HelenAardsma.com is mother to ten, grandmother to a bunch and mentor to 1,000s!
About HelenAardsma.com
Helen E. Aardsma along with her husband Dr. Gerald E. Aardsma own and operate Aardsma Research & Publishing (ARP). This is the most widely read and possibly the most important article Helen Aardsma has written.
"Woman to Woman"
I set aside the medical research article I have been reading as I have rocked and nursed one-year-old Timothy to sleep, and turn out the light. The house is dark, and quiet. The children are asleep. My husband, Gerald, will soon be in from the office.
I carry Timothy, asleep but still attached, to my bed. I slip beneath the quilt while gently holding him to my breast. In a few moments I am settled, cuddled comfortably with my baby beside me. He is still nursing as he sleeps. I see him faintly in the dark. I feel him breathing against me. I smell his baby sweetness. I hear his soft, contented sighs.
Normally I drift off quickly---nursing is a natural relaxant---but tonight sleep won't come. I am deeply disturbed by what I have been reading about these past several months. Soon my cheeks are wet with tears.
I am silently weeping for the appalling destruction of womanhood and motherhood in our culture and in our churches. I am weeping for women with an empty nest at age thirty-nine; their fertility surgically destroyed; their hormones artificially regulated; their physical and emotional health in shambles. I am weeping for infants left to cry alone in a darkness they do not understand; wooden bars in place of mother's warm flesh; inert rubber to suckle in place of her living breast; the smell of butadiene and detergent in place of her God-given scents. I am weeping for one and a half million pregnancies terminated by abortion in the United States each year---one and a half million motherhoods which will never be. I am weeping for the little children, herded together into day-care centers, the economics carefully calculated, each apportioned their proper square footage like turkeys on a turkey ranch, and full of penicillin and streptomycin like them too. I am weeping for one million marriages per year rocked and shattered by divorce, children as flotsam on a raging sea.
Mothers cheated of their children; children cheated of their mothers.
Oh, Lord God, when will this holocaust of mothering end?
I have been reading, studying and researching about the womanly arts for well over twenty years. After I was married and before the birth of my firstborn I began to read every book I could get my hands on. The subjects were pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding, and mothering. I was educating myself for the next stage of my life. I wanted to make wise, informed choices. I knew mothering was too important to leave to trial and error.
My self-imposed education has never let up. But today my book knowledge has been rounded out and overshadowed to a large degree by on-the-job experience. Gerald and I now have nine children, ranging in age from one year to young adult. Yes, they are all ours, and yes, we plan to have more, should the Lord so bless.
Over the past six months I have focused my reading on materials related to parenting style. I must state up front that I have felt compelled to do this out of a responsibility to you, my readers and sisters in the Lord, rather than from any native desire on my part. The topic is controversial at present, and controversy is antithetical to a mother's heart and far removed from my vision and purpose in writing The Mother's Companion.
But the mail I have been receiving has revealed much turmoil regarding this topic at present. Many of you are confused and looking for advice. Some of you are feeling resentment for having followed a certain style only to find out later that it was quite wrong. Others of you are being caused to wonder if another style than you have been using might work better. Some of you are upset to see a different view from that which you embrace being promoted and evidently endorsed by your churches. Many indicators are signaling confusion and hurt. I feel a responsibility to do whatever I can, before the Lord, to help quell the confusion, to help heal the hurts, and to forestall further damage to you and your homes.
I have read (or reread) over a dozen books in my recent investigation of this topic. In addition I have read a number of medical research articles cited by the authors of these books to check the accuracy of their use of professional sources. I have also sampled newsletters, Christian magazine articles, and a number of general circulation items discussing this issue. A bibliography of all but the general circulation items can be found at the end of this article. I have also made free use of one additional resource---I have spent many, many hours in discussion of all these materials, dissecting their arguments, with my logical, science-trained (Ph.D.) husband.
I must confess that I have been appalled by some of what I have read. I suspect my reaction here has been similar to what I might naturally expect of a college mathematics professor should I undertake to write a college calculus textbook---I having dropped out of math early in high school to save everybody concerned much frustration and embarrassment. Here was theory run amuck.
To read more of this important article: http://www.themotherscompanion.org/newsletters/womantowomansample.php
