Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [92]
Turning to formula was out of the question. For one thing, the expense would have bankrupted us. For another, it violated every principle we came here to test. It was a technological redundancy. Besides being already available and free, breast-feeding was healthier for mother and child. Feeding on demand is also nature’s own contraceptive, and we felt strongly about not using chemicals or mechanical gizmos to space our children. (Since Hans, they have come every two and a half years.)
But we had to acknowledge a tradeoff, at least given a boy who nurses mostly at night. The problem was compounded by a certain mistake we made. A woman we know, who was into “natural” methods of child-rearing, told us about “the family bed.” “All the literature I’ve read,” she avowed, “says it’s the only way to go. In Third World countries, that’s how everyone sleeps. It’s just natural.”
We were now lying in the bed she had made for us. Hans was not only a night nurser, he was a night wriggler. By morning he had cleared for himself a broad field equivalent to about half the surface area of our full-size mattress, leaving Mary and me each a sliver on either side. I didn’t really doze off until just about the time the rooster crowed.
Since the “family bed” had become an immovable plank of our natural creed, we didn’t really understand what was happening, why I in particular was getting grouchy. (Mary could sleep through anything.) Sleeplessness must be “natural,” so the problem had to be my lack of adjustment to being awake twenty-three hours a day. Over the years, as we gained more children, we unquestioningly enlarged the bed to make room for them—until finally one day, the parents’ section mysteriously traveled to another room and I was able to sleep again. That was the day I truly awoke from our friend’s advice.
Despite some of the dislocations, we were getting what we had asked for when we came: physical and psychical metamorphosis. Feeling good by feeding one’s own needs was no longer possible or important; the satisfaction came in seeing someone else’s met. Out of the short-term chaos of bodily and chronological rearrangement was emerging a new kind of order, a literal extension of ourselves with its own semi-independent center of consciousness. From the ruptured chrysalis of our former habits a new butterfly was emerging.
One day we got in our car and took a twenty-five-minute ride to a red brick building set halfway up a hillside in a copse of pine trees. Mary’s parents had driven down from New Hampshire, and a friend of mine had flown in from Boston. And there before the altar of this small Catholic mission chapel, a man in a Roman collar committed Minimite heresy: we had our baby baptized. Then we returned home and celebrated.
The trip had one other odd benefit. We learned that the purring of the vehicle put our baby to sleep. This environmentally incorrect gas-guzzler was the greatest pacifier since mother’s milk.
Corrupted by this illicit discovery, we extended the trip. We felt we deserved a little sweetener. We took the Escort for a long weekend. While Mary attended the baptism of a niece, I detoured to Elizabeth-town College near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to hear talks on the history and social relations of the Amish.
What a shock it was to experience academia again. I thought it might be recreational for a day, but in the second session I sat in disbelief as two scholars, back to back, cleverly applied feminist interpretative canons to the Old Order, liberally sprinkling such terms as “gender” (a socially constructed “sex”), “patriarch,” and “male order.” The case was plausible on the surface: Amish men enjoyed nominal leadership roles while women may not even speak at church councils (although they may withdraw assent by not participating in communion); furthermore, there