My Family and Other Globalizers | How did our moms do it?

Anxiety, conflict and guilt are woven into the fabric of motherhood. (Representational image: Billow 926 via Unsplash)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

Becoming a mother is an undoubtedly valuable exercise in humility, although immediately post-partum it can feel merely like one in humiliation. It had become clear very quickly after Ishaan was born that the days when my mammaries were my private business were over. This was unceremoniously driven home when two days post-partum my doctor strode into the Beijing hospital room where I lay supine and without so much as an if you please, copped a feel of my breasts. “Hmm,” he’d said disapprovingly, “milk’s taking a while to come in.”

I watched in misery as women around me pumped bottles full of milk, while all the squeezing of the world produced nothing but sore nipples from mine. I stuck my babe to my boob for what felt like the trillionth time in the day. As Ishaan sucked and sucked, I convulsed in agony as my abdomen cramped in intense pain.

I pulled out my dog-eared copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting and began to read the section on post-partum care. I hadn’t bothered with it before. In retrospect, it is ludicrous how I had envisaged labour to be some kind of finishing line. It was, of course, only the beginning of a life-long post-partum marathon.

The book was brutally didactic. The cramps I was experiencing while nursing were “afterpains.” It turned out that labour contractions did not end with labour. Apparently, the uterus keeps contracting after birth, the pains made worse by nursing. And there was more misery to come – pain in the perineal area, bruises on the chest, incontinence, constipation, bleeding and depression.

I remember thinking that it wasn’t very smart from an evolutionary perspective to kick a mom with bitten nipples and sleepless nights, when she was already down, following nine months of pregnancy and hours of wracking labour. It was a nasty bit of biological misogyny.

On our last scheduled day in the hospital, the pediatrician paid us a visit. The baby’s weight had dropped since his birth, and he had a mild case of jaundice. “Give him (the baby) a bottle of formula,” she urged, even though she knew I wanted to exclusively breast feed. “Just one. Just for today. It won’t affect your breastfeeding.”

It sounded like a medical prescription, but I experienced lactation aporia and seesawed wildly between the options, until my mother, who was with me at the time, spoke up.

“Oh! Give him a ‘top feed’ Pali,” she said, exhaling with barely concealed frustration at my obduracy. “It’s not a big deal. You always had one.” I looked at my beloved progenitor in surprise. I was horrified to learn that when I was a babe, she’d nursed me, supplemented with formula, for barely a month before “returning to work,” a euphemism for switching to the bottle.

“It’s OK,” she said soothingly. “I didn’t have enough milk, and that’s what formula is for.” I was conflicted. On the one hand this revelation seemed terribly irresponsible. What was with the “that’s what formula is for?” One might as well urge a pre-diabetic to gorge on chocolate cakes, because after all, “that’s what insulin is for.”

I did not come from a culture where we blamed our parents for the ills of our lives. It had never occurred to me to be anything but grateful to my mother for bringing me up with much love and care. Yet, for the first time I felt let down by her. Hadn’t she known the damage she could have caused me by failing to breastfeed? I thought back to the endless colds and coughs I’d suffered as a child. Would these have been alleviated by a few more months on the breast?

It transpired, she hadn’t known much at all. Over the next few weeks, I discovered that my mom’s standard responses to baby-related queries, or comments, ranged from, “Really? How was I supposed to know that?” to “I don’t know. It was 37 years ago.”

But it struck me that even had she wanted to know, her ability to access information would have been sharply circumscribed without the Internet. I tried conjuring a world without the endless rash of baby-related posts on my Facebook feed and the twittering of parenting gurus.

For women of my mother’s generation, ignorance must have functioned as an anti-anxiety salve. How wonderful, for mothers to have been able to turn their little ones over on their tummy for a nap, without a care for SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). Or to take a baby for a car ride holding her peaceably in the lap, rather than having to force her flailing body into a car seat.

What a glorious lack of self-reproach our mothers must have felt, given their information-lean world. For so much of the pervasive guilt lacerating moms today is manufactured by the ubiquitous availability of the ever-expanding corpus of contemporary “baby science.”

Later, I realized I was wrong. Our mothers, as theirs before them, must have found inventively customized reasons to torture themselves. For anxiety, conflict and guilt are woven into the fabric of motherhood. The tempering influence of ignorance is merely relative.

I can only imagine the new “facts” our children will have to suffer when it is their turn at parenting.  What if broccoli turns out to be carcinogenic? How angry will Ishaan be with me when he learns that I’d proudly fed him pureed cruciferous vegetables for months? For moms, guilt is inescapable, whether staring you in the face or lurking in the future.