‘I see my role as a kind of spiritual accompaniment.’

Mother’s nature Barbara Childs on early parenting

I am a volunteer breastfeeding counsellor with one of Britain’s leading breastfeeding charities. My work involves helping new mothers to get breastfeeding off to a good start, and to overcome any problems they might face. But it is also much more than that.

Although my organisation is fiercely secular, and I certainly wouldn’t use these terms with any of the mothers I support, I also see my role as a kind of spiritual accompaniment, and I see the mother-baby relationship as a spiritual practice. Here is why.

As Quakers we are advised to ‘take heed… to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts’. I see the mother-baby experience as a time when listening to these promptings is a real and physical event. But when Quakers talk about listening to that inner voice, taking heed, how do we know that we are listening? How will we know we have heard?

Well, here is one example – a mother and baby. What is in that mother’s heart, what is really in her heart?

We could see the little baby as the voice we are heeding. And that little voice is saying: ‘Pick me up, cuddle me.’ But sometimes, due to lots of other forces and circumstances, we might try to block out what we are hearing.

‘You can’t want feeding again.’

‘I’m not going to make a rod for my own back.’

‘You’ve got to learn to self soothe.’

‘I have too many other things to do.’

But that little voice is getting louder now – not just the baby’s voice, but the voice inside the mother that is trying to drown out the other influences and circumstances. And that persistent voice can lead the mother into what the advice calls ‘new life’.

We pick up the baby, we surrender, we sink down into that new way of being and we know in every fibre of our being that this is right. Baby knows it, and anyone else in the room can sense that now we are all living in that blessed place.

So, in my work I try to help mothers really listen to the true voices within them, especially if they differ from other voices around them – and there are always plenty of those.

The Quaker way that we practise relates to every aspect of our lives, early motherhood included.

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