Thanks to a blogger from New Hampshire, who happened to be “Freshly Pressed” by WordPress, http://susannye.wordpress.com/ I started thinking about Moms in general. What was life like around the dinner table, did your mom even cook and insist that you sit down to eat a few times a week? The relationship we form between love and food actually does start at the breast, which then made me think about that controversial Time cover picture of a nearly 4 year old boy in camouflage pants standing up, latched onto his mom’s milk truck.
The Greatest generation didn’t nurse their kids. They embraced white Wonder Bread since whole wheat, brown bread was thought to be only for those who “…just got off the boat.” Those newly arrived immigrants would also nurse their babies; our modern post WWII moms were taught to sterilize bottles. A whole new industry was born, baby formula! No wonder they called pregnancy and early motherhood a time of “confinement,” in fact Bob’s elderly Aunt Bertha asked me once – “When will you be going into confinement dear?”
Now some moms have come full circle, they are baby-centric, wearing their babies all wrapped up in true third world fashion. They nurse on demand and co-sleep in a family bed, it’s something called “Attachment Parenting.” I dislike this term since it suggests that all previous moms in history were practicing “Detachment Parenting.” The feminist in me scoffs, really, do we have to play the mommy wars again? Aren’t we pitting ourselves against the “free range” parents vs the “bubble wrapped” practitioners? Being a good mom means nurturing and loving your child, setting rules and civilizing them too. There is a middle road.
My sister once told me that she never wanted to wake up angry, because she remembers the Flapper being angry whenever my sister would wake her. Of course our Mother had lost her husband to cancer and was working in a shirt factory to make ends meet. She was most likely exhausted all the time. I never wanted my dinner table to be a war zone, because I remember my foster mother Nell always telling me I had to finish everything on my plate. Growing up during the Depression made Nell quite frugal, a ‘waste not/want not’ type of home maker. So we learn how not to be a mother too, from our past.
I wanted a natural childbirth, but my daughter was breech and so they had to do surgery. We plan, God laughs. I nursed her for ten months and wore her on my back in a Bjorn. I washed her real diapers and hung them on the line in the sun. I made her real baby food from whatever I was cooking. But we believed in a good night’s sleep and so she was taught to sleep in her crib. I remember the Flapper calling me one day and asking what was I doing. I told her I was playing on the floor with my infant daughter. She laughed. So I asked her what was so funny?
She said the only time she would play with her babies was when she was feeding or bathing them. Time is the greatest gift moms have to give to their children. Quiet reading, playing, and yes sitting down around the dinner table time. Listening to their day, their concerns, listening between the lines of what they say. Being present. Driving her to cheerleading practice, being his soccer coach. It doesn’t matter if you opened a can, defrosted a TV dinner, or cooked something healthy from an all organic, local farm. Thank you to the Bride and the Rocker, for teaching me how to be their mom. And a very Happy Mother’s Day to y’all.
