The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Amazements
But lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand
Together tread at last the immortal strand
With eyes where burning memory lights love home?
Lo! how the little outcast hour has turned
And leaped to them and in their faces yearned--
“I am your child: O parents, ye have come.”
ROSSETTI: _The House of Life_.
The intermingling of the physical, the mental and the spiritual is so
subtle, intricate and inexplicable that, in describing the states of
the bride who is about to be a mother, it is difficult to know with
which first to deal.
In an Appendix, p. 229, I put in compact form one or two of the obvious
physical phenomena with which it may be necessary for the bride and
bridegroom to acquaint themselves. Although generally known to their
elders, my many correspondents have shown me that even such simple and
direct facts are often unknown to young people, who are frequently so
shy that they do not like to consult a medical practitioner or an older
friend. Assuming then that the simple physical facts are known, there
still remain innumerable subtleties which may cause heart searching,
perhaps to both bride and bridegroom.
It is almost as though the bearing of a child were a function so
primitive in its origin that it tends, to some extent, to dissociate
the ordinary coherence of the mother’s life, and to result in a
weakening of the sub-conscious control over her emotions to which she
had all her life grown accustomed. Thus she enters upon a complex state
in which primitive instincts and feelings may be at variance with the
conscious thoughts and aspirations of highly civilized and sensitive
humanity.
This complexity of her instincts and her conscious feelings may lead
the young wife to find an apparently inexplicable conflict in her
attitude towards her husband. Consciously she desires ardently, with
all that is best in her nature, to bear the child of their love. She
adores her husband and is full of tender emotions towards him as the
coming father, and experiences a form of gratitude that he should be
the means of fulfilling her dreams; but possibly, at the same time,
she may be amazed to find in herself an intense and active antagonism
to his personal presence, an antagonism which she has to fight against
revealing. She may realize that it is utterly at variance with her real
feelings, and she may know that it would be the acme of cruelty to
allow him to become aware of it, particularly when he is full of deep
concern and love for her, and is doing all that a loving consideration
can do for her happiness and welfare.
Such a complex diversity of mental states existing perhaps
co-incidently at the same hour in the mind of a girl may, if acute,
lead to an outwardly recognizable form of hysteria and even to an
unbalanced mind. Of such, however, I am not speaking, but am now
describing the outwardly controllable, but nevertheless inwardly felt
effervescing conflict of instinctive emotions, which is far more
frequent than is generally recognized, and which the best balanced and
most loving women are amazed to experience in themselves.
From women whom I know to be exceptionally happy wives and mothers, I
have evidence on this theme. With, of course, personal variations, they
tell me that they have never confided this bewildering experience to
their husbands, their doctors or their relatives, but, in essence, they
say what is said in the following words by one of my correspondents:--
In the first few months of coming motherhood she had a feeling of
antagonism so strong “that it amounted to actual dislike of my
husband’s presence, and a desire to be right away from him. This
distressed me very much at first as I thought I must be losing my love
for my husband, and could not understand such a sudden reversal of
feeling as I loved him very deeply.... At the end of the first three
months, I found that my feeling of love returned in full strength, and
with it a feeling of intense devotion and tenderness towards my husband
as the father of my coming child.”
Some such experience, generally and fortunately limited to
comparatively short though different periods, is not infrequently felt
and is often a source of secret distress and anguish to the young
wife whose sense of loyalty to the man she loves and married bars her
from the relief of talking of these feelings. As is now beginning
to be realized, emotions deeply experienced which are deliberately
suppressed, may have far reaching effects even on the health. It is,
therefore, well that she should know what is, I am sure, the truth,
that this physical repugnance, which sometimes even amounts to a
detestation of sharing the same house with the husband, and a desire to
escape even from the superficial contact of eating in the same room
with him, is a temporary phase, possibly phylogenetic[4] in its origin.
[4] That is to say, repeating the history of our very early ancestors,
where the female probably felt some resentment towards the male who had
encompassed her maternity, and who most certainly would live apart from
her and not in the ordinary contact of a united life.
This passing phase, whether it lasts a few days or months, is neither
necessary nor absolutely universal, but so far as I can ascertain it
appears to be a common occurrence in the lives of the more sensitive
and tenderly loving of wives. Where the coming child has not been
desired by both parents, and where the mother resents her coming
maternity, there is, of course, a totally different problem for
which there is a very obvious reason. I am speaking now only of the
mother-to-be who deeply desires her child, who is physically healthy
and well formed, living under comfortable, protected and happy
conditions, and who ardently loves and is loved by her husband; it is
she who may and most frequently does feel this passing phase of intense
physical antagonism. That she loves, and consciously loves, gives her
an outward control so that this under-current of inherent antagonism is
not allowed to show, and is gallantly concealed from the whole world.
She would feel it an intense disloyalty to speak of it to any living
soul, but it is there and it is so often a source of distress and
strain upon the nervous system that it should be openly faced instead
of being as it now is a repressed feeling. This repression tends to
result in one of the greatest difficulties of the _healthy_ woman who
is carrying a child, namely sleeplessness. The complex balance of her
nervous control is strained by her surprise at herself, and perhaps by
her self-reproaches, and thus she has an unnecessary burden in addition
to the one of the coming child. This phase, therefore, is not a fact
to be ignored or treated too lightly, and while it lasts it should be
respected so far as is compatible with the circumstances of the two and
with due regard for the mother. It is not a thing either to fear or
to be ashamed of. It is perhaps best openly faced as a fact of rather
curious interest as an ancient survival in oneself of racial history.
If possible it should form the object of innocently playful laughter
between the girl and her husband; this would do much to prevent its
suppression taking a serious root.
Aware of the existence of this phase and its probable meaning and
treating it in this simple sensible way, neither the young mother nor
the father-to-be need fear this brief physical antagonism. Where its
danger lies, however, is in the possibility that unrecognized, it will,
with those who live a shade less perfectly, result in the beginning
of a habit of irritation, and perhaps in the setting up of some form
of verbal bickering on the part of those who cannot lead as secluded
and separate lives as would be possible in a spacious country or in a
large establishment. When once the pair have broken the sweet custom
of speaking only in love to each other, then, even after the temporary
phase of antagonism has passed, they may find themselves with a habit
of verbal bickering which is intensely corrosive, ultimately perhaps
more than any other thing tending to destroy the outward beauty of a
mutual life.
There is another and reverse aspect of the mental phases through which
a young mother-to-be may pass, in which she has an intense and added
passion for her husband, and, as this leads to a subject of great
importance, and a subject which has never been adequately handled, I
will defer its consideration to Chapter XII.