Mothers no longer sleep with their babies. Babies sleep alone in their cribs. Mothers do not carry babies all the time. Most try to carry them as little as possible. Mothers do not always pick up their babies when they cry. They try to teach their babies that mother will not pick them up when they cry. They do not seem to want the baby to know that mother is always there for baby. Instead, it is very important for the baby to learn that mother cannot always be there. Many mothers are hardly there at all. They go to work and have someone else care for their baby. Baby sitters are used when the mother wants to or has to go somewhere. It seems that babies are not welcome everywhere and that mothers often do not want their babies to be with them. It is clear that in our world, unlike the world of the long ago people, babies interfere in the usual conduct of life.

Time is ever present in the world of today. There is never enough, so people hoard their time and begrudge it to others. Mothers and fathers seldom have enough time to do all the things they have to or want to do, including being with their children. We have invented "quality time" with children under the pretense that time with them that is good is better than always being there for them It makes us feel better about our unavailability. We also, as a people, strongly believe in right and wrong. We do not perceive child care as an interactive process where child and parent learn from and about each other but rather as a regime of correct rules and actions. Parents decide, often with the advice of a doctor, how often their babies should be fed, when they should go to sleep and for how long, when they should give up their bottles, when they should be toilet-trained, when they should feed and dress themselves, and at what age parents should begin to spank and punish them. We live in a world of "no time" and "should", and these compulsions regulate the relationship of mother and baby.

How did the world lose its spontaneity? How did the world of mothers and babies get to be filled with "no time" and "should"? And how did it become a place where mothers stopped taking care of their babies the way the first mothers did?

The people who first lived on the Earth did not live in towns or cities. They lived in the world of nature in small groups, usually consisting of about fifty people. Today we call the people who lived a long, long time ago hunter-gatherers because they obtained their food by hunting animals and by gathering it from the plants that grew around them. They did not plant crops or farm or raise animals for food; they did not have to. The land on which they lived provided them with whatever they needed, and they knew a great deal about the land, including which plants and roots were good to eat and where to find them. They also knew how to track animals and how to kill them. Although the people. killed animals and were afraid of those animals that could kill them, they did not see animals as enemies nor did they believe that they were better than the animals. They believed that they, like the animals, were a part of the land and of what we call nature. They did not kill animals for the fun of it; they killed them for food. In this respect they were just like the animals who also only killed to eat. The people, however, did not only eat the animals they killed. They also used the skin and fur and bones of the animals to make things, and in that way they were different than the animals. But they did not look down upon the animals who were unique and clever in their own ways. The people of long, long ago did not dominate the world of nature. They were, as all life, simply a part of it.

What does all this have to do with the first mothers and how they vanished? Well, first of all, the first mothers were the way they were because they were a part of nature and lived in the natural world, and they responded to their babies like the human animals that they were. Second, they vanished after humans created a new and different world from the natural one - a man-made world.

What I am going to say now is very important, and it is also a very hard thing to understand. The people of a long, long time ago would not have found what I am going to say hard to understand. They understood it better than I do. In fact, they are the ones who taught it to me. The reason why it is so hard for people of today to understand what follows is because we live so differently now that we don't even have the words for it. The best words that I can think of are "we" and "one". But it is a little confusing because today people think of "we" as a bunch of "I"s and "one" as just an "I". But what I mean by "we" is that it is a real thing, not a thing made up of separate "I"s, but a thing unto itself. It's like you are a whole person even though you have separate parts like eyes and legs and feet and fingers and inside parts like a heart and stomach and blood. But even though you have all these separate parts, they all work together; they act as "one", which is you. Well, the group of a long, long time ago was made up of all these people with separate structures but they were a "one" and a "we". That's why the first mothers were the way they were with their babies. A mother didn't think of her baby as separate from herself. She and her baby were "one". She didn't think of herself as separate from the people with whom she lived nor did the people think of her as separate from them. They were a "we". And the people did not think of themselves as separate from the world in which they lived. They were "one" with it.

In the world we live in now there are only I's. Sure, people do things together and belong to the same groups, are a part of the same school, same team, work in the same place, and are part of a family, but they hardly ever forget about "me". In a world that, from the moment of birth, treats us as separate, each of us becomes a "me". Most of what everyone does is for their "me". That's why the mothers of today take care of their babies the way they do; the mother is a "me" and so is her baby. The mother doesn't see her baby as "one" with her; they aren't a "we". They are two separate people, each doing their own thing, sometimes together and sometimes not together.

The way the first mothers vanished has to do with the fact that the world and the people in it changed. It's the story of how "we" became a bunch of "I"s and "me"s, how people became separate from each other. How did this happen? Well, all you have to do is pick up a book about the history of civilization. If you read between the lines and keep your eyes open as to what was happening to the people, even though history books are seldom about ordinary people, it's obvious. But I won't ask you to do that. Since I've done it already, I'm going to tell you what I learned.

As I said before, the people of long, long ago lived by hunting and gathering. They lived like this for most of the time that humans inhabited the Earth, until about twelve thousand years ago when people began to grow their own food. and invented farming. At this time, they also began to raise animals for milk and meat. In some places people continued to hunt and gather in addition to farming, while in other areas agriculture became the main way of life. After a while this new way of living began to change how people thought about, and acted toward, each other. The new world was different than the world of nature. It was a world that people had created, a world that they wanted to direct and control. Although they still depended on nature for sun and rain to grow their crops, they had removed themselves from it. Nature was no longer a friend, who supplied humans with that which they needed, but an enemy that too often got in their way. Man and nature were no longer "one"; nature would now serve man. By keeping and owning animals, men had to change the animals' nature. Animals would be trained to obey and to do what men wanted, even if it meant breaking the animals' spirits. Eventually humans would do that to themselves by breaking the spirits of their children.

The new way of life took away the people's freedom. Although the land was used to serve the people, they became captives of the land. Needing the food their plot of land gave them, they could not leave it; they could no longer wander. By owning land, men became owned by the land. Before, no one had owned land; it belonged to everyone. After agriculture took hold, people began to claim and own parts of the Earth. They began to divide the planet up with barriers, fences and laws.

Although everything that I have described took a long time to happen, the result was that the world became very different from the way it had been originally. More and more, the groups of people living together became larger and larger. People stopped sharing. Instead of everyone having the same, some people had more land, more food, and more things than others. The people who had more were not ashamed of having more, as they once would have been. To the contrary, they felt proud of having more and believed that made them better than those who had less. The people who had less believed it too. The people with more used their more to buy and to own the people who had less. The more land a person had, the more workers he needed to work the land and to care for the more and more animals he would obtain. Unlike the first people who did not know about more or less, the people of the world that men had created invented arithmetic and counting because more and less had become the way the world was and would be run.

At first, in this new world animals were used to do the heavy work of farming and building. But as some people began to have more worth than others and there were more and more people, human energy became valuable. People began to be used as animals to serve those who had more. People were no longer equal in importance as they had once been. The people no longer lived as "one" with a common purpose. Instead of a "we" they had become a host of "me"s.

The people began to look at their children differently too. They were just things that had to be taken care of until they could be useful. Although they were a burden at first, the more children born, the better. It was good for a woman to have lots of children. They belonged, as she did, to her husband. More children meant more workers. Children, like land and animals, had become property, and so too had women. Men could have more than one wife. The more wives, the more children. The values that men had regarding their cattle were applied to their families.

The trouble with children, however, was that at first they were babies, and babies had to be cared for. This took time and energy and a mother couldn't have another baby right away if she was nursing. But men, being smart, created the wet nurse. The wet nurse was a woman who was used to breast feed babies that were not her own. Sometimes she was paid for her services or, if she was a slave, she could be ordered to serve as a wet nurse. A slave, by the way, was a person who was owned by another person. The slave, even though he or she was a person, was not allowed to be a person. Slaves could not do what they wanted but were told what to do or not do by their owners. They were property and could be bought and sold. Children could also be sold into slavery by their parents. Even if children weren't slaves, they made good servants. One book I read indicated that a good part of the work of the world was done by children until fairly recently.

Wet nurses not only nursed babies, they also took care of them. More often than not, a new baby was sent away to live with the wet nurse. After two or three years {and sometimes even longer}, the baby, now a child, would return home and soon after be sent away to school or to work for someone else. As you can see, taking care of children was considered a burden to parents. It was better to assign this chore to servants or slaves so that the mother could pursue more important activities. Poor people were usually stuck with the burden of caring for their own children as they could not afford servants or slaves.

The wet nurses and other servants who cared for babies and children usually weren't very nice to them. That was because the new people, unlike the first people, were a cruel people, not only to children but to each other. People always become cruel when their world is divided into "more" and "less" and when power and fear govern their interaction. The people no longer responded to children with tenderness and concern but with anger at their requirement of care. Their caretakers would give them alcohol and drugs so they would sleep a lot and not require attention. Children were beaten and punished and forced to behave the way adults wanted. They were treated like slaves or like the animals people owned. They were domesticated and trained to serve their masters. They were also sent out to work as servants or to work at trades at an early age. It's funny, not funny like something you would laugh at but strange or crazy, that in the new world things got reversed. Instead of children being cared for by grown-ups, the children were expected, and made, to care for the grown-ups.

An even stranger thing happened. Instead of believing that it was good to be nice to children, people began to believe that it was good to be cruel to them. Someone came up with an idea everyone seemed to believe and still believe today that if you were nice to children and responded to them with tenderness and indulged their need for nurturing, they would become spoiled and rotten like old fruit or meat or something. I never did get the meaning of the word "spoiled" when applied to children even though everyone uses it and acts as if they know what it means. To me, the word "spoiled" means useless. Maybe spoiling children means that they won't be useful if you are nice to them. Maybe in the world humans made it wasn't important for children to have fun and be happy and enjoy being children; childhood was instead a time when children were supposed to be trained to be used when they got older. So I guess being cruel to children would accustom them to being used, and children who were spoiled wouldn't let others use them because they expected something better from people, like concern and consideration. Otherwise it doesn't seem to make much sense to view children as spoiled. But maybe I've made it more complicated than it is. Maybe a spoiled child is merely one who hasn't given up on receiving tenderness from adults.

Well, to get back to my purpose, which was to explain how the first mothers vanished - it wasn't just men who believed that being nice to children would spoil or ruin them. Women and mothers believed it too. So the boys and girls who weren't treated nicely by their parents, who were sent away to wet-nurses and out to work, and who were beaten, punished, shamed, and humiliated grew up. When they became parents they didn't know about tenderness, and they did the same cruel, uncaring things that had been done to them to their children. After this happened, generation after generation, century after century, the first mothers were all gone; they had vanished. In their place were women who had babies, even more babies than the first mothers. They were also called mothers, but they were different from the first mothers because they didn't grow up having mothers like the first mothers. These new mothers didn't like taking care of babies. They, like everyone else, saw being a mother as boring, burdensome, menial, worthless, unimportant - as a job for slaves or servants. Pregnancy, birthing, and caring for babies had come to be viewed as a hateful torture, that men didn't have to bear, which was put on women as a curse or punishment. Women no longer valued their milk or their unique and special role in the creation and development of new life. They had become like men - unnecessary after new human life was born.

The world humans had made was very cruel, not only because people became cruel to each other but because they had lost the human ways of tenderness. People no longer cared about each other. Their indifference bred a violent world. With time the world would become less cruel but not more tender. The new attitude toward children and mothers would persist into the modern world. The first mothers had vanished and the goodness which they had imparted to their children through the way they took care of them had also vanished. The "oneness" of the first mothers and their babies would be discouraged in the modern world and seen as a harmful thing to children's growth and as preventing them from adapting to, and coping with, the real world. Mother and infant would be viewed as separate "me"s. In the modern world new ideas and inventions would be developed to keep mothers and babies apart and separate from each other.

Three: The First Mothers

Five: Fake Mothers