It seems most unlikely that any parent sets out with the express intention of killing their children, but sometimes it appears as though that is what we did. As a baby I assume that I was left to cry until my parents heard me – there were certainly no baby monitors about – although to be fair I did have a nanny – so I imagine that she was supposed to be alert to my every sound. Having said that, the first Nanny only arrived after my mother had left me outside in my pram during a snowstorm while she played bridge as she had forgotten all about me! When I was growing up my brother and I ran wild on the farm, climbing over farm machinery, playing in grain silos, jumping in and out of muddy ponds and crawling all over asbestos roofs. We rode our bicycles, without brakes or helmets, down to the local town to play on the swings and slides at the Rec – where everything was set in concrete and a fall would have meant a broken limb at least. One of our favourite games was to see who could hold on to the electric fence the longest. Our father had an old car with a dickey seat (this was an open seat outside the car at the back). It would be completely illegal today and was probably highly dangerous even then, but we loved it. Safety seats and air bags were things of the future and people drove drunk all the time. Somehow most of us survived. Of course, there was far less traffic in those days. Added to all that I longed to be a boy – mainly because I was always made to be the squaw in our games of cowboys and Indians (not sure you are allowed to call then that today) when all I wanted to be was a brave! If it had happened in today’s generation I would undoubtedly have been prescribed hormones and would have a beard and an even deeper voice that I already have. Not to say that old women can’t produce quite fine beards if they’re not careful – although most of us try to prevent this.
Fast forward twenty years and women were advised to eat liver during pregnancy for the iron. Likewise. we ate shellfish, soft cheese and under done steaks. I smoked and drank throughput my pregnancy and gave birth to an 11lb baby! When, my son was born I carefully put him to sleep on his front as we were advised to do in order to avoid cot death. A generation later parents were told that this highly dangerous. Now all babies are put to sleep on their back, although I think there was a short window when parents were told to put babies to sleep on their sides propped up by pillows. We did have a baby monitor which seemed very modern and advanced. It could also prove to be quite a trap for an exhausted mother as it was easy to forget and after excusing oneself from the dinner table ostensibly in order to check on the baby only to be heard by all one’s guests asking the sleeping infant ‘Aren’t these people ever going to leave?’ When my son started school I used to do the school run in the morning and take loads of children in my car – as many as I could fit in without any thought to seat belts – if we had stopped suddenly I hate to think what might of happened – but we didn’t think like that then. Where were ‘Elf and Safety? They must have existed, but I certainly wasn’t aware of them.
Once my youngest grandchildren came along the world had changed yet again. You couldn’t have paté or a nice Camembert while you were pregnant – as for drinking and smoking – these were practically criminal offences. Once the baby was born there were sensors to put under the mattress that detected if the baby had stopped breathing – we used to use a mirror to see if it steamed up as the baby breathed out. Modern babies don’t eat salt until they are a year old. You can download a breast feeding app – I’m not quite sure what this does – but the fashion for feeding has changed enormously from the days when ‘posh’ women employed wet nurses to feed their babies, and then came the advent of baby formula and people were able to stop breast feeding, then came ‘breast is best’, so women were encouraged to do it, at one point there was a fashion for using alternate breasts at each feed and I wondered if that didn’t make you feel a bit lop sided. In my day we were very discreet when we fed out babies either going to another room or draping a shawl over the working surface! Today women breast feed everywhere without anyone turning a hair.
One can’t help but wonder what the next generation will do. Luckily babies are pretty resilient and most of them survive each new method of child rearing as every set of parents flounders around doing their best and listening to the guru of the day.
Has Anyone Seen My Glasses? 