Preparation for motherhood must rise above the practical instruction in the care and feeding of infants which leads to efficiency. It requires a certain mental and spiritual adjustment of the woman to the environment and conditions of maternity. She who is obsessed by the fear of physical suffering which motherhood may entail, who regards the coming of a child as the end of her individual career, her social life, her personal pleasures, will be neither efficient nor joyous. Fear and doubt come between her and success. They even threaten her health.
Therefore, the first step in preparation for motherhood is the firm belief that it is a privilege, not a duty; a joy, not a sacrifice; an investment that will pay big dividends. Thus armored, the prospective mother enters upon the nine months of pregnancy insured against anxiety and ill-health. The joy she finds in carrying her child provides a splendid foundation for the child’s health. The woman who frets brings forth a nervous child. The woman who rebels generally bears a morbid child.
Science wrangles over the rival importance of heredity and environment, but we women know what effects prenatal influence works in children. And, knowing this, what a mystery that we do not mold each thought and act in the interest of the children whose up-bringing will be our real life-work! How strange that mothers do not realize that the burden of maternal and domestic duties can be lightened by prenatal care and character molding.
Science has done much for the modern mother. It has lessened the danger and the pains of childbirth. The once dreaded child-bed fever is now practically unknown. Disinfectants and sanitary care have reduced this danger to a minimum. Anæsthetics have reduced the strain and pain of labor. Physicians no longer withhold the anæsthetic until the hour when instruments or an operation make its use necessary; through the later stages of ordinary labor, the modern physician offers the alleviation of chloroform, and the mother comes through the ordeal with one-fourth the pain endured by her mother and grandmother.
Modern ingenuity also designs many comforts for the prospective mother, not the least of which is maternity raiment, including corsets and adjustable gowns. Why do not women avail themselves of all these aids? Largely because they are not educated for motherhood.
Medical science, through sanitation and hygiene, has lightened the mother’s burden in rearing her baby. It has proved beyond doubt that the child raised under sanitary and hygienic conditions, fed, bathed and clothed properly and trained to regular habits, can escape most of the ailments which were once counted as almost normal manifestations of the child’s growth.
Many of us can recall the day when a colicky baby was considered a dispensation of Providence, not a proof of maternal ignorance or carelessness; when convulsions during teething were regarded as “natural”; when “summer complaint” was accepted as a normal feature of baby’s second summer; when children were actually exposed to whooping-cough, measles and chicken-pox, so they would have these juvenile ailments and be done with them!
To-day, unless a baby is born with some inherited weakness or chronic disease, science teaches how to protect the child from ordinary ailments—colic, convulsions, summer complaint, and contagious diseases. This is the day of preventive medicine, particularly in the care of infants. Prevention lightens the burden of motherhood. When young women are trained to ward off illness in children, not to nurse them through illness, motherhood will mean what it should mean to women—Joy.
Start your maternal career right by preparing your body and your mind for motherhood. Start your baby right in life by studying sanitation, hygiene, the care and feeding of infants. Know your business as a mother, and motherhood will have no terrors for you.
Remember that your own physical condition and the health of the baby you will bring into the world depend largely upon your mental attitude. Cast out all fear of childbirth and all dread of maternal duties and sacrifices. Fretting, grieving, or rebellion will not purchase immunity from maternal duties. Rather it will increase them. The child will be born and laid in your arms to be fed, cared for, and reared, whether you weep or smile through the months of pregnancy. Self-control, cheerfulness and love for the little life breathing in unison with your own will practically insure you a child of normal physique and nerves.