When I think back to my own mom, she always seemed so on top of things.
I feel dismayed and guilty that I'm not handling things as well and feel
a lot more frazzled than she seemed to be.
We've heard this comment from many mothers, and it's both poignant and
sadly unfair to the women who feel this way, since times have changed so
dramatically. In response, we'd like to offer this excerpt from our
book, Mother Nurture.
[From Mother Nurture: A Mother's Guide to Health in Body, Mind, and
Intimate Relationships, by Rick Hanson, Ph.D., Jan Hanson, L.Ac., Ricki
Pollycove, M.D. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking
Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.]
Let's step back for a minute and look at how we got here. During more
than 99% of the time that humans (or our close ancestors) have lived on
this planet, mothers raised families in small groups of
hunter-gatherers. If you had been among them, your life would have moved
at the speed of a walk while you provided for your needs and fulfilled
your ambitions with a child on your hip or nearby. You would have eaten
fresh and organic foods saturated in micro-nutrients and breathed air
and drunk water free of artificial chemicals. Most important of all, you
would have spent much of your day with other mothers, surrounded by a
supportive community of relatives, friends, and neighbors. These are
the conditions to which your body and mind are adapted for raising
children.
Unfortunately, while the essential activities of mothering - pregnancy,
childbirth, breastfeeding, worrying and planning and loving with all
your heart - have not altered one bit, our world has changed profoundly,
and evolution hasn't had time to catch up. You and we are genetically
identical to the first modern humans of 200,000 years ago, and nearly
identical to our earliest tool-using ancestors, who lived over two
million years ago. Nonetheless, at odds with this basic genetic
blueprint, most mothers today must rush about stressfully, constantly
juggling and multi-tasking. Few modern jobs can be done with young
children around, so working means spending much of the day separated
from your kids - and the stresses of the unnatural schedule and pace
they must then handle affect them in ways that naturally spill over onto
you. Compared to our ancestors, most of us eat much fewer vegetables and
whole foods, and much more white flour, sugar, and artificial chemicals,
and we can't help absorbing some of the billions of pounds of toxins
released into the environment each year, which even leave traces in
breast milk. The so-called village it takes to raise a child usually
looks more like a ghost town, so you have to rely more on your mate than
did mothers in times past - but he, too, is strained by the
unprecedented busyness and intensity of modern life.
If you feel like you're swimming upstream, it's because raising
children was not meant to be this way. Many of the problems that seem
purely personal or marital actually start on the other side of your
front door.
Of course, the world is not going to change back to the time of the
hunter-gatherers (and we'd miss refrigerators and telephones too much if
it did!). And those times certainly had their own difficulties, such as
famine or disease. But, like every mother, you can't help but feel the
impact of the whirlwind we're all living in. Just how you're affected is
as individual as a baby's footprint. Some mothers are fortunate to have
low demands, substantial resources, and low vulnerabilities. All too
often, however, the demands are high, resources are low, and resilience
gets worn down: a mother's "cupboard" gets emptied out and shaken and
it's an uphill struggle to get anything back in. No wonder that, over
time, some signs of wear begin to show.
That's why we think it's so important you and every mother to take
active steps to lower her stresses and increase her resources: that's
mother nurture.