I don't think I've changed all that much since becoming a mom. If I've changed I've just become more like myself than ever—more of a homebody, more attached to having a plan—an amplification of who I was before.
One thing has definitely changed: I cannot learn about a child dying without starting to cry. It can be fiction, it can be non-fiction, it can be a 1,000 word essay or a 10 word tweet, it could have happened yesterday or 100 years ago—whatever it is, I will shed tears. Same with a baby being taken from its mother or lost in some way.
Of course these kinds of things were always upsetting, but I don't ever remember crying over them before. Not unless I had a personal connection to the tragedy. Learning about a 1-year-old who died of scarlet fever 159 years ago is not exactly new information that requires my immediate emotional response. And yet, I will now cry over it.
It makes sense, of course. In the course of human history, mothers who are attached to their babies probably do better on average in getting those babies to adulthood. Obviously I'm crying about my baby, and the idea of anything happening to him, but I also find myself crying for all the women who have had to live through their children's deaths.
Up until about 200 years ago, half of all children didn't live to their fifth birthday. That is so much cumulative grief, I don't even know how to think about it. So instead you will now find me over here crying about it occasionally.
6 comments:
I have Many Thoughts about this. First, it's a question whether people grieved their children as intensely when child mortality was 50% as they do now. Long historiographical debate about this, begun by Philip Aries and Lawrence Stone, who posited that people didn't love their families in the same way prior to the 19th C. (Or maybe at all.) I think we've discussed this before, but evidence is mixed. On the one hand, we have evidence of some premodern people intensely mourning their dead children since antiquity (Cicero). On the other hand, if you "read" social practices, they suggest less concern, so it may be that the intense mourners are exceptions? On the third hand, how do you determine in hindsight what does and doesn't count as intense or less intense grief and mourning, which are highly customary rituals whose emotional background is hard to read.
Second, from the first scene of Aristophanes' Assemblywomen, the argument for giving Athens over to the rule of women: "Let us therefore hand Athens over to them without endless discussions, without bothering ourselves about what they will do; let us simply hand them over the power, remembering that they are mothers and will
therefore spare the blood of our soldiers; besides, who will know
better than a mother how to forward provisions to the front?"
Subsequently, one of the two central arguments for women's suffrage. Weird?
Third, I also have this problem. It extends to watching bloody and violent shows generally unless they're so egregiously violent that it's comical (like zombie shows). I don't know if it's always thinking about YOUR babies that precipitates it. Maybe it's a more generalized empathy for mothers, heightened by the intensity of the experience of motherhood. That would link up with my second point above.
Interesting!
To your first point, with no evidence whatsoever, I think this is bogus. The way we talk about love or show grief has likely changed over the course of human history but I find it impossible to believe that mothers didn't love their children. I'm sure they were more aware of the possibility of death, and perhaps dealt with grief differently or thought about it differently, but I imagine their pain was similar to what a modern person would feel. After all, someone who is a very devout Christian today might talk about the pain of losing a child differently because they believe in an afterlife and the will of God, but I am sure their grief (while different) would be as deep as mine.
Re: Aristophanes, I personally dislike this argument for women's suffrage. It suggest that we might therefore deny political rights to women who are single or childless, which is stupid. Though it is interesting that they were talking about this all the way back in 391 BC.
And yes, I agree that I'm not always thinking about my baby in particular when I cry over these things. It's more like a general squishy-ness. Personally I'm not very sensitive to violence in general, but anything involving violence and babies upsets me.
I'm also skeptical, and the tide of historiography has turned against the thesis since it was first advanced in the '60s and '70s. Though that may just be a function of scholars needing something to argue against. I'm teaching a class on the family this term, and we're reading a couple of memoirs from the 17th C. that show a LOT of concern about dead babies. (One of them is called/by Glueckel of Hameln, which is amazing btw, I think you would enjoy.) On the other hand, one thing that really is different is that there was much greater discouragement of extended grief. There are forms of mourning (like sitting shiva for Jews, though I'm not sure if dead children merited a shiva), you do them, and when you're done, you have to move on or you're committing a kind of vice in destroying yourself over something we must all learn to accept. I think that is quite different now, in that our forms of mourning are much more encouraging of extended grief. (True not just for dead children, but more for dead children than other losses. I think we still have a roughly similar sort of disdain for people who can't get past the deaths of, say, their parents, especially as adults.) I agree that the change in forms of grief is a much more compelling explanation for the social evidence of abbreviated concern. (Aries's other evidence is stuff like medieval and early modern family portraits excluding very young children b/c - he claims - they didn't view them as fully members of the family until they passed the most dangerous years of infancy. Also delayed naming, also to wait until the child might be likely to live before investing emotionally in it, and failure to give children under a certain age a headstone when they died.)
I think the strangest irony of this shift is that way fewer people actually HAVE children now, and they have fewer children. When they were numerous, they were expendable. You could lose babies over and over and just keep having them (the other diarist we're reading is Samuel Sewall, a Puritan who lost something like 6 of his 9 children - which he ascribed to God's punishment for his participation in the Salem witch trials). But once we elevated their status and increased emotional attachment to them (and also made it possible to preserve them from many of the things that killed them before!), we stopped having them. I mean, you could say that this is just the logic of supply and demand - when supply is high, price is low. But since people individually control their supply in this case, I'm not sure that analogy applies. Or that kind of modern emotional investment expected is necessarily a limited resource for parents; we just can't have 8 kids anymore and invest the same way, so we logically have to have fewer. But I think also that there is a strange desperation underlying this shift - every baby actually born is viewed as having inestimable value, we go to extreme lengths to conceive babies (infertility treatments, surrogacy, etc), we dignify every configuration of raising them with the title of family. Any baby born in the US today is almost guaranteed an enormously improved life relative to almost any child born 200 yrs ago. It's like we'd do anything for babies. Except have them. But when people had many of them, there was a kind of confidence about the future that didn't require such devotion to them. There will always be more! Now, it's like we're not actually sure there will be.
Sorry, many words. As I said, I have Many Thoughts on this.
Don't worry, the main argument for women's suffrage was the Declaration of Independence one, the principle of equality. But it's quite likely that the one that actually persuaded non-suffragists to support the change was the Mom Vote one.
Yes it's true individual babies are much more important now, but we also value life more highly now. More babies died but also more people died in general, and in horrible ways. Life is more precious now even as we live longer and can be cured of many diseases and infections that killed us before. Does that mean love has also changed? Maybe its social expression has changed, but the emotion itself?
I don't have an argument supported by secondary sources, but it's very hard for me to think the individual experience of loving your child has changed, even as we think differently about children in the aggregate. I don't know that I would love my 5th or 6th baby less than the one I have now. I can't say for sure, but I have a feeling that's not how love works. I would definitely be unable to afford to pay for their daycare or college expenses, but I would still love them.
Also I have Many Thoughts about IVF and surrogacy and the extreme lengths people now go to in order to have a baby. But those thoughts are very muddled and wrapped up in a lot of political issues that are pretty fraught. I wish someone would write a nuanced book about all this (or recommend one to me) because I think there is a lot to say about the moral implications of all this reproductive technology.
I have been thinking about this a bit because I've been watching the BBC series Call the Midwife. It's in the 50s-60s, so pretty modern but still with a lot more risks and death in childbirth and childhood disease than we have now. Anyway, I don't think people loved their families any less, or experienced less pain that we would now at a child dying, but I do think the long term grieving process would be different when it was a common occurrence. Humans are such social creatures and when your grief is part of a frequent collective experience, I think you are able to process it differently. If one of my kids died of an infectious disease I would feel almost uniquely singled out by the universe for terrible misfortune, and almost no one I know would have experienced anything remotely similar. This seems like it would be a different experience if almost everyone I knew had gone through the same thing.
I too enjoy Call the Midwife :)
And yes, I definitely agree that the social expression of grief would be different when illness and the infant mortality was more common.
I just find it difficult to accept that the actual feeling of losing a child would be different, even if childhood death was more common. I guess something in me just wants to believe that a mother's love is a human constant and not a social construct.
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