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9 Her new baby doll. They placed the soft plastic and pink flannel in the little girl's lap, and she turned her moon-shaped eyes toward them in awed gratitude. It was so perfect and so small. She trailed her fingertips along the smooth brown forehead and down into the bottom curve of the upturned nose. She gently lifted the dimpled arms and legs and then reverently placed them back. Slowly kissing the set painted mouth, she inhaled its new aroma while stroking the silken curled head and full cheeks. She circled her arms around the motionless body and squeezed, while with tightly closed eyes she waited breathlessly for the first trembling vibrations of its low, gravelly "Mama" to radiate through her breast. Her parents surrounded this annual ritual with full heavy laughter, patted the girl on the head, and returned to the other business of Christmas. —Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place Bernita Washington was home alone when her first baby came and she had no other alternative than to deliver the child herself. Nor did she have any help in the next few days after the birth: I didn't have anybody, no bigger kids and no family or nothin' like that to help me with my kid, or to see after the house and everything. O.K., the next three days I did whatever I always did. You didn't have any problems as long as you don't lift anything heavy, eat something that might run your blood pressures up, or sumpin' like that. Now ive, after our babies born, we used to drink a teacup of castor oil—a teacup of castor oil, a whole teacupful. That is to keep your bowels enacted. Now a lot of womens, they have babies and itll be, sometime they come home and they bowels still don't be done moved! Because they haven 't took anything for relax [them]. Then they would give 'em ateacup of castor oil [and] the next day they would make 'em eat turnip greens! And that opens your stomach up, tight bowels. The turnip greens will keep you with good open bowels. The castor oil was medicine for your insides that'll heal you back up! But, as she says when recalling carrying 100 or so pounds of cotton on her back the day before delivering a child, "Womens wasn't as 221 But He Wants Us to Be Firm to Misuse a Child— God Doesn't Want Us 222 God Doesn't Want Us to Misuse a Child weak as they are now, then." Now, she says, women even refuse to put up with the pains of labor without medication! And that, she feels, poses its own problems: In the summer of 1990 when her 15-year-old granddaughter, Toni, gave birth, the girl had to remain hospitalized a few extra days because of a slight fever. "Probably," sniffed Bernita, "they gave her too much anesthetic." When Toni came home from the hospital her grandmother urged her to drink a cupful of castor oil to "heal up her stomach," but Toni had refused. "I told all of 'em but they wouldn't do it," Bernita reported, referring to her daughters and granddaughters who have borne children. 'That's why their bodies is weak." (Lansing, Michigan; 1990) Postpartum Restrictions Despite Bernita's protestations that a woman who has just given birth should be able to carry on all of her usual activities, she herself had followed many of the rules of behavior for new mothers once she had enough children to help out after the birth of a new sibling. It is only in retrospect that she labels a number of these practices "nothing but a bunch of old -isms!" In the traditional system these "-isms"—her word for superstitions—reflect the conventional wisdom characterizing a woman who has just given birth as particularly vulnerable. At delivery there is a shift in emphasis from the protection of the unborn child—which was primary throughout the months of pregnancy—to the protection of the new mother. It is she, not her infant, who is in the weaker state. In the next weeks her behavior will by hedged round by a variety of maneuvers designed to keep her from harm. Some of these—the proper disposal of the placenta, for example—are specific to the postpartum period. Others reflect again the familiar risks of cold, dirt, or improper diet. Many of the traditional...

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