2017 Newborn Internship Stories Part 2: Helping Life

"Aiuto alla Vita" - Helping Life 

From my observation notes: March 27

"A baby on the exam table sleeps while waiting for her blood draw. Five minutes later she is a patient who has two nurses, one holding her arm that is wrapped tight by a rubber tube and the other pulling blood up into the syringe. She cries a '4'. 

I record crying that I observe on a scale of '1' being light fussing to '4' being screaming at the top range of fear, pain or exhaustion.

Six other babies are already in the nursery waiting for viewing hours to begin, when their family can come see them through a window. One baby begins to cry, I go over to him and see that his hands are lost up his sleeves. His hands inside the sleeves bat at his face but no self-soothing is possible with his sleeves in the way. He cries a '3' for about five minutes. No one pays attention. 

I put a hand on his head, he calms and falls asleep. I had been trying to resist the urge to do something for him (in the name of science, not because I didn't want to) but then I decided to offer a contact (a hand on the skull) to see if it made a difference. Whether it made the difference or not, he stopped crying. Another baby begins to cry a '3' - her arms and legs are thrusting in and out. I try the same contact, to the top of the head, just to say “someone is here, you are not alone” but she continues to cry with the same intensity.”

The Newborn, with Love

I have fallen in love with newborns. Watching them go through the painful blood draws is one of the worst parts of my internship. Many of my experiences are "bellissime" - incredibly beautiful. Babies call out to a special part of our humanness, the vulnerable part, and perhaps some deep cellular memory is activated remembering when we too were defenseless, at the mercy of those who were handling our care. When I went off to my Montessori training in San Diego, California, I intended to study birth to three in order to work with the beginning of life. The first summer of my Assistants to Infancy training convinced me even more of this - the summer with the 0-12 months focus. 

I took the idea of “Education from Birth as a Help to Life” extremely seriously. I thought, “if we help people understand what normalization looks like from the beginning, we won’t have to help children “normalize” when they arrive in their first Montessori classroom, because hospitals, parents and society never “unnormalized them” or “deviated” them from the path of normal development in the first place. I decided, however, that I would begin my work with the second half of the 0-3 spectrum of development and after some years with toddlers I would go back to work with the first year. 15 years later I've had over 300 children in their second and third years and perhaps 12 in their first year. I'm finally at the point where I can devote myself to the youngest ones who I intended to be working for when I began this journey.

But how I loved those toddlers and those years with a community of a dozen or more humans commonly said to be in their "terrible twos." They are such capable little people, so full of curiosity, but so mistreated and misunderstood for having it. “Don't touch that, don't put that in there, NO, get down from there, you are going to fall down and hurt yourself!” What drives me is that I feel like they must be understood. Not being understood leads to "abnormalization." I must speak out for them, and the little people they first were, the one year old, the newborn. 

I hear the voice of the Lorax, the Dr. Seuss character who defends the trees and the animals from exploitation: “I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”

Babies and toddlers have tongues, but they can't form up their arguments for a couple of years and by then it is way too late. If trees had tongues, when the loggers came they would say, “Don't cut me down, I've been growing here for hundreds of years and I like being alive. I offer a home to thousands of living creatures and I give off oxygen for you to breathe.” 

What would a newborn say if she had words? “Can you hold me mom? I don't feel safe over here without you. Be careful with me when you move me, it is impossible for my brain to tell if I'm moving or if the whole room is moving and that scares me a lot!” In order to understand babies, adults have to learn to understand a language that is Beyond Words. 

I am reading a book by this name right now, about how some animals communicate (the elephants, wolves and those in the dolphin family), how they have emotional intelligence and relationships, how they show love and compassion for one another, but they have no words. A large percentage of humans don't empathize with animal society because they don't recognize the emotional intelligence in them that is in reality the same as ours. Children under 18 months are in this camp: animal levels of "intelligence". If you read this book you won't doubt any longer that animals are wise beyond words, and you will realize as well that, like animals, “newborns are people who feel and communicate” and who have an intelligence that merits our respect. They communicate - if only we knew how to listen.

Grazia Honegger Fresco printed up a timeline for the International Congress hosted by the Montessori Birth Center in 1996. We sold the final copies of this timeline in Prague but hopefully I'll be able to reprint it one of these days. The timeline title is: From Maria Montessori's first observations of the newborn to her discovery that the newborn is a person who feels and communicates: the history of the Montessori Birth Center in Rome. When I first read that title in 2012 at the Percorsi per Crescere course I took with Grazia, it confused me. 

Now it is perfectly clear.

Karin

The following excerpt is from the book: il neonato, con amore. I translated this today for the blog so it may not be a perfectly correct translation, but I think I captured the idea.
(Ferro Edizioni 1987, out of print and only in Italian, and unfortunately you can't actually find a used copy on the market.)

“The newborn human must be helped above all else in the development of all of his potential, starting with the creative unconscious, that which carries out the realization of the consciousness of mankind. He is therefore not just a body that needs to be maintained alive and cared for according to his physical needs for health … 

... this is the force of mankind. It exists at birth already and even before birth.

His delicate body arouses tenderness, but the other part of him, his unconscious mind which has yet to manifest itself in life, is the part that must attract the highest feelings in us: feelings of faith in that which is not yet; dedication to that which is not apparent but that truly forms the very essence of every man or woman. It is the human psyche, and not only the living body, that must inspire, from the very beginning, our loving care. The newborn seen from this perspective requires the most knowledgeable care, even more knowledgeable than that which is offered for his physical body, a form of loving care that is new and unknown and that we might call helping life (aiuto alla vita). ”

This excerpt is from a private letter written by Maria Montessori to Adele Costa Gnocchi in 1949 and was published in il neonato, con amore, pg. 46. I have chosen to translate "aiuto alla vita" as "helping life" rather than it's common translation "an aid to life" which is a bit more sterile and less feeling in my opinion.