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From:
Rachel Myr <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lactation Information and Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 1 Sep 2012 18:10:36 +0200
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Pat asks whether it's possible that mothering develops the way other
skills do according to P.Benner in 'From novice to expert'.  I would
say 'yes' about the practical parts of it and 'no' about the emotional
parts of it.

Everyone who has reached adulthood has had years of experience with
care and nurturing. EVERYONE.  The experience may have been dismal and
the care and nurture inadequate or even criminally negligent or
harmful, but without someone else doing numerous complicated things
over time to keep us alive when we were infants, none of us would be
here.  The experience begins at such a primal stage that we are mainly
unaware of what it has done to us, and what it has done is all the
more pervasive because we are unaware of most of it.

Very few people entering a profession in industrial societies have a
similar background at the start of their work career; trades are
mostly learned intellectually and more systematically than the way we
learn to mother. Even in apprenticeships we know we are in them, while
we don't spend much time as children thinking about how our childhood
is preparing us for parenthood. It just happens as a consequence of
what the people caring for us do every single day. I will not pretend
to know why some new mothers seem to take to it like a duck to water,
while others struggle for weeks or months or even longer, yearning for
a maternal feeling. All I know is that there are differences and those
differences matter in how I will approach working with a mother.

I believe that most of what we do as mothers (and fathers, just for
the record) is simply play back what was recorded during all those
acts of caring we experienced from the first moments of our lives, and
I will refrain from making any bombastic statement about when those
first moments occur, because I think the jury is still out on that
one.  We are not condemned to repeat every mistake our parents made,
because we have the ability to reflect, and to act with conscious
intent.

It has been the greatest gift of my life that my daughter has been so
willing to share her journey into motherhood with me, and the greatest
compliment I have ever had that she seeks my counsel along the way, as
she and her husband make their own choices as parents. It has given me
so much to think about when working with mothers I haven't known since
infancy . And, because I work in a stable community where I have lived
for a generation, it has also given me new ways of observing and
supporting the daughters of my friends, and my daughter's friends, as
they have children.

Naomi Stadlen's books on motherhood really appeal to me, and I'm glad
I read them just at the time I was becoming a grandmother. We need
better ways to talk about mothering so we can honor the fabulous work
the vast majority of the world's mothers do.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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