Mothers feel attacked. By friends, strangers, family, media, doctors. Any time something goes wrong with her child — an accident, bad behavior, illness— the mother is to blame. She feels constantly scrutinized while she’s pregnant. Are you really going to have that cup of coffee? Shouldn’t you be resting? Aren’t you worried about the baby? And even before conception, a potential mother is bombarded by all kinds of pressures — are you too old, are you too young, are you good enough? And yet, who is worrying about her baby more than anybody else? The mother.
I went through what most women went through — a laundry list of commonplace attacks during the time leading up to, and after, my son’s birth. But while I was pregnant, I was also gestating a documentary called “In Utero”. The subject? Life during pregnancy — what happens to the mother and the fetus during those ten months and how those lives, and the environment surrounding them, interact and inform one another.
What I learned while researching “In Utero” was that science tells us not to attack mothers. Why? Because the more stress we put on mothers, the more stress is passed onto the babies they carry.
[For more of this story, written by Kathleen Man Gyllenhaal, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...e971e4b0cbf01e9f5d48]
Comments (0)