“Just go with your instincts,” says the 79-year-old mom

I always figure when people are older than me, and they have more children than me, that they must have more wisdom than me. My neighbor is just that. She’s 79-years-old and knows just how to give advice without making it sound like advice. Which is the best kind, for me.

The other day while standing in the garden talking about her fig tree, I explained a situation that I was contemplating how to handle. It was a situation that sounded like a nice idea, but not something I was really in favor of. How do I know when I’m being too ridged in my parenting and not open enough to break down for a little fun?

I shared some of the details. Then the 79-year-old mom shared some stories about the issue from when she was a child. And her advice was simple.

“Just go with your instincts,” she said.

This is precisely why I love this woman and the generation she comes from. She was an army wife who gave birth to her forth child while her husband was in Vietnam. She breastfed in a day when doing so was rare, because in her mind, it was just what you did with babies.

When I had my first baby it took me months (if not years) to feel comfortable following my instincts to co-sleep. It was not something I planned on doing but sleeping in a chair all night with a nursing baby wasn’t something I planned on either.

The one person who made me feel like sleeping with my baby was completely normal was my midwife – the one who sat crunched under a sink in a tiny bathroom for three hours and 17 minutes while I was in the bathtub trying to push out my baby. At my two-week postpartum appointment my exhaustion was obvious.

She suggested we create a co-sleeper by inserting a piece of plywood between our mattress and box springs, pad it with blankets and let our newborn sleep there.

I love these notions of literally, being simply natural.

Finally, after buying every Dr. Sears book on the market and making him an imaginary member of my family, I embraced the fact that I was not the same kind of mom I encountered at playgroups where moms were competing for bragging rights on how many hours their babies was sleeping at night.

It took me moving to another town and meeting an amazingly supportive group of moms (through a newly formed chapter of the Holistic Moms Network) to feel like my “go with your instincts” style was not an outdated pair of shoes from never, never land.

This is why it was so refreshing, while talking to my neighbor about that baby who is now in the first grade and happily sleeping through the night in her own bed, to hear that the simple notion of “just go with your instincts” still applies just the same.

Except this time I didn’t turn to Dr. Sears because Mrs. Mary was standing right by her fig tree, right when I needed her.