B00AEDDPVE EBOK by Marie Osmond, Marcia Wilkie

time, effort, and healing, also my friend. “You do?” I asked.
    “Yes, Mom. You were always the person taking the picture.”
    Dignity
    Honoring the worth of all people, including ourselves, and treating everyone with respect.

    Happy to be sandwiched between two incredibly strong women: my mother, Olive May, and my daughter, Jessica Marie.

B REATHING IN AND BREATHING OUT

    My family just months before my brothers stepped into the spotlight on the
Andy Williams Show:
(clockwise from left) Jay, Alan, Tom, Virl, Wayne, Father, Donny, Merrill, Mother, and me. Jimmy would join the family a year later.
     

 
    M y oldest brother wasn’t “brought by the stork,” but he was carried around like he was, at least the first couple of days of his life.
    My mother, who was just twenty, had almost no prior experience with babies. She had been an only child for ten years until her baby brother came along. She wrote in her journal, about her firstborn, Virl:
“I didn’t even know how to pick him up properly. I was so afraid of hurting him or kinking his little neck. I would wrap the blanket real tight around him and then pick him up, holding the blanket with both hands, one over his chest and one over his knees.”
    My father told me how my mother would gather the corners of the blanket and carry the baby as if in a sling. When the nurses would come in to change him, my mother was terrified by how swiftly they handled her infant and would cry out, “Please don’t drop him!” This was back in the mid-1940s when a woman stayed in the hospital for almost two weeks after she had had a baby. How much wiser was that than our current hospital policy of sending new mothers home twenty-four hours after delivery? It makes me wonder if so manyreported cases of extreme baby blues, postpartum depression, and even infant illnesses could be prevented if the mother was given time to recover and rest for a few more days, and learn to care for her baby while she is being cared for herself.
    Thankfully, my mother’s roommate in the hospital was a woman who had just given birth to her fifth child. She may have been secretly very amused by my young mother’s first-time nerves, but my mother remembered her as being kind and helpful and answering her string of questions about raising children. One of the first things the experienced roommate told my mother was “Babies aren’t all that fragile.”
    Perhaps babies aren’t all that fragile, but new mothers are. It doesn’t seem to matter if a woman becomes a mom for the first time at twenty or thirty-four or forty-two—there is an undeniable shift in perspective and priorities that leaves you feeling as if you are permanently relocated to a brand-new world. You are, within hours, a woman who now holds in your arms another life that is completely dependent upon you for everything. It probably wouldn’t be so overwhelming if the baby could at least talk and verbalize his needs. But I understand God’s wisdom in having that
not
be the case. New mothers want to fall in love with their babies, and even though infants cry, it would be a whole other story if they could verbally complain right out of the gate. Can you imagine your newborn saying, “Really?
Ducks
on my blanket? Hello! I’m going to be a dog person.”
    When my mother went home from the hospital, she put her newborn’s bassinet right next to her bed so she could hear him allnight long, breathing in and breathing out. She was endlessly concerned about
“a rattle sound”
in Virl’s throat, which the pediatricians told her was normal. All night long she would jump to her feet at his slightest whimper to see what her baby needed.
    I’m not sure my mother ever got another good night’s sleep until 1981, when my brother Jimmy, her last child, turned nineteen and my parents went on a church mission to Hawaii. Actually, by then she usually had one or two or seventeen of the grandbabies around, so any slumber lasting more than a couple