Читать книгу The Fourth Trimester - Susan Brink - Страница 8

PREFACE

My commitment to write a book about the newborn’s first three months comes from my own life. I married very young and have two daughters and six grandchildren. Yet nothing from my maternal experience or from my professional background as a journalist specializing in science and medicine eased me or my grown children through the sudden shock of being completely responsible for the life and development of a brand-new human being.

On my desk I have photographs that tell the story. The snapshots I took a few days before my daughters became mothers show them proudly posing with their full-term pregnant bodies in profile, their smiles broad and genuine. Then comes a shot of my daughter Jenny, triumphant with her newborn Max, but her smile has become uncertain. The same uncertainty is written on Rachel’s face in yet another snapshot, her eyes wary and full of doubt, posing with one-day-old Makayla. As brand-new mothers, my daughters had had their confidence seriously shaken.

I look at those photographs and recall my own shock decades ago when nurses handed over my firstborn. How could they be so reckless as to entrust a helpless new human being to clueless me?

We all made it through, my daughters and I, as new parents do. Yet I know that for the first three months we relied on trial and error, intuition, dumb luck—and the passing of time.

Three months, said pediatricians, other mothers, friends, and family. Just hang in there for three months, and the mysterious and demanding infant will become more human, more like the baby you imagined. Since embarking on the research for this book, I understand in a deeper way why, during the fourth trimester of development, an infant is not like the baby that people imagine. I want others to be able to do more than just hang in there while they anxiously wait for three months to pass. This book is for parents, grandparents, friends, family members, physicians, and students, every single one of them eager to do the right thing by each infant he or she encounters. I want everyone who is in awe of and in love with a newborn to understand exactly how to protect and nurture an infant during the first three months of life—the critically important fourth trimester.

Susan Brink