Linda N. Edelstein, Ph.D.

Kate Middleton’s Baby Bump

by | Apr 29, 2013 | Life Ain't For Sissies, Personal Growth, Trauma/Crisis | 0 comments

I know that we need to be amused and if the internet dropped all the kitten and puppy videos, recipes, and dreamstimefree_169441Kate Middleton, there would be a lot of empty cyber space available.  I am guilty.  I even have a Pinterest account now (although I can’t figure out how to use it), but there is something very weird about watching a young woman’s belly grow.   It is enough to make anyone extremely uncomfortable and self-conscious.   I get it – her job is to breed, preferably look beautiful while doing it, and certainly to keep the British monarchy (one of the strangest, looniest ideas ever sold to a nation) afloat but right now, being photographed and commented on, she is earning every castle and tiara.

I asked my dear friend, psychologist Carol Kerr, Ph.D. in Marin, CA, who wrote her dissertation about pregnancy in the workplace, “Why is Kate Middleton’s baby bump public property?” Here is her very wise (edited) response:

“Margaret Mead observed that the whole tribe takes an interest in the offspring.  (in my study) I  did find that pregnant women felt others had a new level of interest and (sometimes intrusive) degree of engagement with them even when there was no prior personal dimension to their workplace relationship.  My own experience too, was that other people seem to have both a deep protective interest of some kind, probably the “mammalian” level of the triune brain, related to mother and child, and a more personal “identification” through shared experience, for those who are/have been parents.  I was interested that even very withdrawn/odd psychotic patients on Psych Emergency Service would open up and talk with me when I was very pregnant because they recognized the condition and connected to me because of that. (My colleagues meanwhile were feeling I was “at risk” or they were somehow called to be uber-protective..when in fact I felt I was safer when pregnant than when not.)  Anyway, then you also have the British deep collective attachment to those royals as some historic link to better times I guess.”

Photo credit: Luba V Nel, Dreamstime stock photos

Instead of buying me a tiara, purchase Object of Obsession.

OO v3

 

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