New life
The tooth party
Zenga Longmore
`May the child grow to be an electrical engineer and perform great wonders for '1 turned the clock back on this one.'
Africa,' he announced. When someone asked him what child, he merely nodded into his gin in a manner both regal and mysterious.
Never having been a hostess to a tooth party before, I was somewhat nonplussed as to what was expected of me. Nonethe- less, I spent most of the evening ordering cigarettes to be extinguished when Oma- lara was in the room. Since motherhood, my life has changed from taking leisurely fags in the living-room to tearing in and out of rooms like a jack-in-the-box, sneaking the odd drag in hallways.
Many of the guests had no idea what the celebrations were about. Some even brought birthday and anniversary cards. I grew so tired of explaining the toothsome truth of it all that when a particularly pretty silver mug was pressed into my hands with the words, 'for the christening', I decided that the time had come to keep mum. Omalara, who was strapped to my back by a piece of batik cloth, took the whole thing in good spirits, chuckling her one-tooth smile and dribbling down the back of my neck.
The fact that African women have been carrying their babies on their backs for thousands of years seems to have eluded Western baby-book writers, who feel they've patented the idea. The baby trends have turned right round in the past few years. Pick up a Good Baby Guide now, and what do you see? No more feeding every four hours for 2.7 minutes per side. Gone are the days of locking the poor little mite in a barred cot, bolting the door and stuffing cotton wool in your ears when the screams become too deafening. What you'll find now are writers who take the baby's interest to heart. `Away with cotton wool, mothers,' they say, 'pick up the baby the moment you hear a whimper and feed on demand.'
There's even a new book, which has taken New York by storm, that instructs the mother to carry the baby around, somewhere on her person, for the first seven months of life non-stop. I couldn't believe it either. Shopping, bathing and washing-up might be a trifle difficult, the authoress admits, but the baby must be held 24 hours a day, even when asleep. A baby who is left alone for so much as a second will grow up weighted with every Psychological problem known to man. To drive this point home, there is a morbid list at the back of the book cataloguing some of the horrific defects you child will de- velop if the advice is not followed.
Froffi Georgian to modern times, the Only advice these books have in common is, 'Don't listen to your mother. What would she know about raising children? The only one to heed is me, the profession- al.' All a bit dubious, if you ask me. After all, your mother must have done a fairly professional job of bringing you up, or you wouldn't be around to read the baby books.
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