!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
“Have you polished up those hypotheses for us?” Dr. Klein asked. “We’ve got to start selecting the girls for subjects soon.”
Julia had been pushing me for the better part of a year to finish up the background reading and research I needed for my thesis. Books like On Adolescence: A psychoanalytic Interpretation, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman, Maternal Emotions, and Unmarried Mothers. Articles with titles like “The real world of the teen-age Negro mother”, “The ego in adolescence”, and “The second individuation process of adolescence”. Correspondence with other doctoral students who were doing similar research, such as “The Human Newborn and His Mother”, “Infant Rearing Myths of Adolescent Mothers”. My cubby-hole office in the psych library at B.U. was beginning to overflow like a proper academic’s, papers piled on every horizontal surface, books, filled with torn slips marking key pages, stacked haphazardly askew, and steno pads filled with thoughts, asides, plans for organization. We had met twice a month for several years, and I finally had a vision for what I wanted to study, and what form it would take.
I recited from memory the five questions I hoped to answer. “First, ‘Adolescents who are more separate from their families adjust more easily to motherhood’. Second, ‘Those with firmer feminine identities adjust more easily to motherhood’. ‘Stronger relationships with babies’ fathers and peers correlates with easier adjustment to motherhood.’ Then there’s the Freudian one we’re slipping in, ‘Those with greater ego strength adapt to motherhood better’. And, finally, “Infants whose behavior is less worrisome will have more satisfactory interactions with the mothers’.” I breathed deeply, proud that I had honed my inchoate feelings about a teen-age mother’s relationship to her infant into five hypotheses amenable to study and analysis.
“That fourth one, Sarah, how do you define ‘ego strength’?”
“That’s by accommodation to pregnancy.”
“Meaning?”
“We’ll use the Newborn Projective test that Heidi designed a few years ago in Barry’s lab at the CDU.”
Julia nodded. “All right, sounds like you’re ready to start recruiting at the teen clinics over at Women’s and Beth Israel!”
Every week from June through September, I spent an hour at each hospital, interviewing one young mother about 28 weeks into her first pregnancy. By the time I met with my 30th subject, I had the questions memorized. I was able to look into Doreen’s tired eyes, and smile warmly as she rubbed the top of her belly.
“Hello, Doreen. I’m Sarah Stein. I’m doing research on teen-age mothers, trying to find out how they feel about and take care of their babies. Thanks for agreeing to help me with our study. Did they explain a little bit about what we’re going to do?”
“Yeah, you wanna know about me and my baby, how we get along after she’s born?”
“Right. I’m going to ask you some questions. If you feel uncomfortable at any time, you don’t want to answer, or don’t want to continue, just let me know. We’re not going to do anything except talk. Then after the baby’s born, I’ll do a little exam in the hospital before you leave, then meet you again six weeks later. OK?”
She nodded impersonally. “Awright. Let’s go.”
Doreen was Black, nearly 17, living with her mother who worked as a nurse’s aide at Brigham and Women’s. She’d known the baby’s father since the start of her sophomore year. He didn’t come to the clinic visit, but she said they were ‘still together’, and he planned to ‘stay around’ after the baby was born, even though they both thought she was too young to get married. Her friends thought the pregnancy was ‘cool’, and a couple of them had babies of their own.
I gave her ten pictures to look at, babies smiling, sleeping, scowling, crying, and asked for her reaction to each. Then, we talked about three more pictures. The first showed a woman holding a book, in front of a farm where a man and woman accompanied a horse plowing the field. The second showed a woman looking through a door she’s just opened into a room, where flowers sat on a small table. The last featured a woman reading to a girl holding a doll in her lap. I asked Doreen to tell a story about what led up to the picture, what was happening in it, what the people are feeling and thinking, and how the story ends. Julia and I had designed this part of the interview to give us some idea about my second hypothesis, the effect of a teen-ager’s sense of feminine identity on her interactions with her newborn. Early on in the process, I began to regret that these pictures were wildly inappropriate for my study subjects, all the characters being white, and located in environments foreign to these inner city girls. But Julia wouldn’t let me change after we’d started.
Once I’d finished with Doreen, I went to the hospital for a postpartum interview with another new mom, followed by my favorite part of the study, examining the baby. I floated back to my day’s in Barry’s lab, and all those infants I’d played with under the guise of gathering data for our reciprocity study.
Julia, who accompanied me on several of these visits, observed one day, “Now I see why you wanted to do this study.” She winked both eyes, then said, “I guess it’s OK to like them – the babies, I mean. You don’t want to influence your subject moms with your emotions, but the babies – go ahead, enjoy them.”
Two days after her delivery, I found Doreen’s room. She looked up from the wrinkled little baby cradled in her arms, saying dreamily, “Oh, hi, Missus…uh?”
“Stein – I’m Sarah, remember me?”
“Yeah, you’re the lady who showed me those funny pictures.”
I smiled, looking down at the tiny bundle in her arms. A thin pink cotton cap partly covered curly black hair. “She is … lovely, Doreen. Does she have a name yet?”
“Shalice, that’s what I call her,” she said without looking up.
“I think she’ll love that.” I wondered, “Is it after someone?”
Doreen looked up, beaming. “No. I made it up all myself. It means ‘Precious’ ‘cause that’s what she is. So precious.” Shalice cooed at her mother’s voice.
“Can I touch her?”
“Here, you can hold her, Miss,” Doreen said, handing me the swaddled infant.
My chest tightened as I carefully wrapped both arms around her tiny body. I used the opportunity to start the newborn exam, testing her Moro reflex. “OK if I do a little check on her here?” I asked as I laid her gently, slowly down into the rolling bassinet. I felt the room go distant as I carefully unwrapped the blanket, covered with ducklings endlessly following their mother. I marveled at her sudden startle when the cool air hit her skin. Only Shalice and I were left, her so helpless and I in awe at her miniature fingernails, her long thick lashes, her squinting dark brown eyes. As I’d felt so many times before, being in the presence of a baby, still curled from her journey in the womb, I wondered if this was what a mother does, forget everything else except her own, her precious child.
Wrapping her up after I’d finished, I discovered Doreen had slipped into the bathroom. This meant I could hold Shalice a few minutes more. I thought, this, this makes all those books, all those papers, all those crumpled outlines, all that planning, everything I’d done to get ready – this is what I really wanted.
“She’s pretty, ain’t she, Miss?” Doreen asked as she eased herself back into bed, careful not to sit down too hard.
“She is…she is. So pretty,” I said quietly.
“Pardon?” Doreen said.
“Sorry. Here. Such a lovely, lovely baby. You are so lucky. Don’t forget, I’ll be coming to see you two, again, at home next month.”
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