I'm Just Not a Tribal Woman

Sometimes I put pressure on myself as a mom. I want to be like little stay at home Mother Nature Hippie+50s housewife+ Modern Mommy staying up on the latest and greatest baby trends in the west.

 

Basically it starts with the fact that these women inspire me.  When I say ‘these women” I mean tribal women. When I am having a hard day, I picture Sacagawea with Lewis and Clark forging down a river with her baby in tow, or the mothers in the covered wagons making their way across the plains in the winter to Oregon, or the African woman living in a hut working hard to find food for her children with a baby strapped to her.

I think I should do things the way they do it or the way I think they would. Obviously this is mostly crazy talk. In a lot of ways I do think we should go back to our roots and learn from the way nature intends for us to do things. But I am not really willing to forgo baby lotions, nursing covers, and breast pumps…I mean these Mother Nature women don’t have and probably don't need high chairs and excersaucers and bouncers and baby swings and boppys and bumbos and breast friends and Phil and Ted’s strollers and baby leashes, and pacifiers, and Hylands teething tablets. But as much as I rationally see things are not 100% necessary, I feel that I must have them and keep them.

I’ll tell you what though, in some ways we do have some challenges in the west that tribal women do not.......no tribal woman has to drive in a car with her baby strapped to a plastic contraption while they scream to be fed and you could be thrown in jail for feeding them in route. I’m not saying I should be able to take the baby out of the car seat to nurse her (although I am working on a little side project invention that involves a long straw….). I just think that we here in the WEST have some different obstacles that unfortunately make doing everything au natural impossible.