O-mama - Opinionated Moms

• by Lisa Grunwald • 10 Comments
• Tagged in: For Moms

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For this month, we have a little bit of a Mothers’ Day theme happening. O-Mama is always celebrating Moms—especially opinionated Moms…so this month’s books are about Moms—and our special, joyful and sometimes complicated relationships with our kids!

Rainier Maria Rilke (one of my very favorite poets) said: "The knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance."

That's an interesting idea. Especially to parents --- we've all felt it. The ticking clock. That guilty feeling you have when your child is a psychotic toddler and you find yourself wishing time away—just a few months or even a year, just to get you through the terrible 2’s and 3’s. How the days are long, but the years are short. How our kids can't know what they mean to us until they have kids who mean everything to them.

10 ½ years ago, I had my first daughter. Text book pregnancy—relatively easy delivery. I was 32 years old, and when I got home from the hospital I felt like I was about 6. I was terrified and pretty much completely undone by this little miracle. I look at photos from that time and not only can I not remember much, but I honestly look so freaked out that it’s hard for me to go through those albums. I’m sporting this panicked, pained smile that makes me look like an ad for a Lifetime movie: Portrait of a Teenaged Mother. Bear in mind that I was a Kindergarten teacher in my former life; I had a certain level of confidence with kids in general. But somehow one newborn was one hundred times more challenging than a classroom of 5 year olds.

Up to this point only one of my three sisters had had a baby and she had hired a nurse, following in the footsteps of my own mother who always had baby nurses for at least the first few months or until her baby was sleeping through the night. So I knew NOTHING. I mean, I had given my little sisters bottles once or twice when they were babies but that’s about it. I had to have the nurses in the hospital show me how to diaper her and how to breastfeed—of course this was before my milk actually came in and then all my newly acquired skills pretty much went out the window when my boobs blew up into some sort-of freaky alien porn featuring chicks with rock hard watermelon sized boobs.

Two of my best friends had had babies; the only problem was one was in Atlanta and the other in Denver while I was in Southern California. I definitely burned up the phone lines though asking questions about everything from “cord care” to poop colors. The biggest issue though was “to schedule” or “not to schedule.” Does the baby call the shots or do you? At this point I didn’t trust my own instincts. My Atlanta friend was strictly old school. You make the schedule and stick to it—LET THE BABY CRY—she won’t die, and in a day or two or three, the kid will be accustomed to her feeding schedule, naptimes, and be sleeping through the night! Like magic! This is based on a very old and famous book called My First 300 Babies by Gladys Hendricks written before the days of Dr. Spock and attachment parenting.

On the other hand, my Denver friend had completely opposite advice for me. Hold the baby if she’s crying. Feed her when she’s hungry. You nap when she naps so you don’t get overtired from being up all night. Eventually she’ll settle in to her own schedule and she’ll trust you and feel safe in the world etc. etc. I have to admit that this more touchy-feely advice felt “right” to me and yet, I was exhausted and couldn’t stay ahead of the feeding schedule. She ate like a champ and because I was nursing I was never sure she had gotten enough so I pretty much let her snack off me day and night. Whenever she fussed, I was convinced I had eaten something that had tainted my milk and made her gassy. By the time I stopped nursing I was down to just eating chicken breasts and drinking water!

I carried her all the time. I never let her cry. She completely ran the show. I wore that Baby Bjorn everywhere. But she was happy—I was kind-of a wreck because I was SO WORRIED all the time, and so tired. Anyway, we all have variations on the story above. Eventually it all worked out. No tricks, no “perfect solution”—probably somewhere between Atlanta advice and Denver advice would be a decent place to start. But we figured it out, and time went by, as it does, and by the time she was 6 months old or so, we had our own little routine, and sometimes things went according to plan and sometimes we’d start with Plan A and eventually get down to about Plan H before we got out of the house, but that’s motherhood. And by the time she was about 18 months old, we had mostly forgotten all that and decided to have another one! Seems crazy in hindsight. And my youngest sister, the one I used to give bottles to? She has 6 kids now—all younger than my youngest daughter who is 8. She is a freaking pro…SHE should write a book. Her husband is a saint, and I’ll tell you what, that man can swaddle a baby like the finest cigar makers in Cuba—nice and tight—just like the babies like it.

Well, under the heading of “truth is stranger than fiction,” Lisa Grunwald has written an extraordinary novel based on a little known but true fact—if you’ll pardon the redundancy: at Cornell University (and other colleges) there were home economics courses in the 50’s that used “practice babies” from a nearby orphanage. Yes. Real babies—handed off from “mother” to “mother” week to week while these “future moms” learned the day to day care and feeding of a baby. Eventually, when the infants were too old to be practice babies they were sent back to the orphanage and adopted out (hopefully) just like any other child/toddler/infant. And in point of fact, these were sort-of “prize” babies because by this point they were so well “trained.” Sorta like dogs. And I say again, yes. This happened. In this country. And Grunwald, understandably was fascinated and shocked by this and the novelist in her asked, “well, what the heck would happen to a child like that once he grew up?” With all we know about bonding and attachment and the first 3 years of life being so important etc., did all these babies turn into the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world? No, of course not. But the weird fact of these children’s very, very primary u