone to waste, we’ve slid backward, I did something wrong with the schedule.

But most often it has nothing to do with the schedule.

Your baby isn’t waking from hunger. They wake to check whether you’re there.

It’s the same separation anxiety, only arriving in the dark. During the day they keep you in sight, and at night they lose you—and wake to make sure you haven’t vanished for good. The same work of growing up, the same new thought, “Mom is there even when she can’t be seen,” which now gives them no rest even in sleep.

It’s hard. I won’t pretend it’s easy—when you haven’t slept for weeks, any theory sounds like weak comfort. I remember that ragged, foggy feeling well myself, when in the middle of the night you no longer know where the child ends and you begin.

But know two things. First: this isn’t something you broke—it’s a wave. For many babies such periods last weeks, not months, and gradually pass on their own as the brain masters a new skill.

Second: at night your baby needs the same thing from you as in the daytime—not training but reassurance. I’m here. You’re not alone. You can go back to sleep.

How to be the shore

So what is a mom to do in the middle of this storm?

Not to beat back the wave by force, but to become the shore it breaks against.

Right now your baby doesn’t need you to fix anything. They need you to be there—steady, calm, the very ground under their feet. Here are a few simple things to lean on.

Stay close—don’t push them toward others. When a guest arrives, don’t hand your baby over right away. Let the guest first just talk with you, without staring straight at the child. And your baby, from your arms, will watch, get used to them, grow braver. Ten or fifteen minutes of watching from a safe place are worth more than a hundred attempts at “don’t be scared, go to the nice lady.”

Stay calm—your baby reads you. If you tense up and peer guiltily into their face—“oh, come on, don’t cry”—they pick up your anxiety instantly. But if you are calm and friendly with the guest, your baby reads it from you: if Mom isn’t afraid, then it really isn’t scary. Your calm tells them more than any words.

Say goodbye honestly—no sneaking away. The biggest temptation is to slip out while they’re distracted, so as not to see the tears. I know it from the inside: more than once I’ve stood at the door, sheepishly working out how to slip out unnoticed. Don’t do it. Sneaking away doesn’t protect your baby—it undermines the very trust that is being built right now. If you have done it—nothing is broken: trust is built through repetition, and you can start saying honest goodbyes today. Better to keep it short and calm: “Mommy is stepping out and will be back soon.” And—be sure to come back. Let your words always match what you do.

Play peekaboo. This simple game, which mothers play with children in every corner of the earth, is really gentle practice in that same object permanence. The face hides—and here it is again. Again and again, lightly and joyfully, your baby lives through a tiny rehearsal: what disappears comes back. Gone—and back again. From this game of laughter, one day a great calm will grow.

And one more thing—gently, just in case. Almost always this fear and this clinginess are normal, and they pass on their own. But if your baby’s anxiety doesn’t settle for months, if they don’t calm down in your arms at all, if the light goes out of their eyes and their interest in the world fades—don’t stay alone with it; talk to your doctor. Not because something terrible has happened. But because a mom’s calm confidence is worth more than any doubts carried alone.

The story of one storm

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen so many like her, and in each of them, perhaps, you will recognize yourself too.

She came in bewildered, almost in tears. “I don’t understand what happened,” she said. “My baby was so wonderful and sociable. And now they sob the moment I leave the room. Into my mother-in-law’s arms—screaming. At night they wake up several times. I’m exhausted, and I keep thinking: where did I go wrong?”

I asked: and how old is your baby?

“Nine months.”

And I smiled—not at her trouble, but at how perfectly it all fit.

I told her about the storm. That right now, an enormous thought is being born in her baby’s mind—that Mom is there even when she can’t be seen. That the baby is crying not because they are spoiled but because for the first time they have truly understood how much they need her. That this isn’t the end of a calm life—it’s the birth of real attachment.

I watched her face change.

First disbelief. Then—as if someone had lifted a heavy load off her shoulders. And finally she said quietly: “So they’re not broken. And I didn’t break them. They’ve just… grown?”

Yes. They’ve simply grown.

A few weeks later she wrote that the storm had died down—almost as suddenly as it had begun. But that wasn’t even the point. “Do you know what changed on the very first night?” she wrote. “It wasn’t me that changed for my baby. I changed for myself. I stopped approaching my baby as a problem that had to be solved right away. I started coming to them as the shore. And I think my baby felt it before I did.”

That’s what it’s all for.

Not to “defeat” fussiness. But for the moment when a mom stops blaming herself—and becomes solid ground under her child’s feet again.

One small step

Don’t try to change everything at once. Big tasks frighten us.

Do one thing.

The next time your baby cries because you’re leaving—don’t slip away silently and don’t rush to coax them. Stop for a second. Catch their eye. Say calmly and warmly: “Mommy is stepping out and will be back soon.” And then—be sure to come back. And when you’re back, don’t forget to show them: see, I came back.

One honest goodbye. One faithful return. Today—just this.

And then quietly ask yourself:

What if behind what I call “fussiness” there is not bad behavior but the hard work of growing—and what’s needed from me now is not to fix anything but simply to be near?

And one more question—quieter, just for yourself. What in me responds to their “storm”—my own fear, or my own footing? And which of them should I hold on to right now?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself changes how you see things.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when the storm comes again:

This isn’t fussiness. It’s growth that, for now, can only express itself through tears.

Your baby cries when you leave not because they are spoiled—but because they have learned to love you. They fear strangers not because you missed something—but because they have found their own, their one and only. And that one is you.

The eight-month storm will pass. Other storms will pass too—at new milestones, at new stages of growth. They will always come together with something big that is ripening inside.

And you—stay the shore.

Not the one who stops every wave—but the one you can always moor to. Calm. Reliable. The one who is there.

May your baby know in any storm: there is ground that will wait for them.

And that ground is—

you.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 3 →

Chapter 4

A calm mom, a calm baby

I’ll be honest: for a very long time I didn’t believe this about myself.

That my state is not my private business. That it spills over. That the baby in my arms feels it before I manage to put it into words.

And then I began to notice. And you have probably noticed it too.

The moment you tense up inside—remember a harsh conversation, get startled by a phone call, clench your teeth—the baby in your arms seems to feel it through their skin. They start to squirm. Whimper. Arch their back, though a second ago they were calm.

And the moment you breathe out, let your shoulders drop, go soft—they quiet down too. Snuggle closer. Breathe more evenly.

This is not a coincidence. And not your imagination.

It’s the two of you—on the same wavelength.

This chapter is the heart of the whole book. If you remember nothing from it but one thought, let it be this one: it is still hard for your baby to calm down on their own. They tune in to you. And that means your calm is not a nice bonus to good mothering. In many ways, it is the very environment in which their brain grows.

One rhythm for two.

Your baby reads you before they understand words

Your baby doesn’t know a single word yet. They don’t understand “everything’s okay,” “Mom is near,” “hang on a little.”

But they read you—and read you beautifully.

They read your body. Tense arms or soft ones. Quick breathing or even breathing. A face that is alive and warm—or frozen, withdrawn into anxiety. A voice with a taut string ringing in it—or a voice with peace in it.

For us, all this is background. For them, it’s the main text.

Because in the first months and years a child understands the world not with the mind but with the body. They don’t think “Mom is nervous.” They simply feel tension nearby—and their own little system responds in kind. Anxiety spills over, the way warmth flows from palm to palm.

But calm spills over in exactly the same way.

And this is the most important thing.

Why: your baby borrows calm from you

Remember the immature “brakes”?

A grown-up has something inside that helps them recover after a fright, after tears, after a world that is too loud. We are able—not always, and sometimes with difficulty—to breathe out and tell ourselves: “okay, I’m calming down.” A baby has almost none of this yet. The part that will one day become their inner calm is only just being laid down. And it takes years to build.

So how does your baby calm down now, while they don’t have “brakes” of their own?

They borrow them from you.

They borrow calm—from your even breathing, your soft face, your quiet voice. Your mature nervous system becomes their nervous system for a while. Not in place of their own—but until their own grows up.

This has a name—co-regulation. A long word for a very simple and very ancient thing: next to a calm grown-up, a child becomes calm. Not because you are doing something. But because you are near—and you are at peace.

And this isn’t just a pretty image. It is what observers see when they watch mothers and their children.

The psychologist Ruth Feldman described something remarkable back in 2011. When a mother and baby are close, in warm, calm contact, their heart rhythms begin to adjust to each other. Like two instruments tuned to the same pitch. Like a quiet dance in which no one leads on purpose, yet the movements come together into one pattern on their own.

Your steady pulse. Your quiet breathing. Your calm face.

For your baby, this isn’t background. It’s a signal their own system tunes itself by: “it’s okay to relax. It’s safe here.”

This dance goes both ways

And here is something especially quiet and especially beautiful.

This dance goes both ways.

It isn’t only you who gives your baby calm. Your baby gives it back to you. When you pick them up, hold them close, catch their eye, feed them—it isn’t only your baby who calms down. You calm down too.

Many who observe mothers and babies describe this as a two-way recharge of safety: skin to skin, eye to eye, the warm weight of a baby on your chest—all of it gently resonates in both bodies. As if nature itself had designed it so: that what your baby needs, you need too. That you warm each other with one and the same warmth.

Sometimes calm comes through your arms. Sometimes—through a gaze. Sometimes—through one quiet breath nearby.

And these are not two separate stories—your baby’s calm and yours. It is one story.

And this leads to the thought that this whole chapter may have been written for.

The end of guilt: caring for yourself is caring for your baby

How many times have you heard yourself think: “no time for me right now”?

I have heard it in myself hundreds of times. Put off rest. Put off quiet. Put off that one calm breath—because there are more important things, there is the baby, and I can wait, I’ll get to it later.

I want to say this to you very gently and very firmly at the same time.

When you care for yourself, you are not taking from your child. You are giving to them.

If your calm is the environment in which their brain grows, then getting your calm back is not selfishness. It is a direct investment in your baby. The most direct one there is. A mom who is wrung out and stretched tight with anxiety finds it much harder to share a calm she herself is short of. You can’t lead a dance when there is no music inside.

It isn’t a luxury. It is what your baby leans on.

From your breath—to their calm. From your warmth—to their safety. From your fullness—to their growth.

That is why five minutes of quiet for yourself, a cup of tea in peace, asking for help, rest that isn’t put off “until later”—these are not things you steal from your child. They are things you give to your child—by a roundabout but surest route. Through yourself.

Loving yourself here is neither a whim nor a reward. It is the base. The very soil from which everything else grows: calm, and generosity, and the ability to be near without dissolving completely.

Caring for yourself and caring for your baby are not two tasks.

They are one.

You don’t need to be perfect—you need to come back

This is where an anxious mom usually gets scared.

“If I am my baby’s calm, does that mean I have to be calm all the time? But I snap. I get tired. I get distracted by my phone, I get irritated, sometimes I’m just running on empty. So am I ruining everything for my baby?”

No.

Breathe out—this may be the most important part of the whole chapter.

You don’t need to be calm all the time. That’s impossible—and it isn’t required. The bond between you is not built on flawlessness. It is built on coming back.

Psychologists who observe mothers and babies noticed long ago a simple and very comforting pattern: the bond rests not on perfect contact but on how quickly you come back to it. You got distracted, drifted into anxiety, snapped—and then you caught yourself, breathed out, turned to your baby, caught their eye, picked them up. That coming back is what reliability is woven from.

Not “never getting lost.”

But “getting lost—and finding each other again.”

Your baby doesn’t need a mom who never makes mistakes. Your baby needs a mom who comes back. Each such return tells their system more than any perfect calm: “even if things got anxious for a second, everything can be mended. Mom comes back. The world is reliable.”

So let go of the dream of being perfect. You don’t need it—and neither does your baby.

What’s needed is something else. Something small, human, doable.

Coming back.

A story

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen many like her, and maybe you’ll recognize a little of yourself in her.

She was holding her baby and was almost in tears. “My baby feels everything,” she said. “The moment I get nervous, the crying starts. So I’m hurting my baby just by what’s going on inside me. I have no right to get tired.”

Behind those words was a terrible weight. She had decided she was obliged to be a concrete wall—even, calm, without a single crack. And of course she couldn’t keep it up. And every time she snapped, she counted it against herself.

I asked her just one thing. “And what do you do afterward? After you’ve snapped?”

She was taken aback. “Well… I go over. Pick my baby up. Hold them close. Say that I’m here. I feel so ashamed.”

“There,” I said. “There it is. You come back. Every time, you come back to your baby. And that is exactly what your baby remembers—not your anxiety, but that after anxiety your warmth always comes.”

She fell silent. And then she said quietly: “So I don’t have to be perfect. I just have to not disappear for good.”

Yes. Exactly.

She didn’t need to become calmer. She needed to stop punishing herself for being alive. And—remarkably—as soon as the guilt left, half of the tension left too. Things got quieter for her. And that meant things got quieter for her baby too.

This story is about many of us. And, truth be told, more than once about me.

We are so afraid of harming our child with our imperfection that out of fear we lose the very calm we could share. But a child doesn’t need our flawlessness.

They need our presence. And our coming back.

One small step

Don’t set out to “become a calm mom”—big tasks frighten us, and we abandon them.

Keep it simple. Right now, without changing anything around you.

Put your hand on your chest. And breathe out slowly. A long, unhurried out-breath—let your shoulders drop with it. And one more. Breathe however feels comfortable; if deep breathing makes you dizzy, go back to breathing normally. There is no right or wrong here.

And now, if your baby is nearby, just notice: something changes in them too. Maybe just a little. Maybe not right away. But your calm quietly flows to them.

That is co-regulation—in its simplest form. One breath of yours that becomes your baby’s breath too. Small is doable. And doable is repeatable.

And then quietly ask yourself—this may be my favorite question; I come back to it myself on hard days:

If it were love speaking in me right now—what would it tell me about this day? And what one small thing would it let me give back to myself today?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes this question itself is already the beginning of coming back to yourself.

And—gently, but honestly—one more thing. If for a long time there has been no out-breath inside you, only a clenched fist; if anxiety or heaviness doesn’t let go for long days and weeks; if you have no strength at all—then co-regulation is no substitute for help from real people. Then you need a person beside you: someone close to you, a doctor, a psychologist. This happens to a great many moms, and there isn’t a drop of shame in it. This book does not replace a consultation with a specialist. To be a support for your baby, sometimes you first need someone to support you. A person needs a person—that applies to you too.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any anxious day:

You are not calming your baby. You are calming down together.

I don’t need to be perfect and stone-calm. I need to come back—to my breath, to my calm, to my baby. And in this shared breathing we both grow quieter.

Further on, in the second part of the book, we will go through this step by step—quiet, holding close skin to skin, an unhurried walk, warm daily rhythms. But all of it will be about one thing only. About how the two of you can step into this shared calm, again and again.

And it begins with something small. With the simplest thing you already have.

With your breath.

So may you have enough tenderness—not only for your baby but for yourself as well. Because now you know: it is one and the same tenderness. And by warming yourself, you warm your baby.

You are near.

And your calm—even imperfect, even for one breath—is already enough.

And what will your one breath be—today, right now?

Let it be.

And let there be love in it.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 4 →

Chapter 5

Three minutes of quiet

Do you know that feeling when suddenly—in the middle of an ordinary day—everything goes quiet?

Your baby has fallen asleep at the breast. Or is simply looking at you—for a long time, without looking away, with that gaze that has no words in it yet but already holds a whole world. And you look back. And something so quiet hangs between you that you’re almost afraid to breathe—for fear of scaring it away.

And then your head switches on.

“I didn’t hang up the laundry. I didn’t call my mother-in-law back. I yelled again today. Am I doing enough for my baby’s development? Am I doing anything right at all?”

And the quiet crumbles. A precious minute slips through your fingers—and you didn’t even notice it.

I lived like this for a very long time. And only later did I understand: this minute can be held on to. That is what this chapter is about—how to turn a chance pause into something to lean on. A little island of quiet you can moor to in any storm.

Three minutes of quiet.

Sometimes the most important thing is to do nothing

We moms are used to always doing something.

Feeding, rocking, stimulating, changing, keeping up, checking. It seems to us that love is measured in action—the more I do, the better a mom I am. And somewhere deep inside lives a quiet fear: if I stop for even a minute, I’ll miss something.

But there is a form of care that asks nothing of you.

Only to be.

Three minutes of quiet is very simple. You sit so that you can see your baby’s face. And you stay near. Without words. Without adjusting anything. Without “let’s look over here” and “where are baby’s eyes?” You are not teaching them. You are not entertaining them. You are not judging whether everything is right.

You simply are. Together.

This isn’t a waste of time. It’s the fullest time you will have today.

Why does it work? Your baby borrows calm—from you

Here is what’s important to understand—and what lifts half of a mother’s guilt.

A young child’s nervous system can’t yet calm itself on its own. A grown-up has “brakes” inside—something that helps us recover after a fright, after tears, after a world that is too loud. In a baby, those brakes are only just being built. In the first years they can’t do what we do—breathe out and tell themselves: “everything’s okay, I’m safe.”

So they do it differently.

They borrow calm from you.

And here is what scientists confirm again and again as they observe babies and their mothers. Remember, we’ve already talked about Ruth Feldman—the one who described a simple and remarkable thing: when a mother and child are close, in calm, warm contact, their heart rhythms begin to adjust to each other. Your steady pulse, your quiet breathing, your soft face—for your baby, this isn’t background. It’s a signal. A signal their own little system tunes itself by: “it’s okay to relax, it’s safe here.”

Attachment specialists call this attunement. But at heart it is a very simple and very ancient thing.

Your calm is the environment in which your baby’s brain grows.

And now—the main consequence, the one that made all of this worth saying.

When you sit down for three minutes of quiet, you are not only calming yourself. You are giving your baby what they can’t yet give themselves. These minutes in which you seem to be “doing nothing” are the real work. The most delicate and the most important work.

Caring for yourself stops being selfishness.

For a long time I couldn’t let this in. It always seemed to me: first I’ll get everything done, and then, if there’s anything left, I can think about myself. But it turned out the other way around. Loving yourself is not a reward you still have to earn. It is the base. Everything else grows out of it—calm, and tenderness, and the strength to be near without dissolving completely.

When you give yourself back your calm, you give it back to your child as well. These are not two different tasks. They are one.

From your breath—to their calm. From your warmth—to their safety. From your quiet—to their growth.

Let me also be honest about something else. These three minutes are not a cure, and they don’t replace help from real people if things are truly hard for you—if the “darkness” doesn’t lift for long days or weeks, if you have no strength at all. Then what you need is not three minutes but a real person by your side: someone close to you, a doctor, a psychologist. This happens to a great many moms—there is nothing shameful in it—and nothing shameful in asking for help either. Quiet is support, not medicine. A person needs a person—that applies to you too.

How to do it at home

You don’t need anything except you and your baby. No special place, no hush over the whole house, no “right” mood.

Choose a moment when your baby is calm. Many moms find it easiest in the morning or right after a feeding. But any time will do—even in the middle of a hard day. Especially in the middle of a hard day.

Sit so that you can see your baby’s face. In your arms, on your lap, in a sling, beside you on a mat—whatever is comfortable for you. Back straight but not tense. You can sway gently—that’s natural.

Breathe in. Once, deeply. And breathe out slowly. Let your shoulders drop at least a little with that out-breath.

Whisper one phrase to your baby. For example: “You’re my little wizard.” Or your own—any warm one: “You’re my dear one,” “I’m here,” “I love you so much.” One phrase—calmly, once. And if you forget the words, it doesn’t matter. Words aren’t the main thing here.

And fall silent. For three minutes.

Just look at your baby’s face. Listen to their breathing. Feel their warmth if they are in your arms. Don’t direct their gaze, don’t adjust anything, don’t comment. Let them look into your eyes, or at your mouth, or somewhere past you—all of it is right. Your job is to be near and to look with love.

Thoughts will come. Laundry, worries, the to-do list—all of it will surface, without fail. It surfaces for me every time, honestly—I don’t know a single mom whose head obediently stays quiet in that moment.

Don’t blame yourself for them. Don’t drive them away by force. Don’t fight.

Just gently come back each time—to your baby’s face, to their breathing, to this minute.

When the three minutes are up, don’t jump up right away. Kiss your baby. Hug them. Have a stretch yourself. Stay in it a little longer.

And then, if you feel like it, write down one word. Not a sentence, not a report—one honest word about what’s inside. “Warm.” “Quiet.” “Home.” “I’m here.” If nothing special “clicked,” write just that: “it was calm.” That’s enough. This isn’t an exam.

Why exactly three minutes? Not because there is some magic in the number. It’s just that a minute is enough for your head to stop racing, and for your body to remember what it’s like not to hurry. If you want more, stay longer. But start with three. Small is doable. And doable is repeatable.

And one more thing. If you are apart from your baby right now—they are in the hospital, or you are spending the day apart—the practice is still yours. Take a photo of your baby. Look into that face. Say your phrase. The bond lives not only in touch. It lives in your heart, and no one can take it from there.

“For the first time in a month, I didn’t hear my inner voice”

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I have seen dozens like her, and perhaps you will recognize yourself in each of them. Why hide it—I recognize myself in her too.

She came in worn out. One of those moms who do everything right and get twice as tired because of it. Baby in her arms, and guilt in her eyes. “I constantly feel that I’m falling short,” she said. “I’m with my baby all day, and inside there’s something like a counter: too little, too little, too little.”

When I suggested simply being quiet for three minutes beside the little ones, she was almost frightened. “I don’t know how to be quiet. I talk to my baby all the time; I read somewhere that you’re supposed to.”

I asked her just to try.

And there they sit—she and her son. For the first few seconds she fidgets, straightens the baby’s little top, looks for something to do. And then—she goes quiet. Her face smooths out. Her shoulders drop. The baby, who was whimpering a moment ago, suddenly goes still and gazes up at her—for a long time, seriously, the way only infants can look.

Three minutes passed. She raised her eyes, and they were wet.

“Do you know what happened?” she said quietly. “For the first time this month, I didn’t hear my inner voice. The one that keeps telling me I’m a bad mother. Just three minutes—and it was gone. There was only my son. And me.”

That’s what it’s all for.

Not for the sake of technique. Not for the sake of “proper development.” But for the moment when the inner critic falls silent—and what remains is the one thing that has been between the two of you from the very beginning.

Two of you. Near. And that is enough.

One small step

Don’t commit to doing this “every day, always.” Big promises frighten us, and we abandon them. I know this from my own experience—how many times I solemnly promised myself “from now on and forever” and quietly fizzled out by Wednesday.

Keep it simple.

Today—once. Three minutes. One quiet look at your child’s face, with no to-do list running inside. Only that.

And then quietly ask yourself:

What did I feel in those three minutes—and when was the last time I gave myself quiet like this, just because, for no reason?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself is already the beginning of coming back to yourself.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any anxious day:

Sometimes it is enough simply to be near.

I don’t need to be doing something all the time to be a good mom. Sometimes it is enough simply to be near—and in this quiet we both rest.

May your day always hold these three minutes. A little island of calm where you don’t have to prove anything or rush anywhere. Where there are only two breaths—yours and your baby’s—and the quiet truth that you are already giving them the most important thing.

And when was the last time you let yourself do this—simply be, doing nothing and proving nothing to anyone? After all, these three minutes are for you too.

I think it would be something very simple. Something like: “Sit down. Breathe. Look at your little one. Everything is already here.”

You are near.

And that is enough.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 5 →

Chapter 6

Held close, skin to skin

One day you’ll notice it in yourself.

Your baby started crying in the next room—and you’re already there. You didn’t have time to think “I should go,” didn’t have time to decide what to do—but your arms have already scooped them up, already pulled them close, already started rocking. Your body moved before your head. And only then, a second later, does the thought kick in: what happened—hungry, tired, cold?

Your arms know the way to your child before your head has time to find it.

This is neither chance nor blind instinct. It is the body’s very ancient, very wise memory. And this chapter is about that memory.

About how you soothe your baby not with words, not with the right method, not with a special toy—but with yourself. With your arms. With your warmth. With your rhythm.

Held close, skin to skin.

Your body is your baby’s first home

In the last chapter, we learned to be near while staying still—in quiet, face to face. That is one half of presence.

And there is a second half. It is about movement.

Because your baby didn’t come to us out of quiet. They came out of warmth, out of rocking, out of a constant bodily conversation. For nine months, a body was their home. The beat of your heart was their lullaby. Your steps were their rocking. Your breathing was their ebb and flow. They didn’t know a single word yet—but they already knew you by heart. By touch.

And then they are born—into a world that is huge, bright, noisy on every side.

And all they need in that moment, so as not to be frightened by all that vastness, is to feel home again.

And home, for them, is you.

Not the walls. Not the crib. Not even the coziest nest you worked so hard to build. Home is your chest, your arms, your scent, your voice heard from inside. Your baby doesn’t understand the words “everything’s okay, you’re safe.” But they understand skin. They understand warmth. They understand: I’m being held—so I am home.

Touch is their first language. And you speak it fluently, without knowing a single “rule.”

Why does it work? Skin remembers, warmth comforts

Here is what’s important to understand—and what again lifts half of our guilt.

We are used to thinking that carrying, rocking and holding close are “cuddles”—pleasant but optional. Something like dessert. And “real” care is feeding, changing, putting to bed on schedule.

But it’s the other way around.

Touch isn’t dessert. It’s food.

When you hold your baby skin to skin, calm bodily contact helps them settle. And—this touches me every time—judging by many studies, it helps not only the baby but the mother too. It’s like a two-way street: you comfort your baby with warmth—and you yourself grow calmer from holding them. One touch—two kinds of calm.

Remember Ruth Feldman, whom we’ve already talked about? Her work is about exactly this: when a mother and baby are attuned to each other, their heart rhythms gradually begin to adjust to one another. Not figuratively—literally. Two hearts beating closer and closer in time.

And rocking? That ancient gesture a mother finds on her own, without any books?

Calm, rhythmic movement—swaying, carrying, a quiet “shh, shh” in time with your steps—helps a baby settle here and now. And early-development specialists believe that, repeated day after day, this experience of calm next to a grown-up gradually helps their own ability to settle to mature as well. Remember, at the beginning of the book we said that a baby’s inner “brakes” aren’t finished yet? Well, for now your arms are their temporary brakes. You rock—and their storm gradually quiets. And along the way, day by day, their own system slowly learns this rhythm. The way a new language is learned: first by following you, then on their own.

I’ll be honest, as I usually am. This is not a mechanism measured perfectly down to the last screw—scientists are cautious here, and we should be cautious too. But on the main point they agree: warm, calm bodily contact doesn’t “spoil” a baby—it helps them grow.

And here is the conclusion all of this is leading to.

When you pick up your crying baby, you are not “getting them used to being held.” You are doing exactly what you should. You are giving them what they can’t yet give themselves.

From your warmth—to their calm. From your rhythm—to their quiet. From your arms—to their “I’m home.”

And—gently, but honestly. Warmth soothes a lot, but not everything. If no amount of warmth can calm your baby, if the crying doesn’t sound like the usual crying, if you’re worried about their health—a mother’s arms are not the doctor’s rival here but the doctor’s ally. Hold your baby—and don’t hesitate to ask a specialist. One doesn’t get in the way of the other.

How to do it at home

You don’t need anything special. No sling from the “right” brand, no massage techniques from a video, no free hour. You need only your arms and your baby. You already have everything else—it has been with you since birth.

I call these “stretches” (potyagushki)—our warm touch “hello.” This isn’t a “developmental” exercise. It’s a conversation without words.

Begin with a touch “hello.” When you pick your baby up after sleep, don’t rush straight into the day’s tasks. Place your palms on their tummy, on their chest—warmly, calmly. Give them a second to feel: these are Mom’s hands; the day begins with warmth. You can quietly say: “Good morning, my little one.” Not for the words—for the voice.

Stretch together. Gently, carefully straighten your baby’s legs and bend them again—once, twice. Open their arms wide and bring them back together. No effort, no “exercises”—just let your warm hands travel over their body, as if telling every little heel and every little finger: “I see you, all of you is mine.” Your baby stretches with you—and discovers their own body through your palms. If an orthopedist or pediatrician has given you their own recommendations (joints, muscle tone), follow the specialist’s advice; their professional opinion is objective.

Rock—and breathe. If your baby is upset, pick them up and rock them. But here is what matters more than the movement itself: rock more slowly than you feel like rocking. When we are anxious, we rock fast and jerkily—and without meaning to, we pass our hurry on to the baby. Slow down. Find the rhythm of calm breathing, not of panic. That is co-regulation: you are not adjusting to your baby’s storm; your baby gradually adjusts to your calm.

Hold your baby close, skin to skin. When you have the chance—at home, in quiet—lay your baby, undressed, against your chest and cover you both with something light, leaving your baby’s face uncovered. Just lie there together. No task. Let your baby hear your heart—that very first lullaby, which they have known longer than they have known your face. Only make sure your baby is warm and breathing easily, and don’t fall asleep yourself with your baby on your chest. If you start to feel drowsy, move your baby to the crib: skin-to-skin contact is for times when you are awake beside them. It is especially precious on hard days—theirs and yours.

And the most important thing to remember about all these “stretches.”

Don’t do them “correctly.”

Your baby doesn’t care whether it’s the right technique. Only one thing matters to them—that it’s you. That your hands are warm. That you aren’t rushing. That you are near not as a body that performs functions, but as a body that is home.

And if you’re tired and have no strength for a “ritual”—just hold your baby close for a minute. That is already enough. Honestly.

“I carried my baby—and for the first time, I carried myself”

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen many like her, and perhaps you will recognize yourself in each of them.

She came in with her baby in her arms and a guilty crease between her brows. One of those moms who have read everything and so are afraid of everything.

“I think I’ve spoiled my baby,” she said, almost in a whisper. “They only fall asleep in my arms. People tell me: you got them used to it, now suffer, it’s your own fault. But I can’t not pick them up. My arms just reach out on their own. I must be doing something wrong.”

And there was so much quiet anguish in her—between what a cold outside voice was telling her and what her own body was telling her.

I asked just one thing. And what do you feel yourself—there, inside—when you pick your baby up?

She thought about it. And suddenly her face smoothed out.

“I feel… that I’m where I belong,” she said. “That now everything is right.”

There, I said. There’s your answer. This is neither weakness nor a mistake. It’s your body knowing the way that your head is only just learning to walk.

And then came the moment I’m really telling this story for.

She was rocking her baby—slowly, holding them to her chest—and she herself suddenly grew quiet. Her shoulders, which for months had been up around her ears, dropped. Her breathing evened out. And she said, not even to me, but as if to herself:

“You know, I’m not just rocking my baby right now. It’s as if I’ve taken myself into my arms too. For the first time in a long while.”

That’s what it’s all for.

Not for the sake of the right babywearing technique. But for the moment when, holding your child, you suddenly also hold that tired woman inside whom nobody ever quite gets around to holding.

Two in your arms. And both are warm.

One small step

Don’t set out to “always carry correctly and rock mindfully from now on.” Big tasks frighten us, and we abandon them.

Keep it simple.

Today—just once—pick your baby up just because. Not to feed, change or settle them. But with no purpose at all. Hold them close. Breathe together. Let your arms remember the way they already know.

And then quietly ask yourself:

When was the last time I hugged my child not “for a reason” but simply because I wanted to—and when was the last time someone held me just as tenderly?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes this question itself is already the first hug.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when an outside voice tells you that you’re “getting the baby used to being held”:

Your arms remember the way to your child before your head does.

I don’t need to check the rules to know how to comfort my baby. My body knows. I pick my baby up—and we both come home.

May your arms always find the way—without fear, without doubt, without outside voices behind your back. May your home have plenty of skin-to-skin warmth—because this is not spoiling but the very first and most honest language of love. And may you, while holding your child, now and then remember to hold yourself too.

You are your baby’s first home.

And your baby already has that home.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 6 →

Chapter 7

A walk that brings you back to yourself

One day you catch yourself doing something strange.

You’re walking down the street with the stroller—but inside you’re still at home. There, in the kitchen, is the half-washed cup. There, in the corner, is the laundry basket. There, in your head, is a thirteen-item list and an anxious question you carry with you like a stone in your pocket: am I doing anything right at all?

You’re walking—but your body is clenched. Shoulders up by your ears. Eyes on the pavement, under the wheels, so as not to hit a pothole. Your breathing is shallow, as if you were late for something, although, really, you have nowhere to be.

And a walk that could have been a rest turns into one more item on the list.

And yet a whole world is right there. The sky. A tree. Someone’s window with a flower in it. And your baby in the stroller, who is looking at you and reading not your words—but your body.

This chapter is about how to go out for a walk and come back a little different. Not having “logged your hours outside,” but collected. Back with yourself.

I jokingly call it “the yoga director’s walk.” I’ll tell you why in a moment.

A walk isn’t about your legs. It’s about coming back into your body

We moms live a great deal in our heads.

In there are worries, plans, calculations, other people’s advice and a quiet inner critic commenting on our every step. We think about the child, the house, tomorrow—about everything except one thing. Except the fact that right now we have a body that breathes, walks and feels the warmth of the sun on its cheek.

A walk brings you back there. Into your body. Into the “here.”

And here is the first thing I want to say. This is not a walk for the baby’s sake—“we need our walk, fresh air is good for them.” This is a walk for your sake.

Sounds almost heretical, doesn’t it? We’re so used to everything being for them.

But the whole point of this chapter is that one can’t be separated from the other. When you straighten your back, slow your breathing and let the light of the street into yourself, it isn’t only you who calms down. Next to you, in the stroller or the sling, your baby calms down too.

You lead. Your baby tunes in to you.

So we walk without slouching, without staring at our feet, without rushing off to who knows where. We walk as if there were a quiet dignity inside us. Head up. Shoulders open. An unhurried step.

Not a “vacuum-cleaner mom” who has escaped the house for a minute. But a woman who has stepped out for a breath of air.

The whole practice is about this posture—and this breathing.

Why it works—and why your baby calms down too

Here it’s important to understand one thing, and it lifts half of a mother’s guilt.

A young child’s nervous system can’t yet calm itself on its own. We grown-ups have “brakes” inside—something that helps us recover after a fright, after tears, after a world that is too loud. In a baby, those brakes are still being built, over years. On their own, they can’t yet breathe out and tell themselves: “everything’s okay, I’m safe.”

So they do it differently.

They borrow calm—from you.

Your even breathing, your unhurried step, your soft face without a tense crease between the brows—for your baby, this isn’t background. It’s a signal. Their own little system tunes itself by it: “it’s okay to relax, it’s safe here.” Remember Ruth Feldman, whom we’ve already talked about? This is exactly what her work is about: when a mother and baby are close, in living, warm contact—gaze, voice, face—their heart rhythms begin to adjust to each other, to beat in harmony. Specialists call this co-regulation—a quiet tuning in to each other. But at heart it is a very ancient and very simple thing.

Now—about breathing. Why exactly a slow, long out-breath.

When you breathe out for a long time—longer than you breathe in—it’s as if you are whispering to your body: there is no danger. Put simply, we have a nerve inside us that is linked to the state of rest and recovery—and a calm, long out-breath gently sends it that signal. The body responds on its own: the pulse evens out, the shoulders drop, anxiety steps back. Scientists who study breathing see this again and again: a slow, calm out-breath really does help the body find its balance. It isn’t a trick—it’s about how gently we are able to help ourselves.

And your steps? Steps give rhythm.

There is something healing in walking, and people knew it long before any science. The ancients said: solvitur ambulando—“it is solved by walking.” When the body walks evenly and steadily, it becomes easier for the head to let go of an intrusive thought it has been spinning for the hundredth time. Step, breath, heartbeat—three rhythms that, on a walk, gradually tune in to one another.

And here is the main consequence that made it worth telling all this.

When you calm yourself on a walk, you give your baby what they can’t yet give themselves.

These are not two different things—“taking the baby for a walk” and “pulling yourself together.” It is one thing.

From your out-breath—to their calm. From your straight back—to their safety. From your calm—to their growth.

Let me also be honest about something else. Walking and breathing are support, not medicine. If it has been dark inside you for a long time, if the heaviness hasn’t lifted for more than two weeks, if you have no strength, no joy and no sleep—then what you need is not three colors on the street but a real person by your side: someone close to you, a doctor, a psychologist. This happens to a great many moms, and there isn’t a drop of shame in it. Asking for help is not weakness. A person needs a person—that applies to you too.

How to do it at home

You don’t need anything special. No park outside your windows, no good weather, no “right” mood. All you need is you, your baby and fifteen minutes.

And one more thing, right from the start. If you gave birth recently, if the birth was hard or you had a C-section, check first with your doctor whether you can go out walking and start asking more of your body yet. The body recovers at its own pace, and there’s no need to rush it.

First—posture. Even before you step out.

Stop at the doorway. Lift your head—look ahead, at the horizon, not at your feet. Open your shoulders, gently, without strain. And quietly tell yourself: “I’m not in a hurry. Right now I’m not washing, not cooking, not cleaning. I’m just walking. I’m here.”

This is a small adjustment for the body. The body is the first teacher of emotion: when you straighten up, the brain gets a message—“everything is all right, we’re safe.”

Next—breathing in rhythm with your steps.

You can do it like this: breathe in for about four steps, breathe out a little longer—for five or six. One, two, three, four—in. And longer—out, as if you were quietly breathing out the whole of today. The exact numbers don’t matter; there is one guide: the out-breath is longer than the in-breath.

Lost count? No problem. Just start again. Out of breath? Slow down. There is no exam here and no “wrong.” And if counting just isn’t working, simply make your out-breath a little longer than your in-breath. That’s enough.

Then—one phrase. About you, not about the baby.

Halfway through the walk, tell yourself—in a whisper or silently—something warm and your own. “I walk beautifully.” “I am more than a mom. I am a woman.” “I am here, in my body, and that is enough.” Choose the phrase that makes you feel a little warmer inside. Repeat it two or three times.

I know it seems a little silly at first. Walking down the street whispering compliments to yourself—what nonsense. When I first tried it myself, I kept looking around to see whether anyone could hear. And then I realized: people aren’t paying attention to us; everyone is busy with their own lives. And that awkward phrase does its quiet work—it reminds you that you are not just a function. You are a person.

And one more thing—three colors.

Somewhere along the way, start looking for three colors that you like. Not the ones that irritate you—the ones that make you glad. One should be something living: a leaf, a flower, the sky, a cat on a windowsill. One in the details of the city: a door, a wall, someone’s window. And let the third be a surprise—whatever comes along.

This is how our attention works: if you look for danger on the road, you’ll find a pothole and a frowning face. But if you look for color, you’ll find color. It’s as if you were choosing anew what your world will be like today.

If you like, take a photo of what you found. Not to show anyone. But simply to tell yourself: I noticed this. It was here. My day is not gray.

At the end—don’t burst back into the house at a run.

Stop. Three calm breaths in and out. Look at your baby. And, if you feel like it, say a quiet thank-you—to the street, to your legs, to this air, to the fact that you can walk and see.

Why fifteen minutes and not an hour? Because you won’t promise yourself an hour—and if you do, you’ll give up. But fifteen minutes is doable. And doable is repeatable. The small and living always wins over the big and impossible.

And the last thing. If your legs or back hurt, if it’s pouring outside, if you have no strength for a long walk—the practice is still yours. Sit by the window with your back straight. Breathe in the same rhythm—the out-breath longer than the in-breath. Find three colors beyond the glass. The body comes back to itself this way too.

The woman who forgot how to look up

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen many like her, and maybe you’ll recognize a little of yourself in her.

She came in tired, with the particular tiredness that wears down the most diligent of all. The ones who do everything right—and are twice as drained because of it. “I’m always on the run,” she said. “Even when I’m out with the stroller, I’m not walking. I’m just moving my child along the street and thinking about my to-do list. I can’t even remember the last time I looked at the sky.”

I suggested something simple. Tomorrow, on her walk, to lift her head. To straighten her back. To breathe slowly, in rhythm with her steps. And to find three colors.

She smirked—as if to say, that’s it? Some kind of children’s game.

And a few days later she came back different.

“You know what the strangest thing was?” she said. “On the first day I walked along feeling terribly silly. Back straight, breathing by the count, hunting for colors. And on the third day I caught myself walking along and smiling. Just like that. I saw a yellow door—and felt glad, like a little girl. And my baby—went quiet in the stroller. As if they had breathed out together with me.”

And then she quietly added the thing that, it seems to me, all of this was for:

“I’ve started looking up again. For so many months I only looked down at my feet—and it turns out there’s a sky up there.”

That’s what it’s for.

Not for the sake of perfect breathing technique. Not for the sake of pretty photos. But for the moment when a tired woman lifts her head again—and remembers that the world is bigger than her anxiety. And that she is alive in this world.

One small step

Don’t make yourself promises like “I’ll walk like this every day for the rest of my life.” Big promises frighten us, and we quietly abandon them.

Keep it simple.

Tomorrow—once. One walk. Lift your head, open your shoulders, and let your out-breath be longer than your in-breath at least a few times. Find just one color that makes you glad. Only this.

And then gently ask yourself:

What changed in me when I stopped looking at my feet? And when was the last time I walked down the street not to get something done, but simply to be?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself is already the beginning of coming back.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when you tense up again and lower your gaze:

I calm down—and my baby calms down with me.

I don’t need to carry the whole world on shoulders hunched up to my ears. I can straighten up. I can breathe out. And in my calm, we both find our footing.

May you always find these fifteen minutes. A road where you can lift your head and see the sky. Where you don’t have to rush anywhere or prove anything—you only need to breathe, walk and remember that you are already giving your baby the most important thing.

Your calm.

And yourself—real, alive, walking beautifully.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 7 →

Chapter 8

Daily rhythms as safety

There is one question in motherhood that can spoil even a good day.

“Is our schedule right?”

You peek at other people’s neat charts—sleep by the clock, feeding to the minute, awake time strictly by age—and quietly go cold. Because yours isn’t like that. Your baby fell asleep forty minutes later than “they’re supposed to.” Woke up when they “shouldn’t have.” Ate at the wrong time and the wrong amount. And already the familiar counter clicks inside: nothing is going to plan, I’m doing something wrong again.

I know this feeling. I myself once believed that a good mother is one whose child runs on a schedule, like a train. And a bad one is me, whose day always veers off somewhere sideways.

This chapter is about breathing out.

Because what your baby needs is not a perfect schedule at all.

They need a predictable shore.

It’s not regimentation. It’s rhythm

Let’s start by pulling apart two words that often get confused.

A schedule is about the clock. About numbers on paper that we try to fit a living child into. Six o’clock sharp—time to get up, no matter that they’re fast asleep. Twelve—lunch, even if they’re not hungry. A schedule gives orders. A schedule doesn’t ask.

Rhythm is about order, not about time.

It’s not “at what time” but “what comes after what.” First we wake up—then we eat. First we go for a walk—then we sleep. First a bath, then soft light, then sleep. One flows out of the other, the way day flows into evening. The clock can wander back and forth—but the order stays.

Do you feel the difference?

A schedule is about getting it right. A rhythm is about making it clear.

And your baby needs the second. Not precision. Clarity.

They don’t need to know that it’s half past twelve. They need to feel with their whole little body: after this, that usually comes. I’ve been fed—so sleep will come soon. Mom switched on the night-light and things got quiet—so the day is over; I can let go.

This feeling of “I know what comes next” is safety.

Not a perfect timetable.

A predictable shore you can moor to—again and again, at any hour.

Why? Little ones need repetition

Here is what’s important to understand—and what lifts a good half of a parent’s guilt.

A baby comes into a world where, for now, there is neither yesterday nor tomorrow. No clocks, no calendar, none of the sense of time we are used to. Inside them is an ocean without shores. Hunger comes like a wave, tiredness sweeps over like a storm, and they don’t yet know that all this will pass, that the world is reliable, that after darkness there will be light again.

And this is where repetition comes to the rescue.

When the same thing happens again and again—feeding, a walk, a bath, sleep, and again, and again, in a similar order—your baby begins to pick up the pattern. They don’t think in words yet. But they feel the rhythm. And little by little they learn to anticipate: after this comes that. And where you can anticipate, things are no longer so frightening.

Psychologists noticed a simple thing long ago: a baby feels calmer where there is something to lean on—a close grown-up and a way of doing things they can follow. Back in the last century, Mary Ainsworth described how important sensitive, responsive care is for a child—care that can be relied on. Not perfect. Reliable. And the repetition of the day is, in essence, the same reliability, only translated into the language of time.

Each familiar step is like a quiet voice telling the child: “I know this world. People are kind to me here. I can relax.”

From repetition—to recognition. From recognition—to trust. From trust—to calm.

And now—the most important consequence, the one that made it worth telling all this.

You don’t build this predictable shore out of expensive developmental toys or iron discipline.

You build it out of ordinary little things that repeat. Out of what you already do every day. Just a little more like yesterday.

And do you know who else needs this shore?

You.

Because when the day has a soft frame, it’s easier for Mom to breathe too. Fewer decisions in the fog of tiredness, fewer “what now?” moments, less of the chaos you drown in. The rhythm holds not only your baby. It holds you too. And as you gradually calm down, things usually get calmer for your baby as well: calm seems to pass from one to the other. This doesn’t mean you are obliged to be serene all the time. It is enough to be near and to come back to even breathing when you can. As we’ve already said: a calm mom, a calm baby.

Let me also be honest about something else. No rhythm overrides a living child. There are days—teething, a growth spurt, illness, a move—when everything falls apart, and that’s normal. And if you are seriously worried about your baby’s sleep or feeding, if something seems wrong with their health—no chapter can replace a doctor. Rhythm is a support, not a diagnosis or a treatment.

How to make it work at home

The good news: you don’t need to build a schedule. All you need is to make the day a little more recognizable. Start small.

Find three anchors of the day. Not twenty, not “the whole day to the minute.” Three. Usually it’s easiest to rely on the morning, the daytime nap and bedtime in the evening. Let these three points be more or less alike from day to day—and let everything else flow freely. Three steady stones—and the river of the day won’t carry you away.

Keep the order, not the clock. Look not at the clock face but at the sequence. We ate—we played—we get ready for sleep. The same steps every time, in the same order. Did it shift by half an hour? No problem. Order matters more than precision.

Create a small bedtime ritual. A very simple one. For example: a bath, then dimmed lights, then the same quiet song or a few words whispered in their ear. Three or four actions, always in the same order. This isn’t magic—it’s a signal. Your baby’s body gradually learns: all of this means sleep is coming. And letting go becomes easier.

Make the signals noticeable to the body. Your baby doesn’t know the clock—but they do feel light, sound, touch. During the day—more light, ordinary household sounds, a cheerful voice. In the evening—we dim the lights, speak more quietly, move more slowly. This way you help your baby’s body tell day from night without a single number.

Leave room for flexibility. A rhythm is not a cage. It is a riverbed in which a river flows freely—not a canal lined with stone. A guest came over, a holiday, a trip, a hard night—the day went off track, and that’s nothing terrible. One day off track doesn’t cancel what you are building. What matters to your baby is not the flawlessness of every day but that again and again you come back to the familiar, understandable shore. You drifted—and calmly came back. That’s all.

And one more thing, a quiet one.

Don’t chase other people’s charts. Every baby has their own rhythm, their own pace, their own music. Your job is not to fit your child into a perfect scheme from the internet, but to listen to them and gently give the day a shape. You are not a schedule dispatcher. You are the shore.

And remember: all of this is about gentle support, not treatment. If you are worried about your baby’s sleep, breathing during sleep, feeding or weight, that’s a question for the pediatrician, not for a chart. And as for how safe infant sleep works—position, crib, conditions—it’s best to follow your doctor’s recommendations; here we are talking only about rhythm and the mood of the evening.

The story of a mom who let go of her chart

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen so many like her, and maybe you’ll recognize yourself in her too.

She came in with her phone in her hand. And on the phone—a chart. Colored cells, little arrows, hours of sleep, minutes of awake time, norms by age. She showed it to me and was almost in tears.

“I do everything by the chart,” she said. “But my baby doesn’t fit into it. Falls asleep at the wrong time, eats off schedule, and every day I feel like I’m failing some kind of exam. I just want to do it right.”

I asked: and what in your day already repeats itself on its own? Without the chart, just like that?

She thought about it. And suddenly, to her own surprise, she smiled.

“Well… every morning we go up to the window. We look at what the weather is like. I tell my baby all about it. And in the evening, after the bath, I always sing the same song. A silly one—I made it up myself.”

There, I said. That is your rhythm. Not the chart. This.

We put the chart with its colored cells away in a back folder. And instead of twenty items we kept three simple anchors—her own, living ones. Morning at the window. The daytime nap by the same quiet routine. And the evening song, the very one she made up.

She came back some time later—different. Not perfect. Calm.

“You know what changed?” she said. “It stopped being scary that the day wasn’t going right. Because now we have our own ‘right.’ Small, our own. My baby recognizes it. And I stopped checking myself against other people all the time. Now I check in with my baby.”

That’s what it’s all for.

Not for the sake of a schedule. But for the sake of that quiet support that you and your baby build together—out of the most ordinary little things of your own, repeated day after day.

One small step

Don’t set out to build “the perfect schedule starting tomorrow.” Big promises frighten us—and we abandon them.

Keep it simple.

Choose one moment of the day—just one. Morning, the daytime nap or putting your baby to bed in the evening. And for the next few days let it look a little more the same from day to day. The same small order. The same two or three simple steps.

Only this. One anchor.

And then quietly ask yourself:

What small repetitions already live in our day on their own—and which of them could I simply, gently keep?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes it turns out that your rhythm has been there for a long time. You just didn’t notice it behind your worry about how things are supposed to be.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when everything has gone haywire:

A baby needs not a perfect timetable but a predictable shore.

I don’t need to live by someone else’s chart to be a good mom. My child needs a simple, clear “this is how it goes every day”—and we build this shore together, out of ordinary little things that repeat.

May your home have its own rhythm—warm and alive, not strict and borrowed. May a day that goes off track not frighten you, because you know: tomorrow you can simply come back to the familiar shore. And may your baby, falling asleep to your quiet evening song, feel with their whole little body the one thing that holds up their whole life.

The world is reliable.

Mom is near.

And it will be so again.

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Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 8 →

Chapter 9

When Mom disappears

Do you know what is most frightening? Not that a mom gets tired. But that at some point she stops being there at all.

There she is, bending over the crib. Feeding, rocking, changing, singing. She knows by touch every little crease, every sigh, every shade of crying. But ask her in the evening—what did you eat today? what do you want? what’s your name, anyway, besides “Mom”?—and she’ll be at a loss. As if that person no longer exists. Dissolved. Flowed completely, without a trace, into the little body now sleeping in the next room.

And it seems to her that this is love. The highest, the purest. To give everything. Down to the last drop.

I don’t know this from books.

I disappeared like that myself.

That’s not love. That’s a source run dry

There is a beautiful lie that is so easy to believe.

That a real mother is one who has dissolved completely in her child. That the less is left of her, the more the child gets. As if motherhood were measured by how much of you has disappeared into it.

But picture a spring.

A clear, living spring that people come to for a drink. They draw from it—and it gives. They draw more—and it is full again, because inside a source wells up, something feeds it from the depths. That is why it can give water for a long time. For years. For generations.

Now imagine that the source has run dry. People still take water—every day, just the same. But nothing comes up from below anymore. And the level drops. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. Until one day the bucket scrapes a dry bottom.

You can’t drink from an empty well. No matter how many times you lower the bucket.

That is what a dissolved mom is. She still gives—out of habit, on sheer willpower, with the last of her strength. But inside it is already dry. And the child, without knowing it, lowers the bucket into a well that ran out of water long ago.

Dissolving doesn’t mean giving your child more.

It means that one day you won’t be able to give them anything.

Why your baby doesn’t need a mom who has disappeared

Here you want to object. And I hear that objection; it lives in me too: “But I’m doing it for my baby! I’m sacrificing myself—out of love!”

Let’s be honest. Calmly and without verdicts.

A little person doesn’t need a spotless apartment. Doesn’t need a mom who got everything done. They need—a mom. A living one. With a face, a voice, moods, her own warmth that comes from inside and isn’t squeezed out by force.

Remember what the whole first part of this book was about? “Mom is near.” Co-regulation. A child borrows calm from us, because they don’t have their own yet.

And it’s easier to borrow where there is some to spare.

When a mom is empty inside, it is much harder to share calm. It’s hard to nourish a baby with warmth from a heart gone cold. And a child often feels this very early—through their skin, their breathing, their sensitive little system. They reach for water, and there is too little. And then they may become anxious. Clingy. Ask for more and more—not because they are spoiled, but as if they haven’t had enough to drink. This isn’t about blame or a verdict—it is a signal that right now you are the one who needs water first. Children respond to fullness too: when the spring comes back, they will drink their fill as well.

And there is one more thing. Quiet, but important.

A child learns how to live by watching us.

If the mom beside them seems not to be there at all—only a function, only endless service, only “bring this, fetch that, and hurry up”—they gradually absorb two things at once. First: the world revolves around me alone. Second: Mom is not a person; she is a service. And so, without anyone noticing, the little one starts being seated at the very center. Not out of spoiling—out of dissolving.

And let me say right away, so that no misunderstanding grows between us. Picking your baby up, rocking them, coming when they call—this is not “serving the throne.” This is the very secure support the whole first part was about. Responding to a need and putting a child on a throne are different things. The first is something a child needs. The second grows not out of care but out of there being no mom left in that care at all.

But love is not a throne. It is a circle.

In the circle there is the child, loved and wanted. But in the circle there is also Mom—whole, separate, alive. There is warmth between the grown-ups. There is something greater that the family trusts. And the child doesn’t rule this circle—they grow in it. They learn not only to take but to love. Not only to receive but to give. This can’t be taught with words. It is learned by watching a living mom who has a face of her own.

Caring for your baby with all your heart—and not putting them on a throne. These are not two different things. They are one. And it begins with Mom staying.

From her calm—to their calm. From her warmth—to their growth. From a living spring—to a child who has drunk their fill.

How to notice that I’m disappearing

The trouble with dissolving is that it creeps up quietly. No one announces: “that’s it, as of today you no longer exist.” It’s just that one day you catch yourself unable to remember the last time you wanted something for yourself.

A spring doesn’t dry up all at once. And yet a dry bottom has its signs. Listen to yourself—without fear, simply the way you’d read a thermometer.

Irritation that comes out of nowhere. When any little thing—spilled porridge, one question too many—raises a wave too big for the cause. It is often not about the porridge. It is the empty bottom answering with a hollow echo.

Guilt that has moved in for good. Whatever you do, it seems too little. That same inner counter: too little, too little, too little. It switches on precisely when there is nothing left to give, but you still have to give.

Joy that has gone. You do everything right—but inside it’s gray. Your baby smiles, and nothing warms in response. This doesn’t mean you are a bad mother. It means the spring is asking for water.

Losing yourself. When the question “what do you want?” is met with emptiness. Not “no time,” but exactly “I don’t know.” As if your wishes had been wiped away along with your face.

Please remember this. It is not weakness. It is not “letting yourself go soft.” It is a signal—just as honest as hunger or thirst. Body and soul are saying: water. Give me water.

And here is a gentle but important line.

Tiredness lifts after sleep, after a day off, after a warm day. But there is a heaviness that doesn’t lift. When the darkness stays for weeks. When you have no strength at all, when you look at your child as if through glass, and nothing brings joy, and you are frightened for yourself. This is no longer about “refilling the spring on your own.” It happens to a great many mothers after giving birth—and there isn’t a drop of shame in it. This condition has a name—postpartum depression. And there is a way out: it can be treated, people know how to help with it, and asking for help is not weakness but maturity. Then what you need is not advice from a book but a real person by your side: someone close to you, a doctor, a psychologist. This chapter is support, not treatment; it does not replace a specialist’s help. Asking for that help is not defeat. It is exactly what caring for yourself looks like. A person needs a person—that applies to you too.

Practice: the “I didn’t fall apart today” box

When it is dry inside, the first thing we lose is the ability to see ourselves. The day turns into one long list of what you didn’t get done, couldn’t manage, fell short of.

This practice gives you your sight back. Quietly, drop by drop.

Take any box. A candy box, a shoebox—whatever is at hand. This will be your little archive. An archive of who you are.

Every evening, once your baby is asleep, write one sentence on a slip of paper. Just one. About something you did well today. Not heroically—humanly.

“Fed the baby while holding a book in one hand—and didn’t drop either.” “Didn’t snap when I wanted to scream.” “Asked for help—and it was hard.” “Drank my tea hot.” “Today I was simply alive. And that will do.”

Put the slip in the box. And tell yourself—out loud or silently—one quiet thing: “I notice myself.” You can put your palm on your heart. That way the words go deeper.

And that’s all. No fine writing, no exam. One honest fact and a drop of pride in it.

And a week later, open the box. Take out the slips. Read them slowly, one after another.

This is you. Not the one who always fell short. But the one who, every day, at the dry bottom, still found water—for your baby, and at least a little for yourself.

And one more thing—this same week, try something very simple. For one day, notice yourself. Not your child, not your tasks. Yourself. What am I feeling right now? What do I want—right now, in a small way: a drink, to sit down, to be quiet, to open a window? You don’t have to act on it right away. First—just notice. This is the first dipper of water lowered into your own well. This is where coming back begins.

One story

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I’ve seen many like her, and maybe you’ll recognize yourself in her too. I certainly recognize myself.

She came in and said a strange thing. Not “I’m tired.” But—“it’s as if I don’t exist.”

A perfect mom. Everything by the clock, everything right, her baby cared for down to the last little crease. But in her eyes—not light, but an empty bottom. “I don’t remember,” she said quietly, “what I want. I remember what my baby needs. But about myself—it’s as if a page has been torn out.”

I asked her for one thing. For a week—every evening—to write one line for the box. Not about her son. About herself.

The first days were hard. “I have nothing to write; I didn’t do anything.” That was the dried-up spring speaking in her with its own voice—a voice convinced that she doesn’t exist.

But she wrote. Through “I can’t,” through “this is all silly.”

And a week later she opened the box—and cried. Not from grief. From meeting herself again.

“Do you know what I saw?” she said. “I saw a person. I thought it would be empty in there. But there I was—alive. Tired, imperfect—but alive. It was as if I had come home. To myself.”

That’s what it’s all for.

Not for the sake of the box. Not for the sake of the slips of paper. But for the moment when a mom feels again: I am. And out of this “I am,” the water begins to rise again—quietly, drop by drop.

One small step

Don’t promise yourself “from tomorrow I’ll live for myself.” Big promises frighten us, and we quietly abandon them. I should know—how many times I solemnly swore “from now on and forever” and fizzled out by Thursday.

Keep it simple.

Tonight—one slip of paper in the box. One line to say that you were here today—and it counted.

And then quietly ask yourself:

When was the last time I wanted something—for myself? Not for the house, not for the child. Just—for myself?

Don’t rush to answer. If there is no answer yet, that isn’t a verdict. It just means the well hasn’t been allowed to fill for a long time. And the question itself is already the first drop.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when it’s dry inside:

A child doesn’t need a mom who has disappeared. They need one who is fully alive.

Not the one who has dissolved without a trace. But the one who has stayed—with her own face, her own warmth, her own source welling up from the depths. Because you can only give water from a living spring. And you can only truly love by remaining yourself.

So may your spring never run dry. May a quiet source always well up in it—the small things that are yours alone: a sip of quiet, a wish of your own, your own name besides “Mom.” Take care of that source. It doesn’t take love away from your child—it is the very depth from which that love flows.

You are here.

And as long as you are here, there is somewhere to draw from.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 9 →

Chapter 10

Loving yourself isn’t selfishness—it’s the source

There is one prohibition we carry inside us for years. And it doesn’t sound menacing—on the contrary, it’s very quiet. Almost tender. “Oh, come on, a bath? You have a baby. Later. When they grow up—then you can live.”

I know a mom who wanted just half an hour. To close the door, drink her cooling coffee hot for once, sit without jumping up. And just as she had almost made up her mind, that familiar thing rose up inside, wearing her own mother’s face: “selfish.” And she got up. And went. And gave the last of herself—again. And inside it was empty and angry. And that anger brought another round of guilt, because a good mother, after all, doesn’t get angry.

That mom is me. Me, long ago. And maybe—a little bit—you.

That is what this chapter is about. About the most slandered thing in the world—loving yourself. About how all our lives it gets confused with selfishness, although they are different things. Almost opposites.

Selfishness and loving yourself are not the same thing

Let’s finally send them to separate corners. Because all of a mother’s guilt grows from our having glued them together.

Selfishness is “me at the center.” It’s when the world is supposed to serve me. When my wishes come before everyone else’s, and another person exists only insofar as they are convenient for me. Selfishness takes.

Loving yourself is about something completely different. It isn’t “me at the center.” It’s “there is a spring in me, and I take care of it—so that there is water in it for others to drink.”

Do you feel the difference?

A selfish person pours only for themselves. But a woman who loves herself makes sure the pitcher doesn’t run dry—because from this pitcher she gives water to half the house.

It is not the same thing. It isn’t even close.

And here is what hurts. Among exhausted moms I have almost never met truly selfish women. A selfish woman doesn’t know the guilt of half an hour with a book. But you know it by heart. That shame alone says a lot: you haven’t been at the center for a long time. You have long since been at the very edge.

Why you can’t pour from an empty cup

There’s really no point in arguing here—it is too much like the simple truth about the pitcher.

You can’t pour water from an empty pitcher. You can shake it, scold it, plead with it—but there is no water. Water doesn’t come from a sense of duty. It comes from what has been poured in.

It’s the same with love.

We think love is an endless stream that should flow out of us simply because we are mothers. That a good mom is obliged to give always, however tired she is, down to the very last drop. And if she is tired and has nothing left, she must be a bad mom who doesn’t love enough.

Not true.

Love is not a debt paid out of emptiness. Love is what spills over the brim when you are full inside. When I’ve had enough sleep, when someone has hugged me, when I’ve been myself for at least an hour, tenderness comes on its own. But when I’m wrung dry, what rises from inside is more often not love. What rises is irritation. And then I punish myself for it.

You have surely noticed this in yourself. And often the hardest outbursts happen not when the child is “misbehaving,” but when you have been running on empty for a long time.

So this isn’t about your bad temper.

It’s about a dry spring.

And that is why on a plane—remember?—they say something that sounds strange at first: put the oxygen mask on yourself first, then on your child. It sounds almost sacrilegious to a mother’s ear. Myself first? When my little one is right beside me?

Yes. Exactly. Because a mother without air can’t save anyone: only someone who is breathing can help the person beside them.

The mask on yourself first—not instead of your child. For your child’s sake.

Sacrifice to the point of emptiness is not love

Here one uncomfortable truth needs to be said. Gently, but directly.

Sacrifice to the point of complete self-erasure is not the height of love. It is a slow dissolving. And, bitter as it is to admit, it rarely leaves the child untouched.

Because next to a mom who gives the last of herself with an empty face and pursed lips, it is harder for a little one to learn what love is. It is easy for them to pick up two joyless things. First: that to love means to disappear, to endure, to grind yourself down. And one day it may be hard for them to love any other way—or they will run from that kind of love as if from a debt. Second, even less noticeable: that the whole world should revolve around them. That Mom is not a person but a service. And so, quietly and with the best intentions, we sometimes seat a child on a little throne.

But love isn’t about a throne. Love is a circle in which there is room for everyone. And there is a place in this circle for Mom too.

Clear-eyed love knows how to say: I love you—and I will stay alive in the process. I will pour you a full cup—but I won’t drain myself to a dry bottom, because tomorrow I’ll be the one giving you water again.

This is not less love. It is love that lasts.

How to refill the source

Now—the most practical part. What to do about this today, in an ordinary mom’s life, where there is no spa, no free day and no fairy godmother.

The good news: the spring isn’t filled by great deeds. It is filled drop by drop. Drops—but every day.

Make your own micro-care list. Not a list of “how to become perfect”—honestly, no—but a list of what fills you in particular. Small things. Five, ten, fifteen minutes. Everyone’s list is different. Hot tea, drunk sitting down. A shower without rushing. Two pages of a book. Music in your earbuds while you push the stroller. A cream with a scent that warms you inside. A call to a friend. A window, the sky, quiet. Write down at least five such drops—and keep the list where you can see it, because when you are tired your head won’t remember a single one.

Allow yourself to do what you need. Not “if there’s time and energy left”—but simply because you need it. Without earning it. Without “once I finish everything—then.” Everything will never be finished, you know that. So a drop—now. A small, doable one, before you run completely dry.

And—the hardest part. Self-compassion. The very tenderness you give so generously to everyone around you—turn it toward yourself, even for a minute. Tell yourself what you would tell an exhausted friend. Not “pull yourself together” and not “other people cope,” but: “you’re so tired, my dear. You’re doing what you can. And you are already a good enough mother.” Not someday. Already. Loving yourself not for achievements, not for a clean house, not for an obedient child—but just because. Just as you are.

This isn’t self-indulgence. It is care for the spring your whole family drinks from.

And one more thing—quietly and honestly. If the emptiness has lasted not a week but months; if you have no strength at all, everything goes dim, anxiety sweeps over you, or you are frightened by your own outbursts—a drop of tea won’t help here, and it isn’t your weakness. This happens when the spring has been dry for too long. In times like these, caring for yourself also means letting someone help you: those close to you, and sometimes a doctor or a psychologist. Asking for help is not failure. That too is about loving yourself.

A little parable of two houses

Let me tell you about two winters. Not about specific women—I have seen many like them, and you may catch a glimpse of yourself in both.

The first house. The mom in it is a saint. That’s what everyone says: a saint, devoted to her children, not a minute for herself. Up before everyone, to bed after everyone, nothing left for herself. And gradually something elusive leaves the house. The light leaves. Mom does everything—but her eyes have gone dark. The children are fed, clean, looked after—and grow up with a quiet, unconscious sense of guilt: as if Mom were fading because of them. And, perhaps, with one unnoticed lesson—that the grown-up beside you doesn’t live, but serves.

The second house is simpler and less heroic. The mom there sometimes closes the door for half an hour. Sometimes she says: “Mom is going to rest now, and then we’ll play.” Sometimes in the evening she laughs at who knows what—simply because something inside her is still burning. She isn’t perfect. There’s a lot she doesn’t get done. But there is light in the house. And the children grow up seeing a living, warm person whom they can love—and from whom they can learn to love themselves.

The difference between these houses is not in the amount of love.

But in the fact that in the second house, the mom didn’t let her spring run dry.

Children don’t remember whether everything was perfectly tidy. They remember whether Mom’s eyes were shining.

One small step

Don’t promise yourself “from now on I’ll take care of myself every day.” My big vows usually don’t survive to the end of the week—how many times I’ve given myself my word, “now it’s going to be different,” and forgotten it within a couple of days, run off my feet.

Keep it simple.

Today—one drop. One small item from your micro-care list. Tea, a shower, two pages, five minutes of quiet—whatever fills your own spring. And do it not guiltily but calmly—as something completely legitimate.

And then quietly ask yourself:

What fills me personally—and why did I put it at the very end of the line for so long, after everyone and everything?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself is already the first sip of water in a dried-up well.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on the day you’re once again ashamed of taking half an hour for yourself:

Loving yourself is not a reward. It is the base.

I don’t need to earn the right to be full. I don’t need to first get everything done, make everyone happy, finally become perfect—and only then, maybe, a little for myself. No. Loving yourself is not a prize at the end. It is the foundation at the beginning. Everything else grows out of it—calm, generosity, the ability to be near without dissolving completely.

And one more thing—quietly, in your ear. Caring for yourself doesn’t mean loving your baby less. You still respond to their needs, you are still near, you are still their secure support. A mom who is full doesn’t drift away from her child. She simply, at last, does it from fullness rather than with the last of her strength.

May your day always hold at least one drop that is yours alone. A small sip for the spring from which you give water to those you love. Not because you earned it. But because you are already enough. You are—do you hear me?—already all right.

Fill yourself up.

And from that fullness—love.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 10 →

Chapter 11

I am a woman, not only a mom

When I go away from home, it’s as if I forget that I’m a mother, a wife and all the rest of it.

I just walk down an unfamiliar street. No one calls me Mom. No one tugs at my sleeve. And suddenly—for one minute—I am simply me again. That girl who once loved turning down side streets at random. Who stopped at shop windows not because there were children’s things in them, but because they were beautiful. Who knew how to want something just for herself—and not feel guilty about it.

And do you know what always amazed me about this?

That this woman hadn’t gone anywhere. She was here all along. I just hadn’t visited her for so long that I had almost forgotten her name.

That is what this chapter is about. About how to come back to yourself—and bring back into the house not only a mom, but a whole, living woman.

Behind the role is a living person

We grow so attached to the word “mom” that it quietly eats up everything else.

At first it is even sweet. You are Mom. The most needed, the most important, the center of a little universe. And then one day you catch yourself unable to remember: what music did you love? What did you dream of before all this? What made you laugh just like that, for no reason?

And it becomes quiet and frightening.

Because underneath the role there turns out to be emptiness—as if where there used to be a person, there is now only a function.

But that isn’t true. The person hasn’t disappeared.

Behind every mom stands a woman—with her own body, her own age, her own desires and her own inner life that no one else sees. With her own universe. And no child, not even the most beloved, cancels out that universe.

I once thought that forgetting yourself was the highest devotion. That a good mother dissolves without a trace, and that this is her holiness.

But it turned out to be the other way around.

A child doesn’t need a faceless, dissolved woman. They need a living mom—with character, with interests, with a spark in her eyes. One who has something burning inside. Because a living mom has something to warm them with.

Body and age—with open eyes and gratitude

Coming back to yourself often begins with the simplest and the hardest thing. With the body.

With the body that carried a child, gave birth, went without sleep night after night—and that we so often dislike for exactly that.

We look in the mirror and count our losses. Not right, not in the right place, not the way it used to be. New lines, new heaviness, new tiredness in the face. And the inner voice—that same merciless one—whispers: you’ve let yourself go.

I want to offer you a different way of looking. Not blind—clear-eyed.

Clear-eyed love is not “I don’t see the wrinkles.” It sees them perfectly well. It simply looks at them differently.

One day I noticed the silver coming into my hair at the temples. There is still very little of it—but it is there. And instead of the usual sting, a poignant, warm feeling suddenly came. Every wrinkle of mine—it is mine. My laughter drew it. My sleepless nights. My life.

And this gives rise not to a wish to hide—but to a keen wish to stay myself.

A woman is beautiful not when she has no traces of life on her. But when she has stopped fighting them.

Try looking at your reflection this way one day. Not a drop of judgment. Only gratitude.

Thank you, arms—you carried. Thank you, back—you bent over the crib a thousand times. Thank you, body—for still carrying you through this life.

This isn’t vanity. It is coming home—into your own skin.

A woman and a wife—not only a mother

And there is one more part of herself that a mom loses most quietly of all.

The woman beside the man.

When a child arrives, a couple easily turns into two tired parents on opposite sides of the crib. You’re a great team. You pass each other bottles, split the nights, discuss starting solids and fevers. But when was the last time you looked at each other not as two managers of a shared project—but as a man and a woman?

We put it off “until later.” Once the baby’s a bit bigger, once things get a bit easier, then we’ll remember that we are not only Dad and Mom.

But “later” never comes.

And here I want to speak carefully and warmly—because each of us has her own home, and not every one of us has a partner beside her. If you are raising your child on your own, this chapter is still yours. You can bring the woman in you back without a man: through friendship, through those close to you, through the love of those who hold you up. This isn’t about necessarily being part of a couple. It’s about not letting the role of “mom” crowd out everything alive in you.

But if you do have a partner, that relationship is worth protecting no less than your baby.

And here is why this isn’t selfishness or “taking your mind off the baby.”

Children absorb a lot by watching us—not from our words, but from how we live and how we love. Of course, a child isn’t a mirror: a great many other things shape them too—their temperament, other people close to them, the whole world around. But what they see at home every day stays with them.

And if what they see is a woman who has erased herself into a servant, a quiet idea settles in them that love is about disappearing for someone else’s sake. If what they see is a mom whom everyone has put on a throne and everyone serves, another idea settles: that the world revolves around them.

But if what they see is a living woman—and warmth between the grown-ups around her—they absorb the most important thing.

That love isn’t a throne at the center. It is a circle in which warmth flows all the way around. And in this circle there is room for everyone—including them.

Caring for your baby with all your heart—and staying yourself at the same time. These are not two different things. They are one.

As for how to bring love between the grown-ups back into the home—we’ll talk about that separately and in detail. A little further on.

How to come back to yourself

There’s no need to wait for a vacation, babysitters and “when things get easier.” You come back to yourself in small steps—right in the middle of ordinary life.

Five minutes a day—just for yourself. Not for the house, not for the baby, not “productively.” Just for you. Coffee drunk standing at the window while it’s still hot. A favorite song in your earbuds. A page of a book. A shower a little longer than usual. Five minutes in which you are not a function but a person. Small is doable. And doable is repeatable.

Body gratitude. Once a day, look at yourself without counting losses. Find something in your reflection that you love. And silently thank your body. Not a drop of judgment. Only gratitude.

Take back one thing of your own. Something that was yours before all this. Something that made your eyes shine. Drawing, running, flowers on the windowsill, singing, dough under your hands, a language you let go of long ago. Not for the result. For the spark that this thing lights in you again. Start small—fifteen minutes a week. A fire doesn’t need much wood to flare up again.

And if there is someone beside you with whom you are a couple, add a tiny ritual for two. Ten minutes in the evening without phones. A cup of tea together when the children are asleep. A look—not over your child’s head, but into each other’s eyes.

This isn’t taken away from your child. It comes back to them—as the soil they grow in.

And one more thing—quiet, but important. If your tiredness has become the kind that doesn’t go away even after rest; if there is no joy at all, if for long stretches it is empty, anxious or dark inside you, and your outbursts frighten you—please take this seriously. It is not weakness, and it doesn’t make you “a bad mother.” Sometimes there is nowhere for strength to come from not because you aren’t trying hard enough, but because you yourself need support—from those close to you, and sometimes from a doctor or a psychologist. Five minutes for yourself is care, but it doesn’t replace help from real people. Asking for it is a mother’s love too.

The woman who heard herself again

Let me tell you about one woman. Without naming her—because I have met dozens like her. Why hide it—I recognize myself in her too.

She came in and said a sentence I will never forget: “I don’t remember what I’m like.”

Three children. A home. An endless merry-go-round of chores. And somewhere under all of it—a woman she had lost sight of so long ago that she doubted whether that woman had ever existed at all.

I asked her one simple thing. What had she once loved—just for herself?

She was silent for a long time. And then she said quietly, almost in surprise: “I used to draw. My God, I used to draw. I’d completely forgotten.”

I didn’t give her any big assignments. Just one: get out her paints. Just get them out—and for fifteen minutes a week move a brush around, with no goal, no result.

A month later she came back different. Not rested—the children were the same, the nights were the same. But there was light in her eyes.

“You know what’s strange?” she said. “I’ve become calmer with the kids. I snap less. As if there’s something in me to draw from again. I thought I was stealing those fifteen minutes from them. But it turns out I’m giving them back to my children.”

It doesn’t happen for everyone, or right away—and of course it isn’t about the paints themselves. But very often, as soon as a woman takes back even a tiny drop of what is hers, it becomes a little easier to breathe at home. For everyone.

That’s what all this is for.

The paints aren’t the main thing here. What matters is how the woman’s universe lit up again—the one that had been quietly waiting inside her all this time.

One small step

Don’t set out to “love yourself and start living for yourself from tomorrow.” Big promises frighten us, and we abandon them. I know this from my own experience—how many times I promised myself “now I’ll start living for myself” and forgot about it as soon as I got caught up in an ordinary day.

Keep it simple.

Today, remember one thing you loved before you became a mom. Just remember it and call it by its name. That is enough for now.

And then quietly ask yourself:

Somewhere under the role of “mom” lives a whole woman—with her own universe. When was the last time I went to visit her?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself is already the beginning of coming back.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when you feel that only a function is left of you:

Behind every mom stands a Person.

I am not only a mom. I am a woman, with my own body, my own age, my own desires and my own universe inside. And when I remember this, I am not a worse mom. I am more alive. Which means I have something to warm others with.

May your life always hold a corner that belongs only to you. Where you are not a role but a person. Where you can simply be yourself, without proving anything to anyone.

Come back to yourself. To that woman who loved turning down side streets at random. She has been waiting for you all this time—and she hasn’t gone anywhere.

Inside you is a whole universe.

And it would very much like you to look into it again.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 11 →

Chapter 12

From anxiety to trust

There is one evening I still remember.

The baby has finally fallen asleep. The house is quiet. And instead of breathing out, I lie in the dark—and check. Are they breathing? Are they too hot? Did they eat enough today, did I take them out for long enough, did I miss something important that later—twenty years from now—will turn out to be the decisive thing?

My body is dead tired. But my head won’t switch off.

It seemed to me that this was love. That a good mother is one who holds everything. All the threads at once, so that not one slips away. That if I loosen my grip for even a minute, something is bound to collapse.

For a very long time I confused love with control.

And only later did I understand: the tighter I gripped the helm, the less air there was left in me. That is what this chapter is about—how to stop holding the whole world on your shoulders. And how to move from anxiety to trust.

From anxiety to trust.

Anxiety keeps spinning the whole world around the child

Let’s call things by their names.

Child-centeredness—this habit of making the child the center around which everything revolves—has a quiet engine. And that engine is not love. It is guilt and anxiety.

Guilt whispers: you’re not giving enough. And you start to over-serve—giving more than you have, just to drown out that voice. Anxiety whispers: everything could go wrong. And you start to control—every nap, every gram, every second.

And so, without anyone noticing, the whole house, the whole of life, all the grown-ups in it—all begin to revolve around one little person. Not because love demands it. But because Mom is afraid.

I want this to be heard clearly—because it lifts a great weight.

Responding to your baby’s needs—being near, comforting, feeding, carrying them in your arms—is not child-centeredness. It is the very secure support we talked about in the first chapters. A child should be able to lean on your love. It is their right and your joy.

But leaning on is not the same as ruling.

Care is not a throne. You can care for a child fully, with all your heart, and still not make them the center of the universe. The difference is not in how much you give. The difference is in what you give it from. From love—or from fear.

And here anxiety plays a nasty trick on us. It disguises itself as care.

It tells you: you’re anxious because you love. And you believe it. But in fact anxiety doesn’t add a single drop of protection for your child. It only drains you. And what your baby needs far more than a guard is a calm grown-up nearby—someone beside whom there is nothing to fear.

What’s in my hands—and what isn’t

So what should you do? Stop caring? Give up?

No. Not at all.

The antidote to anxiety is not indifference. The antidote is trust.

And trust begins with a very simple and very grown-up distinction. There is what is in my hands. And there is what is not in my hands. And wisdom is not in holding everything. It is in learning to tell one from the other.

In my hands: to give warmth, to give food, to take my child to the doctor, to be near. To do what I really can do today.

Not in my hands: to guarantee that my child will never get sick. That they will never have a single bruise, a single tear, a single hard day in their whole life. That I will live this life for them and cushion every one of their steps.

I can’t. And you can’t. No mother in the world can.

And do you know what I once understood? That this is not my weakness. It is how the world is made. I don’t have to carry what isn’t mine to carry. It simply isn’t my burden.

Anxiety is born where we try to steer what we can’t steer. We grab the helm of a ship that is already sailing—and wear ourselves out till we shake, trying to prove to the sea that it has to obey.

But there is another way.

You can do your part well—and let go of what doesn’t depend on you. This isn’t inaction. It isn’t “giving up.” On the contrary—your hands do what they should. It’s just that inside, meanwhile, it is quiet.

Calm within action. That is where we are heading.

The invisible weaver

But to let go of the helm, you need to believe in something. You can’t open your hands into emptiness—that is too frightening. Hands only open when you know: you are being held.

And here I will speak about the quietest and most important thing.

Life has its own order. Its own pattern. I don’t always see it—most often I don’t see it at all, especially when I’m standing close, nose pressed up against one hard day. From the back, any weaving looks like a tangle of knots and broken threads. And only if you step back and look at the front does the pattern become visible.

I like to think that there is an invisible weaver. That someone great and loving is weaving this pattern—patiently, thread by thread, and that even the darkest threads are somehow needed for the design.

Call it what you like. Life. Love. Something greater than me. I don’t know all the words. But I know the feeling—the feeling that I am not the only one holding this thread. That my child and I are being held by someone, even when I let go.

And that is such a strange relief.

Because if everything rests on me alone, then yes, I can’t sleep, I can’t make mistakes, I can’t breathe out for a single minute. But if I am being held, then I can allow myself to trust. And even—to be amazed. At how sometimes everything falls into place by itself, without my frantic interference. Better than I could have arranged it if I had held every thread in a death grip.

For a long time I lived as if I were the weaver. But I am only one of the threads. Warm, alive, needed—but one of many. And there is no humiliation in that. There is rest in it.

Practice: two columns

Let’s make anxiety visible. It often frightens us precisely because it swirls like fog—huge, shapeless. But as soon as you write it down, it settles to a human size.

Take a sheet of paper. Draw a vertical line down the middle.

On the left, write at the top: “What is in my hands.” On the right: “What is not in my hands.”

Now write down everything that is gnawing at you right now. Each worry in its own column.

“I’ll take my baby to the doctor if it hasn’t passed by tomorrow”—on the left. I can do this. “Make sure my baby never gets sick at all”—on the right. I can’t do this.

“Be warm with my baby this evening”—on the left. “Live out my child’s whole destiny for them”—on the right.

Write honestly. Most likely you will see what I once saw: half of my nighttime fears lived in the right column. Among the things I couldn’t change however much I wanted to. I simply carried it for years—to no purpose at all, except one: I didn’t sleep.

The left column is clear. Choose one thing—and do it. Calmly, without strain. That is your part. You can handle it.

And the right column… it has to be let go.

Not “solve” it. Not “stop loving.” But in your mind—open your fingers. You can say a quiet phrase to yourself. Your own. Mine is something simple: “This is not in my hands. I trust.” And hand it over—to life, to love, to the invisible weaver. To that greater something that holds more reliably than I do.

And one more thing, every day. Small, but it changes how you see.

In the evening, name three things you are grateful for today. Very simple ones. That your baby smiled. That there was warm tea. That you made it to this evening, and now—it’s quiet. Anxiety looks ahead, at what might go wrong. Gratitude looks back, at what has already turned out well. And little by little it teaches the heart that the world is not just a list of threats. That there is so much in it that you didn’t arrange—and yet it happened. And it was kind.

To notice—and let it fill you.

The woman who unclenched her hands

Let me tell you about one mom. Without naming her—because I have seen so many like her, and in each of them, probably, there is a little of me.

She held everything. Sleep charts, feeding tables for starting solids, developmental activities scheduled to the minute. If something didn’t go according to plan, her world went dark. “I have no right to relax,” she said. “The moment I breathe out, everything will fall apart.”

And she truly didn’t breathe out. For a year, for two. And she was wasting away before our eyes—not from a lack of love, but from its unbearable weight.

One day she fell ill. Simply collapsed into bed—a fever, unable to get up. And for the first time in all that time she couldn’t hold everything. Grandma took the baby for the day. The schedules went sideways. The food was the “wrong” food. The nap was off schedule.

She lay there almost crying with horror: that’s it, now everything will collapse.

And in the evening her son was brought back to her. Rosy-cheeked. Content. Full of the “wrong” food. Well-rested at the “wrong” time. Whole and completely happy.

“You know what I understood then?” she told me later. “That the world wasn’t resting on my hands. It managed perfectly well on its own for a day. And here I thought I was some kind of Atlas. But I’m just… a mom. And that, it turns out, is enough.”

She didn’t become indifferent after that. She still loves her child, feeds them, cares for them when they’re sick, carries them in her arms. But she finally opened her fingers where there was nothing to hold. And for the first time in two years, it became possible to breathe in that house.

And do you know what is amazing? The little one seemed to breathe out too. Children are so sensitive to us—they pick up our state before any words. And when Mom stopped guarding the world, a quiet permission seemed to pass to the child as well: you can grow calmly, it’s safe here, there’s no need to be afraid here.

One small step

Don’t set out to “control nothing from now on and trust in everything.” That isn’t how it works. Trust isn’t a switch; it is a muscle. It is built up little by little.

Keep it simple.

Today, find just one worry from the right column. One. One that is definitely not in your hands. And for one evening—let it go. Tell yourself quietly: “There’s nothing I can do about this. And so—I hand it over.” And give the space that frees up to something alive: hug your child, look into their face, drink your tea hot.

I’ll admit that even I still sometimes catch myself at night by the crib—checking whether they’re breathing. An old habit has a strong grip. But now at least I notice it—and open my fingers a little faster than before.

And then quietly ask yourself:

What am I holding out of love—and what out of fear? And what in me will get to rest if I unclench my hands on at least this one thing?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes this question itself is already the first out-breath.

And also—gently, but honestly. If anxiety doesn’t let go day after day, if it wakes you at night and won’t let you live, that doesn’t mean you are “not trying hard enough to trust.” It means you need a real person beside you: someone close to you, a doctor, a psychologist. This book is support, not a substitute for a specialist’s help: if your heart is very heavy, leaning on a doctor or a psychologist is right and important. Trusting something greater and getting a specialist’s help aren’t at odds—they go hand in hand. Asking for help is also letting go of the helm. And that too is courage.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on any day when everything inside you clenches up:

Do what you can—and entrust the rest.

I don’t need to hold the whole world on my shoulders to be a good mom. I do my part—warm, honest, doable. And the rest I hand over to the one who holds it better than I do.

This is the quiet shift this whole chapter was written for. From “I hold everything”—to “love holds us.” And when we open that frantic grip, space suddenly frees up. Space for air. Space for tenderness between the grown-ups. Space for a whole circle of love in which there is enough warmth for everyone—but more on that further on.

May this quiet calm settle in your heart—the calm of someone who has done what they could and entrusted the rest. May letting go be not frightening but full of light. And may you one day step back and see the pattern in the carpet—and quietly marvel at how beautifully it was being woven all along. Even out of the threads that seemed dark to you.

Do what you can.

And the rest—entrust it.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 12 →

Chapter 13

A circle, not a throne

In one home I once saw a little king.

The child was about a year and a half old. They could barely walk yet—but the whole house already walked around them. Lunch was whatever they deigned to eat. The TV showed whatever they pointed a finger at. A conversation at the table would begin—and die out the moment they made a sound. Grandma ate standing up because they had taken her chair. Dad spoke in a whisper because “the baby’s asleep.” Mom hadn’t managed to eat, sit down or catch her breath all day—and she smiled guiltily, as if apologizing for existing separately from her child at all.

And I caught myself asking a quiet, uncomfortable question.

Do we love them—or serve them?

Don’t rush to answer. I ask it of myself too—without any judgment, only with recognition. Because the line here is finer than a hair. And you can cross it out of the purest, most genuine love.

That is what this chapter is about. Not about how to love less. But about where we place the one we love.

On a throne—or in a circle.

Do we love—or serve?

Let me say the main thing right away, so that you don’t tense up too soon.

This is not a chapter about “don’t spoil them.”

We agreed at the very beginning of this book: a child under three cannot be “spoiled” by closeness, by being held, by responsiveness, by warmth. When you run to a crying baby, you are not ruining them. You are building a support inside them. That was true on the first page, and it remains true here.

So this is not about giving less.

It’s about letting love flow the right way.

Picture two ways a home can be arranged.

The first is a throne. The child sits at the very center, and around them—courtiers. The world revolves around their mood. All the grown-ups are servants of their wishes. Their “I want” is law, their whim is an order, their displeasure is a catastrophe everyone rushes to fix.

The second is a circle. In the circle the child is there too—they have a warm, secure, beloved place. But not the only one. Beside them is Mom, who has a life of her own as well. Beside them are grown-ups who love each other—or a circle of close people, your own people. Beside them is something greater that the whole family trusts. And the child is not at the center of the circle. They are inside it. Among those who love.

The difference seems small. But a whole person grows out of it.

Because it is harder for a child on a throne to learn that there are others around them too. They take in one thing: “I am the center, and the world owes me.”

But a child in a circle finds it easier to grow into someone who knows how to love: “I am loved—and I love; I am given to—and I give; I am part of something bigger than myself.”

This isn’t about strictness. It’s about the direction love flows in.

Caring doesn’t mean making the child the center

This is the right time to stop, because this is where it is easiest to get confused. I got confused myself.

“Wait,” you’ll say. “All through this book you’ve been teaching me to respond. To be near. To pick my baby up. To feed on demand. Not to leave them crying. And now you’re saying—don’t put them at the center?”

Yes. And the one doesn’t get in the way of the other. Not at all.

Because caring doesn’t mean making the child the center.

These are two different things, and it is very important to learn to tell them apart.

Responding to your baby’s needs—hunger, fear, pain, loneliness, the need for closeness—is not a throne. It is a foundation. It is the very reliability out of which a calm, confident person later grows. Your baby cries at three in the morning—you get up. Your baby is frightened—you pick them up. This is neither spoiling nor servitude. It is love that holds.

But when the whole life of the family starts revolving around their every little want—when the grown-ups stop eating, sleeping, talking, loving each other, just so the child doesn’t make a peep—that is a throne.

Do you see the difference?

Secure attachment and the circle are not enemies. They are allies.

You can hold your baby in your arms all night—and still not seat them on a throne. You can come running at the first call—and not make them a king. Because a throne isn’t about how much you give. It’s about who is in charge in the home.

And the one in charge of a home shouldn’t be someone who is a year and a half old. Not because they are unworthy. But because it is too heavy a crown for such a small head.

And do you know what I often see behind such a “throne”? Not happiness—but anxiety. A child who has been seated at the very top is more often lost than triumphant. Because running a whole world of grown-ups is unbearably frightening for someone who can’t yet climb down the stairs by themselves.

They don’t need a throne. They need dependable grown-ups beside whom they can simply be a child.

A need or a whim?

So how do you tell one from the other in practice? Where is care—and where is it already a throne?

I’ll be honest: I don’t always get it right myself. I remember how once in a store my child wanted not that box of juice—but this one, with a different picture, and right now. And I had almost reached out to buy both, just so there wouldn’t be tears in the middle of the checkout line. My hand was reaching on its own. And something inside quietly asked: wait, does my child really need this?

That is how I came to have one small question. Ridiculously simple. And it has saved me more than once—from rushing to grant wishes that didn’t need granting.

Before I rush in, I pause and ask myself:

Is this a need—or a whim?

A need is about what a baby truly requires. Closeness. Safety. Response. Comfort. A full tummy. “I’m scared,” “it hurts,” “I’m lonely,” “stay with me.” We meet a need generously. Always. Without bargaining and without conditions. That is sacred.

A whim-as-demand is something else. It is “everything has to be my way.” “I want this cup, not that one, and let the whole house be in an uproar.” “We’re not leaving the store until you buy it.” “Do what I said, or there’ll be screaming.”

And here—attentively, warmly—we hold the line.

Not coldly. Not angrily. Not “stop it right now.”

But calmly and with love.

Because sometimes the most loving thing we can say is a kind “no.”

“No” doesn’t cancel love. It is part of love. It is the riverbank. A little one who is allowed everything, always, is actually more anxious: it’s as if their world had no walls, nothing to lean on, and they fall into the endlessness of their own “I want.” Boundaries are exactly those walls within which it is calm.

A kind “no” sounds like this: “I love you very much. And I hear you. And right now, this is how it will be.” A warm voice—and a firm bank. Hug them—and don’t give in on what matters. Acknowledge the feeling—“you’re upset, I understand”—and leave the boundary where it is.

It’s hard. I won’t pretend it’s easy. When your little one is crying over the “wrong” cup, your heart aches to give in. But giving in to a whim doesn’t mean loving more. It means seating them on the throne again.

And we are not raising them on a throne. We are raising them in a circle.

There’s room for everyone

Do you know which thought brings all of this together?

In a circle, there is room for everyone.

This isn’t about taking the child’s place away. On the contrary—they have their own place, warm and secure, and no one will touch it. It’s just that besides their place, there are other places in the circle.

There is Mom’s place—alive, separate, with her own universe inside; we’ve already talked about this. There is a place for grown-ups who love each other. There is a place for those close to you, your own people. There is a place for what you share—for what is bigger than each of us.

And the simplest way to bring this back is shared rituals with “us” at the center, not the child.

A shared table where everyone eats—and the grown-ups sit too, instead of jumping up. A shared evening where the conversation isn’t only about the baby. Small family details in which you can clearly read: there are several beloved people here, and each of them has a place.

A little one in such a circle isn’t deprived. They are blessed. Because they grow up among love, not on top of a pyramid made of it.

And here is what I have noticed over the years. Children who grew up in a circle rather than on a throne are calmer. As if they don’t need to keep checking whether they are still in charge. They already know they are loved. And they are loved not because they are at the center—but simply, as one of their own.

A parable of two houses

Let me tell you a composite story. Without names—because I have seen many homes like these, and perhaps you will recognize something of your own.

In the first home, the child was the meaning of everything. The parents gave up friends, trips, evenings together, their own wishes—everything for the child. Every “I want” was granted instantly. Every “I don’t want” canceled the whole family’s plans. They loved their child—desperately, without reserve, to the point of dissolving completely.

The child grew—and for some reason became unhappier and unhappier. Fussier. More anxious. However much they were given, it was too little. Because for the one on the throne, it is always too little: a throne is a very lonely place.

And in the second home, the little one was loved no less. Picked up just the same, run to at every cry just the same, warmed and protected just the same. But Mom stayed herself. The grown-ups loved each other—and didn’t hide it. Everyone sat at the table. And sometimes the little one was told a kind, calm “no.”

And that child grew up—generous. Knew how to share, having seen the grown-ups share. Knew how to wait, knowing the world wouldn’t collapse if they waited. Knew how to love—having grown up inside love, not on top of it.

The same love. A different riverbed.

In the first home, it all drained into one spot—and stagnated. In the second, it flowed in a circle. And came back.

One small step

Don’t remake your whole home today. Big changes frighten us, and we abandon them—I know this from my own experience.

Do one thing.

Today, just once, catch yourself before you rush to fulfill a wish. And quietly ask: is this a need—or a whim? If it’s a need—run, hug, give generously. If it’s a whim—try a kind, warm “no.” Once. Just to feel what it’s like.

And then ask yourself:

Where does my child stand in our home right now—in the circle, among those who love, or on a throne after all, alone at the top? And what is the smallest thing I can do so that next to my child’s place, mine becomes visible again?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself turns everything around.

When the circle isn’t the problem

And one more thing—quietly and separately.

If you catch yourself having gone weeks without eating properly or breathing freely. Having no strength at all. Smiling guiltily, as if apologizing for existing at all.

This isn’t about a “wrong circle,” and it isn’t about you doing something wrong.

It is about the fact that you yourself need support right now. Help from those close to you—and if the heaviness doesn’t lift for long days, a specialist’s help too. This book is here to support you, not a replacement for a doctor. Asking for help is nothing to be ashamed of. A person needs a person—and that applies to you, first of all.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on the days when your heart aches to give in where giving in isn’t right:

Love is a circle, not a throne.

I am not depriving my baby when I don’t make them the center of the universe. I am giving them the best there is—a place among those who love. Warm, secure, their own. But not lonely.

Care for them fully—and don’t raise them onto a throne. Meet their needs generously—and hold the line with love. Love them with all your heart—and, alongside them, love yourself too, and those close to you, and life itself.

Because a child who grew up on a throne finds it harder to believe that the world isn’t only about them.

But a child who grew up in a circle is more likely to learn to love.

And this, it seems to me, is the greatest gift we can give them. Not a crown. But a place in the circle—where it is warm, where it is safe, where there is enough love for everyone.

May your home have such a circle. A roomy one—so that there is room for your little one, and for you, and for love between the grown-ups, and for quiet trust in something greater.

There will be room in it for everyone.

And for your child—first of all.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 13 →

Chapter 14

The heart of the home: love between the grown-ups

They are sitting at dinner. The three of them.

The little one in the high chair is smearing porridge across the table—and both of them are looking at the child. Talking about the child. “Our little one said a new word today.” “Did you see how they hold the spoon?” “We need to book the doctor—a tooth is coming in.”

And then the little one is carried off to bed. And two people are left at the table.

And suddenly—silence. That awkward, unfamiliar silence in which it isn’t clear right away what to talk about. Because all day, all week, all this year they have talked only about the child. And when the child finally fell asleep, it turned out they had almost nothing to say to each other.

Two people looking at each other across the table. And somewhere at the very bottom flickers something a little frightening: “And who are you now? We used to be… someone to each other.”

“Later,” they think. “Later, when the child grows up. Then we’ll remember ourselves.”

I know that silence. And I know how imperceptibly “later” stretches into years.

That is what this chapter is about. About what stands at the very heart of the home.

A home doesn’t rest on the child. A home rests on love

We are used to thinking that the child is the center of the family. Its foundation. What everything is for.

But if you look closely, things are a little different.

A child is not the foundation of the family. A child is its fruit. The most beautiful, the most longed-for—but a fruit. The foundation came earlier. The foundation is the love of two people, which existed before the child and thanks to which the child came into the world at all.

A tree doesn’t grow from its fruit. A tree grows from its roots. And the deeper the roots, the bigger, rosier and sweeter the fruit.

So it is with a home.

A home doesn’t rest on the child—a child is too small to hold up a whole family, and that weight isn’t theirs to carry. A home rests on the love of the grown-ups. On that warm, living thing that flows between two people who once chose each other. That is the foundation. And when the foundation is strong, you can build anything on top of it: a nursery, and holidays, and a whole life.

But sometimes we do the opposite. We throw all our strength into the fruit—and forget to water the roots.

A child learns love by watching love

Here is the thought this chapter was written for.

A child doesn’t learn love from books. Not from our words “you must be kind.” And not even from how we love the child themselves.

A child learns love by watching how the grown-ups around them love each other.

This is their first school. And one of the most important.

Think about what your child sees every day. How Mom and Dad talk to each other. How they look at each other. How they make up after a quarrel—and they do quarrel, everyone quarrels, and that’s not frightening; what’s frightening is something else—when people quarrel and don’t make up. How one pours tea for the other without waiting to be asked. How “thank you” and “I’m sorry” sound. How two people can be different—and still be together.

Out of this—out of a thousand little things we don’t even notice—a child’s first idea of what love is takes shape. What it looks like. How it sounds. How it smells in the mornings.

And here is the whole point.

If a child grows up where everyone around serves them, they can easily conclude: love is when I am served. When the world revolves around me. When I want—and others do.

But if a child grows up where the grown-ups love each other, a completely different feeling takes shape. That love is when you give. When you notice the other person. When there is room not only for me.

Of course, a person doesn’t grow out of a single picture. There will also be their own temperament, and friends, and a whole life ahead. But what they see at home day after day goes into the very foundation. Children learn not so much from what we say. Children learn from what we do with each other.

And the most valuable lesson in love we can give them is not a present, not attention, not an endless “you’re our very best, most special one.” But simply a living, warm love between us, the grown-ups. The kind they look up at—and learn from.

Don’t use your child to plug the gap between you

And now—gently. About something that is hard to talk about.

Sometimes it happens like this. Something between two grown-ups has gone cold. It has become empty, chilly, distant. And instead of warming that empty place, bringing it back to life, they fill it with the child.

All the tenderness that doesn’t go to each other pours down on the little one. All the conversations are only about the child. All of life revolves around them. Because between the two of them there seems to be nothing left to talk about, but about the child—there always is.

I understand why this happens. It isn’t ill will. It is an attempt to hide from pain in the brightest thing there is.

But it is bad for everyone.

Bad for the couple—because the gap doesn’t heal; it has just been curtained over. Bad for the child—and this is important to understand. Loving your child with all your heart is natural and beautiful; that’s not what this is about. It is about how the child is quietly seated on a throne, made the center, the meaning, the one and only light in the window. And at the same time is deprived of the most reliable thing they could have: ground under their feet. Strong, calm grown-ups who love each other.

A child isn’t made to be the only meaning in the lives of two grown-ups. That is too heavy a weight for someone who is still so small. It is hard to grow under it—the way it is hard for a sapling to reach upward when a whole crown is leaning on it at once.

And do you know what gives a child real support? Not toys. Not developmental activities. And not a mom who has dissolved in them without a trace.

Enormous support comes from something simple: when the child feels that between the close grown-ups there is warmth and harmony.

When they see: here they are, two big, dependable people, and things are good between them. They are warm together. The world is steady. The ground isn’t slipping from under my feet.

Protecting love between the grown-ups doesn’t take anything away from the child. It gives them one of the strongest foundations there is.

How to water the roots

It doesn’t take much. Really. You don’t need to go away to the sea together for a week—though if you can, go. You can start small. With what is doable today.

Fifteen minutes a day—for each other. Just fifteen. When the little one is asleep or busy. Sit next to each other—and be together. On one condition: not about the child. Not about teething, not about vaccinations, not about “today the baby…” But about you. How was your day? What touched you today? Remember when we… Let it be a little island where you are simply two people again.

Say it out loud: “We were here before you—and we have each other.” Not to the child, of course—to yourselves, to each other. This isn’t about the child being in the way. It’s about you not being only parents. You are also two people who love each other. And that part is alive.

Keep a small evening boundary. An hour when the nursery door quietly closes and your time begins. Even if it’s short. Even if it’s just tea together. But—yours. A home in which the grown-ups have their own quiet evening stands stronger.

And one more word—the most important one in this chapter.

I know that not everyone has a “two of us.” Some are raising a child alone. Some have lost someone. Some left on their own—and were right to. And if something ached just now—please, no guilt. This chapter isn’t saying that a home without a couple is incomplete.

The heart of the home is wider than a couple. The heart of the home is love itself. The living love of close people around the child.

A grandmother who sings to them at bedtime. A sister, an aunt, a loyal friend. A grandfather who gives them rides on his shoulders. That circle of your own people where it is warm and where they love—each other and the child. A child needs to see love between grown-ups—but those grown-ups don’t have to be Mom and Dad. Love multiplies wherever it exists, in any form.

And also—protect the love within yourself. Don’t let it dry up. Because a mom in whom love is alive is already a whole heart of the home. And that is enough.

Two people who remembered

Let me tell you about one couple. Without naming names—because I have seen many couples like them, and perhaps you will recognize someone in them. Or maybe yourselves.

They came in tired—with that particular tiredness that wears out good parents. Everything for the child. Everything right. The best preschool, the best activities, the best of everything—for their son. And between the two of them—like roommates. Polite, caring roommates who parent together.

“We don’t fight,” she said. “It’s just… as if we have nothing more to say to each other. We’re a good team. But not a couple.”

I asked one simple thing. When was the last time you talked to each other about something other than your child? Even for ten minutes?

They exchanged glances. And were silent for a long time. They couldn’t remember.

I didn’t give them any great advice. I simply suggested: fifteen minutes in the evening. Tea. And an agreement—not a word about their son.

The first evenings, they told me later, were almost agonizing. They kept being pulled back to the familiar, to their son. They sat in silence, not knowing where to start. And then one day he remembered how they had met. She laughed. He laughed too. And suddenly they talked until late at night.

“It was as if I’d dug out someone who had been buried under everything,” she told me later. “He was right there all this time. And I was looking straight through him—at the child.”

And they noticed a change in themselves too. They became gentler, calmer. They snapped less over little things. And the home seemed to grow warmer. And children feel this—such a change in the air can’t be put into words, but it passes to them. It seemed to them that their son had become calmer too: as if the boy had sensed that the ground under him was solid again. Mom and Dad are together again. It’s safe to grow.

They took nothing away from their son. They gave their child more.

And one more thing—honestly. Not everything in a relationship can be healed with fifteen minutes. Sometimes too much has built up between two people, or one of you is truly heavy-hearted—and then don’t stay alone with it. Turning to a family psychologist is not weakness but care for your home. A good specialist here is like a midwife at a birth: doesn’t do the work for you, but holds you when it’s hard.

One small step

Don’t promise yourself “every evening from now on, always.” We don’t keep big promises—I know this from my own experience: how many times I swore “every evening from now on” and quietly backed off as soon as tiredness piled up.

Keep it simple.

Tonight—find someone close to you whom you love. Your husband, your mother, your sister, a friend. And talk for fifteen minutes—not about chores, not about the child. Simply, as people. Ask how they are. Tell them how you are.

And then quietly ask yourself:

When was the last time I felt living love between me and someone close—not care, not chores, but simply warmth? And what is keeping me from warming it up again?

Don’t rush to answer. Sometimes the question itself is already the first step on the way.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on the days when it seems that everything should be about the child:

The best thing we can give a child is our love for each other.

Not dissolving in them. Not serving them. But a living, warm love between the grown-ups, which they watch—and from which they learn to love.

Take care of the roots, my dears. Water them, even when your strength is running low. Because a home blossoms not because we tremble over every flower, but because deep in the ground the roots are alive and well watered.

May there always be warmth between the grown-ups in your home. May your child grow up watching love—and learn that love isn’t when the world serves you, but when you have each other.

And love, after all, multiplies. The more of it there is between you, the more your child receives.

And there will be enough for everyone.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 14 →

Chapter 15

Love that lets go

Every spring, when the streams start their chattering run along the roadsides, we go out to float little boats.

We fold them from a sheet of notebook paper—clumsy, a bit crooked, with a creased sail. We set them on the water. And they set off—timidly at first, then more and more confidently, caught up by the current.

And we stand on the bank and watch them go.

For a long time. Until the little boat dips under a footbridge, sways around a bend, disappears completely. And for some reason something always tightens in my chest—even though it’s only a scrap of paper, only a game.

Once I caught myself feeling this—and suddenly understood what it was about.

It’s about children.

We fold them so carefully. We lower them onto the water so gently. And then the current picks them up—and carries them away. And one day all our love gathers into one quiet movement: watching them go. Not holding on. Not pulling them back to the bank. But watching them go—and letting go.

That is what the last chapter is about. About love that knows how to let go.

Love doesn’t keep them for itself

There is a love that clenches its fist.

It is afraid of losing—and so it holds tight, tighter and tighter, until it smothers. It says: you’re mine, only mine, don’t go, don’t grow up, don’t look over there, around the bend. It calls this tenderness. But really it is fear.

And there is another love.

The kind that opens its palm.

A strange thing, if you think about it: real love seems to work against itself. We invest years, sleepless nights, our whole heart—in what? In letting go one day. In a little person standing on their own feet and walking—away from us. Down their own road. Toward their own life.

Love is centrifugal. It doesn’t pull inward—it sends outward.

We feed them—so that they learn to eat on their own. We hold their hand—so that they walk without a hand. We carry them in our arms—so that one day they run ahead without looking back. Every “I’m here” of ours quietly prepares a future “I can do it myself.”

And there is no loss in this. That was the plan all along.

For a long time I confused love with possession. I thought: if I love, then it’s mine. But it turned out the other way around. In love you can’t claim ownership. You can only give, nourish and see off.

Our children don’t belong to us. They pass through us—the way light passes through a window. And our task is not to hold back that light, but to be clear glass through which it will enter the world.

Why the circle teaches us to give

Remember we talked about the throne and the circle?

A child on a throne, served by the whole house, learns one thing: the world exists for me. That is exactly the selfishness we are so afraid of when people scare us with “you’ll spoil them.” Only it is born not out of love—but out of lopsided love, the kind that all drains into one spot and stagnates.

But a child in a circle learns something else.

They see how the grown-ups love each other. How Mom takes care of herself—and of others. How everyone in the home has their own place, and there is enough love for everyone. They grow up inside a living current of love—and absorb not “I am owed” but “this is how it is: people give to each other.”

And here is what’s important to understand about the very youngest.

There is no use teaching a two-year-old generosity with a lecture. “Share,” “give it back,” “don’t be greedy”—for now these are empty sounds to them, and sometimes a hurt. They will learn to truly share much later—and not from lectures.

But from the air of the home.

Children read not words—but atmosphere. They absorb what they breathe. If people in the home give, the child learns to give. If people in the home notice each other, the child learns to notice. Not because they were told to. But because they grew up inside it, like a sprout inside warm soil.

That is why “teaching a child to give” in the first years isn’t lessons. It is example. It is the very fabric of the home.

You took a pie to a neighbor—and brought your little one along. You comforted a crying child on the playground—while your child watched. You said “thank you” to Dad—out loud, so your child could hear. Together you scattered crumbs for the birds in winter. You didn’t explain what kindness is. You let them touch it.

From atmosphere—to habit. From example—to the heart. From a circle where people love—to a person who knows how to love.

That is what all this is for. Not for an obedient child. For the future grown-up who will carry love further—to friends, to the weak, to their own children.

A family is not the place where love ends at the child. A family is the place from which love goes out into the world.

We hold tight—so that we can let go

And now the most important thing. And perhaps the most unexpected.

To let a child go freely one day, you first need to hold them very, very tight.

This is not a contradiction. It is the whole meaning of the book, gathered into one thought.

Remember where we began. “Mom is near.” Co-regulation—when you breathe evenly, and your baby grows calmer beside you. Responding to their every call in those first months, when closeness doesn’t “spoil” but builds support. All those endless “I’m here,” “I’m near,” “you’re safe.”

What was it all for?

So that an anchor would grow inside your child. A quiet, unshakable certainty: I am loved, the world is reliable, someone will come to me. This is what is called secure attachment. And here is what those who observe babies and their mothers notice again and again: most often the children who go out into the big world most boldly are precisely those who have a secure base behind them.

Not those who grew up in the cold. Not those who were “toughened” by loneliness. But those who, at the beginning, were held warmly and tight.

Because letting go is frightening for someone who has nothing to lean on. But someone who knows they are loved and awaited goes forward more boldly. They have somewhere to come back to—and so they have somewhere to go.

For a tree to blossom and reach for the sky, it needs deep roots.

The roots are us. Our arms, our voice, our “near.” But the blossoming and the road to the sky are theirs, and theirs alone.

I’ll be honest: I hold on tighter than I should, too. And every time, all over again, little by little, I learn to open my palm. So this chapter isn’t written from on high—it’s written beside you, on the same shore.

That is why we held so tight.

Not to keep them for ourselves. But to give them the strength to leave one day—and not break.

A story about a bird and a nest

Let me tell you something I have seen more than once—in different women, in different years, yet it seems like one and the same story.

A woman spent her whole life building a nest. She wove it out of warmth, out of care, out of sleepless nights. Her child was everything to her. Not a part of her life—her whole life, down to the last drop.

And then the child grew up. Was ready to fly. Began glancing over the edge of the nest—toward the sky.

And the mother got scared.

She began weaving the walls higher. Tucking in on all sides. “Where are you going? It’s dangerous out there, it’s windy, you’re not ready, stay a little longer.” She did it out of enormous love. She truly believed she was protecting her child.

But a fledgling that isn’t allowed to spread its wings doesn’t become safer for it. It becomes a bird that is afraid of the sky.

And there was another woman.

She, too, wove her nest with all her heart. She, too, went without sleep, trembled over her little one. But one day she understood: a nest is not a cage. A nest is a launch pad.

And when the time came, she stepped back to the edge. She was frightened—no less than the first. But she watched her fledgling try its wings, slip, flap, catch its first current of air—and fly.

She didn’t hold on. She watched it go.

And do you know what the difference between these two is? Not the strength of their love. Both loved equally.

The difference is in what that love wanted. The first wanted it for herself. The second wanted it for her child.

And only the second was able to let go. Not because she loved more—but because her love was not about herself but about her child. And this can be learned. Any one of us can one day open her palm. I believe this—otherwise I wouldn’t have written this book.

One small step

There’s no need right now to think about that distant day when your child will leave. They are still tiny, snuffling at your side—and that is happiness. There is a time for everything.

Today, do one small, warm thing.

Create your own letting-go ritual. It can be literal—float a little boat in spring and watch it until it disappears. Or it can be quieter: in the evening, by the crib, say silently to your baby—“you are not mine, you are your own; I’m not holding you back, I’m seeing you off.”

And one more thing, a very simple one. Today, let your little one see you give something away. Share in front of them. Thank someone out loud. Comfort someone nearby. Scatter crumbs for the birds—together. Let the first lesson of love for the world come to them not from words but from your warm example.

And then quietly ask yourself:

Am I holding this person—or am I already, little by little, claiming them? And can I, loving so much, still look not inward, at myself—but after them, where their road leads?

Don’t rush to answer. We will be asking ourselves this question all our lives—and that’s normal.

Lighthouse phrase

Keep this close—and come back to it on the days when your hand clenches and you don’t want to let go:

We hold tight—so that one day we can let go freely.

These are not two different loves—one that holds and one that lets go. It is one love, each in its season. First—roots that nourish and hold. Then—the sky one can fly into. And neither lives without the other.

* * *

And that’s all. We have come a long way together.

We learned to be near—truly, with body and heart, so that calm could grow inside a little person. We learned to stay ourselves—not to dissolve without a trace, to refill our spring, to remember that behind every mom stands a Person. We learned to protect love between the grown-ups—that living warmth from which a home grows. And we learned to let the child into the circle—not onto a throne, but into a circle where there is enough love for everyone.

And all of this—for one thing.

So that love doesn’t get stuck, doesn’t go sour, doesn’t turn into “you owe me.” But flows on—through the child—into the world.

A calm mom more often raises a calm baby. And a baby who grew up in love is more likely to learn to love. And a person who knows how to love makes the whole world around them warmer.

That is what this whole book was for. And that is what all your effort is for. Every sleepless night of yours, every quiet “I’m here,” every minute when you chose love over fear—all of it is already being woven into something bigger than can be seen from here. That same invisible weaver we talked about is quietly weaving this thread of yours into the common pattern too—and you can trust that it is woven in for a reason. You do your part—and you do it well. And then—you let go. You fold the little boat and set it on the water.

And now—take care of yourselves. Float little boats. Hold tight while they’re small. And believe: when the time comes, you will be able to watch them go.

Because you love for real.

And real love always knows how to let go.

With warmth—until we meet somewhere along your road.

Write it down and check it off in “The Potyagushi Diary”—practice for chapter 15 →