Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 3

THE price of every beauty in this world is in proportion to its quality, even although the payment of the price exacted may be long deferred or may be made in such an intricate and remote form that its connection with the result is overlooked.

As the greatest thing which lovers can give each other is a child, and as none in the world are so great as lovers, the price exacted by Nature for the child of loving and sensitive people is correspondingly heavy.

This statement may apparently conflict with ​the idea that the joy of bearing a child to the beloved is a woman's consummation of happiness; yet it does not conflict, because of the deeper truth that the supremest happiness is mysteriously intermingled with self-sacrifice. A young woman whose character is sufficiently beautiful and sensitive to know the highest joys of motherhood—the full delights of human existence and love—will also be sensitive to the varied pains which motherhood will bring. Indeed, in this respect, the poet's saying that "the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be pricked by the thorn" is essentially true.

The radiance of the highest form of motherhood is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed by suffering comprehended and endured, transmuted into a service beyond and above the lower desires of self.

For long, indeed for the many millions of years during which she has shown a motherhood comparable with that of human beings,^[1] Nature has essentially trapped and tricked the mother into her motherhood. All the woodland and jungle creatures, the deer or the tiger, the rabbit or the squirrel, grow up through their ​brief adolescence into a partial consciousness of delight in themselves and reach the phase of their development in which their own desires urge them to unite with each other. One can scarcely believe that they are conscious of the resulting parenthood which will become a physical fact at a later date, although the training of her cubs by a woodland mother undoubtedly does include handing on, through some speechless communication, of some actual instruction. A similar blind parenthood, but in addition coerced, has for many thousands of years been characteristic of a large portion of the human race. Even to-day motherhood is too often blind: the young girl delighting in herself and the fairness of her own body, conscious of the power she wields in social life as a beautiful and attractive creature whom older people pet and please and young men place upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self-centred delight into accepting through flattery the enjoyment of herself by some chosen mate; and the later consequences of motherhood are then faced either in amazed astonishment or in open revolt.

Earlier civilizations often dealt with the excessive births resulting from blind or coerced parenthood by destroying the children as infants after birth. This was done directly, and often by her leading citizens, in Greece (one of the ​highest forms of civilization ever attained) and still infanticide direct or indirect goes on among all the populous races of the world. Where the value placed on the mother's mental and physical suffering is low, one may still see motherhood, not as a fine, voluntary and glorious act of selfsacrifice from the highest possible motives of love and service directly to the beloved, and indirectly to the race, but as the exploitation of a trapped and helpless sacrifice.

Mothers will say that their babies are their greatest joys; one may ask, therefore, how I can use the word "sacrifice" in connection with motherhood. The use of the word is just, and based on truths too generally concealed by those who know them, and far too generally unknown by those who ought to know them. Ignorance of their extent has made men callous, indifferent or ribald towards the profound sacrifices of motherhood.

Few there be, however, who do not know of the agonizing torments of actual birth. The Bible is read aloud in churches, and in its wording there is some recognition of the existence of this agony, although based upon earlier and simpler civilizations in which the women were probably better cared for and better fitted for motherhood than the majority of women are to-day. Following biblical tradition, the memory of the agony of birth is generally portrayed ​as being wiped out by the supreme joy in the child which follows. To-day, however, this effacement of the anguish is by no means universal, and the abiding horror of the birth is so great that not a few women refuse to bear another child. Then men, who cannot even imagine the experience of child-bearing, denounce such a mother, rate her and hold her up to derision. How little do they realize that in her they may see Nature's working of the laws of evolution (see p. 34).

The torturing agony of birth might so easily have been averted by Nature had the construction of our bodies differed but very slightly from those which we to-day possess in common with most of the higher animals. The human baby when the hour comes for it to sever its connection from its mother, and as an independent individual to venture into the open air of the world, has to make its way through the arched gateway of bone fixed and set by the mother's own requirements as a frame to her own structure. The encircling archway of bone through which the infant has to pass is but three or four inches in diameter. It would have been possible had our evolution taken a different turn for the infant to have made its exit through the soft wall of the mother's body instead of through this fixed and hardened circle of her bone. But for some causes too ​remote for us at present to discover this was not so, and the essential fact faces us to-day that every infant born naturally must be born through this circle of bone. Moreover if the infant is a well-developed and healthy one, as the ordinary baby of a healthy and beautiful young couple should naturally and rightly be, that infant's head is larger in diameter than the circle of bone through which it has to pass. Its tissues have, therefore, to be squeezed and pressed to mould their shape in order to allow its exit through the orifice, and this must be a slow process, and one which almost always entails great pressure and consequent agony to the mother. Dr. Mary Scharlieb says in The Welfare of the Expectant Mother:—

It is, however, scarcely possible that either the public or the profession realizes that one woman dies in child birth for every 250 children born alive. In addition to this we have to remember that the same accidents and diseases which kill the mothers and the babies inevitably cause a still heavier percentage of crippling and invaliding (p. 43).

Twenty-five per cent. and more of the babies conceived and borne die before they reach normal birth. Often they find the journey through the bony archway into the outer world so difficult and arduous a task that they perish in the process of birth, although probably had they been born by Cesarean section, they ​would have survived and grown into healthy children.

We do not consider what the infant itself in birth may be enduring. The infant is "unconscious," that is to say it carries no memory of these earlier months in its conscious memory as it grows up, but the excessive moulding, particularly of its head, which often has to take place and sometimes takes weeks to right itself, must, one thinks, greatly disturb the little brain, and in my opinion may have a lifelong effect.

I have never heard this aspect of our present problem duly considered. The fact that the increasing brain capacity of civilized man tends ever to give the new born infant a larger head, and tends proportionately to increase the size of the head out of relation to the size of the circle of its mother's bone, has been commented on, and appears to some far seeing thinkers as the possible cause of the ultimate extinction of the human race. Because if we go on developing in the way we are at present doing, ever depending more and more on our brains, and the head of the new born infant tends to increase with the natural development of the brain, the day will come when the birth of a child is absolutely blocked by the relative diameter of its head and of its mother's pelvic bones. If the higher races maintain a dominant place ​in the world, the day may come when with nearly all women such an incompatible relation will arise. Of what avail then would be the ratings and peevish fury of callous men? What scheme the race may have devised before that date to relieve this cruel deadlock we cannot here discuss. The perfecting of the method of birth by Cesarean section offers much promise. It may become a racial necessity. This possibility, on which to-day we are beginning to impinge, indicates one great cause of the torturing agony of the actual hours of birth which the young mother and father-to-be may have to face before they can see the child of their love.

Fortunate women are even still so constructed that the circle of bone has a relatively large orifice which allows the infant comparatively easily to pass through it, and the difficulty and danger of birth for them is minimized. With them the birth pangs may be so trivial in comparison with the result, that they are truly "almost negligible" as most men would like to believe of most women.

Such women, when outward circumstances allow it, are those whom every impulse should encourage to be the mothers of the large families, which are, under proper conditions, still desirable for a portion of our people.

Such a woman as the one who wrote me the following letter is indeed the standard which ​all women and would-be mothers would gladly reach were it possible in any degree to control the formation of a growing girl's body so that as a woman she might retain such a primitive adaptation to motherhood:—

On the exact right day the babe arrived . . . in a quarter of an hour he was there, without nurse, doctor or any one and with no pain to myself. This little party has grown into a splendid specimen, very large (he was 8 lbs. at birth) and firm and muscular. He is the whole day long laughing and kicking or sleeping.

Such women, however, so far as records go, are few. Much might be done by science to discover what are the causes of the reverse condition, and if possible to attempt to eliminate them.

In view of the agony which myriads of women throughout the ages of civilization have endured, it seems strange indeed that no effort should apparently have been made by the learned to undertsand the causes which control the individual formation of the growing structure, with a view possibly to securing some such development. In recent years, however, a little has been done in the recognition of the causes of the converse, that is to say the excessive narrowing of the pelvis to the degree where child birth is not only torment but a life and death agony. And it is now well known that this condition ​is associated with malnutrition and rickets in infancy and early girlhood.

The little baby girl who has rickety bones (which result from being improperly fed as an infant) is, in extreme cases certain, and in many cases very likely, to have such contracted pelvic bones that when her turn comes for motherhood, the birth of a living child may be impossible by the ordinary processes of Nature. Here again, as so often is inevitable, in the course of any consideration of the profound truths of mated existence, we impinge upon the treatment of the unsound and the diseased. This under development of the mother's pelvic bones is a different problem from that evolutionary one touched on in the paragraphs above.

Alas, that it should be true that the great majority of city dwellers come into the category of the spoilt and the tainted in some respect or another. But with the vision of true health and beauty as a standard before our eyes, many might escape the incipient weaknesses by consciously pursuing a standard of health, beauty and normality. It is this standard, this ideal picture, which may yet be reproduced in the lives of millions, which I desire to present in this book, so that in telling young married people some of the great facts which are ahead of them I will present only those difficulties which are inevitable, and leave to others the handling of ​disease. As things are to-day among British stock,^[2] it is the very exceptional women who find birth an entirely easy process of which the pain is trivial, and this is chiefly due to the bony structure fixed and limited in size, which stands as a gateway of pain between the infant and the outer world, between the young wife and her motherhood.

Before the hour of birth is reached, however, the young mother-to-be, if she is neither instructed nor helped by the wisdom of her elders, may have already endured much that it will distress and dismay her lover and husband to observe, and much more which she, being a woman, will endure without allowing him to perceive, although she may be so frightened that it may be hard indeed for her not to cry out in her bewildered pain. How much of this distress and pain is essentially "natural," how much is the artificial result of our mode of living and our ignorance of Nature's laws? What are the things which a healthy, finely-built young woman mated to a healthy young man must endure, those experiences which she cannot ​escape and those which she may with proper help avoid altogether or in part? It is the object of several chapters in this book to answer these questions more truthfully and I hope more helpfully than they have yet been answered. The things I deal with specially, because they will face nearly every healthy girl, are in most books ignored.

My chapters may appear superfluous to those who view the long list of books purporting to give advice to the young wife and expectant mother on how to treat herself and the coming child. I have read the majority of those books, and I write this one because of their failure to touch on the profoundest essentials in a way which will truly help the healthy and sensitive type of young people. The healthy, normal and happy in my mind's vision are the standard of the race: those who to-day to some extent foreshadow the strength and beauty of bodily and mental equipment which will become a commonplace when all have risen to their standard, and it is for them that I feel it imperative to add this one more book to the long list of books advising the young mother. With the young mother I also consider and try to help the young father who has been so strangely neglected and ignored and who also needs help.

The majority of the writers on cognate sub​jects, like the majority of the minds of those who are concerned at all with the problems of the young mother, really though perhaps unconsciously present studies in discasc, pictures of aberrations from the normal, accounts or innuendos dealing with illness and handicaps, with abnormal conditions which should never arise, and the knowledge of which should not be brought before the sensitive mind as if they were a usual and general thing. The acquiescence in a low standard of health, the discussion of discased conditions as though they were normal, or even as though they were unavoidable, arc intensive in their result and harmful to all who come under their influence. The race sickens ever more and more profoundly because of such influences.

We have to-day in our community a new conception in the Government Department of the Ministry of Health, but alas, that Ministry is engrossed in the contemplation of discase. In the present state of our civilization this is perhaps unavoidable, because there are enough people in the country of standing and experience in scientific research who have concerned themselves with the problems of the healthy and beautiful, and with the needs and requirements in the way of instruction and outward conditions and environment of those who by nature arc healthy and normal, and who ​desire to remain healthy and normal. Even these need instruction to compensate for that which Nature cannot give to those who toil apart from her bosom in the cities, where they cannot hear her voice for the roaring of the traffic. This is the pitcous plight of the majority of our citizens to-day, for so many live in towns.

Alas, that there are physical facts which all must face of a type which makes one feel that Nature is cruel in her treatment of us. When two young, beautiful and ardently happy beings are embarking upon the greatest work for the community which they can do, with a desire to create further beautiful and happy lives, it seems indeed an ironic and wanton mistake that there should be distressing physical experiences for both of them to endure. But "As gold is tried by the fire, so the heart is tried by pain," and if they are given a conscious knowledge of what they must face and what they may avoid, there will then be a firm foundation and a triumphant consummation to the visions and ideals of splendour and perfection which they can secure unimpaired through the trials which they conquer.