Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the FutureStopes, Marie Carmichael
Science
Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future
Stopes, Marie Carmichael
Mothers
The conscious dream of parenthood, a parenthood which shall give the
children the best possible chance in life undoubtedly lies behind the
majority of marriages. Hence when the young man who has married with
the desire, perhaps not for immediate, but for ultimate fatherhood,
first learns the definite fact that he has already inaugurated the
beginnings of his child’s development he must experience an intense
and unique wave of feeling, which, as in the early days of marriage,
with all its freshness, and with the actual physical difficulties yet
unfaced, must be one primarily of buoyant delight.
There is also in the earlier months, for the man of artistic
perceptions, an unique experience in the appreciation of his wife’s
enhanced beauty. It is perhaps known that the most critical artistic
view of woman claims the highest point of perfection in her form
about the third month of her first period of motherhood. To a pair of
lovers who have delighted in their bodily beauty, as all natural and
healthy and well formed young people should do, this period, when the
loveliness of the woman is at its very height, and when the man can
feel that he has contributed to its perfection, must be a time of very
special entrancement. That it is something from within his most sacred
being that has added this glow and radiance in perfecting the rounded
form of the body that he adored in its virginal grace, must give a man
with artistic and poetic potentialities an all too brief but never
to be forgotten experience. The young father-to-be should not lose a
day of these swiftly passing weeks, for this phase, like all human
developments, but even more intensely so than most, is passing and
transient, only to be immortalized in the permanence of a perceptive
memory.
When, as is inevitable, it has passed, and is followed within another
month or two by a phase so acutely, perhaps agonizingly its reverse,
the crucifixion of the mother’s sensitive feelings which is entailed
should be hallowed and elevated in both their minds by that deeper,
less personal, and more profoundly racial delight, the picturing with
each other of the radiance, the strength, the power, the purpose and
passion of the life which they are creating. So tragically soon after
the days when he has feasted his eyes and filled his memory with her
beauty, she will, she must withdraw her body from him and for months
to come he will be shut out entirely from all sight of her. The reward
will be an inner experience of the mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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