Anyone who is a mom knows about becoming Mama Bear. (I usually say Mama Lion but I’ll go with the more standard animal terminology.)

Mama Bear appears when we feel our child is threatened or treated unfairly. And she is fierce!

The first time it ever happened to me was actually before my son was born. I was 20 weeks pregnant and, as an important personal choice for us, my husband and I opted to do a genetics test on the fetus to make sure everything was okay, all normal chromosomes in place. I was nearly 40 years old with one miscarriage behind me. It was recommended at my age and just made sense.

The very experienced doctor overseeing the test explained the process, an extraction of just a little of the fluid in the placenta. With an ultrasound showing everything going on inside my uterus, he inserted into my belly the longest needle I had ever seen. 

Like turning on a switch, I was suddenly on high alert, ready to defend, at war. I could’ve scratched his eyes out with a blood-curdling scream.

Instead, I looked away, gripped my husband’s hand tightly and took deep breaths to fight off the feeling. 

When the procedure was completed—which was within seconds—tears came in steady streams, uncontrollable. My strong reaction startled me. The trippiest part was how absolutely instinctual it was. It wasn’t a conscious thought but involuntary, the need to protect my child. The doctor did an excellent job, and I felt like I wasn’t doing mine, letting that needle come so close to my son. Even though it was by my choice.

I became Mama Bear, ferocious and willing to do anything to protect my young.

Adrenaline surged for a long time afterwards. 

I’ve had a number of Mama Bear moments since then.

Mama Bear came to light just the other day in reacting to a high school teacher who was giving students all zeroes on essays if they didn’t cite sources in the correct MLA format. My son told us about it with frustration at dinner. The content of the essay wasn’t even considered. Students were given only minimal feedback. 

But what I took issue with the most was the lack of teacher-facilitated exercises before the essay that would have given students a chance to fail and correct themselves and learn. 

In this particular Mama Bear moment, despite the high emotion, I kept my claws to myself. I didn’t talk to the teacher right away. My husband and I knew the first step was our son advocating for himself, which he did, resulting in the opportunity to fix the citing issues and raise his grade, still only to a 75% from a zero for most of his classmates, but a reasonable success. 

Mama Bear is still keeping her eyes open though. Grrr.

There’s a neurological reason for the Mama Bear phenomenon. Usually when an animal senses danger, it’s gone, out-of-there, see ya’. Flight. Or it freezes like a deer does. But not when offspring are threatened. Man, then, that deer might get all up in your face. Parents’ defend their young, could even kill to protect them.

Neuroscientists from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon, Portugal, discovered in 2017 that this radical change in parents’ behavior (from self-defense to defending their young) depends on the action of oxytocin—sometimes called the “love hormone”—on the neurons of the amygdala, the part of the brain known for its crucial role in the processing of emotional reactions. 

The amygdala is where fight or flight instincts happen. When triggered by fear, anger, anxiety or aggression, it releases stress hormones that prepare the body to fight the threat or flee from the danger. 

Oxytocin has many functions, among them is bonding, between mothers and their young, and within couples. 

You combine the love hormone with the stress hormone, that’s Mama Bear, right there. Or Mama Lion!