My mother, Mary Ann Kasten, was a young group Leader in La Leche League and a literary contributor to some of the organization’s first publications. In the early 1960s, the fact that my mother was committed to nursing her babies made her something of a pioneer. She found the support she needed through the League and enthusiastically shared her experience and insights with the members of her fledgling group.

She was drawn as well to the experience of home birth, after two unsatisfying hospital deliveries, and so I was born in the bedroom of my parents’ new home, and my mother never looked back.

At a time when women still had relatively few choices, my mother was embarking on a path of parenting that involved putting the needs of her family first, as she and my father saw them, even if her beliefs as to how to best nurture her children and her mothering spirit were seen as radical.

After three joyful home births and five children, my mother’s life came to a tragic end during the delivery of her sixth child, when her uterus ruptured. Her death so impacted our community that there was a line of people outside the door of the funeral home waiting to enter, a major snowstorm notwithstanding.

Throughout most of my teenage and adult life, the knowledge of how my mother died had left me with a near-paralyzing fear of having children of my own. After much soul-searching, I came to the belief that Mother would never have wanted the sad situation of her passing to prevent me from living out my own dream of being a mother.

While driving by the international headquarters of La Leche League in Schaumburg on my way to and from errands, I decided to stop in one summer afternoon to inquire if there might be anyone working there who had known Mary Ann Kasten.

As I felt the comforting arms of two women who had been friends with her, I felt Mommy’s arms surround me, and a deep sense of peace came into my heart. It was truly as if I had come home. A solitary memory I have of my mother holding me on her lap and rocking me back to sleep after a bad dream came first and foremost into my mind, and I let my tears flow. I knew right then that if I were to be blessed to become a mother, that all the knowledge I really needed was imprinted on me, there in my heart. Just as Mother had made an impression on the women she knew from League, her love was imprinted on me and my brother and sisters.

When I became pregnant in the spring of the following year, I returned to visit my new friends in Schaumburg at LLL. As I shared the joyful news, I felt as if I were telling my own mother.

On December 29, 1998 my daughter Grace was born, nearly thirty years to the day that Mother died. In that moment, I felt so close to her, as if a great weight had been lifted, and I had the keen sense that she was very happy for me. I began to feel the sadness of her death melt away from me and I saw how committed she was to her beliefs and her hopes for the best childbirth experience possible. She gave all five of us such a beautiful, loving start at life, and although she was only physically present to me for my first five years, her loving influence is with me today.

My three sisters and I have all nursed our children, no doubt feeling the same love for them as she felt for each of us. In March of 1999, when my daughter was two months old, I wrote this entry in my journal:

After a five hour sleep,
you woke and I nursed you
and you were calm and wonderful
and beautiful,
and my tears fell on your precious head,
and I hoped that you would, somehow,
imprint my love for you
in that perfect moment
in your memory,
should anything happen to me
and I wouldn’t be around as you grew up
for you to ask me
about when you were an infant,
and to tell you how much I loved
being a mommy to you.

I know that love resonated all around little Grace, and it gave me comfort, too.

________________________________
by Martha Kasten, Illinois USA
from Continuum, 2001 #2

Back to Continuum Articles