Were our mothers weak as well?

[Guest guest]

Dear Group,

I am trying to get myself together after loosing yet another cat to disease. The

cats that I am loosing are kittens from terrible situations. They were taken

from their mothers and abandoned at someone's door or thrown into the trash bin.

The kitten that I lost today seemed to be fine except for a slight cold that he

had on Friday, so I rushed him to the vet to be looked at. He got the right

medications and had to take antibiotics for a few days. He was fine last night

and seemed to be fine this morning. I got worried when at 7:25 pm, I could not

find him and so I looked all over the house and I started to look in the

backyard. I found him dead in the tall grass. His sister was weaker today and

had neurological symptoms and so I rushed her to the vet before her office

closed at 8 pm. I asked my vet what could be happening to these kittens, and she

said that their mother could have been ill when she was pregnant which could

have made her weaker, or she could have passed on whatever illness she had to

the kittens. I lost one brother cat a few months ago and now my favorite guy

that we called Rambo because he jumped on us and climbed up my skirt to then

climb up my blouse or sweater to end up on my shoulder where he loved to stand

and lean against my face and purr to me for a long time.

In case you are all wondering what does this have to do with CFS, then please

read on, because my answers are going to be more questions. One of you, asked us

to answer a few questions about our illnesses, and then answer if we were

traumatized or abused as children. When I was driving back from the vet I

started getting hot, and then I got the chills. And now that I am back home, I

have a slight sore throat and I feel a little feverish and I felt dizzy as I was

climbing the stairs to reach my front door. Some CFS symptoms are getting worse

from the stress.

My questions to all of you are these:

1) What was the physical health of your mothers when you were conceived?

2) Were your mothers under a lot of stress when they were pregnant with you?

3) Did you mothers have hard lives before they married and had children? Did

they have awful childhoods as well?

4) Was the pregnancy normal?

5) Was the birth process normal or was it traumatic for either the mother or for

you as you were being born?

6) Were you breastfed when you were a baby? Not being breastfed seems to be

connected to lower immunity.

Let me tell you why I asking these questions: I was born in 1959 in communist

Poland. My mother was then 30 years old and seemed to be healthy when she

married my father in 1958, but I have been told that her schizophrenia came out

during the pregnancy.

My mother was born in 1929 in Eastern Poland what is now part of Lithuania. She

was 10 years old when WWII started. My grandfather was worked to death by the

Russians in a labor camp and died I think in 1941. My grandmother had to survive

with two stepsons who were teenagers and two of her own children. She ran

moonshine in the woods to sell to people on the black market. There were many

times when they had nothing to eat. My mother's brother said that he was so weak

at times that the wind could have knocked him over, which means that he so

hungry that he could not walk straight. My grandmother and my mother and my

uncle survived the war. One of the stepsons survived the war and one just left

the house one day to go to get some work on the village and he never came back.

When the war was over the Soviets gave the Poles in eastern Poland a choice:

either you stay in your house and have your land but you become Soviet citizens

or you get on a train to the new parts of Poland. Stalin wanted the move all of

the countries of central and eastern Europe to the West, so German lost their

eastern lands, the Poles lost their eastern lands and were moved where the

Germans had been before. My grandmother decided to leave her house and all she

had and get on a cattle train to the formerly German city of Breslav. I know

that they stopped for a while in Warsaw but 85 % of the city was then in ruins,

the Germans blew up a beautiful city building by building. There was nothing to

eat and no place to live there, so they got on another train to Breslav and

stayed there. My mother eventually moved to Warsaw because she wanted to go to a

good high school and then to attend university. She told me that she and other

people walked the narrow paths in the ruins and threw pieces of bricks to the

sides to widen the path. That was the Warsaw of my mother's youth.

I am writing a part of my family history to stimulate your thinking about the

time that you came into the world. Were our mothers under stress when they were

pregnant with us?

I am trying to find out if the mental and physical health of our mothers during

pregnancy could be affecting us now.

If some of your write back that will be fine and if others do not that will be

fine as well. I just want to know if I am onto something there. If there is no

answer at this point as to a cure at least I would like to know more about the

causation. That will at least give me some peace of mind because I will

understand how this all came about.

My love to all of you!

Mira