The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Delights
The sweet, soft freshness that blooms on baby’s limbs--does anybody
know where it was hidden so long? Yes, when the mother was a young
girl it lay pervading her heart in tender and silent mystery of
love--the sweet, soft freshness that has bloomed on baby’s limbs.
TAGORE: _Gitanjali_.
In a happy and desired motherhood, every hour of the day and night may
bring its intense delight, both in the dreams of contemplation, wherein
the experience of love sinks deep into the heart, and of the linking up
of the present with the future. All natural functions rightly performed
give a deep satisfaction and content, but this, the greatest function
of all, now so specialized and intimately interwoven with every highest
racial impulse and every dearest personal desire of the loving pair,
yields a wealth and profundity of experience surpassing all else.
In my opinion, undoubtedly the ideal way of spending the earlier months
of coming parenthood is in the form of an extended honeymoon, in which
the couple travelling slowly should follow the guide of seasonal
beauty or should visit place after place of historic interest or
natural charm so that the mother’s mind should be fed and stimulated
by historic memories, by the exquisite freshness of nature, and the
grandeur of man’s artistic achievements. This, of course, would not be
possible in its fullest extent to many, until, in the future, society
recognizes the supreme importance to the race of the expectant mother.
Some such course, however, might be possible to a larger number than
it is at present were they to realize not only their personal good but
the racial benefit of this procedure. In our country, owing to our
artificial and unclean attitude, the mother-to-be, particularly during
the later months, stays at home so far as possible, and does not go
from place to place. When going about entails battling with crowds on
public conveyances, this is wise. But the easy effort of walking or of
riding in the old fashioned horse carriage from place to place on an
extended journey, is ideal, and sometimes appears to have beneficial
reactions on the character and quality of the child that is coming.
But, even if such a mode of life is impossible, yet the mother by
reading and conversation can, if she has a mind of trained imagination,
vary and enrich the mental environment of her child while it is
developing.
Then, too, the mother-to-be can count among her delights all the
intimate personal enjoyment of the little physical things which
contribute to the great anticipations of the future. She can, if she
has the skill herself, sew the little clothes, stitching into them
sunny thoughts and beautiful hopes, making them links between the
present delightful _solitude à deux_ and another beautiful time which
the little one who is coming cannot comprehend till, many years hence,
he or she will experience its charm in turn.
Little things intensely loved undoubtedly bring a greater reward in
human happiness than great and numerous possessions, the joy of which
can be but partly grasped. Within a tiny home, a mother whose heart
vibrates with love can find a thousand sources wherewith to enrich the
coming life.
But of all her delights, the greatest must always be the thought of the
wonderful gift, which, at some ever nearing date, she will be able to
give to the man whom she adores. Some men are negligent of the charms
and enravishments of children, but I think in every man who fully loves
and is fully loved by his wife, the thought of the child of them both
must always be a stimulant to everything most ardently beautiful and
profound in their natures.
Pictures of the child in after life filling brightly and beautifully
some big position in the world may flit past the mother’s mind during
this time, but, if the mother is wise, she will not too intimately
visualize the outward form of her child as a maturing girl or boy. By
so doing she may indirectly wrong it. (See Chapter XIV).
Her delight should be to picture a tiny laughing messenger from God,
thinly veiled so that its sex is hidden; the figure of a child a few
years old, still full of divine innocence and radiant possibilities.
Happy hours of bodily rest may be spent picturing it in a thousand
beautiful actions dancing in the sunlight, a contagious centre of joy
in the whole world around them. On such an idea of delight she may
lavish every day invigorating thoughts and wonderful dreams; none
will be wasted, of that she may be assured. If, at the same time, she
is securing the coming child’s bodily well-being through the proper
material channels, then she can feel that these dreams of higher than
material beauty are being built into reality. The secret sacred wonder
of the process of which she is the active centre casts its spell of
magic and delight around the willing mother. “A Garden enclosed is my
Beloved,” and she feels within her own existence the mystic sense of
divine beauty, which one feels in another form in a walled garden in
the summer twilight.