"BEFORE THE REALITY of the delivery room, I was certain that the ultimate extension of my career as a teacher would be my involvement in my own child's quest for identity. I felt that that experience would reveal to me the meaning of my own existence. I entered motherhood searching for the new dimension that would make my womanhood complete. Here, then, are the thoughts and feelings of the first six months recorded in my journal as I began my new life."

In one moment of undrugged physical release, our baby is thrust into the world, uniting us, husband and wife, in the communion of birth. We join hands as we watch his tiny face crumple in protest. My own body, so recently reaching into unknown reserves of energy, relaxes beneath a reviving flood of undiluted emotion. I share with women throughout the centuries the joy of bearing my husband a son.

The baby, a startling fragile-looking creature, is handed to me for a moment and then to his father. I refuse to acknowledge my own awkwardness. Will I not somehow be endowed with the accumulated wisdom of mothers before me?

I am wheeled from the delivery room and permitted to watch my son's first bathing. Feeling entirely satisfied to let the nurse handle him, I dismiss as fantasy the notion that the process of giving birth mystically transforms a woman into a mother. And later, in my hospital room, I bask in the lingering glow of achievement, content to rest. Not until a few hours later does an instinctive hunger to cuddle my child and nourish him rise within me.
The nurse helps me prepare for this nursing. Then she hands me a nest of soft wrappings that holds a tiny red face, mouth stretched wide. Instinct bobs his head back in a body-quivering search for the warm nipple. He is so trusting and I am so clumsy. And already he's asleep, his mouth open against my breast. Now motherhood is creeping over my old self like a long-awaited tomorrow that finally is today. I have lived it all again and again in my mind, but without the intoxication.

Even while he's asleep, his lips are remembering milk. His chin trembles unexpectedly;his body jerks without waking;his muscles respond to unwilled urges. I could spend half of each day just watching him.

Already, in his third day of life, the sound of my voice seems to have meaning for him. Milk will soothe him back into the sleep he never fully woke from. This newly discovered pleasure causes him to call out with impatience. To me his cry sounds rich and strong.
It seems so simple to put your baby on your shoulder and wait for a burp, but little knees used to being curled up to the chin leave you with a round baby that rolls down into your lap.

Carefully choosing from the travel case the exact baby clothes to suit the weather, I am aware that my husband and I are acting worse than newlyweds. We have that almost embarrassing pride gleaming in our eyes and the awkward meticulousness of our own justassumed roles. The nurse removes our son's hospital garments and wraps his strangely long and straggly body in the oversized going-home outfit that once looked so unbelievably small. Understanding nurses call good-by, and the elevator takes us down, a family now.

Out in the parking lot my husband dashes around in the fall drizzle, solicitously opening car doors, undoubtedly trying to stay in motion lest the nurse decide to hand him the baby. It's a little scary taking this helpless creature and driving off with him. What if he starts crying and I can't figure out how to stop him? I can't explain things to him--that he can trust me to feed him, change him, burp him or just hold him. And babies cry so loud. He won't understand that he doesn't have to let everyone know he's unhappy. Just me.

Our son is one week old. There he lies, flushed from yelling, his bowlegs attached below his abdomen where his hips will be, his softly curved arms attached below his ears where his shoulders will be.
He dominates my life. My days are a whirl of diapers and false-alarm hunger cries to be eased with a pacifier. My nights are a daze of half-heard wails answered with half-remembered feedings and a midnight rendezvous with the diaper pail. My former routines no longer serve me. I must concentrate on every movement and every minute until the mechanics are a part of me and motherhood allows me to resume my role as wife, sharing with my husband the wonder of being a parent.

We reflect upon our new status and decide there's nothing unusual about a new father's feeling terribly masculine and also terribly uninvolved in the three-ring circus his home has become.Our son looks like a relic from a miniature monastery, with his long gown and smooth scalp. He fits the part of a tiny old holy man toothlessly wise. The only bits of world that penetrate into his hazy awareness are sudden bursts of light let in at random by his eyes. At times his whole being seems concentrated unblinkingly on a beam of light. Perhaps he's struggling with an idea too complex to absorb.

To have my baby take nourishment from my body, to see his eyes drift shut, to hear his purring contentment, is painfully exquisite. How many mothers spend their children's lives trying to satisfy their own urge to give and protect and be needed? Now is the time to give myself over to the cuddling and crooning, so that as his need diminishes I can loose my hold without regret.

Now at three months, I am suddenly faced with a crisis. As he sucks on his pacifier his grabbing fingers accidentally pull it out, leaving his mouth naked. Instinctively he plugs up the space between his lips with the built-in pacifier--his little mouth closes around his thumb. I watch apprehensively like a parent seeing her son sampling his first cigarette, envisioning him hooked on the habit but fearing to interfere. Fending off the warnings left by psychologists in my memory, I finally force myself to let my natural reactions guide me.

These newly acquired responsibilities are awesome. My gaze, voice, touch, have the power to bring about rewarding smiles, happy sounds and hearty eating, or they can encourage tears and fussy meals and frustrated thumb-sucking. I see motherhood ahead of me like an overgrown path that disappears into a dark woods. On one side is the fear of forcing a child into a mold not his own;on the other, the danger of leaving him to be molded by indifferent circumstances. Who am I to decide which behavior shall bring rewards and which reproof?

I am his mother.

Our son is four months old. The center of his world, the source of all pleasure and all unhappiness, is oral sensation. If he could fit the whole world into his mouth, he would understand all there is to know. He tries frantically to stretch his lips to admit both fists into the inner sanctum, the better to comprehend their purpose. His sausage feet loom before his eyes--within grabbing distance, but inaccessible to his waiting mouth.

And when he finally makes it over from his back to his belly, my husband and I realize that our own muscles have tensed, urging him on.
Secure within his hazy aura of mother love, he reaches out to his father. His eyes reveal the moment when indifference to this father familiar figure changes to recognition.

The baby's concentration is intense as he studies our eating movements. He mimics our simplest gestures. But also he has his own style of table manners:eagerly he dumps his peaches in my lap, slurps from his cup before plunking it to the floor, smears a handful of beets into his high-chair tray, gleefully sneezes cereal in my face.

The half-year mark approaches, and the novelty of my breast as the milk machine is gone. His lips lose their hold on the nipple in the fascination of discovering a button or stroking my sweater's softness. I am prepared to surrender the lifeline of milk, knowing that his needs and mine must be one.

I watch our son perform award-winning roles, unconcerned about audience acclaim. He is a turtle accidentally stranded on a rock, frantically projecting head and limbs high in the air, but unable to budge;a victorious boxer, clasping hands in triumph. He is The Thinker, scratching pensively behind his ear;a Lilliputian superman with his bib flung over the shoulders.

I nurse him for the last time, savoring the ritual about-to-be-memory. My thoughts go back to when he emerged from the womb, clothed only in innocence, skilled only in searching. Soon he will unlock the mysteries of self-propulsion. One dare not think of the terrible void that will be left by the absence of this tiny, incredibly lovable being.
But motherhood sweeps away all thoughts of the impermanence of the human body in a wild exhilaration of love and dreams, and the bearable ache of letting go little by little, day by day. As my child struggles to sit, to search out the sounds and feel of the world, I sense that my role these six months has been beneath him, supporting. From now on my role will be from above, lifting.

Motherhood feels comfortable(#).

@1972 by the McCall Publishing Co.
"The Diary of a New Mother" appeared in Redbook
September '72, by Judith Geissler

ARTICLES ON THE FIRST FLOOR
ARTICLE No. 1
THE BIBLE'S TIMELESS--AND TIMELY--INSIGHTS by Blanton
ARTICLE No. 2
A SIMPLE SHORTCUT TO SET YOU FREE by Davis
ARTICLE No. 4
THE REMARKABLE SELF-HEALING POWER OF THE MIND by Hunt
ARTICLE No. 5
OPEN YOUR EYES TO THE BEAUTY AROUND YOU by Rau

No. 6:WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE? by Viorst
No. 7:THE SECRET OF HAVING FUN by LeShan
No. 8:PIED PIPER OF SEVENTH AVENUE by Comer
No. 9:OBEY THAT IMPULSE by Marston
No. 10:THE LOVING MESSAGE IN A TOUCH by Lobsenz

And some more...
No. 11:THE WISDOM OF TEARS by Hunt
No. 12:HAVE YOU AN EDUCATED HEART? by Burgess
No. 13:THE STRANGE POWERS OF INTUITION by Lagemann
No. 14:WHY KIDS ARE 20 DEGREES COOLER by Mills
No. 15:THE RIGHT DIET FOR YOU by Stare

And still some more...
No. 16:STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT THE LIVING-TOGETHER ARRANGEMENT by Montague
No. 17:...The ABC's of It by Lakein
No. 18:The Day We Flew the Kites by Fowler
No. 19:"Touched by Something Divine" by Selzer
No. 20:How to Live 365 Days a Year by Schindler

Ascend to Second Floor
(Recommended)
Ascend to Third Floor