Dec 16 2008
A Matter of Constitution?
Today was busy and satisfying, although it lacked one-on-one ‘me and the little one’ time, which no doubt I’ll make up for tonight 
In the morning, I volunteered at the breastfeeding drop-in, and found it rewarding to welcome two new mothers of newborns. I cannot believe how little they are, and how their cries sound like a pterodactyl dinosaur’s!
A lot of other my mothering ‘peers’ seem to be getting broody again… not me. Sure, I get the odd moment of thinking it would be nice, but only a fleeting moment. Maybe that’s just because I have a ‘high needs’ baby - but I also find the idea of being pregnant in the near future quite scary and improbable. When I was pregnant, it somehow felt like I wasn’t ‘me’…I remember that almost as soon as the Pibler was born, although I felt exhausted and on another planet, I also felt a huge sense of relief: I was back to being me, and I felt so normal in comparison!
After the drop-in I unsuccessfully tried to get the Pibler off for a nap - usually works just to ride him down the hill in his buggy, but not this time. Did some shopping and headed back home to teach my mom-and-toddler yoga class, only I was running so late my student was there before me! Luckily it’s all pretty relaxed, and actually very cute because her son (16 months old) has recently learned to say my son’s name, and gives him bear hugs all the time! It’s lovely.
Then I caught up on the phone with my lifelong friend who is all the way in Bristol and I sadly only see a couple of times a year, while cooking dinner with the Pibler on my back in the Ergo . He was too fractious, though, so i gave up and put him to bed at 5:30 p.m. One good side-effect of no naps is zonking out early, and easily, when it comes to bedtime! Unfortunately though, he’s already woken up twice since then!
My friend and yoga ’student’, who is also doing the breastfeeding peer support course and also volunteers at the drop-in, said something that interested me, on her way out today: that she thinks it may be a sort of ‘constitutional’ (that’s my word, I can’t remember what word she used) thing that determines whether mothers are able to abandon, for example, ideas of ’scheduled feeds’ a la Gina-Ford, and feed their babies as much as they need to, in order to get a good supply going. That is, women who have an inherently very strong need for ‘order’ and predictability in their lives, and tolerate mess and chaos less well, will struggle to embrace the inherent chaos of motherhood.
This is close to the topic I dealt with in my article ‘Ten Years On: Surrendering to the Shifting Tides of Motherhood’ in the latest issue of ‘natural parenting’ magazine Juno. I wrote about how I chose the path of least resistance, and abandoned my ideas of how things ’should’ be; and my journey as a mother has been so much richer and more of a learning experience, because of it. For me the key difference is whether you see your child as having something to teach you (and I think the Pibler is my greatest spiritual teacher at the moment!), or if you see them as needing to learn all the lessons from you.
