Only in our Western Society has anyone ever asked, ‘what will I feed
my baby?’ and ‘where should my baby sleep?’ No other mammals dress their little
mammals, nor has another mammal ever looked for an alternative to breast milk
(or decided that breasts were for sex and not milk.) We are so very smart that
we have thought up all these wonderful anti-bonding behaviors, probably while
seeking our own convenience (or pleasure, or both) apart from our babies. This
goes back in our history to at least the Middle Ages.
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.) Did wet nurses bond with their charges, and vice versa?
And then were these babies weaned and abruptly separated once again, for the
second time, from the one person they thought they could rely upon? I can understand
employing a wet nurse in an emergency, for example if a mother died in
childbirth. But to choose or refuse to nurse one's own baby intentionally and
give him to a peasant, who, back in the Middle Ages hardly lived up to the same
standards of hygiene and cleanliness as that of her mistress. Besides, the wet
nurse would often abandon her own newborn in favor of this new, more
economically advantageous arrangement: she would be housed, well fed, and paid
for her 24-hour-a-day services, though the wet nurse would often have no child
of her own in the end when all was said and done.
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 if infants were being trained to be
rocked to sleep, they 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, 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. (Genetic flaws
in specific races is now on the top of the researchers’ lists at this time.)
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.
The French have an old saying that goes
something like this: every baby is born with a loaf of bread under each
arm. ~ as quoted by Dorothy Day
When
we were having our babies, 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 home schooled, gardened, ate locally and seasonally, canned a good portion of our food using a pressure canner
on our wood stove, 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 relationships. We called them our ‘free-range’ children. I
didn’t feel like some camp's activity 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, adding a few cat hairs along the way, got over-kneaded,
tasted, 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
stay; artists, priests, nuns, writers, storytellers, monks, hermits, travelers
– 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, (while I hung onto the rung on the front of the wood stove, while squatting and pushing.)
The year was
1987. She was our 5th child, 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. (Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing: How Ecological
Breastfeeding Spaces Babies, by Sheila
Kippley). Hannah, like her sister Rachel
before her cost us all of $25.
They identified with Laura and Mary as we read
every single Little House on the Prairie book to them by
kerosene lamp, 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 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 have done differently, but we are proud of
each one and who they have become.
Note: By the way, 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. 169, and A Natural Delivery of
Vertex Twin Birth DVD, c2005 Birth Gazette Video.
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