Our family and the maternal women's interactions are often guilty of judging the character of a generation.

In the movie, The Family Way, {which I only saw this scene of} I smirked at the scene where John Mills and {I think} Marjorie Rhodes played the parents of a son, who was having early marriage problems. I thought only my maternalistic family was swift to call people "lacking of natural affections" who had not been nursed at the mother. "Bottle fed", in our family seemed synonymous with not having natural affections. This is truly a large leap of spiritual reasoning from the providential distinction of an infant having been attached to his mother or not. We did it though. Many times, in family discussions, I was silenced by the other mothers who simply put fingers to mouth, when a word of disrespect or corruption was coming from the mouth of one or another. They will understand later on, when they have a child or God will spank them on that subject. They silenced me often and categorized the person as an immature person, unwittingly to the person. Always silently, these maternal eye contact kept me knowledgable of the secret society that we were, having gone through travail. There is no way to bring someone's soul into sympathy of childbirth, not having experienced it. I thought we should teach them. No, shhhhhh! God will bring them through experience, was understood. All of these unsaid or single word understandings were spoken outright in the scene of that movie.

The swiftest way to get a negative word from a mother is to attack her child. The father of that child or not. If you falsely accuse her offspring she will attack.

The knowledge that ordinarily a dearness attaches in the nursing process. A sense of humanness and eye to eye interaction, physical and mental in the preserving of the dates of maternal child feeding. I had stacks of books at my nursing chair, some for the child and some for me.

Why should I continue this archaic cultural remnant of our beastiality? Was always my question. Why should I endure the pain of this? What is the benefit of my sacrificing and enduring such? I had my answers in some books beside me, "La Leche"etc.. These encouraged me that there was some benefit.

The other books were for the soul. My soul and the soul of my child. Who is God? Why are we Christians? What do we believe about Him? Along with the early expressions of physical aptitudes, spiritual perceptions were also part and parcel of the nursing session. Not to bite momma, for one. This is the aspect that all nursing mothers mean when they talk about not having natural affections. Those bottle fed children can bite the nipple as much as they like, but there is a human element attached with human feeding.

In parallel, God is in Heaven and in Him we live and move and have our being. He is certainly not to be minimized in His power above us and we in our need of Him. He is loving and kind and gracious, but certainly feels our spurning of Him. There are many ways to teach this truth, but at the mother's earliest nutrients is a strong lesson.