Was accidentally swept up into a support group for mothers with 3 to 6-month-old babies today; the details of how this happened aren't that interesting, so I won't give them. It was painful in a sense to revisit that difficult time; it seems to me that very nearly all mothers go through a form of unconscious hazing from the baby during those second three months, either with sleep issues or teething or feeding problems and so on. And by the second trimester of the baby's life, the fatigue factor is so high for most moms that...I don't even want to think about it.
Be that as it may--it was interesting to compare this support group with the only other mom's support group I've ever attended. I went to one of these ten months ago, in which the babies' ages ranged from seven weeks to three months; I was still pregnant, and was just there to see what kind of problems were emerging for the new mothers. It turns out that the complaints and problems expressed by the moms in today's group were almost identical to the ones expressed by the mothers ten months ago. "My baby wakes me up five times a night"; "He just cries and cries"; "I have breastfeeding issues" and so forth.
Attending these two groups reminded me of two things: the extraordinary difficulty of parenting a young child, and the utter ordinariness of it. I'm sure that women five thousand years ago were communicating to each other about the same sorts of issues discussed by these two groups. I'm sure women have been exchanging advice on teething, colic and sleep in every generation since men and women came into existence. Yet, this sort of discussion doesn't lose its vitality.
It has been my experience that whenever crucial information is being exchanged in a group setting (and I do believe that with some mothers, the information they receive in these groups, or even just the verbal support, saves them from depression or nervous breakdowns), you can feel it; the mothers are listening keenly, and asking a great number of questions about every subject that comes up. A lot of information is exchanged in a short time, and sometimes, you can see the relief flooding into a mother when she receives a piece of information that solves a major problem for her.
Come to think of it--I learned today about a teething remedy, Camelia, that I'd never heard of before--they claimed it works wonders, so I'll definitely try it the next time my son is having teething problems.
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