Radiant Motherhood/Chapter 9

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of the many.

Tacore: Gitanjali.

WITH all the passion for children, with the protective chivalrous feeling towards his wife which a well born and well knit man instinctively feels, through all the joy of fatherhood that is coming and the delight in its accomplishment, there must run a thread of intense distress at his own helplessness to help. With every consideration that the most resourceful man can think of towards his wife, with every helpful, tender, encouraging, supporting thing that he can do, how little is his share during all these months in the burden of the coming parenthood. If, through sympathy, he feels each pang his wife may feel; ​if, through sympathy, he curtails his activity to rest with her, nevertheless it is a voluntary abnegation, and if it became intolerable at any moment he could escape; he could run over the hills; he could go for a day's fierce solitude and activity wherever his feet desired to lead him; but he knows that his wife cannot, that she is chained, that not for a moment of the day or night for nine months can she lay down. the burden for a brief rest—that there is no exit for her from this imprisonment of so many of her potentialities but through the gateway of agonizing pain.

The instinct behind marriage is often a feeling of chivalrous devotion towards a tender and confiding girl, and the desire to give her every protection. The man finds, however, that his act has placed the one whom he desired to protect in such a position that she must bear the greatest burden possible for a human being to bear, and must bear it alone. This must be a deep distress to an imaginative man of integrity, although the distress be mingled with other and joyous feelings. To pretend that it is not so, to say that the joy of coming parenthood should and does wipe out all such undercurrents of thought is merely to be callous or silly. To repress an intense feeling, to pretend that it is not there, may give an apparent surface bravery or brightness. But such repression is ​ultimately destructive to the consciousness and whole physique of the one who, thus gallantly to himself, endeavours to deny the truth, and is often apt to lead to deeper disorders. The modern school of psycho-analysts who endeavour to set right the effects of mental strain often discover that throughout life, perhaps dating from childhood, a personality has been handicapped and weakened by some deep suppression of an intensely experienced emotion.

In my opinion, the pretence that a sensitive man does not feel, and does not endeavour to conceal his feeling about his relation to his wife, particularly at the time of their first coming parenthood is to dishonour man's capacity and his imagination. Why imply that a rational man does not experience what surely all but a brute must feel. It impoverishes our life of emotional expression, and it tends to injure the man himself, to increase the strain by the pretence that the strain is not there. I know, for instance, one man who fainted at the time his wife gave birth to their child, and who, under no consideration, would allow her to have a second child, although he had intensely desired and looked forward to the fatherhood of a large family before he knew the actual physical experiences which it entailed. Such a man, in my opinion, was a good father wasted by an excess of emotion made all the more intensely des​tructive to himself by the endeavour to maintain the totally artificial and indeed the crude attitude which is supposed to be "correct" for a man, namely a sort of dissociation of himself from his wife's experiences and a hardened lack of recognition of all that is involved. It is surely better to recognize that there is that intense and poignant sense of helplessness, that the sensitive and developed young man should and does feel it, but that it should be recognized as the compensating price which he pays for fatherhood.

If we are ever to raise our race to the point when every child is so precious that no child can be hungry, neglected or unwanted, the conscious price which the father pays for his children will be one of the assets in valuing the children of the nation. It is, therefore, better to acknowledge and encourage such sensitiveness in the father by allowing the open and honourable expression of such feeling, and thus to avoid that almost neurotic and destructive effect of the suppression of such intense feeling as warped the father mentioned above. Because, if the wife avails herself of the advice I give in this book, and if the time for parenthood is chosen rightly and wisely in relation to her general health, and it is ascertained before she embarks upon potential motherhood that her bodily and bony structure is fit for motherhood, ​then though the experiences of both will be difficult and profound in their testing of the quality of each other, motherhood should not result in any excessive strain, and should indeed be a time of wonderful life activity.

With all needless ill-health, and wanton ugliness and wasteful distress which at present are artificially involved in it, once swept away, potential motherhood should not be an unendurable burden. Though the father's feelings should be intense and poignant on behalf of his wife and though she may go through searching experiences, yet the gladness should so preponderatingly weigh in the balance in excess of the troubles and difficulties that no normally healthy and well endowed young couple should ever suffer so much that they dare not face a second maternity, as happens alas only too often to-day.

On quite a lower plane, but nevertheless on the one so essential that it greatly affects all the rest of life, is the too frequent distress of the young father-to-be about the more material provision of all that is necessary for his wife. In counting the cost of the coming parenthood, too often quite heavy expenses are unforeseen, and, with a fixed income, the young man may have the intense distress of being unable to provide all that his wife not only wishes but really ought to have. Recent years, for instance, ​were times of extraordinary difficulty for all women who bore children, and who had a naturally healthy and proper desire to eat fruit. With oranges at a shilling each, as they were in the winter of 1918–19, how could an ordinary young couple afford a glassful of orange juice a day, which I recommend as profoundly valuable (see p. 90). It was obviously impossible. Such a time, of course, one hopes will never be repeated. It was a period of undue strain, when none, considering the future of the race, should have borne a child unless private reasons made it specially advisable.

But apart from such excessive and unprecedented difficulties, there are, and probably always will be, difficulties for the young man who desires to provide everything that can benefit his wife. Not long ago in the newspapers, a budget of the cost of the baby in an ordinary lower middle class home was given, and there was an item: "Dentist's bill for the mother, twenty pounds." A wise comment was made on this that, alas, it is by no means an unusual, indeed it is a usual experience that the coming child adversely affects the mother's teeth, and both for the health of the baby and the mother they should be attended to. Possibly, even her very life may depend on her teeth being thoroughly free from decay after the birth. A heavy dentist's bill is too often ​an unexpected anxiety to the young husband, so that the teeth are neglected. Neglected teeth either weaken, or may actually result in the death of the mother from their decay, causing internal poisoning, to which she is peculiarly liable after bearing a child.

Then too, there are unexpected and heavy expenses which are unforeseen through a variety of circumstances, such, for instance, as the uncertainty of the date of the birth. Those who go to nursing homes, as many are now doing owing to housing and service difficulties, experience this trial more acutely than others. They expect and plan, perhaps, for the birth within a given week, and the baby may delay two or three or even more weeks beyond the calculated time. Young couples, scarcely able to afford the heavy expenses of a good nursing home, who yet had saved sufficient to allow the wife three weeks there, may have their plans quite dislocated by a delay of three weeks in the infant's appearance, resulting in the mother unexpectedly having to remain double the length of time for which they had saved the money for the nursing home. The young father is then faced by the sordid difficulty of finding the necessary money, and unless he is gifted in such a way as to make extra earning a possibility, is under a condition of strain. Just when all his free energy and time should be ​devoted to companionship with his wife and infant, he has to spend extra hours working at high pressure in order to meet unexpected expenses. The young father-to-be who wishes to maintain the right and beautiful atmosphere around his coming child should inform himself of all certain and likely contingencies of expense, and should make due provision for these before the great act of calling into being one for whom he is primarily responsible.

To a healthy man, also, there may be a period of chastening experience in sharing daily life with one who is out of health. Though the prospective mother ought not to be in any way invalided, yet, alas, as things are, too often she is, and only an unselfish man will fail to resent the personal sacrifice which he endures as a result.

There is a certain self-centred type of man who may, with the most model intentions and in order to lead a self-respecting life, marry, and who may find the resulting pregnancy of his wife very disconcerting to himself and very thwarting to his own requirements. With a certain bitter selfishness, this attitude was unconsciously expressed by one of my correspondents in the following words: "Something must be done to prevent any more children; imagine what a wretched time I have with my wife sick every day for nine months." Perhaps the reader ​can scarcely restrain a smile at so callously self-centred an attitude on the part of a husband, but, nevertheless, that man does have a real and difficult physical problem before him. One way, of course, in which to help such a man would be to place such help and knowledge before his wife that her motherhood should be more normal, and not so terrible an experience for her.