To a healthy man, also, there may be a period of chastening experience in sharing daily life with one who is out of health. Though the prospective mother ought not to be in any way invalided, yet, alas, as things are, too often she is, and only an unselfish man will fail to resent the personal sacrifice which he endures as a result.
There is a certain self-centred type of man who may, with the most model intentions and in order to lead a self-respecting life, marry, and who may find the resulting pregnancy of his wife very disconcerting to himself and very thwarting to his own requirements. With a certain bitter selfishness, this attitude was unconsciously expressed by one of my correspondents in the following words: “Something must be done to prevent any more children; imagine what a wretched time I have with my wife sick every day for nine months.” Perhaps the reader can scarcely restrain a smile at so callously self-centred an attitude on the part of a husband, but, nevertheless, that man does have a real and difficult physical problem before him. One way, of course, in which to help such a man would be to place such help and knowledge before his wife that her motherhood should be more normal, and not so terrible an experience for her.
CHAPTER X
Physical Difficulties of the Expectant Mother
We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so much more than we do that they cannot understand us; but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what therefore they are most likely to expect; and we can see that they get this, as far as it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them.
Samuel Butler.
To far too many women the time when they are carrying a child is a period of strain and semi-invalidism, a time filled not only with surprises and difficulties, but too often coloured with actual distress and ill-health. This should not be. The time of prospective motherhood should be one of buoyancy, health, physical activity and mental vitality. The low standard of health which the modern woman tolerates is deplorable.
But to whom can the young mother-to-be turn for advice and assistance? Such healthy, happy, prospective motherhood does not come by instinct in our city life. Those around her, older than she, who have had children of their own may perhaps be able to give her a hint here and a little piece of advice there, which to some extent may alleviate her difficulty or pierce with a faint shadow of light the gloom of perplexity in the ever deepening unknown into which she is entering for the first time; but nearly all such women have themselves gone blindly and individually through this period of immense significance and mystery without having had any rational help from one devoted to the maintenance of health.
Almost every book written to advise the coming mother is written by a doctor of disease, with very few exceptions by doctors who tolerate what is, in my opinion, a disgracefully low standard of general health in women. A distinguished gynecologist who, in cross-examination before a commission persisted in maintaining that the “daily morning sickness” which is so prevalent in women who are carrying a child is “physiologically right and natural” (indeed, he implied almost that it was necessary) represents an attitude of mind very general and capable of far-reaching hypnotic injury to the community as a whole.
By far the best and sanest book available for healthy women is one to which I have already referred, namely Tokology, by Dr. Alice Stockham, but this book has its inaccuracies and its drawbacks, and even its pages are too much occupied with the wretched and handicapping troubles which women do experience in large numbers, but which should not be.