Parents and Children
Dummy Run
By MONICA FURLONG
The middle-aged doctors, male and female, who write books on baby-care often pass over the. weeks. following . the „birth as a misty-eyed period of happiness and fulfilment. For physical and emotional strain, for bewilderment and anxiety, for hopelessness and despair, it is much more like being a new recruit in the Army under a brutal NCO or serving a novitiate in some barbarically austere religious order. (Before a dozen correspondents write to assert that there is also a sense of happiness and fulfilment, let me quickly add that they ate perfectly right. It's just that one is too exhausted to notice.) Babies cry. They cry, not just as it iays in the books because they happen to be wet, lonely, hot, cold, ill, hungry or dyspeptic. Net :wen because they have safety-pins sticking into them. I have known babies who were dry, accompanied, cool, healthy, pinless, and fed with exquisite care to cry in a purposeful, maddening way for hours. For all but the exceptionally lucky, this is the first problem of motherhood to be solved.
Every instinct in a woman nags at her not to rest while her baby cries, and it is no myth that a mother who can sleep through air-raid or tempest wakes instantly at that cruel, knife-like wail. Dragging herself out of bed for the umpteenth time, she changes the baby, comforts it, puts on another blanket, and produces a drink. If it is a bottle-fed baby she tries out every variation of formula known to man, while toying sensibly with the possibility that what is annoying her infant could be enteritis, whooping-cough, thrush, scurvy, sore gums or bubonic. (Babies do some- times get scurvy.) Even when she has thoroughly examined all these hypotheses, and dismissed them as false, the baby very likely continues to cry, particularly if it is under the magic age of three months. What is the poor creature to do?
If she consults her Health Visitor she will nowa- days very likely be told, 'Start him on solids,' and there is some sound sense in this. There do seem to be babies who are never properly satisfied by milk, but who turn amiable as soon as they start eating those grisly little messes of cereal and sieved fruit. But a really tiny baby, even when desperately hankering for Scott's or Robinson's, often hasn't got the technique to swallow it, and usually expels the whole spoonful into its lovely lacy matinee coat. Then what? I have a lot of sympathy with a friend of mine who, after trying everything else first, used to put her baby's cot into a sound-proof corner of her large Victorian house and go off and continue her life out of earshot for an hour or two.
'Isn't it a little cruel?' I once timidly suggested.
'It's him or me,' she said. 'If I didn't get away from that row sometimes I should put my head in the oven.' I believed her.
Being myself of a more stable and compas- sionate temperament, I employed a dummy. I notice with mixed feelings that dummies are now creeping into medical esteem, but two years ago I was a pioneer, and endured the reproachful ex- pressions of assistants in high-class chemists. I had resisted for some weeks myself, sneering at the elderly relative who insisted on bringing one into my house. One night, broken by exhaustion, brainwashed by *bat intolerable noise, I gave in, and stuffed the dummy into the baby's jaws. The baby fastened on it instantly, an expression of indescribable satisfaction swept over her fa° her arms shot above her head in that familiar gesture which in babies and gangsters means stir' render, and she went off into a sound sleep:11g problem was solved. Nor, as the days passed quietly, and NO returned to occupy its usual seat in my bc3it/' could I see why I had been so much against doln nties in the first place, beyond the fact that no 00 else seemed to use them. My baby, like so ri'311! babies, had the greatest difficulty in finding ile thumb and putting it into her mouth, though Iler desire to do so was shown in the funny little c31. scratches she had made all over her cheeks. .1114 dummy, so much easier to keep clean than It thumb, proved neither to deform her jaws not r° inculcate an ineradicable habit of sucking, astli moderns had sternly warned. It taught me my first and best lesson in mother' hood. There are no rules, no experts, no authrnt. ties. All is make-do and intelligence.
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