The Myth of Normal 144

As I worked on this chapter, in mid-May 2020, a horrific terrorist assault on a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, killed twenty-four people, including some nursing mothers. In one of the most moving news videos I have seen, women arrived to nurture and nourish these orphaned infants. “I have come here today to breastfeed these babies,” one young local woman said through her COVID-19 face mask, “because they lost their mothers in this bloody attack. I have a four-month-old baby . . . and came here to give them a mother’s love by breastfeeding them.”[25] It may be that the allomothering instinct is as natural as that of mothering itself. Bottom line: It was never Nature’s agenda, if we can speak of it as such, that a distressed and confused young mother such as Emily Oster should have to struggle in closeted isolation, or to compromise on her instincts and desires to bond calmly with her child. It’s not the job description of parenting that imposes these stresses on mothers and fathers; the problem lies with, so to speak, the sociocultural job site. To say we have drifted afield from a community-parenting model would be an understatement. Today’s insulated nuclear family unit is a distant cry from our “evolved evolutionary niche,” traces of which grow fainter with each new decade, with every fresh turn of the wheel of economic or technological “progress.” With evolutionary precedents shattered, we are made to endure serial breakages of our instinctual inheritance. Consider what has happened to local communities within just a very few generations. I and many others in my age cohort can still remember growing up in neighborhoods where nearly everyone knew one another, where children played throughout the day in the streets, and where every adult, known to us all, was a surrogate parent, keeping an eye on us or ready to call us to order when out of line. Families shopped in neighborhood stores; the grocer, the baker, the hardware dealer, and the car mechanic offered their goods and services within walking distance. (A personal note: During my childhood in Budapest, the sidewalk outside our building was almost as wide as a playground, and served as such for the dozens of children from the neighboring apartment houses. I visited my old neighborhood on a recent speaking trip to Hungary, to find the sidewalk now narrow, a multilane