Before our world was filled with memes that filled computer and phone screens, there was a thing called a newspaper. Within that newspaper would be different sections; headlines, sports, classified ads, editorial, obituaries, and so forth. My mother went right for the editorial section. My father would browse through the obituaries, looking up over his half-eye reader glasses and lowering the paper slightly he'd grin, "Just checking to see if I'm in here yet."
The only section I was interested in was the three or so pages of comics. The "funnies". On week-days they would be black and white like regular newspaper print. The Sunday paper comic section was full color with even more comic-strips than the usual week-day paper had. I had my go-to faves. Blondie and Dagwood. Prince Valiant. Funky Winkerbean. Family Circle. Of course, Dennis the Menace. Though one comic strip in particular I could never quite figure out. "Mary Worth". "Mama, what the heck is this comic strip even about? I just don't see what the point is....it's not funny at all!" "Oh honey....Mary Worth....let's see...well I think she's just sort like a traveling aunt. She visits different families and helps them with their problems." Lame, I thought. And not funny at all.
One summer, when I was about fourteen, my sister was having her second child. My parents drove me to New Mexico and left me to stay with her little family for a couple of weeks. Being a huge fan of my sister, and an even huger fan of her toddler not to mention my obsession with babies, I was in heaven. I'm not exactly sure how much "help" I was at that age, but if nothing else I do remember watching both children while my sister and her husband went out for a short date. Things like retrieving diapers and outfit changes while she could sit and breast-feed were seemed simple, and yet maybe not so much.
The next summer my youngest aunt had an emergency cesarean. She nearly lost her life giving birth. My uncle called my mother, explaining the situation. The baby was perfectly healthy in every way, but my aunt on the other hand would need to stay in the hospital for at least a couple more weeks. He was asking if she could possibly come out to stay so he could bring the baby home; insurance wouldn't cover the daily cost to keep a healthy baby in the infant nursery. I was sitting on my mothers bed only able to hear her side of the conversation. She looked over at me. "I am working full-time, but what would you think about Allyson coming out?" My jaw dropped. He must have been desperate. The next thing I knew I was boarding a Greyhound bus bound for Union Station in Los Angeles.
After a very long, boring drive through the deserts of Arizona and California, I finally arrived. My uncle, holding the hand of their two-year-old toddler, greeted me. We drove straight to the hospital. He and my little cousin waited in the waiting room so I could go into the ICU room where my Aunt lay trying to gain her health and strength back. She is a perpetually joyful, happy person. I was shocked to see her attached to so many tubes and machinery. I felt a lump in my throat. I was scared. She smiled at me. "Come here and see me! Look at the highlights in your hair! So pretty!" Okay. That sounds like her. I walked over to her bed and gingerly sat on the edge next to her side and gave her a tender hug. She smelled like hospital, not like the usual expensive perfume I associated with visiting her. She gave me some tips about my little two-year old cousin, potty-training, food likes and dis-likes, sleep schedules. She couldn't give me any tips about the baby. She hardly knew him herself. The most she knew about him really was the industrial looking breast pump the hospital provided her to help her keep her milk though she wasn't able to nurse him until she healed.
For the next two weeks my fifteen-year-old self woke every two hours to the cries of a newborn. I'd walk down the hall to get him out of his cradle, go into the kitchen to warm a bottle on the stove (no microwave) and feed, then burp him, change his diaper and then shuffle back to the canopied bed where I curled up next to the warm body of my little cousin. After about a week, I called my mother long-distance. I was in tears. "I don't know what to do. I'm so so tired." She told me to call the hospital nursery and ask the nurses for advise. I did. They asked me how much I was feeding him. "Double the amount. He's a big baby and he's just extra hungry." I did and it worked. He started sleeping for three to four-hour stretches. I was a little less zombie-like during the day. I gave the baby his first bath. In the bath-tub. I recall that I didn't tell my aunt about it though. I didn't want her to be sad about missing a "first".
My uncle announced that the doctors had cleared her to go home. He took their daughter and I waited at home with the baby. Sitting on the couch I peeked out the sheer curtains. I saw the car pull up. Picking the baby up I walked with him out to the porch to greet her. She was wearing a beautiful floral dress. And high heels. Trying to feel normal. Against doctor's orders she carried her daughter up the steps and walked up the steps and greeted me. She smiled sweetly at the baby but didn't make a motion to take him from my arms. Huh. No matter....she's busy with her little girl. She'll hold him later.
He was hungry. I knew it was his feeding time, but I also knew she had planned to breast-feed him. "Do you want to go ahead and take him?" I walked him over to where she was sitting. Moving her daughter from her lap to beside her, she reached up, unbuttoned the top of her dress and latched him to her. No confusion for this baby. He nursed like a champ instantly. She had a soft smile but her eyes looked strangely distant.
I was so relieved that I could finally sleep a full night for the first time in over two weeks. Feeling more chipper and energetic I kept waiting for my aunt to start acting like "herself". But every day that went by she seemed more and more not herself. One time she had a laughing attack that came out of nowhere. Laughter that sounded oddly mixed with crying. It scared me. I couldn't understand it. He was such a good baby, and I was feeling like more and more I had to remind her that he was crying and that it was time to feed him.
When it was time for me to go home, my aunt and uncle drove me back to Arizona. One evening after dinner we were sitting in the living room. My aunt started to weep. "I don't feel like myself!" A long older sister to younger sister heart-felt conversation ensued. My mother advised my aunt to stop breast-feeding. The horrible feelings she was having were usually onset when feeding the baby. To this day, my aunt will say that it was like a switch flipped. She stopped nursing. Her hormones adjusted. She was herself once again. It seemed so simple. But it's so complicated.
From that experience I had at fifteen, I can say that I personally have never looked into someone's eyes, and seen them not there. Before or since. I felt completely helpless. But even worse, she felt helpless.
By the time I was having my own babies, I had helped my aunts, sister, sisters-in-law with many of their babies, even got to attend some of their births. At thirteen, I went to Germany to help another aunt with her new baby. Being a military wife/mother has it's own set of unique challenges. I remember my aunt telling me about one of the wives in the neighborhood. "She is depressed since having her baby." I couldn't begin to understand why on earth anyone could be sad about a cute little baby. That was my thirteen-year-old thought.
I'm not exactly sure what the women's liberation movement has given us. Well, wait. Let's see. It did give us the birth control pill. A seemingly miracle drug that makes family planning so simple. The ability to manipulate your hormones so that your body thinks it is perpetually pregnant. But it also follows that approximately three generations of girls/women who, if they want to, can engage in casual sex without the consequences of pregnancy and child-birth. I guess women's lib has also given women the idea that they can do anything a man can do and better. They don't need a man to open a door for them, don't need a man to provide for them, and anymore, they don't even need a man to be a father in order for them to become a mother. They just need some of any man's DNA. They can do it themselves. All. Of. It.
Let's not forget, it also gave women the right to kill the babies they conceive, in the event they don't want to give their body over for nine months to allow another innocent human being the chance at it's own life.
The week my second daughter was born, I had a horrible case of mastitis. I was raging 103 degree fever. Emotional, exhausted, and with tears on tap, I dialed my mother-in-law. Trying to hold back the tears, "Do you think you could come hold the baby so I can fold my laundry so I'll have a place to sleep?" She was at our door within minutes. Every day for the next two weeks, she came over for two hours; folded my laundry, tended my two littles and forced me to go take a nap. "But I'm really not sleepy...." She had nine children. I felt like her tenth. "Go lie down". I obeyed. I healed.
What has happened to our society. Why are we so very connected with our phones, our apps, our social media, and yet we are the most disconnected we've ever been. Why are we looking on-line for help instead of calling our mother, our sister, our friend, our neighbor, and admitting we need help.
Is it because the big fat lie that we've told ourselves? We can do it all? We can do it better? We can have sex and not get pregnant. But if we do we can just get rid of it. And in some states, we can get rid of the baby after it is born. And if a baby survives an abortion, we have laws in place to make sure there are no measures taken to help the baby live. Because that....that would be far too traumatic for the mother. But I guess you can't call her a mother unless she wants the baby. Only then she is a mother.
Until we decide what value life has, all life has, I'm afraid we really won't be able to truly have an honest dialogue about the things that are so horrifying that they are nearly unspeakable.
I do know this. If you see a mother that looks a bit overwhelmed, she probably is. Maybe she's trying to figure out why her life doesn't look like the curated lives of the women she sees on her phone as she's scrolls, feeding her baby for the umpteenth time that day with little to no sleep. The people on her phone are not her village. We are her village. She needs to take a nap. Maybe even a shower. One without having the toddler crying at the door and a baby crying in the infant seat on the bathroom floor. Maybe she needs to eat just one meal while it's warm. The entire thing. Uninterrupted.
Post-partem. The fourth trimester. It's perhaps the longest. It's certainly the most fragile.
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