The Young Mother-to-be:
Her Distresses
The amount of suffering that has been and is borne by women is
utterly beyond imagination.
HERBERT SPENCER: _Principles of Ethics_, II.
The bodily changes which at first almost imperceptibly steal upon the
mother, if she be a girl who has enjoyed her own physical beauty,
and has taken that care of herself which so delightful a thing as a
young woman’s body merits, will be at first a series of amazements and
perhaps of delights as her body rounds itself and becomes more perfect.
At this time the husband should fill his memory with her exquisiteness,
for though she will, in the end, return perhaps to her normal strength
and a re-awakened and different beauty, she will never again in her
life reach such a point of bodily perfection as she does during the
first three months or so of her coming motherhood, culminating at about
the close of the third month.
As the years pass, hallowed and sanctified by love which is understood,
even when grey with age, her face may gain an ever increasing beauty
and power, but the perfection of her body is reached in the early days
when she is first about to become a mother.
To one who cares for the outward form of her body, changes will occur
inevitably as the months pass, which may give rise to deep distresses,
principally because they feel at the time so permanent and it is
difficult to believe that the disfigurements will ever pass. For a
time she must inevitably become less and less beautiful; she may
indeed become, even to herself, repugnant. Perhaps to her as to so
many thousands of women the sight of themselves then is a torment, and
the conquest of this feeling is a great and increasingly difficult
mental exercise. As this time approaches and is upon her, the young
mother-to-be must concentrate all her conscious thought on the beauty
of the future. She must forget the present and its cruel distortions
and live in the months and years that are to come when she will have
with her another life and lovely form to which she has given origin.
Nothing is at present gained for our civilization by the obstinate
blindness on the part of some, and the wilful deception on the part of
others, which together encourage the concealment from the bride of
what she has to face.
On the one hand stand these prudes, but on the other the too eager
and explicit, even lewd and profane and soiled minds who delight in
lugubrious warnings.
The result has been that many a woman enters upon her motherhood gaily
and eagerly, totally unprepared for what is to follow, totally unaware
that, by the first act of motherhood, she gives up something essential
to herself and something which is irreplacable in all the after years.
So great a gift should be made not only voluntarily, but consciously,
and with full knowledge of what it entails.
Cruel indeed is the callous hardness of the older mind that can see
without desiring to help the proud and sensitive young spirit embarking
upon a course which cannot but entail subtle difficulties at the best
and extreme physical anguish at the worst, yet help of the kind the
modern sensitive girl needs is almost unobtainable. Rare indeed is the
mother of the last generation who has the power and the knowledge to
meet the unvoiced demands of this.
Acquainted as I am with all sorts and conditions of men and women, I
am nevertheless frequently amazed and filled with burning indignation
at the well-nigh inhuman cruelty, stupidity and hypocrisy of the older
generation towards young potential parents. It is not an uncommon
thing to hear a man who is unfaithful to his wife because she has lost
her physical beauty, at the same time haranguing the public on the
compulsory duties of parenthood on the part of all young married women,
and coupling his denunciations with sneers at the young girl who fears
to embark on motherhood, reviling her as selfish. Yet the cause of her
shrinking may be that from all the weltering confusion of contradictory
and scrappy information which may have been allowed to reach her, the
one which has fixed itself in her mind most vividly, is that which
promised her loss of her bodily charm and that of all she possesses
which is most valuable to her as a bond which binds her husband’s
affection to her. The woman who is perfectly sure of the continuance of
her husband’s spiritual and romantic love does not fear the risks of
motherhood. All who truly and deeply love, desire parenthood. But can a
woman who was married by a shallow man only for her beauty dare to risk
the thing which holds him to her?
There is indeed a diabolical malignity in the older man who is himself
unfaithful because of the very things in his wife which he denounces
the younger girl for fearing.
This must not be misunderstood by my readers as indicating that I think
a woman should shrink in any way or that her husband should grudge the
sacrifice of all the fragrance and beauty which they possess towards
making the child of their love the citizen of the future. But with
fervent intensity, I feel that to keep the young woman ignorant of
facts, and, at the same time, on the one hand to upbraid and bully her
and on the other to terrorize her with evil minded tales and tragic
sights, is conduct which would be laughable in its absurdity did it not
touch the spring of tears.
As the months of expectant motherhood succeed one another the girl
will find her power to walk and run, to keep up with her husband in
his pleasure, his out-door exertions, or even to do the usual standing
involved in the course of her house work, increasingly curtailed. This
is perhaps the inevitable consequence of the burden of actual weight
which results from the later growth of the child within her as it
increases and approaches the size of a living baby.
Sometimes the fortunate mother finds that she is still capable of the
same amount of exertion to which she is generally accustomed, but,
under modern conditions, this is but seldom. The stories of Kaffir
women on the trek who bear their children and follow on with the
rest, and savages whose activity is in no way curtailed, are neither
applicable to modern conditions, nor are they fair standards to set,
because such women do not live as the modern woman is forced to, nor
is their bodily organization really comparable with that of our highly
sensitive brain-evolved race.
Nevertheless, with the exception of heavy exertion, the girl who is
carrying her child should be able to indulge in a much greater amount
of healthful exercise, without undue fatigue, than she is generally
able to enjoy. (See also Chapter X).
Most women have heard rumours of others who have been able to follow
out almost all their usual occupations, and have felt little or
no handicap from child bearing. Such an exceptional woman is my
correspondent who wrote:--
I lived exactly as usual; I played golf up to the middle of the
seventh month and bicycled up to my very last. On the afternoon
of the day my second child was born (weighing 8-3/4 lb.) I was
shopping with a woman acquaintance, who had no idea there was
anything on the way.
Such women, although not very many, do exist among us. Their existence
is perhaps the source of the hope which always animates every girl
first embarking on her parenthood that she, by the sheer force of the
longing for health which is within her, will prove also to be such
an exception. Sometimes this desire may be apparently fulfilled,
but generally, unless it is coupled with much greater knowledge
than most girls possess, as the months pass one by one, her proud
spirit will bend, she will give up and give up and give up. Humbled,
weakened, humiliated before herself, through the fact that she is not
strong enough to fight what she now is inclined acquiescently to call
“Nature,” she too goes down the stream with all the myriads of other
happy hearted girls, whose gallant endeavours have equally failed. Then
she creeps, wearily resting by the way, where she had hoped to tread
with a firm and lightsome step.
There grows in her mind, and this is stronger the more she loves her
husband, the added distress that she feels that she is failing him.
He married a mate, an equal, who lighter of step could yet cover the
ground as well as he, and who could share his amusements, his work to
some extent perhaps, and his pleasures. She feels that she must, so
far as she possibly can, maintain this position. This hope impels her
particularly if they have been married but a short time, and hence
their days of delightful untramelled companionship have been so few.
In this unselfish distress, which is primarily for him, she is tempted
to conceal her effort and tends to overstrain herself in an endeavour
to act as completely as she can the part, as reported, of the early
Greek or Roman matron or of the proud and savage mother who could
bear her children as lightly as a woodland creature. Finding sooner or
later that she _cannot_ do so, she suddenly gives in. Her strength,
undermined by the series of distresses, the subtle shocks and blows to
which she is secretly subjected, she yields and takes on that air of
semi-invalidism, demanding constant care and consideration from her
husband and those about her, which in a way represents the hauling down
of her gallant flag. Her dreams of an easy motherhood are vanquished.
She will at times be dimly conscious that she is no longer able to feel
so acutely. This, in a way perhaps, is Nature’s provision against the
too intense experiencing of emotion, which would otherwise come with
sensitive motherhood. The sensation can be described, as one woman put
it, as though each one of her powers of feeling were wrapped round in
cotton wool, deadened and clogged so that they no longer gave contact.
This may be well, but it adds in a dim way to the various distresses,
a sense of unreality and apartness, which, if it coincides with that
temporary antipathy to her husband, which was noted on page 33, may
make the mother-to-be, for the time at any rate, indeed a wanderer in
the valley of the shadow.