How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

How Not to Be a Perfect Mother
Libby Purves

A fresh new look brings this parenting classic up-to-date for a new generation of mothers and mothers-to-be. Taking an irreverent and humorous look at the trials and tribulations of motherhood, Radio 4’s Libby Purves has created an invaluable survival guide so that even the most unpromising madonna can cope with the baby years.This is a parenting book with a difference- rather than a serious tome laying down the law, Libby Purves’ lighthearted book shamelessly describes how to cut the corners and bend the rules that never mattered much anyway. Forget the other parenting books that hide the real truth- this is the true battle manual for mothers on the front line!This timeless guide to coping with motherhood has been revised, bringing it up-to-date for a whole new generation of mothers and mothers-to-be.Based on Libby Purves’ own experience of domestic havoc with two babies and on the wit and wisdom of fifty like-minded mothers, this motherhood companion guide is full of down-to-earth tips and hilarious anecdotes.Topics covered include pregnancy, preschoolers, sibling fights, fraught outings, nannies and careers.This is an invaluable guide to being an imperfect mother- and, more importantly, enjoying it.

How NOT to Be a PERFECT MOTHER

Dedication (#ulink_05fedf5d-0d59-5a26-a68d-10102a11c9bf)

To my children, and Paul

Contents

Cover (#u103ae7e5-f08a-51ad-918f-f3df17aaaea4)

Title Page (#ucf9748f3-1059-5c52-b3ab-0689b96d63d9)

Dedication (#ub9c0674f-ca7a-53e7-9168-af8bb2a35bc8)

Preface, 2004 (#uf96fdaa8-ef72-54e5-a8c7-aa57642481c8)

Introduction (#u4a48a64c-7f3b-5b09-87d6-3625cc871385)

1. Pregnant, Proud and Panic-stricken (#u8679a259-b0cd-58b7-bb4f-16ba4cf04251)

2. Hard Labour: Birth (#u362e6d92-80e4-5019-a0f7-62a0eb846b18)

3. Basket Babies: Infancy (#uc82b994a-d5a8-5896-98cd-6245e0fb36ca)

4. From Bundle to Vandal: Bigger Babies (#litres_trial_promo)

5. The Leaving of Little Ones (#litres_trial_promo)

6. Double Shift: Working Mothers (#litres_trial_promo)

7. A Tale of Two Nannies (#litres_trial_promo)

8. Toddlers and Tornadoes (#litres_trial_promo)

9. The Second Lap: Siblings (#litres_trial_promo)

10. High Days and Holidays (#litres_trial_promo)

11. Last Word (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Preface, 2004 (#ulink_901dc4c6-bc43-5ee8-a116-9b2be1013690)

I wrote this book because 20 years ago I needed to read it, and it wasn’t there. Contemplating my new son in his hospital cot, or struggling with his wakefulness during long, long nights, I wanted a book that acknowledged that I had feelings, too. I wanted someone to admit that perfection in motherhood is impossible, that not everything can be planned or scheduled, and that to get through the day with an infant all you need is love – which comes pretty easily to most of us – commonsense, good-humour and a great deal of rat-like cunning.

There were a lot of perfectionist baby-books around at the time, focused (understandably) on the needs of the child and frankly rather careless about the parents in charge. So, during the turbulent years while I had two children under three, I made notes. When I began writing, with the youngest in a basket under the table and the eldest rampaging round on a plastic Thomas the Tank Engine which took lumps of plaster off the kitchen wall, I was still in the thick of it, on the front line, hunched over a typewriter at the kitchen table. But I knew that I didn’t know it all, because we all lead different lives in different styles. So I began by circulating a rather tatty questionnaire round 50 mothers I knew. They were of different ages, types, incomes and generations, but all of them were women who seemed to me to be doing, or to have done in the past, a pretty good job of it.

I just asked how they handled the daily round – bathtime, tantrums, feeding, dressing, sleep, biting, the lot. Their answers were magnificently diverse, cheerful, fond, resigned and occasionally a bit bizarre. They encouraged me greatly. So I wrote this book, and launched it off into the world in the hope of sharing that encouragement and pleasure with other mothers. To my amazement it has never been out of print since, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Babies, clearly, are an international language. They do not change with passing fashions.

However, the century has turned and now the time seems ripe to examine and revise How Not to Be a Perfect Mother. Above all, baby equipment has changed: there were points that needed updating (when did you last see a carrycot?). In some ways the attitude to mothers has changed as well. In the early 1980s a baby was not yet the designer accessory it has become since. Film stars did not push buggies around where cameras might see them. Now that Rachel-from-Friends and Miranda-from-Sex-in-the-City brandish babies in fiction, and Madonna Ritchie and Catherine Zeta Jones are photographed toting infants with all the carefree style of pashminas or Prada bags, there is a new and different pressure. You may fall for the dangerous illusion that it is possible not only to be a perfect loving mother – and probably a worker too, for some of the time – but to remain chic and soignée as well, fit for a Hello! magazine spread. And that is just as much nonsense as the old idea that a grown-up busy working girl would mutate into a calm, milky household angel by the mere fact of giving birth.

Contemplating all this, it seemed a good moment to revise the book a little. I have not changed much, except a few tenses and some advice on modern equipment, because the essence of the original How Not to Be a Perfect Mother was that it came straight from the coalface of practical early motherhood. There is nothing more irritating to the new mother than being given sanctimonious advice by some middle-aged woman who gets enough sleep and whose children are big enough to be sent up ladders to fix bits of loose guttering. So I have tried to leave intact the original tone of the book, even when it verges on the mildly hysterical.

But I would also like to take the opportunity to say that the friendships and contacts I made in the years after this book was published have – however brief and fleeting some of them were – meant a great deal to me. This book has become, across ages and backgrounds and some national borders, a kind of club. We look one another in the eye—having met perhaps in some quite different context – and both say, ‘Yup. That’s how it was. That’s how it is, and always will be.’ The extraordinary, taxing, inspiring, despairing, exhausting and energizing experience of having a baby and caring for it through the infant years is something no mother ever forgets. And not many fathers, either. To all who went through it alongside me, and have shared the experience since and nodded in recognition of the way this book told it, I am happy to dedicate this new edition, with real love. And, as we say these days, respect!

Introduction (#ulink_71e72cd2-48c3-5d20-99f7-ceea4ea21098)

A mother’s duty is quite clear: it is to be perfect. Mothers, as we all know, are sacred. They are sweet, loving, caring, self-denying madonnas. They are always there. They have tender bosoms and endless patience. A mother is like the legendary pelican, ripping her own breast to feed her young. Any mother would lay down her life for her child …

Well, yes, true enough. I am a mother, and I would lay down my life for my children; but I see no reason to do it every single day. Under the mantle of every mother lies an ordinary, disgruntled human being: there is no special saint-factory churning out tranquil and self-sacrificing madonnas. Every carefree, adventurous, selfish girl-in-the-street is at risk of being conscripted to wear a mother’s halo. And the transition from healthy adult selfishness to the status of maternal angel can be a painful one: rather like a butterfly trying to climb back into the chrysalis. It is that transition, in the early years, which is the subject of this book.

Nature helps the process along: in the first days, the urge to perfect pelicanhood is strong. When a baby is born, the average woman becomes chronically unselfish. The infant lies there in a plastic hospital cot, hypnotizing her with its beady blue eyes; and although she hurts all over and her head is still spinning, her baby’s willpower can bend her exhaustion to its demands. It sucks busily, works out its own sleeping schedule with reference to nobody, wets its nappy whenever it feels like it, and feeds eccentrically – three times an hour and then not for ages. Place any small obstacle in the path of the baby’s inexorable will and it will scream at a pitch carefully programmed to exact immediate maternal obedience. It demands conversation at midnight but falls rudely asleep in the middle of Granny’s best nursery rhyme; a baby has no manners, no consideration, and no responsibilities. It just gets on with growing bigger.

Confronted by this tyrant, you drop everything and swim with the tide, serving the baby and forgetting that you ever had preferences of your own. At first, this makes good sense; for a few months after a birth, nobody should expect much beyond survival and the odd quiet drink in front of the television. The problem is that the habit of self-obliteration tends to carry on for too long, reinforced by the sentimental picture we have of motherhood. Sometimes, the reasonable doctrine of ‘demand feeding’ continues unreasonably for 18 years, and widens to embrace demand washing-up of teenage midnight feasts and demand lending of the family car every Saturday night. Even in the early days, we overdo the sacrifice: we leave the house on freezing days with the children wrapped like Eskimos, but too preoccupied to put on our own coats. We stop every conversation five times a minute to wipe noses and respond to insistent little voices at knee-level; we walk miles in blizzards to buy finger-paints (well, I did, once). After a few years of this, we end up dressed like bag ladies and apologizing to everybody. For the most extremely unselfish mothers, the ones with no pleasures of their own, are often the ones who feel most guilty and depressed.

There is enormous pleasure in being a parent. It is fun to watch a baby grow, and smile and talk and begin to invent mad private games with bits of old hosepipe and buckets of sand; but it is also cripplingly hard graft. It is inescapable work: even professional nannies and nurses, when their own first babies are born, have been reduced to tears by the realization that now there will be no days off. A mother’s working day can stretch to 18 hours or more if she lets it.

But why should we let it? If there are corners to cut, which hurt nobody, why not cut them? Why not bend the baby to your own convenience every now and then? May not a saint put her feet up with a beer and a book occasionally?

This book is about the way real, fallible mothers really get through the day. There are plenty of technical baby manuals on the market: some are excellent, some manage to make bathing a baby sound as complicated as stripping down a MIG fighter engine; nearly all of them are perfectionist in tone. This is an imperfectionist book, about the cheerful cutting of corners, without guilt.

Of course you have to look after babies and small children properly. It is hard not to, when every whimper of fright or trembling lip can strike you with agonized sympathy. But with a bit of low cunning, you can win a part of your own life back, and do the child no harm. Squaddies in the army have always understood this principle: the war has to be fought, and possibly your life sacrificed, but in the process you can work the system, sneak the extra chocolate into your knapsack, and get a kip behind the cookhouse while someone else peels your load of potatoes. You stop short of treason or desertion, but there are always rules to bend.

From madonna-and-child to Sergeant Bilko is a bit of a comedown for your image, perhaps; but it is much easier to live up to, and considerably more fun. Sometimes, as Bilko, you actually do the same things that the perfectionists would have you do, but for slightly different reasons. During the worst difficulties of early breastfeeding, when no theoretical benefit to the baby compensates for the pain, I kept myself going on the thought that the more breast milk I got down the baby, the less chance there was of having to nurse him through frightening baby illnesses. Or take discipline: I once watched two mothers at tea, both pestered by their toddlers. One kept saying: ‘Don’t touch the mug, darling, it’s hot, it might burn you.’ The other mother put it differently: ‘Don’t touch that mug, darling. It’s Mummy’s.’ I noticed that the latter one managed to drink her tea, fending the little beast off with her arm and defending her rights; whereas the former put her mug up on a nice safe shelf and never touched a drop. She left, tired and thirsty, for another gruelling bathtime of creative water-play and coaxing. I suspect that the more selfish and least ‘perfect’ mother (who, no doubt, used bathtime as a chance to paint her own toenails while the child splashed undisturbed) was the happier woman. And as for the children, I doubt whether it made much difference to them either way.

This book covers the first three years, or a little more, depending on your child. I have never seen the point of lumping ‘preschool children’ all together; it is the first three years which contain the maximum bewilderment and the fastest changes. A baby has landed, as alien as a UFO, as odd as a dream. Slowly he turns into something more like a human adult, and as the fourth year begins, he has travelled a long way towards it. You have, at three and a half, a small individual who can talk enough to be reasoned with, who knows (although he may not agree) that fair is fair and orders is orders. You are not forever having to coax him to lie on his back while you change nappies; he can communicate with strangers and eat with a knife and fork.

At this age, too, children become widely different individuals. Not that they aren’t individuals before three; but early on, the common qualities far outweigh the differences. All six-month-old babies grab the spoon when you try to feed them; all new walkers pull things off tables on to their heads; and the particular qualities of a two-year-old (not unlike a suitcaseful of gelignite on a bouncy castle) are pretty universal too. But after four years you may have acquired a tough gunslinger or a dainty Victorian miss (of either sex); an intellectual or an athlete or a socialite. They stand apart from one another, small but separate, each on a private platform of heredity and chance and conditioning. So a mature three seemed a good age at which to stop; it is also the period which I know best from my own life. To fill in the gaps and catch the great and ingenious variety of mothering styles, I consulted 50 friends, with 86 children between them. Some are of my generation, some older or younger; some working mothers, some housewives, some single parents. To all of them I am boundlessly grateful for their advice, confessions, encouragement and occasional reproofs.

One final apology. These days, writers have to tie themselves in knots trying to be fair to both sexes (back in the days of Truby King a baby was ‘he’, and that was that). Some writers say ‘he/she’ and ‘his/hers’ all the time, or else alternate ‘he’ and ‘she’ so that you get a disquieting impression of a running sex-change; some bravely confess that since theirs are all boys or all girls, they will stick to the sex they know best. Nobody dares to say ‘it’ any more, even of a foetus, lest the mothers should be mortally offended.

I have one of each sex, myself. And after much thought, I have decided to use he, she and it indiscriminately and according to my mood. I hope it does not annoy you too much. After all, nobody’s perfect.

Chapter One (#ulink_ca1cfac1-b574-5a62-859a-8fad9c7c4078)