Learning Patient Parenting

By Nora Rock
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"I have a new mantra," my mother told me last week: "Effort is fortune".

I had to laugh, not because mantras are new to my mother - she loves them - but because she already works harder than most people I know. Effort is a good thing in our society. We like to see hard workers succeed, and we're uncomfortable with "dumb" luck, with "blind" faith, with anything that implies just sitting around.

But are we possibly working too hard to think, to step back and consider whether our effort is generating the results we want? Do we really want to work extra hours to pay for the new house with four bathrooms, with its three extra toilets to clean? Must we have the big promotion, and the new responsibility of supervising a group of people as ambitious and demanding as ourselves? Or, if most of our hard work is done at home, do we need to be the parents of a child who can read at the age of three, and why?

From an evolutionary standpoint, effort equals survival, so we come by it honestly. But as life has gotten easier, and as the true necessities of life that we must procure directly have dwindled in number, we have had to become more creative about the directions in which we channel our efforts. Our homes are certainly much cleaner (though not necessarily healthier) than the caves and shelters and cabins that housed our foremothers. We nurture personal talents passed on, probably unwittingly, by ancestors who went before and had more cooking and washing to do. And, because being a good parent is highly valued these days, we devote a lot of energy to "raising" our kids.

If we take our cues from most popular media, or from, say, the family courts, we're told that a good parent is an active parent, a doer, one who spends quality time - instructing, raising, bringing kids up. But what if we didn't bring them up? What if we did nothing but watch?

I had my first baby at home. People were surprised. I'm a lawyer, a little conservative, a mainstream type of person. But when I was in college a girlfriend told me about another friend who had a midwife-assisted birth at home, and a little light went on in my head. In a lawyerly way, I checked it out. The first place I went was the law library, and my introduction to homebirth came by way of the transcript of a coroner's inquest into a homebirth death. The baby had lived only a couple of hours. Had she been born in hospital, the coroner found, she might have lived a couple of days. Certain things would have been done, efforts would have been made that weren't practicable at home. I was undeterred. Three years later I had my own homebirth.

But despite being able to rhyme off the safety statistics, I had trouble answering the questions of others about my own, personal reasons. Having now had a few years perspective, and another homebirth besides, I've come to the conclusion that the aspects of birth at home that most attracted me were the passives, the not dones. No drugs. No induction. No speeding car in the middle of the night.

Passivity is woven through the language of midwifery. A midwife is a with-woman, a sitter and a watcher. She doesn't deliver your baby, she catches him: safe sure hands at the end of his journey. The less she does, the less effort expended, the more highly she rates her workday. It's almost an anti-profession; and certainly very alien to what my husband and I were used to in our own careers. But these women touched our lives when we were exposed, raw with the wonder of birth and new parenthood. According to postpartum author Robin Lim, birth leaves a person temporarily open, not just in the anatomical sense but generally vulnerable to emotion and impression(1). And I think our various midwives, despite their hands-off policy, left deep imprints on us as parents.

As our children grow, the influence of that passive midwifery philosophy seems to float to the surface out of nowhere. I remember asking our first midwife how she knew when to wean her own children. Preferring to let me find out for myself, she gave me a joking answer. Our own baby nursed past his first birthday, then his second. My journal is sprinkled with industrious entries: "began weaning him today", but they grow farther and farther apart, until somewhere along the line, heavy and lazy with another on the way, I moved on to other concerns. He nursed past three, without even a notation to mark his final stopping.

There are notes, relentless and obsessive, chronicling the same child's waking in the night. He finally slept through at age twenty-five months, one week. In the months leading up to that first silent night we developed many plans of action, but we were too exhausted to follow them through. It was abundantly clear that nothing we ever did or didn't do about it made one whit of difference.