Nothing makes you appreciate your mother like becoming a mother yourself. For all the times my mom has answered my frantic questions, offered guidance, and listened to my frustrations, I realized that I rarely ask her about her own experience raising children…or my grandmother, for that matter. So I sat down with them to talk about what has changed in ‘mothering’ since the 1950’s and 1980’s.
Here is a transcript of our conversation:
Me: What was it like being pregnant? Did people give you advice?
- Mom: Well, they just started doing ultrasounds in the mid-80’s. When I was pregnant with you, they did them routinely halfway through. And I remember someone at work saying, “Oh, I wouldn’t have that done. The ultrasound is going to damage a baby’s ears; they’ll have bad hearing.”
- Grandma: See, we never had any ultrasounds.
Me: What were your prenatal visits like?
- Grandma: They would just listen to the heartbeat and ask how you were feeling.
Me: Would they talk about your diet?
- Grandma: No, and they never said anything about drinking either. But I didn’t anyway.
Me: What was it like when you went to the hospital to give birth?
- Grandma: The men were not allowed in. Once you were there, you were in their hands.
Me: So whatever they would need to do, they would just do. Now people have birth plans, where you write down what your preferences are.
- Grandma: No, they just took you in the delivery room and then they gave you- I think Ether, at that time.
- Mom: We went through Lamaze classes.
Me: But for you, Dad was there, right?
- Mom: Yup. They were just starting to come around to letting you labor and deliver in the same room.
Me: So you would have to move when it was time to push?
- Mom: Yeah. Then we would only spend one night at the hospital.
- Grandma: I stayed seven nights. We didn’t get out of bed until the third day; then you could sit on the edge of the bed and exercise your legs.
- Mom: Well, you didn’t have your babies in your room either.
- Grandma: When I gave birth in the army hospital, the baby was in our room. And then I’d have to go to the kitchen to get a bottle for her. And when we ate, we had to go to the dining room and leave our baby in the room.
Me: What was a typical day like when your kids were little? What kinds of things would you do?
- Grandma: They had no toys, hardly at all. They would play with boxes and stuff like that. As for clothes, our kids had hardly anything. They had one good outfit, and even that wasn’t very good.
- Mom: We would wear hand-me-downs. They just went from one kid to the next to the next.
- Grandma: And that’s another thing. When our babies were little, we never dressed them up until they were probably six months old. They wore these little nighties.
- Mom: Or receiving blankets. Always wrapped up, like you swaddle them now. But all day long you’d keep them in a blanket when they were little. So I can see where the swaddling comes back now.
- Grandma: You put these little nighties on and wrapped them up in a receiving blanket. What else was different…well, we had no car seats. The kids just piled in the car. We didn’t even have seat belts. When we drove back to Michigan from the army [from Virginia], your dad was a year old, and his sister was two months old. We had all of our stuff in the back seat, and there was about a foot of space left at the top, and that’s where the baby laid, up there. All the way home. She slept all the way. I had to wake her up to feed her.
Me: Was breastfeeding popular when you were having babies?
- Grandma: Yeah, I did it for a while. And instead of formula, we had Carnation milk. We’d add water to it and a little syrup. That was our formula.
Me: I’ve heard when formula first came out, breastfeeding wasn’t as popular.
- Mom: Mothers were working; that was a big change. And the pumps now are all electric. I had a pump, but it was manual, so by the time I went back to work I didn’t even give a thought. I just quit nursing.
- Grandma: And after the kids were a month old we started putting cereal in their milk before they went to bed. So they slept all night! And we had cloth diapers.
Me: That’s getting popular again! We used cloth diapers for a while.
- Grandma: They have those services where they pick them up, don’t they? We had to wash our own.
- Mom: Through the ringer washing machine. I remember with my mom.
- Grandma: And babies slept on their stomachs.
- Mom: And ours were on their sides. We’d use a blanket to prop them up.
Me: And now we put them on their backs. How about working? I’m sure while you were having kids a lot of women weren’t working outside the home.
- Grandma: No. At that time, not a lot of women worked.
Me: Now I think there’s a lot of pressure. Women who stay home feel like they should be working, and women who work feel like they should be staying home.
- Grandma: Well, I helped outside a lot on the farm.
Me: What was harder about being a mom then?
- Grandma: The washing. We had no dryers. And washing the diapers out. When they were messy, you had a hard time bleaching them. We hung everything outside, and I think that helped. And we didn’t have carriers, like that car seat you have. When we went away, we carried them. We had them in our laps all the time.
Me: What about the number of kids you had? Was that something you planned?
- Grandma: We just took them as they came. We didn’t have birth control.
Me: Now everyone thinks about how many kids they want and how they’re going to space them and when to start.
- Grandma: And as far as disciplining kids, you could paddle their butt. I still think some kids nowadays need that.
- Mom: I think it’s easier not to discipline them, to give them what they want. And sometimes you just don’t have the patience. You come home; you’re tired. It’s easy to give in. But in the long run it’s better.
Me: Is there any advice you have for moms of my generation?
- Grandma: Every mom is different.
- Mom: Let them get dirty. Let them make their own games. Let them just play.
- Grandma: Years ago, we had to. We didn’t have much. The kids played outside all the time. Made mud pies. They just went outside on the farm.
- Mom: There were a lot of kids in families too, so you always had someone to play with. We were fortunate to have the neighbors who were your age, so you played outside a lot. But we would let you, too. I guess we didn’t worry about someone picking you up on the street.
Me: Well, you knew everyone here, and you knew it was safe.
- Mom: And there wasn’t a lot of that going on. Maybe there was, but we didn’t hear about it.
- Grandma: And birthdays. Now kids get all this stuff for their birthdays. They get more for one birthday than we got all our lives. For our kids, we had cake and ice cream, and that was it.
- Mom: It’s hard, because you don’t want your kid to be the one that’s left out. Especially now with technology.
Me: And the Internet.
- Grandma: It is kind of scary, really. There are so many good things about the Internet, but there’s also a lot of bad things.
- Mom: I think you have to have limits, what they can do, what they can’t do.
- Grandma: I guess I’m old-fashioned. I can’t get into it. I’ve never sent a text in my life.
Me: I wonder, “What is his generation going to be like?” Texting will be old-fashioned for them.
- Mom: You feel like you have to keep up.
Me: How about baby-proofing?
- Grandma: We never had that.
Me: Locks on the cabinets, outlet covers…
- Grandma: Nope. I just said, “Stay out of there or I’ll paddle your butt.” It’s so different now.
- Mom: I guess the thing that bothers me the most is the respect, when you see young ones who don’t even respect their great-grandparents. At least teach your kids to respect elders and other people. As a grandparent, it’s really not your position. The parents need to teach that. I think kids learn more from what they see.
Me: Are there things that you think are the same for moms across all generations?
- Mom: I feel that you’re lucky to be a mother, you know? You’ve got that bond the whole time, and you never lose it. I’m sure a father has it too, but a mother is something different. It’s something special.
- Grandma: Years ago, the men weren’t involved with caring for the kids at all. On the farm, there was no time. Today men do a lot of cooking, change diapers. Years ago, they didn’t do any of that.
- Mom: I’ve seen that change, from my dad, to when I was a mom, now to your generation. Fathers get more and more involved, which is very, very good.
- Grandma: Probably because of women working.
- Mom: And they’re involved more from the beginning, too.
- Grandma: Our guys weren’t even allowed in the delivery room.
- Mom: So they didn’t have that immediate connection.
- Grandma: They’re a lot different than they used to be, that’s for sure.
- Mom: And it’s good.
- Grandma: It’s really good.
- Mom: And it made a difference that when we had you kids, your dad was ready for it.
Me: Do you think a lot of your friends and siblings were waiting for when they felt ready to have kids?
- Mom: I think people were starting to think about it more in my generation.
Me: Grandma, for you, it’s just what people did.
- Grandma: Well, like I said, no birth control. They told us when you nursed you couldn’t get pregnant.
Me: Which is not true.
- Grandma: Yeah, sometimes people did get pregnant anyway.
Learn from the women who have mothered you: love being a mom, let your kids play outside and get dirty, and remember that guidelines will always change, and it’s important to be flexible, and go easy on yourself.
Someday, we will be able to tell our children and our children’s children the crazy stories about how we raised them. And they will wonder how they ever survived, and they will love us anyway.
