Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (7 page)

__ C. Arrange for the heads of Titus’s sons to be brought to him on a platter, along with his own hand.

__ D. Enjoy the pastry served at a party hosted by Titus.

__ E. All of the above.

Answers on
page 299
.

Feel like mom’s always getting under your skin? That’s because she never left!

T
homas Wolfe once wrote that you can’t go home again. Well, it turns out that it might be just as tough to leave home and mom too. It’s true—at least on a cellular level.

Even if you’re all grown up, you can still have blood and tissue cells that you picked up during your time in the womb. Meanwhile, there’s a good chance that mom can’t part with parts of you either. Decades after a woman gives birth, she can still have cells in her body that came from the babies she carried during her pregnancies. The cells are actually descendants of stem cells that have transplanted themselves, taken root, and begun reproducing in both mom and baby.

In fact, women who’ve had sons have been known to have male cells in their bloodstream for up to 27 years. A woman who has been pregnant can have both her mother’s cells and her kids’ cells floating around—no wonder moms sometimes say they have trouble keeping their own identity straight.

This foreign-cell phenomenon is called microchimerism. Foreign cells are few (up to 61 fetal blood cells per tablespoon of blood translates to less than one in a million). Medical researchers using genetic tools to identify foreign cells believe they are a common phenomenon in both sick and healthy people.

The impact of mom’s cells staying in your body is still a mystery. While there’s evidence that foreign cells might encourage autoimmune diseases (where the body mistakenly attacks its own tissues), some scientists believe that a mom’s cells will be shown to benefit her offspring. The jury is still out.

Meanwhile, if you feel an inexplicable urge to wear clean underwear or close the door because you weren’t born in the barn . . . you know the reason. Seems there’s a bit of mom in all of us.

In the ancient world, mom could explain the mysteries of life.

W
e all know motherhood is a powerful thing. But did you know it could make the seasons change, bring stormy weather, and turn night to day?

For a time, the earth knew no winter. It was always warm, always sunny, and always growing season! People owed this eternal summer to the Greek goddess Demeter, who was in charge of agriculture and vegetation. Demeter had a beautiful daughter, Persephone, who was the apple of her mom’s eye.

But everything changed when Hades, god of the underworld, noticed Persephone and realized she was a total babe. He doubted that mom would consent to let her daughter marry him and live underground to preside with him over the souls of the dead. So when Persephone was out picking flowers, Hades split open the earth below her and took her underground to rule as his queen.

Meanwhile, a worried Demeter searched the lands and seas for her beloved daughter. When she finally found out about the kidnapping, Demeter fell into a funk. She let the world turn dark and cold.

Hungry and frostbitten, the unhappy gods came down from Mount Olympus. They tried to reason with Demeter
and reassure her that empty-nest syndrome was completely normal, but the kid did have to marry someday. They brought Demeter gifts and begged her to restore the fruits and blossoms of summer. The mourning mom told the gods, more or less, to go to Hades. The earth remained cursed, cold, and barren.

Finally, realizing that even tackling the lord of death was easier than arguing with a grieving mom, the gods went down to see Hades. “Enough!” they cried. “We’re freezing! Let that kid go home!” Hades reluctantly returned Persephone to her joyful mother, who immediately caused the dead earth to bloom again.

Life seemed to be headed back toward eternal fruits and veggies, but alas, it was not meant to be. Persephone overlooked the first rule of visiting the underworld—don’t eat anything or else you will not be able to return to the land of the living. In her misery, Persephone had turned to food. (Hey, who hasn’t?) She tasted the seeds of a pomegranate, so by celestial laws she had to return to Hades for at least a third of the year. Now when Persephone dwells underground, her mother sadly lets the earth go cold and dark, a phenomenon otherwise known as winter. It’s only when Demeter is reunited with her daughter that spring and summer can return and you can pack away your long underwear.

The Aztec warriors in ancient Mexico believed in the fierce mother goddess called Coatlicue, “the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes.” In addition to her unique fashions, Coatlicue was known for her many, many children. One hundred and one, to be exact. She gave birth to a daughter, Coyolxauhqui, and a hundred sons, who became the stars.

One day Coatlicue found a ball of hummingbird feathers, a bit of an oddity that she tucked into her bosom. Suddenly she got that old queasy feeling and realized that oops, she was pregnant again. But her feather-pregnancy story was so strange that her sons and daughter just didn’t believe her. (Can you blame them?) The kids wanted to know who the father
really
was. They decided their mother had dishonored them, so they decided to kill her. Seems that even goddesses can have dysfunctional families.

But just as they were about to attack her, Coatlicue gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, the warrior sun god and son of hummingbird feathers. He came into the world ready to protect his mother with the help of a fire serpent and his strong sun rays. The fierce Huitzilopochtli destroyed his brothers and beheaded his sister, throwing her head up in the sky to become the moon.

This murderous family squabble was the way the ancient Aztecs explained the sunrise. Every sunset launched a battle between day and night. When the sun came up, it symbolized the victory of Huitzilopochtli and his fertile mother over the forces of darkness.

When he advised American families on how to raise their children, Dr. Spock rebelled against the legacy of his own mother.

“T
rust yourself,” Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote. “You know more than you think you do.”

With those calming and now famous words, the New England pediatrician revolutionized the way American moms bring up babies. His book,
Baby and Child Care
, was an immediate best seller in 1945 (selling for 25 cents) and went on to become one of the best-selling books of all time. Though there was no dedication to Spock’s mother on the cover, in a strange way you could say she’d been his inspiration.

As mothers thumbed through Dr. Spock’s book for advice on everything from family dinners to diaper changes, they also learned that hugs and kisses wouldn’t spoil their babies. They were encouraged to ignore rigid feeding and toilet-training schedules in favor of flexibility with the individual needs of their baby.

Hugs, kisses, and flexibility were revolutionary ideas for the 1940s. Prior to Spock’s book, the most influential baby-care expert was John B. Watson, who gave stern orders. “Never, never kiss your child,” Watson insisted. “Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.”
Watson’s antiaffection theory was that mother love was dangerous; it was smothering and kept a child from developing into a strong adult. It left a “never-healing wound” that damaged the chances for a successful future.

With Watson demanding that mothers tie their child’s arm to the crib if a toddler sucked his thumb, imagine the relief when Dr. Spock advised mothers that both they and their babies could enjoy the experience of child rearing. But if the moms who sought advice from Dr. Spock knew he was opposing the standard ideas of his day, they probably didn’t know that his advice also directly contradicted the views of his own mother.

In 1903 Mildred Louise Stoughton and Benjamin Ives Spock gave birth to the first of their six children, Benjamin McLane Spock. Well-to-do Mildred had her share of maids, but she hired no governesses or nannies that might interfere with her child management. Papa Benjamin quietly watched from the sidelines while Mildred ran a strict home with the goal of raising perfect children.