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Home › Articles › Motherhood › How Did I Know That?

How Did I Know That?

Investigating Mother's Intuition

By Dr. Laurie Nadel

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The first time it happened, I woke up at 3 in the morning. Except for the sound of my legs rustling under the blankets as I sat up, there was no sound. In the shimmer of a red nightlight, nothing looked disturbed. But in the center of my breathing, it felt tight.

"Are you OK?" my husband grunted, half asleep.

"Charly had a bad dream," I said. Before I could even question how I could possibly know that, our 2-year-old woke up crying.

"Mommy, there's a witch in my cwib," she sobbed as I picked her up and hugged her.

Holding her until she fell asleep, my mind continued to race. What had just happened? It didn't bother me that I had awakened a few minutes ahead of her. That seemed to be part of what I would call a maternal instinct, a biological connection that enables us to anticipate our child's physical needs. Although my past experience with infants had been limited to having them scream whenever I held them, giving birth to my own was entirely different.

During the months of pregnancy, I frequently wondered: Since infants don't come with an instruction manual, how would I know what to do? But within a few days, there was an unmistakable silent language of facial and body expressions as well as sound.

"One of the first things that happens in life is for newborn infants to synchronize their movements to the human voice," writes anthropologist Edward T. Hall who describes the first year of communication as a period of biological time in which hours, days and nights are measured by the needs of our bodies and our babies. I learned to tune in to her needs by listening to her breathing, her heartbeat and the gurgling sounds she made when she was happy. My father said that I was living proof that there was such a thing as a maternal instinct.


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