When I look back to that first three years of my married life, I wonder how I lived through it. I was weak and ill, could not suckle my second baby. And then a third baby coming along made my life a continual drudgery, and to crown my misfortune my husband fell out of work, and I had to do shirt work at home in order to keep a roof over our heads. My third baby was very tiny and thin when born. I put this down to the worry and the shortness of food which I had to put up with, and though he lived till he was three years old and died from diphtheria. It was a happy release to me, as he was an epileptic, and I thanked God, much as I loved him, that he was taken from this life, where even sound people have a difficulty to exist.
I do not think I was very different in my pregnancies to others. I always prepared myself to die, and I think this awful depression is common to most at this time. And when bothered by several other children, and not knowing how to make ends meet, death in some cases would be welcome if it were not the dread of the children. “How would they get on without their mother?”
My husband was fortunate enough, just after the loss of my third child, to get regular work, and I never bore another child under such awful conditions. But I believe that I felt the effects of it in all my other pregnancies.
After the first three living children, I had three still-born children. I was six months advanced when I fell downstairs over a stair-rod, which killed the child, which was born after forty-eight hours’ labour, and perhaps it seems wicked to you, but I was glad, because it left my hands free for a time to look after the other two, for I was fearfully weak and ill. After a lapse of two years I had another seven-months baby born dead, and again, after another two years, a five-months still-born child, all three still-born children being boys. I had a miscarriage after this of two months, and when I was thirty-five years old had my last baby, who is now living, nine years old.
I do hope you will not feel that this letter is morbid, and that I delight in writing horrors, for I do not, and had you not asked for information I should never have written this all down. It is strictly true, and when I look back to my early married life I could cry for the girl who endured so much for life that was wasted. I am fairly healthy now myself and have much to thank God for—a loving helpmeet and dutiful children—so please do not think I am miserable, for I am not, for I believe—in fact, I know—that there is a brighter day dawning for the mother and child of the future.
Wages 21s. to 30s.; four children, three still-births, one
miscarriage.
137. Five Still-Births.
Mine is rather an exceptional case. Through being left without a mother when a baby—father was a very large farmer and girls were expected to do men’s work—I, at the age of sixteen, lifted weights that deformed the pelvis bones, therefore making confinement a very difficult case. I have five fine healthy girls, but the boys have all had to have the skull-bones taken away to get them past the pelvis. Always a case for two or three doctors, so you will know I have suffered something. I wish more could be done to train young girls to be more careful. Over my first baby I was eleven months before I could walk again. A woman ought, in my opinion, to be treated more or less as an invalid during pregnancy. I suffered most with sickness and swollen legs, terrible bad carryings. You cannot follow up with work as you ought to do. I suffered with a terrible bearing-down pain all through carrying. I often wonder how some poor women do that have such very fast confinements every twelve months and no care at all bestowed on them.
Wages 20s. to 22s. 6d.; five children and five still-births.