Anti-mothering propaganda

I was in the OB's office waiting for a shot when I spied the April issue of The Atlantic. I never buy mainstream magazines; they are controlled and owned by very few people with an agenda--a negative agenda (I'm sure they think it is a positive one) which ends up being propaganda for the current "think".

This particular issue contained two provocative articles, but one was of particular interest to me; it concerned breatsfeeding.

When I returned home, I read the article online. It was a rant by a woman who feels trapped by the nursing of her baby; she feels breastfeeding makes "equal parenting" impossible, that it keeps women from being "successful", that it is only mildly nutritionally better, and it may even drive women crazy.

I was barely able to stand her self-centered complaints, but I got through the article and forgave her; she is also a victim.

Another article on the same website caught my attention; this one on the battle over daycare. In all honesty, I barely perused it, but I wasn't surprised to find all sorts of studies sited, and all things so boringly scientific I wanted to go to sleep (which was good because it was late at night and I had been fighting insomnia).

My neighbors assume I was born and raised in a parsonage in an ivory tower. Who could blame them? I walk around in skirts with long hair, and I bake cookies and sew and play with my children.

They don't know I grew up in a trailer court and caught the schoolbus every day in front of a topless bar on the bad side of town. They don't know I was put in daycare myself from an early age and then became part of the first wave of "latch-key children".

As a child I kept having a recurring dream. In it I was sitting at a table with other children. I remember vomiting, and then having a woman jerk me by the hair and scream at me as she held my head over a flushing toilet. As I grew older, I learned things that helped my dream make sense.

It seems that when my parents divorced the first time, my mother went to work and put me in a daycare center. The woman in charge seemed as though she loved children, and my mother felt confident leaving me there. But I contracted a kidney infection, with a high fever. It was during this time that I experienced the events of my above recurring nightmare. My mother described to me how she would come to pick me up and find me burning with fever, wrapped in a heavy blanket, and without any evidence that my antibiotics had been dispensed to me.

It was abuse and neglect, and I am sure the daycare worker thought I would never remember--little children are easy that way, aren't they?

I was put in daycare again at the age of 7. I remember how lost I felt those first few days, and how I lay on a cot and cried silently during naptime. Over a period of the next 3 years I experienced two more daycare experiences. One was pretty good, the other treated children like animals to be corraled and fed like prisoners.

I have also seen daycare from other perspectives. I spent a summer in high school working in such a center. We placed the "criers" in playpens, fed the babies like cars on an assembly line, and unceremoniously patted their bottoms so they would sleep in the afternoons. So neat, and no attachment necessary.

After my own first daughter was 6 weeks old, I had to return to my Army obligations--it was the law--even though I begged to be let out. I trusted my tiny child into the arms of a Christian woman at church. My baby would not take the bottle--and the babysitter even tried using an eyedropper to feed her. I would pick her up and hold her all the way home as she stared deeply into my eyes--a pleading, desperate sort of stare. My husband changed shifts so we could work opposite of each other and one of us could be with her at all times. Eventually he stayed home altogether while I worked. This didn't seem to help our daughter; she lost more and more weight. We had her in the hospital for lots of tests--but there was nothing more wrong with her than a broken heart. My leaving her to go overseas did not help much. I have pictures of her as a 1 year old with her ribs showing.

But as soon as I was able to care for her myself, she flourished. I have pictures taken of her just a few months after being reunited--and she is plump and filled-out.

It wasn't the formula or anything else; she just needed her mamma.

If we could all step back for a minute and consider life, not from a materialistic, pragmatic standpoint, we could see it. If we could put on lenses that showed what is truly important, we might find that nurturing, nursing, loving and passionate affection, are all to be held in the highest esteem.

B.F. Skinner, an infamous thinker of our modern era (one still revered by the education system in our country), considered human beings to be no more than mere machines. He advocated the doing away with human freedom and dignity--stressing that every action, thought and feeling is prompted by outward stimuli, and that by harnessing and purposely directing this stimuli, we could change the individual's behavior, and, thus, society. He believed so much in this premise that he put his own daughter in a "Skinner Box" so that every input she received could be scientifically controlled. At first the experiment was encouraging, but the end result was a despondent young woman driven to suicide.

We are not just a collection of chemicals and electrical responses. We are eternal--there is a spirit residing in each of us. This spirit needs more than just a fully-nutritional pill to be swallowed with purified water each morning. We need affection, we need connections and nurturing and interaction with others. We were not created in the image of R2D2, we were created in the image of God.

And God knows all these needs, and He created mothers for the express purpose of meeting those needs in the lives of babies and children. You can feed a baby with a machine, but it will die without the comfort and soothing of a human being. You can throw a small child in the midst of a group of children his age and expect him to thrive, but something essential to the development of his soul will be lost--never again to be recovered. To touch and be loved, to know there is someone specifically watching over you--these are the essence of living.

So I don't really care whether or not mother's milk is "superior" to formula. It is the nurturing that is important. It is that I am willing to interrupt my busy schedule to take the time to soothe and rock and caress. It is that I am giving of more than some physical nutrition; I am giving a little bit of myself and pouring it into the life of my child. I am saying, "You are precious to me--I freely give this time to you."

Children need us--they need our input and our hovering and our cloistered wings around their shoulders--even when they are old and gray, they will need that soft spot, to remember someone holding their hand in the dark.

We shouldn't be ashamed or sad or embittered about our role--we should be embracing it and living it to its fullness..

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

-St. Francis of Assisi