Posted in What Mothers Do

I've already had some positive feedback on this book.  It is SO great!

Chapter 3 is called "All the responsibility" and points out another huge task a mother does that has no name: getting to know her new baby.  Even if she has already had 10 babies, this baby is new and will have different signals for what he wants.  And as the author says, "This is no nine-to-five research project ,with a computer to collate results and a comfortable night's sleep between one day and the next. Suddenly the new mother learns that she cannot even hurry to the toilet without first thinking about the safety and well-being of her baby."

This reminded me of when my 3 year old Ryan was a newborn.  He did not like to be put down!  I set up the stroller in our bathroom so I could put him down, get myself settled, and then hold him while I went.  Sounds crazy, right?

Ms. Stadlen points out that if we were expecting an unknown guest from abroad, we would ask about their preferences in advance.  They would tell us, and we would try to accomodate them.  All of that would be done through language.  It's unfamiliar territory to have to study someone to figure out what they want.  Does that cry mean hungry, or wet, or cold, or lonely?  You can't ask a baby.  And the majority of the responsibility for the baby falls on the mother.  A mom says, "I can't get used to that feeling: 'The buck stops with you.'  My husband asks, 'Shall I change B for you?'" 

Here is a wonderful quote: "There are bookshelves of advice on how to look after a baby;.  The books are often beautifully written and illustrated.  The difficulty is that they contradict each other...Both sides seem so adamant that only their view is the 'right' one."  She goes on to say that mothers do not need a "super-expert" to tell them every right thing to do, but that they need support in finding their own way to mother. "Far from helping new mothers, the experts may undermine the confidence each mother needs to work out for herself what her baby wants."  It reminds me of friends of mine who have hurt their marriages by reading books that purport to tell them what their husbands should want, or how their marriages should look.  I bought into this for a long time, feeling hurt that my husband was not interested in doing something that was really so minor, but yet an organization I admired insisted it was the husband's job to do.  That's really stupid!  In fact, wives might be better off to apply the process of figuring out our newborns to figuring out our husbands.  Watch him, see what he wants.  What does it mean when he says that or does that?  Then try to do what makes him happy.  Forget the experts and the books!

This quote goes along with my feelings about having twins exactly: "Everytime a woman has a baby she has something to learn, partly from her culture but mostly from her baby."  It is really not recognized that we learn from our children.  I have said that I really wanted to see what God wanted me to learn from having twins.  One thing I have learned from my culture is how happy twins make people.  Even people who wouldn't look twice at one baby will smile at twins.  A few weeks ago I was in a store and had gone into a little section with the double stroller.  An elderly lady was in there with her back to us.  She turned around and gasped.  "What a beautiful sight!" she said to the twins.  "You are so lovely!  I am so glad I saw you!"  She really seemed genuinely touched just to have seen them. (They are awfully cute, though I might be biased on that!)

I know it's no mistake that God gave us twins, even though the road is bumpy and sometimes very hard.  It's rutted and I get stuck in the ruts.  I get sad and feel overwhelmed and down and like I can't move.  But thank God that He showed me this book, because it shows me how much I really am doing.  All that unnamed work that is wearing me out is exactly what I am supposed to be doing.  I am supposed to be mothering these little guys so they can bless society now and later when they grow up.

Chapter Four concerns another thing mothers do that has no name - being instantly interruptible.  A mother suddenly can be interrupted at any time, no matter what she is doing.  "Because human beings are good at adapting, some mothers become adept at being 'on call'. They find that after all they can make rough predictions and provisional plans.  Gradually, being prepared to be interrupted becomes the norm.  Then mothers find it much more difficult to cope with the old method of doing one task at a time and getting it all finished.  A mother may feel she has become stupid because she cannot focus on a single issue for very long the way that she used to."  I know I was making fun of myself a couple months back on my blog for this very thing!  It seems like light-years away that I wrote my master's thesis!  I don't feel capable of that kind of sustained thought anymore.  Sometimes I don't feel capable of playing Solitaire online!

Sometimes we mothers respond with annoyance, but when we see how much we were needed, we are filled with love for our child and annoyance fades.  As the baby grows, he becomes more able to wait a moment while we finish something up (sometimes!). But "for the rest of her life, her child may suddenly turn to her and expect her immediate attention."  That is so true.  I could call my mom right now at 1 AM if I needed her and she would wake up and give me her attention.  And if I truly needed her, she would drive or fly to get to me.  To be fair, I should also point out that when I nearly died after a miscarriage, my father began making immediate preparations to come help me.

"Mothers hardly notice when they do it [be instantly interruptible].  But we could be more aware of this wonderful act, and observe how often mothers are doing this." I agree!

Posted in What Mothers Do

Chapter 2 is called "Nothing Prepares You."  It is all about the shock of becoming a mother and the lack of preparation for motherhood provided by our society today.  There is an interesting contrast between preparation for parenthood and falling in love.  The mother's work, really, the first few months is to fall in love with her baby.  But "it's revealing to compare how differently women get ready for romance.  We don't go to falling-in-love preparation classes...We expect the person who is in love to be dreamy, moody, forgetful, unavailable for ordinary commitments and wholly focused on the beloved person."  That sounds like a new mother, doesn't it?  That's a time when sitting and gazing at your baby is the only thing that is important.  I loved to sit with my knees up and sit the baby facing me on my lap and just treasure those moments.  But why doesn't society recognize this time as being necessary? Instead, it demands new moms be back at work by 6 weeks, have everything on the ball, and totally recovered.

 

Developing the "hurdle model" is "another way in which years of education and work can influence a woman's expectations of motherhood.  Being a mother is an ongoing relationship...[Dana Breen] describes what she calls 'the hurdle model,' in which a person prepares to overcome a particular difficulty or hurdle.  After that, life returns to normal...Education requires students to jump hurdles...They require that a girl prepare thoroughly, demonstrate her knowledge during a short and intense period, and relax afterwards.  This pattern tends to be repeated at work...It is only too understandable that a woman might apply the 'hurdle 'model to childbirth...She must study hard, aim for a 'successful' birth and then she can go home and relax.  Once she has recovered, life will return to normal...How alarming, then, to return home with the baby and find there isn't even a moment to settle down to a video."

 

Don't you think this could have a lot to do with many mothers' unhappiness?  They have never lived a life where nothing is ever finished.  I still remember that wonderful feeling after my last final or paper was done.  But now, everything I do I must do again twenty minutes later (or so it seems!).  If you homeschool year-round, then that is never finished either.  Things drag on and on.  We feel we must finish the book, when they hardly ever finish books in public school. I never learned any history past 1945 because it was always the end of the year!  Every day there is more laundry, more cooking, more cleaning, more nursing, more dirty diapers, more bills to pay...This is not even a marathon - that's over at 26 miles!  I think this is one reason why blogging has been helpful to me: I write something, it's short, then it's done, and then I get feedback.  (I love feedback!)

 

Of course, for our daughters, homeschooling year-round and never really finishing might be just the thing to make it so they don't develop the hurdle model.  My daughters, who are 10 and 8, see the never-endingness of taking care of the babies and the house in a way that I never did as a child. 

Posted in What Mothers Do

I wish I could afford to buy a copy of this book for every mother in the world! What Mothers Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing by Naomi Stadlen is brilliant! It has made me feel so much better about where I am and what I am doing.

 

I borrowed this book from La Leche League.  I actually saw it in another mom's bag, and just from the title, I hoped she was returning it so I could take it.  Here's what the back cover says:

 

"Have you ever spent all day looking after your baby or young child - and ended up feeling that you have 'done nothing all day'?  Do you sometimes find it hard to feel pleased with what you are doing, and tell yourself you should achieve more with your time?

 

Maybe it's because you can't see how much you are doing already.

 

In this unique and perceptive look at mothering, Naomi Stadlen draws on many years' work with hundreds of other mothers of a wide variety of ages and backgrounds.  She explores mothers' experiences to reveal what they - and you - are doing when it may look, to everyone else, like nothing.

 

If you are a mother, and have ever felt

• that nobody understands what you do all day
• overwhelmed by your feelings for your baby
• tired all the time
• that nothing prepared you for motherhood
• uncertain what your baby seems to want
• short-tempered with your partner

you will find this is the most reassuring book you have ever picked up.

 

What Mothers Do has been written to support mothers.  Rather than trying to tell you what you should or shouldn't do, it can help you to recognise much better many of the nameless, everyday things that mothers keep doing which usually go unnoticed."

 

Now at first, I thought the book was going to be analytical, like she had observed mothers to see what they did all day.  Like "3 hours, 45 minutes: nursed baby; 1 hour, 15 minutes: changed diapers," etc, but instead it was SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT!  What she did was outline the work of mothering and explore what mothering actually is.

 

There is only one other book I have ever highlighted (A Mother's Rule of Life) but I found myself wishing I owned this book so I could highlight it. I don't know if I can even touch on half the things that are so revealing.  For example, in the introduction, she points out that a job in an office involves boring work, just as some say doing things for the baby is boring.  The difference is that with office work you feel part of a larger whole, while mothers feel "lonely, invisible, and unimportant."  But "each mother is preparing her child to  belong to the society that we all share."  This is not a new concept.  However, instead of going on to blame the mothers for not recognizing their importance, she says, "If mothers feel unimportant, then surely the value of their work is not being properly acknowledged."  

 

In Chapter One, called "Who Understands?", Stadlen introduces one of her main themes: "there isn't much that explores what mothers do achieve.  If there were, we should have more words or phrases to describe motherly achievements."  A little further on, she quotes some mothers who have difficulty describing their days (one says that she had taken her 2 month old to the hospital and it had taken all day, so she felt "gutted" when it only took 5 minutes to describe it to her husband), and then says, "When a mother can't explain her day, she is very unlikely to say to herself: 'Maybe the right words are missing.'...No, a mother who has little to relate usually assumes that this is because there really is very little worth telling." 

 

Stadlen then goes on about the mother's journey to the hospital.  "Motherly achievements often go unseen.  If there aren't words for them, how can we recognise them?  For example, how could one explain what the mother was doing who took her two-month-old daughter to hospital?  Just planning the journey must have involved much thought.  A mother of a two-month-old doesn't plan one successful journey.  She plans several, in which she tries to cover and solve the most obvious things that could go wrong.  And what about keeping a two-month-old from crying during the unavoidable waiting times in a busy hospital?  The mother was bringing her intimate relationship with her child into a public place, over which she had little control, and where social norms applied.  How does one explain the complexity of all this?"  How indeed?!  No wonder I get so tired going out!

 

This is so difficult, because I want to quote the whole book!  Here's a specific example about what she means about lacking proper words to describe mothering.  There are overprotective mothers, and underprotective mothers, but there is no word that means "protecting her child the right amount."  Or we have the phrase "abusive mother", but what is its opposite?  Then she says that the good words we have all describe the state of a mother's heart, like warm, loving or patient, and not what she does.  "We could walk into a room where a mother had just spent half an hour calming her distressed baby. We might apologize for disturbing her.  She would probably reply: 'It's all right, I wasn't doing anything special.'  But she was."

 

She then talks about what worrying is, and how mothers commonly apply words taken from psychiatry like neurotic or paranoid to their behavior, when it is unwarranted.  "A much more appreciative word is needed to honour intelligent motherly concern."  Do these words wash over you like a big hug like they do me?

 

"How can anyone feel satisfied at the end of a day doing something as responsible as being a mother, without being able to explain to herself what she has done well?  How can she discuss her day properly with other people if she can only describe her failures?"  I had two goals today (besides keep 6 children alive and relatively happy); I achieved one of them, and that was something that should have been done last Friday.  The other goal got about 1/4 done.  Doing those things meant that I did not do many other things that are pressing, like check schoolwork, or do enrichment subjects with my older children, or make any side dishes to go with dinner, or spend meaningful time with my 3 year old.  There, I have just done what she said.  I summed up my day by telling you what very little I got done.  I didn't say, "I clothed, fed, nursed and cared for 2 babies.  I looked into their eyes and told them I loved them.  I held them when they were upset until they were happy again.  I took delight in watching them toddle around. I evaluated their different nursing styles, and realized that Christopher nurses just as much as Alexander because he nurses more during the day, while Alexander still nurses at night.  I shared the Panthers blowing another 4th quarter lead with my oldest child.  I assisted my older daughter in addressing the envelope to her new pen pal, and then took her to the post office so she could mail the letter herself. I snuggled with Ryan as he fell asleep for his nap, and I let him touch my mole even though I don't like it.  I complimented my younger daughter's sense of color coordination."  That's a pretty full day there, and I certainly feel much better about it now than I did a few minutes ago!  And that is all just in the first chapter!!

 

More tomorrow from this much-needed book...