High sensitivity
Should it matter in the parenting decision?
Every light in my house is on a dimmer, and I am forever taking the lighting down a notch. A few times a week, I jump out of my skin after being deep in thought and interrupted, even if I was expecting the interruption. I screen myself from 95% of the television others recommend because it would keep me up at night. Tidiness is a close cousin to spirituality for me—if my house is out of order, life loses meaning and mooring.
I am a Highly Sensitive Person—a term coined by psychologist Elaine N. Aron. After reading the first few chapters of Elaine Aron’s book in high school, I cried with the relief of understanding myself better. I felt like Aron was reaching out and giving me a hug. Aron posits that not only among humans, but among other mammals as well, a subset of the population evolved to have sensory-processing sensitivity, meaning we are more sensitive to not only emotions, but also external things like light, noise, hunger, and pain. When I took the Highly Sensitive Person quiz, each answer for me was a resounding yes.
None of this may seem related to the question of whether to become a mother, but for me it had everything to do with it.
A baby is the definition of over-stimulating. The cries. The smells. The noisy gadgets. The disorder babies seem to bring to every house they touch. And older children come with their own versions of each of these, along with stamping feet. I handled all of this well enough during my babysitting years, when I could retreat back to my quiet bedroom at the end of the day. But I didn’t see how I could manage it all hours of the day, for days on end.
This is one of the few fears of motherhood I kept largely to myself. Society still tends to look with skepticism on sensitivity. It’s an identity I’m only recently coming to embrace.
Yet I had a deep sense that my sensitivity should not be a determining factor. Aron’s basic point is that the trait serves as much as, if not more than, it hinders. I learned this early on from my mom. No doubt highly sensitive, and no doubt a beautiful mother. Sensitivity might make the hard parts of mothering harder for me (the noise and the overwhelm), but I hoped it might make the beautiful parts more beautiful as well (empathetic connection).
Join the conversation: If you are highly sensitive, how did that impact your approach to deciding whether to become a parent?