Motherhood
To be honest, I've always had a bit of a problem with Mr. Gibran's sentiments above, unless he means them to apply to our offspring only after they've had children of their own. You see, to me, as much as parents try their hardest to bring children up morally and nurture them with love and support, there are several factors about our modern society which make that very difficult, and I'm going to list them here. If you've read some of my other blogs you'll know that I take an interest in astrology, and that discipline has always said that we humans don't become adult until we are nearly 30 years old, at our first Saturn Return. That doesn't necessarily mean that parents have to look after their offspring until that age, only that the cycle of development which rules physical attributes like bone growth and how we keep our physical body together through discipline, work and earning enough money for our own support, completes a cycle at that stage, when Saturn has been round the Sun once, and appears to have traversed all 12 houses in our horoscope once to come back to the place it was when we were born on earth. And as an astrology student I'm not so much influenced by which political party is in power in any particular country and any particular time, but more in the timeless principles indicated by the planets and signs in astrology, which we all share.
As well as ruling the nuts and bolts of the physical world, Saturn also rules the laws of relationships, which is why it is exalted in the sign Libra, sign of balance and fairness. This is also why 20 somethings sometimes find themselves in a bit of pickle at age 29 - I did; if their relationships have passed all the tests of fairness and doing unto otherness they will be fine; if not, a couple might want to think about whether they should get married and whether they are really suited to each other personality wise. That's if they are not already married and/or have children, because if they have, it's time to call a family therapist and try to sort out everyone's egos.
Up until last century, when women started to become a big part of the workforce, marriage and having children started much earlier than it did today, with many women becoming mothers in their early 20s. Nowadays, lifespan has been prolonged through good nutrition and hygiene, many people in the West go to college or university, and often women do not marry and perhaps have children until their 30s. So the 20s is really all about trying to sort out how to apply our talents and education into something useful in the world. Although this has given women a lot of independence and self esteem, some of those careers which provide all this material stability might not be so beneficial to actually being a woman and protecting and nurturing the children we might have before our biological clocks run out. Which is what I found out after I became a mother. Below is a list of society's trends which I actually found very threatening to my ability to protect my children. Some of them are unique to the US, others we find in UK and Europe.
1. Don't ruin your body and mind with unnatural birth control. . Up until last century pregnancy used to mostly occur after marriage, with a small ratio of out of wedlock births. But as we all know, sex before marriage became the norm in Western society in the 1960s. This lead to a greater demand for birth control - beyond the method of monthly fertility timing and rubber devices already in use, and the scientists/biologists and businessmen were very happy to provide these in the form of the contraceptive pill, the IUD (which is in fact an abortifacient method of birth control, preventing the fertilized egg/blastocyst from embedding in a woman's uterus) and, as a last resort, abortion. These later methods are finally getting the scrutiny they deserve by women who feel they have been used in a gross social experiment which disregards our natural link with nature, our psychology, and most of all, the moral and ethical error of destroying a life with abortion, even though it might only be a 4 week old embryo. Margaret Sanger, the American woman who first introduced contraception to the US, and founded Planned Parenthood was actually against abortion, and I'm sure would turn in her grave if she saw the thousands of abortions occurring each month in the US. This 2018 video is a good summary, in my opinion, of the change in attitude which is slowly coming.
2. Get married (the old fashioned kind) preferably before getting pregnant, and preferably to the father of your child. A wedding ring on your finger probably won't make much difference if you've married a reckless person who continues to act as if they were single, lusting after other women (or sometimes men), but it might remind him that he has made some vows, which enable any children produced by the marriage to have a secure, stable home.
3. Breastfeeding This is actually why we women have boobs. The erotic part is, I think, some sort of Freudian psycho-sexual memory from when we were all fed by our mothers as soon as we entered the world. In astrology, the sign Cancer rules the breasts, as well as the stomach, which are symbols of nurturing. And it's not just nutrients which are so important to a newborn, but all the immunity to disease which the mother's immune system has built up is transmitted to her baby in breast milk. So why are women in the West encouraged to forgo this essential and wholesome process in favour of formula? I can understand if the mother is not well nourished, she is not going to have enough nutrients in her breast milk, and formula might be a better alternative, but in the affluent West, some women are just too embarrassed or frightened to breast feed their babies, especially in public. Well, you don't have to do it on a London bus, although I once did, and doing it at a restaurant might cause the waiters to drop some plates, but there's always somewhere private you can go, preferably in nature - under a tree, on the beach, on top of Glastonbury Tor or overlooking the Grand Canyon etc to get the whole feeling of connection. It is what we are here for.
4. Vaccinations- WARNING; can of worms alert! Let's start by saying that I am not an anti-vaxer, and followed the recommended vaccination schedule for both my children back in the 1980s in the US. But it was when I started working in schools in the 1990s that parents started suspecting a link between these vaccinations and their children's autism. It was British physician Andrew Wakefield who caused the big scandal in Western medicine by suggesting that there was a correlation between these vaccinations and autism, but as we all know, his research was discredited and he was banned from practicing medicine in the UK. Why then, if these vaccinations are so safe, did politicians like Tony Blair get their children vaccinated in France, where there is a stricter protocol of single vaccinations rather than multiple as in the UK? And why do American holistic physicians warn their parent-patients to do the same, or not get their children vaccinated at all? It is NOT because these physicians or parents don't understand the principle of vaccination, which when discovered by Edward Jenner, was probably one of the greatest contributors to health and life extension, eliminating life-threatening diseases such as smallpox, polio and measles. It is because of the highly suspected link between the preservatives and adjuvants in these immunizations which is scaring parents off the recommended schedule for their children, and this has unfortunately caused a resurgence of measles and mumps in some states in the US. Mercury and aluminum are known toxins to the human nervous system and cause allergic reactions and inflammation. For thorough coverage of this subject and most other holistic health considerations, Dr.John Bergman is the man to see.
By the time your child is 18, he or she would have had 72 vaccinations if you follow the US recommended schedule. While immunity from polio,measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough would seem to be essential for a normal life, do we really need to have our teenagers immunized against sexually transmitted diseases such as HPV? If all parents taught their teenagers to wait to have sex until after they were married, or at least engaged, maybe the disease would not be so widespread and need protecting against.
5. Psychiatrists Feed your child sugar, in candy, pastries or soft drinks and they will probably develop attention deficit disorder/ADD or Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/ADHD. When my kids were in middle and high school no one seemed to understand this and the schools proudly displayed Coca Cola machines in both the student nutrition areas and the teachers' lounge. Coke even sponsored student athletic matches and student scholarships. I was the only mother who dared to question the sanity of this and was excused as being a bit eccentric because I was British. But now comes the serious stuff. Once your child has been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD they will be prescribed psychiatric drugs if you are foolish to take them to a psychiatrist. They might even get diagnosed with depression or one of several mood disorders listed in the ever expanding diagnostic manual of psychiatric "diseases" for which there is no objective test, like there is for example high blood pressure or diabetes. These psychiatric drugs have side effects worse than the symptoms they are supposedly trying to ease, including suicidal thoughts, and like all drugs, ultimately have a see-saw effect of causing dependency. By the time your kid is a teenager they will probably have developed Bipolar Disorder, which is the umbrella term given to many teenagers by psychiatrists whether they have mood swings or not. It is done because this label satisfies insurance companies so that your kid can receive even more drugs without you having to sell your house, and so that the psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies have high paying careers with which to send their kids to college, so that they too become psychiatrists, pharma reps and perhaps lawyers and marry other doctors, lawyers and maybe hedge fund investors and have children who they send to college to carry on the whole diabolical cycle. STAY AWAY FROM PSYCHIATRISTS and give your kids natural foods.
6. Glyphosate/Round Up If you are lucky enough to own a house and have your own front lawn, please just leave it alone and don't use pesticides on it, or xeriscape it and meditate on the Zen beauty of pebbles and palms, because you are not only poisoning your family but the whole neighbourhood. My late husband developed Non-Hodgkins' Lymphoma from mysterious causes, but strongly suspected were pesticides, including the DDT that his parents used in their garden when he was a child. Home Depot in the US, and I suspect stores like Morrison's in the UK still blithely sell home use pesticides without any warning labels.
7. Recreational Drugs I've recently heard so much rubbish from mothers with young children or teenagers, saying that they think legalizing cannabis for recreational use in the UK would be a good thing. Mothers in the UK better prepare yourselves if Britain follows suit from America and feeds its children misconceived ideas about liberty. Today's marijuana is a hybridized monster plant, with 10-15 times the THC than when we might have smoked it in the 1960s or 70s. Even then, I remember some of my friends messing up their lives by simply losing all motivation to do anything but be a sort of passive hippie vegetable, and they are still smoking it today in their 60s, but for the teenagers who start smoking today's concentrated weed, known as Skunk, mental illness in the form of psychosis is very common, increasing the more often they smoke it. The recent legalization of marijuana in some US states including Colorado and California (Proposition 64) however has been met by a speedy backlash from furious parents, who see how the cannabis lobby is abusing our children all in the name of monetary profit. If you are a parent with similar concerns, you might like to join Moms Strong, or follow them on Twitter here.
8.Guns Imagine living in a country where, as parents, you are never sure whether your children will come home from school alive in the afternoon, or that you might see on TV or on your phone that your children's school has a live shooter. This country is America, and if anyone has any nonsensical ideas about how guns don't kill people, people do, or that gun liberty makes a better society, please go over to Nationmaster.com's homicide page. The USA is 53rd out of 134 countries in murder rates per million, which means that a person would be less likely to be murdered by over half the countries in the world. More pertinently, the statistics also show that the homicide rate in the USA is four times higher than its neighbour Canada, or France, Scotland, the UK, and most of Europe. It doesn't take a genius to work out why this is. America's Second Amendment has not bought much freedom to Americans, because no one can experience the freedom of life if they are dead, injured or grieving over the loss of a child who has been a fatal victim of gun violence.
Because the Second Amendment is so much a part of US culture, many Americans, in my opinion, feel emasculated without owning at least one gun. The sad fact is that in homes where there are guns, someone is five times more likely to be murdered, injured or commit suicide by gunshot than in homes without a gun. By the way, I have lived in the US for 30 years and have never owned a weapon and don't want to. I don't even like looking at the weapons on police personnel. Guns are not like cars or kitchen knives, which people like to compare them to, illogically saying that we should control these implements too. The fault in their logic is that cars and kitchen knives, indeed, baseball bats and electricity have positive, useful purposes and uses. A gun is simply built to kill or maim, and US citizens who are law-abiding citizens when they buy them, have a greater likelihood of using them to injure or kill others or themselves than those who do not.
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