When I was growing up, I met a farmer’s wife that lived a few roads behind our farm. She had six children, breastfed her babies, made her own food, and worked the farm with her husband. I admired her very much and as a pre-teen, young teen ager I just sat in her kitchen soaking up everything she had to tell me about taking care of small children and what her life was like.
Flash forward about 15 years and I am ready to have my first baby. I had saved books and booklets about breastfeeding for years to prepare myself to nurse my own baby. My mother had always regretted not being able to nurse me and my sister and I was determined that that was not going to happen to me. When I started having trouble with nursing in the hospital, an elderly volunteer who was a former nurse and a mother of six children came to my room and helped me get started with having him latch on. My entire hospital stay, when I was having trouble, I would get out of bed (very difficult for me after a C-section) and try to find her. I trusted her like a grandmother and she helped me figure out how to nurse my firstborn.
Flash forward another year or so and I joined a Cesarean awareness group so that I could learn how to avoid a C-section and have a VBAC. There were lots of women in the group who had gone on to have successful VBACs and I learned so much from their experiences and their advice. I attended every meeting, every month religiously and even had one of those members accompany me as a doula for the birth of my second child, which was a successful VBAC delivery.
What I remember about each of those situations is that I gave myself over as a willing sponge, to soak up information and support. I knew that I did not have to reinvent the wheel, that wise women had gone before me, and that I could glean much from their experiences and wisdom. I had a teachable spirit.
I post a lot about the difficulties of the Titus 2 responsibility and how it is difficult to live out that command. It is my opinion, that a great deal of that comes from an unteachable spirit in many young women today. I came across two examples of this in blogs by first time moms this week.
The first mom was told at her first prenatal visit that she would probably need a cesarean for cephalopelvic disproportion. Never mind that we don’t know how big the baby will be, or how her pelvis will accommodate during labor, she has been set up at the very beginning for major abdominal surgery. She has totally bought into that and is not open to any other points of view. She is also totally convinced that having a hospital birth is the way to go.
“Just because it’s faster, easier, cleaner and more attractive doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worse.” I bet if we could go back and ask those millions of women who have given birth over thousands of years, especially those that suffered horribly and/or died, they would probably be more than willing to take on the risks associated with a hospital birth as opposed to the ultimate risks they took when they had their babies.
I’d totally be willing to debate that hospital birth is faster, easier or cleaner (infection rates anyone?) or that all suffering and death in history occurred outside of the hospital! But she is obviously not in a place to hear that. I did not even try.
Another mom is struggling with nursing her newborn:
I’m only going to tell you what’s going on if we all promise an assvice moratorium. M’kay? Not that I’m opposed to suggestions, it’s that I already have plenty.
Nothing will shut down the possible sharing of information than to be told ahead of time that it is probably unwanted “assvice.” The comments on that one echoed that sentiment. Knowledge, experience, wisdom are all greeted as unwanted “assvice.” I didn’t really try on that one either.
These particular ladies are in their late 30s, about eight years or more younger than me. What I wonder, is what happened in their coming of age that was so different from mine? I came of age in the late 70s. What was it about the early 80s that taught these women that other perspectives are unwelcome? These two ladies come from totally different paradigms by the way. They are 180 degrees from each other in many things. So it’s not a Christian vs. nonChristian thing, liberal vs. conservative. I believe this is a sign of the times thing and I think the divide started around 1980. This is all conjecture on my part, but I find it fascinating to observe and think about.
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