Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (37 page)

Catch the high-flying moms—if you can.

T
hey were pioneers speeding through the air or orbiting into space. Did they ever come down to earth to raise kids?

Beryl Markham grew up in Kenya, where she was a successful horse trainer until a friend took her for a ride in his plane. She knew she had found her calling. Taking lessons, she became a commercial “bush” pilot, flying to remote areas in Kenya. In 1936, Markham wanted prize money, so she made the first solo flight across the Atlantic “the hard way”—from Britain to Canada and against the headwinds. The flight, and her book describing it,
West with the Night
, made the pilot world famous.

Did the daring Markham ever dare to face the challenges of motherhood?

Cochran, a beautician, had worked her way up from the rural South to the urban New York City. Once Jackie took flying lessons in 1932, she said so long to shampoo and hello to planes. Cochran began flying in competitions and won the Bendix transcontinental air race in 1938. During
World War II she trained female pilots for the British and the U.S. governments, receiving a distinguished service medal for her efforts. Cochran then became the first female pilot to break the sound barrier. She set more aviation records for speed and altitude. At the time of her death in 1980 she held more records than any other pilot—male or female—in history.

Did Jackie’s kids ever break the sound barrier watching TV?

Valentina came up (way up!) the hard way. Born in the small Russian village of Maslennikovo, she worked in a factory and studied engineering. Valentina was chosen as one of five women to join the Soviet cosmonaut corps based on her amateur parachuting experience. In 1963, she took off on
Vostok
6, becoming the first woman in space. Orbiting the earth 48 times, her flight lasted just under three days. That same year she also married fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev.

Did Valentina and Andrian become the first set of “spacey” cosmonaut parents?

At 27, Sally Kristen Ride’s four degrees, including a PhD in physics, seemed to propel her toward an academic career. Then she saw a newspaper ad placed by NASA calling for astronauts and, impulsively, she applied. Her impulse paid off and in 1983, Sally became the first U.S. woman in space when she orbited the earth in the space shuttle,
Challenger.
Sally found space work exhilarating. But back on the ground, she had to contend with reporters
who asked her if she wept at work or needed a bra in space. (“There is no sag in zero-g” was Sally’s reply.) Post-NASA, Dr. Ride worked to encourage girls to enter scientific fields. She is a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego.

Does Sally Ride have kids of her own that plan to be astronauts?

Answers on
page 301
.

Can moms predict whether they’ll have a boy or girl?

S
hould the nursery be painted pink or blue? It’s an age-old question for moms-to-be. These days there are ultrasound sonograms to determine a baby’s sex with 95 percent accuracy. But ancient methods of foretelling whether baby will be a boy or a girl are still going strong.

When researchers investigated old-fashioned methods to predict a baby’s gender, they made a surprising discovery. One method worked—mother’s intuition!

Before technology stepped in, mothers relied on folk wisdom to determine whether the occupant in their womb was male or female. If the mother seemed to carry the baby high, the child would most likely be a boy; if the baby was carried low, a girl was predicted. When visible clues weren’t easy to spot, the pendulum prediction method was a popular standby. Mom-to-be, or a friend, would thread a string through a ring. The ring was dangled over the pregnant woman’s stomach. If it swung back and forth, the baby was a boy; if the pendulum moved in a circle—break out the pink paint!

A popular urban legend claims that a mixture of Drano and the pregnant woman’s urine can reveal the sex of her baby-to-be. If it turns green, is it a boy? Does red mean a girl? What about brown? The truth is that mixing Drano
and urine won’t tell you anything about an unborn baby at all. The only thing it will tell you, to paraphrase the great Ann Landers, is if your kidneys are working. Valuable knowledge? Yes. A predictor of boys and girls to come? No.

When researchers from Johns Hopkins tested the accuracy of folk methods for determining a baby’s sex for 104 women, the methods were accurate about 55 percent of the time—the same as random guessing. But there was one puzzling finding. Women who relied on their own dreams and intuition predicted the baby’s sex with 71 percent accuracy.

Did mothers possess special insight to help predict the sex of their baby? The question was studied by Dr. Shamas of the University of Arizona. One hundred women were asked to use just their intuition to predict whether they would give birth to a boy or a girl. Mothers predicted gender correctly over 70 percent of the time, well above random chance.

But Mom can’t let her personal preferences get in the way. Dr. Shamas’s study also found that women who preferred one gender to the other had less successful intuitive abilities. “The point is that there’s a big difference between what you want to happen and what your intuition tells you is going to happen,” explained the doctor.

Does this mean mothers can forget about sonograms? Well, maybe not, but researchers have agreed that mom’s surprising ability to predict the sex of her baby through intuition is a phenomenon worth serious study.

Of course, kids knew that all along. When Dr. Shamas did a survey of college students, nearly 75 percent of them claimed that their mothers could read their thoughts and feelings in ways no one else could.

Ada Blackjack was alone on an Arctic island with few supplies and no wilderness skills. All she had was a determination to survive for the sake of her child.

A
da Blackjack was Inuit, a full-blooded Eskimo who had never seen an igloo. Ada was a city mom who lived in Nome, Alaska, where she cleaned houses and took in sewing to make money. Like many aboriginal people from an urban environment, Ada never learned the survival skills of her people. She certainly had no idea how to live in the Arctic without modern conveniences.

At 23, Ada had known hard times. She’d had three children with her first husband and had lost two of them. Only six-year-old Bennett had survived, but the boy had fallen ill with tuberculosis. Ada was desperate to get her boy good medical care, only she couldn’t afford it—until it seemed she got a lucky break.

In 1921, an expedition of four young men came to Nome to hire Eskimos to help them live off the land. They intended to camp on the Arctic island of Wrangel and interest the United States or Canada in its development. No Eskimo wanted to go to Wrangel, which was then controlled by Russia. Located north of Siberia, it was desolate, barren, and locked in ice floes much of the year.

But Ada needed money, and the expedition needed a seamstress to repair and sew warm clothing from animal skins. Leaving Bennett in a children’s home, Ada went to Wrangel Island to make some money.