I know well those feelings though. I was not able to nurse my middle son (long story) and I still feel like we, the two of us, missed something really special. I don’t think that I failed or that it was something that can’t be recovered, but I do look back on his early days and long for a do over, you know? It really wasn’t until my third baby that I learned to lighten up, relax and just BE with my baby, hear him and listen to myself – to not feel a need to “Do Motherhood” right, but to just be a mama. It makes me really sad that I missed that with my older two.

Thank YOU Debbie for stopping by!

Have I told you lately that you’re brilliant? Because you are!
That makes so much sense, and yet I didn’t even consider it. I’m sure that we DO have some instincts (though maybe learned through experience rather than innate) that are more relevant to our current way of life.
I read somewhere a long time ago that in people who live in southern climates, the veins are much closer to the surface of the skin in order to better release heat and cool the body. In fact, when a northerner moves to a southern climate, after several years, her veins will “migrate” closer to the skin. I found that totally fascinating. Now, I realize that has little to do with instinct, but it does show that our physiology has some interplay with our environment.

Thanks for taking me a little farther down that “lovely winding road”… your ideas have given me lots to explore and new paths to go down. I’m so glad you’re here.

I wish you and your family the best with your schooling decisions too. It can feel like such a leap of faith to take that homeschooling plunge, but for us, it has been such a wonderful way of life.

I believe our instincts change according to what we create around us. I do not have an instinct for when to plant maize, but I have a really good instinct about when a car is going to pull out in front of me, or when a child is about to catch his fingers in a library door, even if it’s not my child. The native bushman mother would be useless to her child in our society. And we would likely starve and die from exposure were we plunked into the Bush.

Our senses and our brains are adapted to our environment, which, unfortunately, is an artificial one we ourselves have created. As we grow in those environments, our bodies adapt to give us what we need. In that way, in my opinion, it is still instinct.

And I do agree that we do not listen to our instincts nearly often enough.

Stephanie, I’ve said it before but your writing inspires me. Your essays are like lovely winding roads that lead right back to home, and I am always excited to see what you’ve done next. Is the house next door to you for sale, by any chance?

Sometime back in January I read an article from Mothering magazine about breastfeeding and was shocked to read about the Breast Crawl. I had never even heard of this phenomenon. Luckily for me the article mentioned that you could google breast crawl and find links on you tube.

As I watched this breast crawl I was literally brought to tears. I could not beleive my eyes! When I had to have my son delivered by c-section 4 years ago and had subsequent problems with healing I became very depressed. I was depressed because I felt as if I was letting him down by not being able to do virtually anything for him. I even had problems breastfeeding. I was so dissappointed in myself.

When I read the article and viewed the you tube video I was amazed at the instincts of the baby and finally it all made sense to me. My son and myself were essentially robbed of the instinctual bonding that is necessary between mother and child. Go see if you can’t view the video’s and maybe it will give you more clarity or maybe it will do the opposite.
For me it makes sense that we have lost our instincts! And we certainly need somesort of a return to it on so many different levels of our being.

Thanks for a GREAT topic of discussion.