Contemplating Motherhood

On Mother’s Day

I never was a great believe in the Mother’s Day. I always thought that celebrating Mother for one day, when 364 days a year the mothers of the world were treated badly really wasn’t a celebration. I preferred the International Women’s Day on March the 8th because it highlights the importance of our work for building equal relationships between the sexes in our society. My view of Mother’s Day has been impeded by my knowledge of the inbuilt violence against women in our society, but it has grown on me. I am clearly thawing. It is the grandmotherhood that is doing the job of making me see the more positive side of the Mother’s Day celebration.

Do not take me in the wrong way. I have enjoyed many Mother’s Days. In fact my first Mother’s Day as a young mother was when I came home with a new baby boy. I have also instigated a tradition of buying pyjamas to everybody to celebrate Mother’s Day. It has been fun. I have enjoyed sending cards to my own mother, grandmother and greatgrandmother. I was aware that they clearly felt that this day was an important achievement and I have always respected their views. But that time when my daughter gave a Mother’s Day Speech at the Finnish Society’s Mother’s Day celebration a few years back started the thawing process for me for real. And then of course she gave me my first grandchild and my son gave me my second one. That got me researching about this phenomenon called Motherhood.

Biological considerations on motherhood

By interpreting what the brain research during the last 20 years says, I can quite confidentially trace my grandmother’s urge for compensate emotional strain by retail therapy to her mother. My greatgrandmother had lost two babies before giving birth to grandmother. This experience of deep loss had left her emotionally incapable of connecting with the new baby, cuddling her or smiling with her. That caused grandmother a lasting trauma.

According to the brain research, it is the right side of our brain that has the primary capacity to understand and regulate emotions (McGilchrist, 2010). The left side interprets more mixed feelings. A baby stores the face of the primary carer to the right side of the brain. The more we, mother or carer, adore them, interact with them and cuddle them,the more their capability for empathy is developed (Szalavitz and Perry, 2010). According to the most confirmed research done with rats, the way we nurture our young will choose the DNA pathways that determine how we and the generations after us nurture our young.

But all is not lost to biology as according to research we choose the best of the best by mirroring the carer that has nurtured us most as babies. So, interpreting this research leads me to conclude that my grandmother chose to mirror my greatgrandfather, who at the time, instead of greatgrandmother had the capacity left to adore her, cuddle her and think that she was the best. Due to this emotional interpretation she then in her turn adored my mother who then adored me. This was enhanced by my father adoring me as well as he thought that I along with my sister was the best of the best. Following this lead, I of course loved my babies ‘to bits’ and my kids with the help of their spouses love theirs the same.

This according to grandparental investment theory leads to the best possible way for our survival as a family (Coall and Hertwig, 2010). So, why wouldn’t our brain, after a long generational left brain preferred functional interpretation of the pieces of information coming from the whole reality of the right brain knowledge come to the logical conclusion that a day called Mother’s Day would be the best representation of the culmination of this development. That is that on one particular day all primary carers called Mothers in different languages should be celebrated as tokens for this empathy development in our society. This decision of course mirrors the similar logical process by which Alexandra Kollontai and others determined that March the 8th would be the International Women’s Day in rejection of the Mother’s Day celebrations that did not feel politically correct for them. This is of course why we now have a Father’s Day, a Children’s Day and as many token days as we care to celebrate for any reason what-so-ever. They are not the reality but bring the thought into focus for a time, just like our left brain likes it.

Mother’s Day as a cultural statement of intention

To me Mother’s Day as such has not been real. It has lacked consistency in mirroring what really is the daily life of a mother. I can see it as a statement of intention in relation to what would be ideal. However, we are nowhere near there. But as with the idea of Santa Claus as a representation of goodwill in society, the idea of Mother’s Day as representing how we would like to treat all the mothers of the world, every day, is a valid ideal.

When looking at the history of Motherhood, it can only be said that there is a huge lack of sources and materials from where to look for the record of the concrete experience of motherhood in our culture. Across the cultures, through the history, women have been described as ‘made for motherhood’. They are essentially mothers by virtue. According to available sources all women were born to motherhood (Vanderberg-Daves, 2002). Much of these sources are religious statements on Virgin Mothers of various religions as a picture perfect ideal of womanhood. For a long time this distorted picture has determined motherhood as ideal womanhood.

The other reality for women comes from the statistics of domestic violence across the cultures. For me, as a researcher who has researched violence against women for decades and as a result has at times been totally disillusioned by the utter horror of it all, Mother’s Day celebrations seem a little bit too small as an effort to bring the inequality of the situation into focus. However, I am now warming to the idea. As a historian of ideas, I do recognise that it takes centuries to bring an idea to reality and 99-years of Mother’s Days and about the same amount of the Women’s Days is really a short time.

This year I will happily accept the flowers for the Mother’s Day. In fact I’ll buy the Tulips all on my own. I will also go and get myself a Whipper Snipper to ensure that these flowers will keep growing in my garden for the sake of motherhood and grandmotherhood as a cultural statement of genuine change in the world for more empathy in humanity.


References:

COALL, D. & HERTWIG, R. 2010. Toward an integrative framework of grandparental investment. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 40.
MCGILCHRIST, I. 2010. The Master and His Emissary; The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World, New Haven and London, Yale University Press.
SZALAVITZ, M. & PERRY, B. D. 2010. Born For Love; Why Empathy is Essential - and Endangered, William Morrow, Harper Collins Publishers.
VANDERBERG-DAVES, J. 2002. Teaching Motherhood in History. Women's Studies Quarterly, 30, Fall, 3/4, 234-255.

Where do the foundations of charitable and philanthropic thinking processes lie? – Looking for answers though the scientific approach.

Brief reflections and realisations gained at Dr Bruce D. Perry’s seminar on Transforming Childhood Trauma: Connecting with Empathy and Compassion held in Brisbane, 15/09/2010

A friend and I shared a very wonderful day at the Brisbane Convention Centre listening to Dr Bruce D. Perry’s insights on childhood trauma and recovery models. The auditorium was full of his fans from far and wide. Dr Perry certainly can take his audience to an exciting trip though the human brain development. The research and the case stories he shared with the spectators were extremely well streamlined within his presentation.

I was immediately captured by his comments on the age old practice of having your child sleeping next to you and his declaration that the modern preference to separate the children from their parents is not respecting the natural children’s brain development which is dependent on the building of a close nurturing relationship between the primary carer and the child. The closer and the more fostering this relationship is the better for the future of the child’s ability to feel empathy and be compassionate towards other human beings. Coming from a culture where this is a widely accepted practice, his declaration felt good to hear.

The other most remarkable comments by Dr Perry were that 65% of all the calories a newborn takes with food are consumed by the brain and a four-year old brain has already created 90% of all its functions, including the primary sense of being.

For me it is interesting to note how the brain works in practice by following my own memories that relate to philanthropic, charitable and humane thinking processes in my own life. It is also fascinating to analyse my own attitudes and through self analysis get to know what determined my world today. I have heard this saying so many times in the context of consideration about the rising consciousness: “if you look at yourself now, you know what you were in the past and if you look at your thoughts today, you know what you’ll be in the future.” These types of comments are often articulated in such discussions that conclude to consider words things. This process is concerned of realising an idea in the material world. The thoughts solidify into words and these words solidify into actions and ultimately may materialise as things.

I have two vivid memories that relate to developing as a humane human being, the other voiced by my own mother, with a long career as a teacher in Lapland, Finland and the other a friend in India, with a long career as a doctor and lately a director of Kristnamurti Educational Centre in Bangalore. Both are concerned in educating children to become compassionate human beings. My mother says that we should be learning to eat with a spoon from an early age and sit up properly on our chair as it is part of our culture. My Indian friend says that the two most useless inventions by humans are the spoon and the chair as when we eat with our fingers, our touch is also stimulated and when we crouch, our posture is kept firm and we keep healthy. Both are occupied and agree in bringing up healthy and able human beings. It is remarkable how human beings can start from two totally opposite directions and be of the same mind on the whole. To me this is a demonstration of how unity can be created from diversity. There is not only one way to do things, but many as long as the goal is agreed upon.

Listening to Dr Bruce Perry, who is an expert in brain plasticity, for a day on childhood trauma and recovery models, helped me to realise that we can also take a scientific approach and use our current knowledge of how the brain develops and functions as a tool to enhance and aid the transformation of the human consciousness.



A few thoughts clearly stood out for me on the day in relation to my search for the philanthropic thinking models:

1. The initial quotation Dr Perry used, from W.R. Inge, namely: “The best time to influence the character of a child is 100 years before they are born.” – This relates to longtime hereditary approach.
2. “Our brain allows us to absorb the accumulated and distilled experience of thousands of previous generations in a single lifetime.”
3. The utmost plasticity of the brain, which allows us to rebuild and re-organise the brainstems, diencephalon, the limbic system and the neocortex of the brain from the basic stems to the more complex systems and the other way around from the cortex to the basics. – This leads to that we can influence the brain in positive ways by providing ‘pattern repetitive inputs’.
4. The utmost co-dependence of the organisation of our brain to the close human relationships we have initially formed or the lack of them – The power of human relationships.
5. “From the neural developmental perspective, we need to be respectful of our biology in the process of inventing our reality.”
6. Being born a human does not ensure that a child has the capacity to care, to share, to listen, to be empathetic and have values or to be compassionate. This develops from being cared for. - “Humans become humane.”
7. Human mind pays more attention to the negative comments than to positive. The negative responses we get from our relationships outnumber the positive by 3:5 – “Everybody needs their rewards bucket filled every day.”

It is very comforting and positive to know that Dr Perry’s ‘Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics’ is producing results in the ‘treatment’ of trauma in children. The knowledge that it is possible to work closely together with the traumatised children and their families by using this model by first mapping and then re-organising the brain that has been maltreated in the past, brings with it new realisations of the possibilities imbedded in the utmost plasticity of the brain. What is incredible is that even though the human beings when creating our world seem to have little respect of our neurobiology and instead mostly work against it, it is never too late to re-organise and re-create our reality to better suit the natural environment.

Thinking of the model and the information I got from the seminar, through the handout reading materials and some additional research I could easily draw a direct line to philanthropic thinking models. The same realisations could be used in determining that people with little empathy or inclination to charitable or philanthropic thinking or action have some trauma to recover from. If we would think that a fully mature humane human being does possess the capacity to be compassionate and empathetic, then there must be a way to re-organise the brain to realise this aim.

Many practices aiming at raising human consciousness that we are accustomed to are based on repetitive impulses, yoga-practice for example and mediation, music and movement, prayer and much of singing, particularly traditional folk singing and dancing, even some traditional ways to create art. These practices have been developed during many centuries. We find them comforting and often revert to them when in need to ‘fill our rewards bucket’. All this practice requires close human interaction and relationships in the community to learn.

Lot of what Dr Perry said during the day is something that I knew before, scattered in little bits of information here and there. There has been much scientific research done on following young children to adulthood and through this it is evident that the brain takes longer to develop to its full mature capacity than thought before. The latest research says that we can only expect a 27-year old brain to be fully mature. Other topical interesting research concerns hypothalamus and its functions in sorting out human emotions and the blends of emotions. Our day with Dr Perry brought this research in sharper focus for me. I am really looking forward to reading his book Born for Love; Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered, written with Maia Szalavitz. The reading material that was handed out has been a great source of information. Lots of it can be found in the Child Trauma Academy Website as well. http://www.childtrauma.org/ It is well recommended.

I greatly appreciate all comments for future development.