When I was pregnant, I would sometimes call my mom and wine
a little about how sick I felt, how tired I was and how much I was panicking
about how things would be with a baby. My mom would usually respond by asking
how often I had thrown up, or how long I had slept, and when I would say that I
hadn’t really thrown up yet, but I felt really sick all day, she would tell me
that there were tons of other people that felt a lot worse than me (usually
with anecdotes of people she knew that had experienced something a lot worse).
This did not usually make me feel better.
However, I noticed that I do the same thing myself. Recently
I read “Our babies, ourselves” from Meredith Small. It’s a really good book
that talks about how your cultural background shapes the way you parent, and
that a lot of things that we find perfectly normal (like have a baby cry a
little, or have a baby sleep by herself), is found absurd in other cultures. In this book I read about the
Ache, a group of hunter-gatherers in Paraguay. The Ache mothers will for
the first year of their babies’ lives have them sleep in their laps, hunched
over to protect their babies from danger. Not only during the day, but also
during the entire night. So that means that that year, they only sleep sitting
up with a baby in their laps . Often when I’m awake at night because 7 month
old BlueEyes is awake or wants to nurse I think about those women, who
completely sacrifice themselves for their baby. To me, that has been one of the
hardest parts of being a mother: the fact that often you have to ignore your
own needs, or at least have your babies’ needs come first. But whenever I feel
sorry for myself that instead of hanging on the couch I am nursing a baby to
sleep, I think about those women and imagine them sitting on a hard floor with
baby in their lap the whole night and I feel better.
I remember having a similar reaction to something I read about a culture in which children do not cry, like NEVER, because basically 24/7 they are on,with, held, etc by another human being. I remember think how is that even possible but it sure put things into a different perspective
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