Rookie Four Move: A Postpartum Confession

There are many pros to having kids later in life. You’ve figured a few things out: you have a stronger sense of identity, a more established community, and you’re even a little more financially secure. Maybe you also take care of yourself a bit more consciously. After all, you want to stick around as long as possible to see this new creature grow up and make you proud.

In my experience, whereas much of this was true, the fact that I’d finally figured a few things out after working very hard to get there emotionally, professionally, and relationally made it challenging. Don’t get me wrong. Becoming a mother is and was the highlight of my life. I’d longed for it for as long as I can remember. But when that didn’t happen fresh out of college, or grad school, or the better half of my thirties, I quietly put that longing away and became a career woman. Whether as a songwriter, therapist, or Enneagram teacher, I found great comfort in knowing I could funnel all that longing into a career.

Little did I know that when it did finally happen at the ripe age of 40, I would feel all kinds of complicated and opposing emotions around becoming a mom. Sure, I was over the moon in love with my son! And I was also under the table, terrified of losing the significance and opportunities that I’d slowly built over the past two decades. Hell, I accepted a large speaking gig in Texas a month after my due date because I had a death grip on the fear of losing my identity.

A month postpartum, and I said yes to a stage. I know, rookie Enneagram Four move. A week before the event, I had to get on the phone and, in a puddle of tears, decline it, in equal parts embarrassment and fear.

A year later, as the world had slowed to an eerie halt due to COVID-19, I found a lump on my right breast. A battery of testing, surgeries, chemotherapy, and reconstruction came later, finally putting us squarely in 2023. My son was almost four.

In the haze of all of it, I look back and grieve the bond I wish I’d been emotionally available for. Sure, I was there physically, but the steady drone of anxiety took up space where I wish love and attunement for Tucker had been. Don’t worry y’all, with more therapy than Jonah Hill, I have done the deep work of repair, but I want to share some insight I’ve gained along the way.

Human beings have the longest period of dependence on their original caregivers of any other mammal. We are needy creatures through and through.

It’s no wonder we all need Jesus and therapy; it’s literally impossible to get every last need for safety, love, and connection met. This is a big distinction I make when exploring a client’s family of origin story, lacking and imperfect as it may be. It’s not about blaming our parents. It’s about understanding the story.

For the last decade in my work as a therapist, I’ve been fascinated and committed to finding ways to use the Enneagram with clients, as well as resourcing other therapists to do the same. After all, the Enneagram is a powerful map of personality that gives us tremendous insight into our patterns. However, insight without integration is what I like to call sophisticated suffering. Healing and change require a way of working with insight, a method, something actionable to begin the change process. Attachment work is a pristine example, and one that became a lifeline in my own experience of postpartum and cancer as a youngish mom.

Here’s what I mean by lifeline.

Attachment theory starts with a simple, almost embarrassingly obvious fact. Of every mammal on this earth, we are the neediest babies. A baby giraffe is standing within the hour. A human baby cannot hold up its own head. We arrive into the world completely unable to survive without someone else, which means our earliest task is not walking or talking. It’s figuring out whether the person in charge of keeping us alive is safe to depend on.

So from the very beginning, before we have language for it, we are asking two questions on repeat. Am I lovable? Am I safe?

Alyssa Blask Campbell writes about this in Tiny Humans, Big Emotions, describing how children are essentially running an ongoing experiment on the people around them, watching every reaction and quietly recalibrating their behavior in search of the answer. Every reach, every cry, every moment of being picked up or left to wait becomes a small piece of evidence. Over thousands of these tiny interactions, we build what attachment researchers call a working model, a felt sense of whether love is reliable, whether closeness is safe, whether our needs are a burden or a welcome.

This isn’t about blame. Your parents were running their own working models, built from their own thousands of interactions, most of it happening below the level of conscious choice. Nobody sits down and decides to raise an anxious kid. But the patterns get passed down anyway, quietly, generation to generation, until someone gets curious enough to look at them.

That’s the part I find most hopeful about attachment work. Because the questions don’t stop at childhood. We keep asking, “Am I lovable? Am I safe?, well into adulthood. We just stop noticing we’re asking. It shows up in how we handle conflict, how close we let people get, what we do the second someone we love seems the slightest bit far away. My own answer to those questions, forged long before I could form a sentence, shaped exactly the kind of mother I was terrified of becoming, and it’s the same anxiety I carried into a hospital bed a year later. Insight into that pattern didn’t change it. Working with it did.

Which is where the Enneagram comes in, and where I think it earns its keep as more than a personality quiz.

If attachment theory tells us what happened, the Enneagram tells us what we made of it. It’s a map of the specific strategy each of us built in response to those early questions, the particular way we learned to secure love or safety when we weren’t sure it was guaranteed. A Nine learns that peace keeps connection intact, so they go quiet to stay close. An Eight learns that vulnerability got exploited, so they lead with control instead. A Four learns that being ordinary risks being overlooked, so they build an identity too specific, too deeply felt, to lose. Nine different strategies, nine different children trying to answer the same two questions the only way they knew how.

This is why insight alone falls short. Knowing my type told me I run toward significance when I feel threatened. It did not, on its own, stop me from saying yes to a stage a month after giving birth.

What actually moved the needle was tracing that pattern back to the question underneath it, noticing the exact moment my body decided that love was conditional on being remarkable, and building new evidence against it, slowly, on purpose, in real relationships. That’s attachment repair. The Enneagram just tells you where to start digging.

Tucker is almost seven now, going on 13, and I am as alive and kicking as I’ve ever been. I’m fully back in my body and more at home in myself than I’ve ever felt. That matters because it means I can be regulated and available for him in a way I couldn’t back then. I’m a flawed human and mother, no question, but Tucker knows I’m always coming home for him. And although his future therapy fund is looking very healthy, I pray he feels it in his little bones that his mom is a safe and loving place to land, over and over again.

With love and gratitude,

Katie