How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

Pregnant, Proud and Panic-stricken (#ulink_ca1cfac1-b574-5a62-859a-8fad9c7c4078)

When I was first pregnant, and prone to describe every last flutter and twinge to everyone I met, I went to lunch with a friend who already had a couple of children under two. I sat in my circular splendour, hands folded on my vast bump, while she mopped and wiped, and caught toppling high-chairs, and embarked on wild, hopeless lines of reasoning about Teddy eating up his carrots and the discarded rabbit-slipper not wanting to sit in the milk-pan really. For the first time, at that moment, it occurred to me that pregnancy is a lousy sort of preparation for motherhood.

When you are pregnant, you buy new clothes, think about your diet, avoid lifting, put your feet up, and dwell endlessly on every gripe and swelling of your precious body. You attend classes about your internal organs, watch your fingers anxiously for signs of oedema, and are told to feel proud of yourself. Once the baby arrives, what happens? You never get your feet up, you live off discarded Marmite soldiers, wear old shirts covered with sicked-up banana, and have to lift a great lump of a baby around all day.

As for the precious internal organs, you would hardly notice if you got appendicitis; and nor would anyone else. All that pregnancy really prepares you for is the birth – which, however tough, is basically an event at which you are the centre of attention. People put pillows behind you, and everyone keeps saying how well you are doing (‘Six centimetres dilated! Well done, Mum!’). You never think of preparing for all the years after these exciting few hours, when you are just the harassed rag-bag in the background to your baby and when – far from telling you how well you are doing – the world blames you squarely for every spot, bruise, tantrum and beer-can thrown off the Millwall terraces. There do exist a few classes labelled ‘Education for Parenthood’, but none which includes running a commando course through a maze of weaving sit-on buses, carrying a bowl of apple slime, answering mad questions, and never once taking your eye off the tense dialogue between the two-year-old and the cat.

Women who already have children, like my friend, have little patience with the processes of other people’s first pregnancies. I remember offering a magazine editor my emotionally acute ‘Diary of Nine Months’ and explaining how fascinating it was that while I started out by feeling vulnerable yet protective, by the third month I felt, well, sort of protective yet vulnerable; and how useful airline sick-bags were on the Underground. Editor had a child of her own, so her eyes glazed over a bit; but she gamely agreed to print this rubbish. However, by the time I got around to finishing it, my son was born and I, in turn, could not see what all the fuss had been about.

So it is with some diffidence that I offer a chapter on pregnancy and its problems. I can only say that, at the time, they seemed as enormous as I was.

The most useful side-effect of being pregnant is the Cousin Elizabeth complex (see Luke 1:39–41!). This is an overwhelming urge to visit other pregnant women and compare notes. It makes you some very good and useful friends, who you are going to need later on. And women in waiting together invariably become horribly intimate; we tell one another the most amazingly frank things about our various membranes and urges, as if preparing for the utter shamelessness of the maternity ward. (In a postnatal unit, if a TV repairman walks in wearing a white coat, half a dozen novice mothers start ripping at their clothing and trying to discuss their nipples, piles and stitches.)

Since encounters with actual mothers tend to bring on the sort of shamefaced guilt that I felt during that chaotic lunch with the two babies, other newly pregnant women are essential if you want company in which to discuss the various exciting developments under your smock. You can also share your innocent idealism about children, which for some reason seems to enrage people already toiling at the coalface of motherhood. If you plan to give birth standing up, to the sound of Mozart, or underwater with a Radical Midwife standing by with raspberry-leaf tea, you can ramble on about your ‘birthing’ theories to your Cousin-Elizabeth friend. If you plan to stimulate your newborn to genius with flash-cards and breastfeed for five long years, fine; tell her all about it. If you have visions of perfectly ironed flounces surrounding a delicate cradle, set in a flowery room lined with shelves of terry nappies as white and soft as swan’s down, tell her about that, too; and have nice little chats about fabric-softener. Argue with your friend about nannies, about state education, the importance of surrounding the child with Art, the morality of ‘Red Riding Hood’. Smile radiantly at everybody, dream your dreams; say how disgusting the title of this book is, and plan a life of serene self-sacrifice. You will be down here with the rest of us soon enough, learning mother-cunning. Welcome.

Meanwhile, there are the ailments and irritations of pregnancy itself to deal with. It is a bit like being hijacked, or having squatters in. You suddenly have an important, vulnerable, determined little passenger, curled up comfortably in there, shoving your stomach and bladder hither and yon, taking what it needs without a by-your-leave. You, for instance, will get seriously anaemic before the baby runs short of iron. As to food, healthy babies have been born to half-starved mothers. The baby is in charge. All you can do is to make sure that it isn’t forced to have anything it shouldn’t, like cigarette smoke, alcohol or drugs. With every new research document, these indulgences grow harder and harder to countenance; no sooner has one lot of gloomy doctors concluded that ‘even one glass of wine a day’ may damage a foetus, than another lot wades in with the conclusion that the unborn ‘flinches and squirms away’ when a mother even allows the thought of a cigarette to cross her mind. There are books more medical than this to persuade you one way or the other. All I offer is my own selfish reasoning: it kept me down to a couple of glasses of wine a week and not even a single paracetamol for two lots of nine months. I just used to tell myself that this baby had to be born exceptionally big and strong and shockproof, because it was going to have a less than perfect mother. This tactic worked. Every drink turned down, every additive-burger rejected, seemed like a form of insurance against having a fretful, sickly baby later. I could not defend this line of reasoning in court, but it kept me perfectly happy and abstemious through two pregnancies.

Coming off the booze and cigarettes, however, is a mild problem. Other physical matters are more intrusive. (The only merciful dispensation of providence that I can remember is that just when your ankles have swollen so revoltingly that you can hardly bear to look at them, your bump shoots out so far that you can’t see them anyway.) Here are a few comments and a few cures for the ailments of pregnancy:

Antenatal clinics

It may seem odd to list a clinic under ‘ailments of pregnancy’, but after a couple of routine antenatals in a big hospital, you will see why. However good a hospital is about the actual birth, the odds are that its clinic is terrible. Appointments are made in great batches, all for the same time, so that mothers (even with sad, wailing toddlers) sometimes have to wait several hours after their official time. My personal best is 2 hours 55 minutes. Even then, all that may happen is a blood test, followed by another long sit, followed by a urine test and a hop on to the scales; then another sit, and a desultory chat with a student midwife. Incidentally, it pays to learn the belts of the nurses on your first visit: students, junior and senior midwives have different colours. Do not waste your valuable time asking some 18-year-old student questions; grab someone with a belt that has been earned.

On my first-ever visit, I sat bursting with anxious questions while the ‘booking form’ was laboriously filled in by a very junior nurse indeed. She asked severely, ‘Right. Now. Contact with dates? Have you had contact with dates?’ Dates? Dates! My God, I thought, they’re not toxic, are they? Dates don’t produce abnormalities in foetuses? I remembered the panic about the green potatoes a few years before. And I had eaten stuffed dates only the week before! Oh, no! ‘Contact with dates?’ repeated the child, pencil poised, obviously writing me off as one of the poor dim underclass mothers they teach you about at training school. ‘Well?’ Recovering my balance, I snatched the form off her and read: ‘GERMAN MEASLES (RUBELLA), CONTACT WITH: Dates:’. She had missed a line. These encounters do little to soothe the nervous primagravida.

When your big moment comes, you are led into a cubicle, asked to take off your lower garments, and lie on a padded plank until The Consultant comes round. Even sitting up to read your book or ease your heartburn may be treated as insubordination and Wasting Doctor’s Time (what doctor? where?).

After a couple of hours of this persecution, a nervous woman will become hopelessly docile, too timid to ask questions even if they are burning in her heart; and the more spirited, bolshie type becomes so rude that she, too, forgets to ask the questions that make her cry secretly in the night.

None of this is any good. Plenty of people have campaigned to improve British antenatal cattle clinics, and they are making slow but sure progress. Rudeness, insensitivity and inattention are regularly exposed by the dutiful media. Occasionally one hospital lays itself open to ridicule or disgust, and all the others pull up their socks an inch or two. I did most especially enjoy the tale of the woman who miscarried and insisted she was still pregnant. She demanded an ultrasound scan, but was refused one. Eventually, she was admitted against her will to a mental hospital for being obsessively demented about this phantom baby. When she escaped and got her scan, it turned out she was still pregnant. She had only miscarried one of twins. The baby was born safely, and the hospital, according to reports, ‘apologized’. Apologized! It should have been put in the stocks!

Plenty of midwives campaign to improve the system; depending on where you live, you might be luckier than someone else. Meanwhile, there are a few ways of improving your lot:

• If you live in an area where you are expected to go to the hospital for every visit, ask for ‘shared care’, so that half your appointments are mere visits to your own GP. If you don’t like your GP, or he looks gloomy at the thought of obstetrics and new babies (some doctors positively prefer cosy chats about arthritis and golf), then for heaven’s sake change your GP. Quick. A doctor who doesn’t like pregnant women is not going to be overjoyed when you turn up with a new baby covered in mysterious spots, either, or when you dither for weeks over the whooping-cough jab. Change doctors! Now!

• At the hospital, make sure you always book the first appointment of the morning, and get there 20 minutes before it. Then nobody can say, ‘Doctor’s running a bit late this morning.’

• Take something to read. The hospital supply of mysteriously stained two-year-old copies of OK! magazine can seriously damage your morale.

• Alternatively, knit. Everyone knits in antenatal clinics, sometimes managing a whole sweater while waiting for God to sweep in in his white coat. Or you can score points over bossy solid nurses in clumping shoes by arriving in an elegant flowing dress and doing petit-point embroidery. On no account wear a personal stereo or you will miss the magic moment when they mumble your name, and have to wait another hour.

• When you do see the consultant, mention how long you waited, if you did. He might like to know, and he has a lot of power in the class-ridden hospital society. Tell him no wonder your blood pressure is up.

• Write down your questions before you go in. Somehow, lying half-naked on a high table being prodded by a strange man in a hurry and a brisk, bored midwife, one tends to forget things. But stay friendly; let the midwife see that you respect his or her experience and opinions as much as the doctor’s, if not more.

• If the midwife leaves you alone to take your clothes off, and leaves your notes on the table, for heaven’s sake read them. Of course it is not snooping.

• If you are really worried, don’t hide it. With my second child I was irrationally convinced, near the end that something was wrong; but went through almost the whole of my 32-week appointment with a stiff upper lip. One casual kind word from my consultant, just as he was leaving after the regulation 45-second prod, brought on a flood of tears. It saved the day. Back he came, ordered the nurses to fetch a loudspeaker so that I could hear Rose’s heartbeat, gave me a kick-chart to fill in, and sent me home to the first peaceful night’s sleep for weeks. The dreadfully businesslike and abrupt manner of medical people sometimes creates a sense that they are hiding some awful secret from you. In fact, they are just brooding about their next pay rise and whether gorgeous Dr Gupta in Intensive Care really meant it about the Nurses’ Home dance on Friday.

• Read all the books about pregnancy and birth that you can bear to. Go to classes run by the National Childbirth Trust if you can. If you can use terms like placenta, membranes, engagement, cervix and so on, the staff might talk to you almost as an equal. It is roughly the same principle you use for outfacing a contemptuous young garage mechanic who keeps going on about tappet-adjustments.

• If they won’t talk to you, fight. It is often the youngest doctors who behave most like pigs. Remember all the time whose baby it is. Here is a piece of dialogue from my own past:

JUNIOR DOCTOR(bustling in): Mrs, erm, er, Heiney. Er. (addressing midwife). Is this one complaining of any problems?

ME: A bit of a problem with heartburn and bad leg cramps.

MIDWIFE: She has heartburn and leg cramps, doctor.

JD(still to midwife): Oh. Yes (scribbles prescription).

Give her that (tries to depart).

ME: Hang on, doctor, sorry, what is this prescription for?

JD(as if suddenly noticing me): You just take it to a chemist and he will give you some medicine (tries to depart again).

ME: I will bloody well not take it to a chemist. I will take it to my GP and ask him for a civil answer. Why should I take anything when you won’t even spare me thirty seconds to say whether it’s supposed to be for the heartburn or the legs?

(Doctor departs, but his ears are becoming satisfyingly red.)

MIDWIFE: Oh, I am sorry about him. But what can we do?

Such little playlets are being played out every day around the antenatal clinics of the nation. Just make sure your part is a speaking one. And don’t worry about making enemies; at least the fragmentation of care in Britain means that you may never see the same doctor or nurse twice, let alone be delivered by anyone whose name you even know. So you can stand up for yourself without much risk of meeting your adversary the next time in advanced labour. If you do, you could always brazen it out and say, ‘Oh, how lovely that it’s you, someone I know.’

Of course, it would be better not to have any fights at all. I am just saying that if you do, it probably isn’t your fault, and I hope you win.

• Finally – a useful hint for staying happy during hospital appointments. Don’t watch ER, Casualty or Holby City. In recent years it would seem that the production team of the latter programme has invested in a rather expensive bit of kit which simulates a womb, for filming Caesarean operations. As a result, every other plotline involves an emergency Caesarean, often involving death, mayhem, or the discovery that the baby is an IVF error or product of adultery, because it is entirely the wrong colour. Do yourself a favour, watch Friends instead.

As to the usual physical discomforts of pregnancy, there are a few things to be done, but most of them too often repeated to be worth enumerating again. At one stage in my childbearing career I decided that if one more kind person told me to eat a slice of bread before getting up (for the sickness), stand properly (for the backache) and take Milk of Magnesia for the heartburn, I would knock them down and sit on them. One acquaintance of mine swears blind that raspberry-leaf tea cures sickness, backache, heartburn and cramps in the legs, and that gipsy women who drink it never have difficult labours. The fact that it tastes like shredded lorry-tyres is neither here nor there.

There are a few things, however, that I wish I had known earlier:

Sickness

If you are, you are. The usual remedies may not work. If you are going to go on throwing up, at least you can manage it gracefully; embarrassment and tension are worse than the actual puking. Get everyone to save you clean airline and coach sick-bags, and carry a stock, with rubber bands to seal them, a damp flannel, and a few tissues. Try to retain a sense of humour when people in the street think that you are a drunk. If you throw up your breakfast, there is no harm in eating another one, to stop you feeling rotten later on. I once had three breakfasts, two unsuccessfully, and presented a live radio programme at nine o’clock. Curiously, going live on the radio completely cured the sickness, as it does hiccups.

Heartburn at night

Cured by sleeping with your shoulders propped up on four pillows, like El Cid lashed upright stone-dead on his horse. But:

Leg cramps

Leg cramps are best cured by having your legs propped up on another four pillows. You feel like a banana. The other cure for leg cramps is to have a sleeping partner trained to fling himself on your calves at the slightest moan and begin massaging the lump away. Mine was so well-conditioned after two pregnancies that he hurled himself at my legs if I so much as turned over in the night.

Above all, forget occasionally that you’re pregnant. In my first pregnancy, I had all the above symptoms and more, but went off sailing, walking round Ushant, and on a fortnight’s trip down the Mississippi for a newspaper, travelling hard, hitching rides on towboats and tugs, and walking alone round the Vieux Carré of New Orleans at seven months gone. Interestingly, every single symptom vanished for the duration of the trips. As soon as I got home, every single one came back.

There are some useful things you can do during a first pregnancy, although really the best activities are travel, taking holidays and earning extra money, all of which will get difficult after the birth. If you must do useful things, you could make detailed preparations, trimming cradles and laying out tiny vests, even buying nappies. I couldn’t bear to do this; it seemed too much like counting your chickens before they hatch. I preferred to lie in hospital while my poor husband went flying around to stock up on zinc-and-castor-oil cream and bolt the wobbly old cradle back together. If you share my superstitious dread, but still feel a need to be doing something and getting in control of the future, there are a few general things to do, make, and consider without tempting fate by assuming good luck in Month Nine. Here they are: