Getting ready to be a mother

by Carolyn Conant Van Blarcom

If he could talk, as he looks back at you, I fancy your baby would tell you how much your care of him, during the months before he was born, has meant, and then he would beg you to stand by, very closely, for a few months more, until he is a little more used to being a separate person living outside your body.

“You have given me a wonderful start,” he seems to tell you, “and now I want to go on and develop the best possible mind and body. I shall be able to do this if you will help me, for what you can give me now is of more importance than what all the rest of the people in the world can give. You can give me through your milk exactly the materials that Nature intends me to use to develop and build this partly finished body of mine, and to protect it from disease. Just tide me over this most difficult period of my life, and I’ll be a credit to us both, not only as a baby but as a growing child and later as a robust man or woman, helping to do my share of the world’s work. I’ll have fine straight limbs to bear me on my way, a good brain to help me take a creditable place among people who count, and steady nerves I’ll have, that will always be dependable. I’ll put into reality the dreams that you and I are dreaming, and when I do, I’ll look back to these early weeks and months and realize that I could not have done it but for you.”

And so you look into the eyes of this baby of yours and pledge yourself to stand by and do for him all that lies in your power, realizing already that the keeping of that pledge is going to bring you, along with its demands, an endless and satisfying happiness; a consciousness that you are doing something indispensable to your baby’s welfare that no one else in the world can do.

You know, now, that your baby’s greatest single need for the next few months is satisfactory nursing at your breast, but you will be able to give him this only if your diet and general mode of living are favorable to the production of good milk.

Quite evidently, then, your big service to your baby, for a while, is largely a matter of caring for yourself.

It seldom happens that the mother who has had good prenatal care, followed by good care during and after labor, is unable to nurse her baby if she orders her own life in the way that is known to be necessary to promote and maintain the production of breast milk. The first essential is her real desire to nurse her baby, next, her appreciation of the continuous care of herself that is necessary to this end, and third her whole-hearted willingness to take such care, for her baby’s sake.

It is safe to say that if the doctor and the nurse and the baby’s mother all want him to nurse at the breast, and all do everything in their power to make this possible, they will almost invariably succeed. This assertion can scarcely be made too positively and we should never lose sight of the fact that if the baby is not breast-fed he is being defrauded, and in the vast majority of cases, because of insufficient effort on the part of those who are caring for him.

Practically the only conditions which doctors in general now recognize as sufficient reason for the mother’s not nursing her baby are retracted nipples, tuberculosis, convulsions, severe heart or kidney trouble, certain acute infectious diseases such as typhoid fever, and the state of pregnancy.

When none of these conditions exist, a favorable frame of mind and a state of good nutrition are the two indispensable factors in establishing breast feeding and maintaining the production of a satisfactory quantity and quality of breast milk. These factors in turn are both affected by the mother’s general mode of living.

Women with happy, cheerful dispositions usually nurse their babies satisfactorily, while those who worry and fret are likely to have an insufficient supply of milk or milk of a poor quality. In addition to this sustained influence exerted by the nursing mother’s state of mind it is well to remember that the quality of milk that has been entirely satisfactory may be seriously injured, for the time being, by a fit of temper, fright, grief, anxiety or any marked emotional disturbance. Actual poisons seem to be created as a result of these emotions and they may affect the baby so unfavorably as to make it necessary to give him artificial food, temporarily, and empty the breasts by pumping or stripping before he begins to nurse again.