I spent this morning at the funeral of Arlene Eisenberg, the mother part of
the mother daughters team that brought the world What to Expect When You're
Expecting and its sequels. Arlene died yesterday morning, after a long
fight with cancer.
Arlene was a pillar of my synagogue, and ran a parenting group in the
neighborhood that was continually well attended, mostly by almost-desperate
mothers of first babies under six months. I had a running argument with her
in her last years, trying to persuade her to improve the breastfeeding
information in her books (and we may in fact see improvements over the coming
years, since one of her daughters, Heidi Murkoff, was the most
pro-sustained-bf of the three, I think). But however imperfect those
passages are, they have nonetheless been the means of persuading many young
American mothers, and perhaps others around the world -- the books are in 30
languages, I"m told -- that breastfeeding, which they might never have seen
done, was worth doing. Arlene breastfed her own three kids in the 50s and
60s, when it wasn't an easy thing for middle class American girls to do, and
nothing gave her so much joy as seeing happy nursing couples on the park
benches of Manhattan.
More important, the big points Arlene always pressed home is that your child
is an individual, and that he or she is entirely lovable. It may not get
you all the way to a fully AP lifestyle, but it is the most important bottom
line: be with your baby, pay attention to your baby, love your baby and let
your baby love you.
The funeral was relatively quiet and serious, as funerals normally are. But
when a young baby began to chat aloud from the back of the room, there were
only smiles. Nobody thought for a minute that Arlene would have preferred
to leave the world in a ceremony without babies.
Elisheva Urbas, NYC
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