I also
wonder about the whole mindset behind employing wet nurses when it first became
fashionable. Were the gentry too ‘dignified’ to nurse their babies? Did only
animals do that, meaning breastfeeding? During the 16th to 18th
centuries, well-to-do mothers in Europe and the Colonies rarely nursed their
own babies. The infants were given to wet nurses and returned home only when
they were weaned, if they lived. Most fashionable women of the period wore corsets
made of leather with stays of bone. The corsets not only broke ribs but often
damaged breast tissue and nipples, making breastfeeding impossible. Employing
wet nurses was also a sign of a family's elevated status in society. (A
History of Wet Nursing, LLL International, March 2007)
About
the same time, during the Middle Ages, the first pacifiers were invented. A rag
soaked in chamomile tea would sedate a crying infant, replacing the much needed
calories in mother’s breast milk. In Holland, I read in one book, the rag was
knotted and dipped in whiskey. The infant mortality rate was known to be high
during this era and I don’t doubt that practices like these contributed
significantly.
The
cradle was employed during this era. A mother could multi-task finally: get
another child to rock the baby to sleep so she could cook or clean. She could
rock the cradle herself with her foot while spinning or weaving, another
convenience. When the cradle went out of style it was the (un)doing of one
doctor in particular whose thesis was that infants were being trained to be
rocked to sleep, would never learn to sleep on their own, were smart enough to
manipulate their mothers (sounds familiar?) and that the cradle was producing
spoiled children, though adult size cradles were not being produced to
accompany young adults to college that I know of. But I wonder again why
cradles were replacing the important skin-to-skin contact babies needed. Another little piece of non-bonding
trivia: In the 1700s, “…cabinetmaker Sheraton,
in his Cabinet Dictionary, designed a cradle which included a
spring mechanism designed to keep the cradle rocking for an hour and a half-- a
function now accomplished by electric motors in this age of preoccupied childcare
providers”. (Graham
Blackburn, furniture maker, author, and illustrator, and publisher of Blackburn
Books, Bearsville, N.Y.)
Exactly!
Preoccupied childcare providers. Why do we value our non-bonding time and space
above the needs of our children? I believe we honestly think we are not harming
them, otherwise how could we have been so oblivious for so long? To our small
minds do we think we must be able to tangibly see abuse or harm before
addressing it? The long-term effects of behaviors don’t cross our minds in most
circumstances. I have written about it already, but I come back repeatedly to
my observations of the researchers in Minnesota turning over every single
minute pebble in their search for the hidden cause(s) of autism. Everywhere
except the broken bond we have created ourselves, perhaps because it is
invisible, versus vaccines, for example, whose levels of mercury we can
quantitatively measure, though I don’t think we can ignore their side effects
any longer, either.
While
we employ nannies, baby sitters, and daycare we not only raise the expenditures
in our budgets, we also create more non-bonding time for ourselves.
Convenience? We have more time to create more ‘important’ (and costly) things
to do. No wonder our standard of living in the U.S. in particular and the
Western World in general is so high. We think we must have a two-income
household to survive, but in reality, we often create that level of need
ourselves.
Making the decision
to have a baby – it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go
walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone
When
we were having our children, we lived below the poverty line intentionally, not
because we knew about the importance of bonding, but because we didn’t want to
pay taxes that would be funneled into the military and the (then) Vietnam War.
We homeschooled, gardened, eating locally and seasonally, canned a good portion
of our food using a pressure canner on our woodstove, raised a pig named
‘Bacon’, made our own clothes or shopped second hand, and created our own
‘organic’ entertainment. I didn’t work outside the home (a log cabin at the
time). Our children were
amazingly independent very early, which surprised us. We did not realize that
by having one or both of us present all the time – they didn’t have a baby
sitter once during those years – they felt completely secure and chose their
own time to branch out into other levels of relationship. We called them
our ‘free-range’ children. I didn’t feel like some camp activities director,
either. I was too busy. If I was kneading bread, they each got a little lump to
destroy on their own. Theirs fell on the floor, gaining a few cat hairs along the way, got
over-kneaded, tasted and licked, and poked, and then went into the oven along
with my loaves. They ate theirs for lunch, slathered with homemade jam. If I
was cleaning one of the cabins with a baby tied on my back, (we maintained a
retreat on 70 acres of virgin oak forest in Wisconsin back then, receiving an
average of 600 guests a year) they all came along, inspecting bugs along the
paths through the woods, eating wild black berries, having mock weddings in
which they threw acorns in lieu of rice at the conclusion, the boys having
peeing contests, seeing who could hit the farthest tree. Ruth tried but
never scored.
They
met people from all over the world: a pianist who played for them on our old
upright (that I had bartered for a handmade quilt), a cleric from England whom
they introduced to Dr. Seuss and employed him to read to them every night
during his month-long stay; artists, priests, nuns, writers, storytellers, monks, hermits,
travellers – they all came for shorter or longer stays in the cabins. Our
children observed all of them and gravitated toward the more well-adjusted
folks among them; believe me, we got all kinds. This was the world our fifth
child, Hannah was born
into.
The year was 1987. She was born just
under 3 years after Rachel who was born 2 years short of 5 weeks after our
twins, Isaac and Ruth who were born on the Farm* with Ina May Gaskin and the
Farm midwives in 1982. The twins were born 2 years minus four days after our
eldest, Abraham. I had breastfed all of them well into their second year, using
breastfeeding alone to space our babies. (See Breastfeeding and Natural Child
Spacing: How Ecological Breastfeeding Spaces Babies, by Sheila Kippley.) They identified with Laura and Mary as we read every
single Little House on the Prairie book to them, stopping to
make Almanzo’s pancakes, or Pa’s button lamp, or dolly quilts from scraps like
Mary’s. (Yes, Abe and Isaac also learned to sew by hand.)
Hannah was the easiest baby yet as all
her siblings adored her and entertained her constantly. I did not realize then the
level of bonding that was happening between them as siblings but it has
remained with them to this day. They are all grown up now and we are
grandparents. The time really does fly by. We did not always find the right way
with each child as this or that one tried to find their own independence and
looking back we see things we could and should have done differently, but we are proud of
each one and who they have become.
Note: By the way, like her sister Rachel before her, the $25. Hannah cost us bought 1 box of
maternity sanitary pads, 1 box of Chux for the bed afterwards, and Slippery Elm
tea which I used to prevent bleeding after her precipitous birth. The others
had all come very quickly which can cause hemorrhage sometimes, so I wanted to
be prepared. The receipts are in her baby book. There isn't much else there,
though. It never became an item on my list of priorities.
*see 2nd edition Spiritual
Midwifery, by Ina May Gaskin, p. 130 or A Natural Delivery of
Vertex Twin Birth DVD, c2005 Birth Gazette Video.
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