Children First

Diary of a Yale Mom

Children First

11-1-10



By the time I had my first child, Dr. Spock was out and Penelope Leach was in as the expert on raising children. Penelope and I became very good friends in the early morning hours when everyone I knew who had ever had a baby was sound asleep, unavailable for consultation. I would identify the symptom that I thought my child was experiencing, find it in the index, then look to see what I could possibly do to relieve the pain. Thankfully, I can read, but more importantly the advice always gave me an answer. For a new mother who had never even babysat for anyone in her entire life, the book was a resource that helped me feel more confident.



I am still in shock that in America, there is no requirement to take a class before having a baby. Most people seem to assume that having a baby comes with an innate operating manual. But I know many women for whom mothering does not come naturally. I want to explain this a little further because where I came from, if you wanted to attend an Ivy League college, you did not have free time in high school to babysit. I took at least five Advanced Placement courses in high school. I was the Business Editor for my high school yearbook. I played tennis and field hockey. I was also on the gymnastics team during my freshman and sophomore years until I tore a muscle doing the Chinese splits. Free time did not exist in my schedule. Babysitting was not on my list of things to do when I decided that I wanted to go to MIT, Yale or Harvard. I worked really hard. Nor as the baby in my family did I have younger siblings to take care of. So I never learned anything first-hand about caring for kids.



My more recent reading about parenting has shown me that research is only now beginning to decipher how a mother’s brain really works. I am no longer a scientist, but I’ve found some outstanding articles about the “mother gene”, fosB. Just google it and you will read some amazing information. So, legitimate research has shown that some people have the gene in tact, while other people have damaged fosB genes. If yours is in tact, then when your baby is born the gene turns on the nurturing part of your brain. “Mother Love” really is tied to a gene. I love science.



Good information occasionally comes from places other than books, too. Recently, I saw a report on television about memory loss after delivering a baby. After having three babies, I can testify from my own experience that motherhood memory loss is real. I have named it “Motherhood Amnesia (MA)”. I ask myself many times how I could have had more than one child after all the sleepless night and exhausted days. Forty-four hours of labor had exhausted me for months after the first baby was born, and my memory seemed never to quite get over the results of the exhaustion. The research now points to a valid reason for “MA”, and I like the preliminary conclusions.



Mothers have to make room in their brains for all the new information that they must store in order to take care of their newborns. Finally, there is a real answer to the seeming motherhood memory loss question. My mother-in-law had eight children and my grandmother had ten children.. They always forgot their children’s names. I used to wonder why they had such a hard time remembering where they parked their cars or left their keys. It’s MA.



Now that I have three children, I know that I have “lost” some of my memory. My husband keeps asking me questions about concerts we have attended. I can only remember that we have gone to Disney World ten times since 1989. Oops I mean ten times to Disney World and one visit to Disney Land since 1989. I told the children in 2004 when we took our last official vacation to Orlando that if I had saved all the money from our numerous vacations, I would have a nice nest egg.



But I also have a lot of new memories about my children. Children First is the title of one of Penelope Leach’s bibles which I’ve used more recently. I suggest you go to a few parenting classes, and go to the library and/or bookstore or your digital reading library and get some books that seem to answer your questions. Figure out the guide that will help you get through the first two years and then keep adding to your library until your children enter college. I continue to learn about how to parent as my children enter every new phase of childhood. It really does not get easier just because they are bigger. In fact, the bigger the child, the bigger the problems they have.



Finally, remember that your brain did not get smaller. Instead, it probably got larger to hold all the new knowledge and memories of motherhood.



Diary of a Yale Mom