able to lift and hold them in a way that the babies found comfortable.
However, the mother—infant dance, where the partners in that most vital of relationships can read each other, is not always easy. In fact, Carol says she’s often stunned by how often it simply doesn’t happen. Much of her role revolves around teaching a mother how to read her baby’s signals of distress. This is more difficult than it sounds, given that preterm babies cry much less than babies born at full-term. However, with a little patience and care, parents can be taught to recognise when their baby is stressed and unhappy—dysregulated, as Carol calls it.
These signals may include a screwed-up facial expression, clenched fists, stiff arms, and even the colour of the baby’s skin changing so that it becomes mottled, red, or sometimes blue. In the face of these changes in their baby’s behaviour and appearance, the mother is encouraged to slow her movements down, pacing her actions and the way she touches the baby to a tempo that it can cope with.
Carol’s observations of babies and their mothers are helpful to her now, as a grandmother, and they have informed the way she went about bonding with her grandchildren when they were born. Of course, she says, she was just dying to immediately touch and hold them but, because of her work with prem babies and their mothers, she was able to pace her approach to her grandchildren, reading the subtle signals they gave that let her know she was proceeding at the rate they were comfortable with.
Often, the way she advises parents to interact with their prematurely born baby may actually result in them touching their babies less. She tells me a story about a father she observed who was visiting his little daughter in the hospital while she was still confined to an isolette. ‘He was rubbing his thumb up and down the sole of her foot and every time he did it, she moved her foot away. So he’d follow her and he’d do it again, very lovingly, lovingly,’ she emphasises, ‘touching this little girl.’
‘Does she like that?’ Carol asked the father, hoping to prompt him to really observe his daughter and read the signals she was sending.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he told her, ‘you can tell she likes it, because every time I do it she moves.’
Carol pauses and for a moment we both contemplate the scene she has just described. ‘Can you see how,’ she asks me, ‘with the best will in the world, parents can actually make their babies move away from them rather then towards them?’
Preliminary research that Carol and her team have conducted into the brain development of the preterm babies whose mothers they have been working with has indicated some interesting results. They were hoping to see increased brain volume in the babies but, while this did not appear to be occurring, what they did observe was that the molecules of the myelinated nerve cells in the brain, through which electrical impulses travel, showed an improvement in the way that they lined up, allowing for enhanced transmission of impulses.
Carol is familiar with the work of Tiffany Field. She tells me about a study research that Field did in the area of newborns and massage where babies were massaged by researchers for 15 minutes three times a day for ten days. The treatment also included gently moving the babies’ limbs. At the end of the ten-day period, the massaged babies had put on 47 per cent more weight than the control babies who were not massaged. Kangaroo care can achieve similar results, Carol believes. ‘I think human beings need close bodies. Whether you’re a baby or an old person, you need people who love you to be physically close to you.’
‘There’s such a lot of similarity between little bodies that are at the edge of viability and old bodies that are at the edge of viability,’ Carol tells me, and this belief influenced the way that she interacted with her father when he was old and dying. Towards the end of his life, he was in a nursing home where she would visit him three or four times a week. But, she says, she would never just sit beside the bed. Ignoring the sometimes-puzzled looks of the staff and other visitors, she would climb up on the bed and sit beside her father so that her body was touching his. She would also stroke his arms and head with her hands.
‘There’s almost some sort of taboo about touching your dad the way you would touch a baby, she says, ‘but I would do that all that time.’ It was something they both found comforting.
On one visit, she found him bruised and battered in his bed after a bad fall. As usual, she had arrived in time to help him with his evening meal, but he refused to eat.
‘I just leant over and gave him a big hug,’ she says, ‘and his old arms went around me.’ They stayed like that for a long time and then, finally, when they broke the embrace, she was able to get her father to eat. ‘He absolutely needed the close contact more than he needed food. He needed someone to hug him and to understand how he was hurting.’
TOUCH HAS ALWAYS been associated with the healing professions. Doctors, physiotherapists, nurses, myotherapists and masseurs, occupational therapists, and practitioners of alternative medicines use touch diagnostically, to comfort, and in the course of treatment.
In many traditional blessings, the hand of the holy person is placed on the head of the one to be blessed, the touch conferring authority, absolution, or a benediction. The Bible contains numerous references to both Jesus and his apostles ‘laying on hands’ in order to heal or to bestow the Holy Spirit.
Royalty were once thought to have the power to heal through touch. When the king or queen claimed the source of their right to rule as coming directly from God, their power was exemplified through the notion of the Royal Touch. Exercised by monarchs in England and France up to the 18th and 19th centuries respectively, the ritual was deemed particularly beneficial for sufferers of scrofula, a nasty tubercular condition that afflicted the lymph nodes of the neck area. Ugly, weeping sores resulted, and the condition was known in France as ‘mal le roi’—the King’s Evil. As well as being able to bestow healing with the touch of their hands, true kings are apparently never attacked by lions.
Massage, whether therapeutic, remedial, or for relaxation, is a popular way that we can get permission to be touched. As our society has become more affluent, there has been a rise in businesses that enable us to be ‘professionally’ touched in an impersonal and yet intimate way. From the hairdresser and the beauty therapist to masseurs and physiotherapists, we lower the usual boundary of personal space to allow these strangers and acquaintances to put their hands on our bodies.
Recently, when I had a massage as a treat for my birthday, as the therapist, a young woman who I had never met before, tucked the soft, thick towel into the band of my underpants and edged them down, I was reminded of the intimacies of touch that happen between a child and its mother. The physical environs of the modern massage suite serve to further evoke the nursery: the darkened room, the soothing music, soft cloths placed against the skin, and the sweet smells of citrus and lavender.
It was like being a toddler again, being fussed over and coddled a little. I was positively tucked in. As I lay there happily submitting to the firm, professional stroke and kneading of the masseuse’s hands, I reflected on the pleasant selfishness of submitting to this touch that did not require reciprocation. Apart from the fee that I would pay at the end of my session, I had no obligation to respond to the firm strokes and the occasional deep bite of pressure on a particularly knotted muscle. My experience of it was as a one-way transaction, but I did wonder if my masseuse felt the same way.
Anne Davies is a myotherapist. Myotherapists use many traditional massage techniques, along with a detailed knowledge of anatomy and the working of joints and muscles, to treat pain, injury, and dysfunction of movement. Anne’s client base comes mainly from those with sports injuries or postural issues and ranges from elite athletes to weekend joggers. Small and compact, she strikes me as someone who focuses on the biomechanics of massage and its therapeutic benefits to the muscles beneath her hands. I imagine her treatment room
