How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

Consider your house

Or flat. Is it warm? Is it easy to get warm? Are there bits of it where you spend a lot of time, like the kitchen, which are always cold and draughty? If so, is the cold area close to a warm area where the baby can doze in its basket or sit in a chair watching you?

Is your home a pleasant place to be all day long, or just somewhere you have always flopped after a day’s work? You may not want to decorate a nursery, but it pays off handsomely to decorate your main rooms and landings and bathroom. At no other time, probably, will you spend so much time in your own home as when you have a new baby.

Give up any idea that a baby is a small thing which takes up little space. The amount of equipment that accumulates around the most economically run infant is prodigious. It certainly needs a whole chest of drawers to itself. Do you have any storage space to spare? No? Right, what are you going to throw out?

Consider your transport

If you have a car and are about to change it, it might pay to go for a four-door model. The grip that even the tiniest baby can get on the pillar of a two-door car, when you are trying to manoeuvre it into its seat, takes some believing.

Consider your clothes

Maternity clothes should no longer be much of a problem. All the old grumbles about viscose sacks with ‘touches of interest at the neck’ are out of date. Mail-order firms and specialists have pretty, folksy clothes for those whose instincts in pregnancy turn a bit more floral than before. High-street chains and XL shops have T-shirts and drawstring pants in a huge range of sizes, which will do for all but the largest mothers-to-be to wear casually at home; saris, kaftans and wild ethnic drapes are fun for evenings and will furnish the future family dressing-up box. It pays to have one really nice pashmina.

A working wardrobe can be more troublesome if your office is formal. Specialist maternity shops provide trouser suits and boring coat-dresses which will help, but if you spend too much money you will resent it. One of the best answers is to borrow off friends or relatives: a particularly fetching Popeye sweatshirt and a lovely striped cotton maternity blazer I know of have draped five babies in three families, including two of mine. The journalist Valerie Grove mistily remembers one tent-dress by Monsoon which got used in eight pregnancies (various incumbents) around literary North London in the 1970s, and finally fell to bits on her sister in Sydney, Australia. Publisher Helen Fraser mysteriously mentions the virtues of ‘army surplus’, raising an intriguing picture of lumbering camouflage printed guerrillas moving in on a maternity ward like an overweight platoon of the SAS. A BBC researcher drove half her department wild by simply getting out her old school gymslip (she was a tubby 12-year-old who turned into a slim swan) and flouncing around like an extra in a blue St Trinians film.

You may have trouble with bras: if you start off small-breasted, you are just as well off buying larger and larger sizes of good conventional bras, but if you start off at 38 or so, you will fall prey to the nursing-bra trade. Most nursing bras are profoundly depressing, droopy, misshapen and punitively uncomfortable, and drive you half-mad with frustration and gloom. The ones marketed by the National Childbirth Trust are a bit better – at least you can try them on and exchange by post, and not trudge mournfully around every cubicle in town trying to fit your twin Zeppelins into something bearable.

But on the whole, as I say, maternity clothes are not a problem. Apart from official maternity wear, there are floppy smocks, homemade tents, large-size men’s tracksuits and sailing sweaters, husbands’ jeans worn with huge safety-pins, and all the ‘ethnic’ flowing cottons. Those who do best are cheerful, stylish women who can take a joke. The important thing is to accept that you are what you are – pregnant. You don’t need to look sexy or alluring. Clean shiny hair, clear bright colours and a pleasant smile will do, It’s not for long.

Once the baby is born, you have definite needs which it pays to anticipate. Make sure you have washable things; forget the dry-clean only culture – it’ll break your heart, and your bank. You need smocky tops that push up from the waist for feeding (a good costume for the first few weeks, with or without a winter sweater, is your favourite old cotton maternity shirt worn loose over trousers – then baby can be sick on it without ruining a sweater). Before you go to hospital, it pays to put a few easy, practical clothes together at home in a place where you can find them quickly. I used to long for some simple garment like a Babygro to haul myself into: a Mummygro. With feet.

One final point on clothes: I used to get very cross at tights which crept gradually down over the bump, even if labelled ‘maternity’. When I asked my friends what they did (I told you pregnant women get pretty intimate in their conversations), I found that everyone had the same problem. Some switch to socks; one used over-the-knee stockings with garters, and got varicose veins from it; several wore a size larger and put them on back-to-front (swivelling the feet, which is not terribly comfortable) and another simply cut the tights down the front and wore knickers on top. (Like Superman. Now we know what was wrong with him! He was pregnant!)

Consider the baby’s clothes

If you did nothing at all about these before the birth, you could still send your friend or husband down to the corner chemist to buy five all-in-one suits and five vests, and survive perfectly well for several weeks with a new baby, just adding disposable nappies and a warm little blanket. If you have knitting grannies, aunties and well-wishers, it would help to steer them on to something actually useful: lacy cardigans are terrible, because the baby gets its fingers caught in the holes; most cardigans have far too narrow sleeves for easy dressing, anyway. Wide, loose-armed square sweaters are simpler, and quite smart; best of all is to set the knitters to making a supply of tank-tops (sleeveless slipovers). They look wonderful in stripes, pastel or bright; you can drag them on in seconds over a Babygro, or pyjamas, or another sweater, just to keep the baby a bit warmer without the ordeal of sleeves.

If you find a good source of secondhand clothes to lend or buy, hang on to it!

Finally, consider your duty

The responsibility of a baby can seem huge, vague and impossible at times. Too much reading about infant care and bonding and imprinting and early influence can stampede you into a tearful panic. It can depress you into feeling that life will be a dreary round of nappy-changing and fiddling around with sterilizers, broken only by earnest coffee mornings with other sick-stained Mums in a litter of hideous toys. Clinics hand out leaflets about parenthood, carrying frightful ‘Specimen Daily Routines’ like this one:

and so on, all day, with never a line suggesting: ‘Mother reads paper, walks round garden, goes out and gets haircut, goes to drunken lunch with friend.’ It is fatally easy to confuse the baby with the bathwater: daily routines, crossover vests, coffee mornings and the peeling of nourishing vegetables for husbands are all no more than bathwater. All that is really going to happen is that you will become responsible for a small, highly entertaining, amazingly tolerant and self-contained person. Your only duty is to keep this person fed, clean, warm and entertained. There is no reason why you should stay in the house, ironing sheets or baking like a ‘real’ mother, if you don’t want to. New babies are completely portable, and care very little where they doze and wake and feed, as long as you are there. Things will change later, but by then you will be expert enough to adjust matters to suit yourself. It is pretty rare for a normal, sober, undrugged woman to do a baby any actual harm; as long as it is fed and clean and warm and has a place to sleep in peace, it will do fine, and probably not even cry much.

Incidentally, if you have doubts about whether you will love your baby, because you think other people’s children are horrid, squirmy, snotty, damp pink things, do not worry. It is quite possible to have babies of your own (sweet-smelling, perfect and brilliant) and still perceive other people’s as revolting and dull. Nature is very crafty. And the actual tasks of babycare are not bad at all, once a real baby is involved; you may be repelled by ‘parentcraft’ classes with a grinning plastic doll and frayed terry nappies, yet really enjoy bathing and changing a real, kicking baby of your own.

Your baby’s father needs to know all these things, too. He may be feeling as uncertain, excited and nervous as you are. I have deliberately kept fathers in the background in this book; not because that is where they ought to be, or where my own husband is, but only because the moments when a mother most needs support are precisely those lonely times when fathers are off somewhere. The office day, the factory day mean long stretches of paternal absence. The promptings of biology mean that in the first year, even the first three years, and even when both parents have jobs, mothers move fast and urgently towards a child’s distress even if father happens to be moving that way too (couples in which the father gets up at night to the baby frequently report that the mother lies awake anyway until he gets back). Some inbuilt tolerance seems to make women more patient with whiners and clingers and vandals and food-flingers. But even so, the more closely a father is involved from the start, the more he will enjoy his babies and the less isolated and solely responsible you will feel.

Men do have a different style of babycare; I never got a child back from my husband complete with the same number of shoes, socks, hats, gloves, etc. that I handed it over with; but what the hell? Socks are not everything. If he is the sort who baths the baby in hospital, plays, tosses, bounces, gets the first smile to himself, and confidently takes charge of a tiny baby round the clock, then you are lucky and he is lucky and the baby is very lucky indeed. But it doesn’t always happen like that; I am writing about under-threes, and some men just can’t do much with them, or won’t. If that happens, the babies still have to be looked after by someone, and you are the one who is left with no choice. That is why I have written for mothers, about mothers, and with the help of mothers; any father who picks up anything useful from the book is more than welcome, and any father who shoots it down in scorn is, at least, involved. Good luck to him.

If the whole prospect still overwhelms you, do something small and absorbing. Go out, buy some unbreakable fishing line, and restring all your favourite bead necklaces on it. Then you have something the baby can play with and hang on to while you carry it around; and you keep your favourite beads.

Or else earn some extra money, or sell something, and set up a baby fund; there is no time in your life when a few extra pounds will make more difference. One friend combined the problems of no storage and no savings, booked a market stall for a day, looted the house, and made £300 in one afternoon. She still thinks that the sight of a hugely pregnant woman standing on an orange-box shouting her wares (‘a sixties Beatle scrapbook … a personal stereo … a wok …’) was enough to intimidate the population of South London into buying it all. Besides, it was an adventure. Just because you are about to have The Biggest Adventure of a Woman’s Life doesn’t mean you can’t have a few small ones as well.

Chapter Two (#ulink_e9736921-fc7d-58b1-bc1c-deca356fe624)

Hard Labour: Birth (#ulink_e9736921-fc7d-58b1-bc1c-deca356fe624)

My first child was born in November, when the sellers of Remembrance poppies were out on the streets. I was days overdue; one gloomy evening, my mother-in-law rang for a bulletin. ‘Have they come yet,’ she enquired lugubriously, ‘to take her away?’ On being told that they hadn’t, her response was electrifying. ‘Aye,’ she said, generations of old wives’ lore quivering in her voice. ‘I bought a poppy t’other day. I thought of Libby.’ And having thus memorably equated my coming confinement with the mud, blood and mortality of the trenches, she left us to wait on, amid the howling winter winds and the chilly fog curling off the river.

We were glad of it, really. It made a nice counterpoint to the breathless optimism of the National Childbirth Trust classes, where an upbeat teacher had stripped away all the mystery from the abdominal events to come, trained us never to refer to ‘pain’, and generally raised our expectations. We had been comfortably looking forward to a supremely interesting, mildly tiring Life Experience, and it was salutary to be reminded of the other point of view: the howling, heaving and bedpost-gripping made familiar by a hundred historical novels, and warned of (with graphic hand gestures) by generations of grannies.

For years they told us that when A Woman’s Time Has Come, she moans and grips her husband’s hand; then comes an interlude of black terror, screaming, sweat, agony and struggle; followed by exhaustion necessitating a month in bed and a ritual visit to the nearest temple for purification of her foulness. Old bags in launderettes still mutter joyfully about Auntie Helen who was Never the Same Again after what she went through with her second; about Our Brenda who never had a day without pain (and it was Twin Beds from the day she came out that hospital until the day he passed on, the dirty beast); about dropped bits and ruptured bits and Specialists down from Lunnon who had never seen anything like it in 40 years. The advantage of this great female legend in its heyday was presumably that when the terrified young girls actually came to have babies, they found it nowhere near so bad as they expected; and in their subsequent relief felt positively light-hearted about the few residual aches and pains. The disadvantage was (and is) that the more frightened the mother, the worse it hurts. The legend was thus enabled to live on, with ever more refinements of detail (‘Ooh, you should have seen my stitches. I tore 3inches. Doctor said he’d never seen anything like it …’).

The great legend took a bashing with the advent of the childbirth movement. New childbirth, natural childbirth, Birth without Fear, whatever you call it, the symptoms are much the same. They include a refreshing blast of technical knowledge, a refusal to admit that it hurts much and, at the more extreme limits, the claim by Sheila Kitzinger that ‘birth is the most exciting sexual experience of a woman’s life’ (depends on all the others, I should say … ). The new prophetesses use ‘birthing’ as an active verb, admire Leboyer’s vision of a child drifting into the world to gentle music and dim lights and warm water and love. They point with enthusiasm at Michel Odent’s squatting, naked mothers and athletically involved fathers at the Pithiviers clinic, and publish books of exercises to stretch every useful muscle. They write blow-by-blow accounts of their own beautiful labours, surrounded by friends playing guitars, nourished by ancient honey-and-raspberry-leaf infusions, and culminating in the joyful eating of the placenta in an iron-rich stew.

This approach, like the other one, has its disadvantages for the nervous, bone-idle, easily confused primagravida. The pursuit of knowledge is useful; being urged to frenzied activity during labour is a very good thing. (Hospitals ought to have ping-pong tables. At least husbands might, for once, let their wives win as they approach 5 cm dilation, and it would be less boring than flinging yourself on a beanbag.) And the scorn poured on painkillers has at least stopped medical staff from their famed practice of shooting women full of pethidine to make them shut up groaning.

On the other hand, all that fulsome praise of Nature tends to infuriate the large minority whose babies, in Nature, would not have had a lot of fun getting out; Caesarean, drip induction, epidural anaesthetic and forceps victims have developed a tendency to complain bitterly about being ‘cheated of the experience of birth’, which must sound incredible to the howling-and-bedposts school of obstetrical fantasists. Like complaining about being cheated of the rack or the thumbscrew. Almost as bad is the awful guilt, felt by the likes of me, that no baby can have a calm and silently magical Leboyer delivery if the first sound to assail its little slimy ears is the sound of its mother swearing like a Billingsgate porter and punching its father in the neck.

Now, on top of this struggle between the earth-mothers and the doomsters, comes a sneaky but influential lobby which says ‘Look, spare yourself the hassle, keep the diary tidy, go for an elective Caesarean.’ Earth-mothers, and some doctors, are outraged by the ‘too posh to push’ lobby; however, you may come under subtle pressure from mothers who chose Caesareans for psychological or social rather than medical reasons. Don’t give in without thinking hard: a Caesarean is a serious, major abdominal operation; you will take longer to recover, be unable to drive or lift heavy things for weeks, and compromise your chances of having a natural birth later. Infections, even fatalities, are not unheard-of. It’s a safe enough operation if you need an op, and preserves many lives; but if you don’t need it, it is not an option to take lightly. Perhaps the most disgraceful example of medical advertising ever was the US ad for Caesareans beginning ‘Keep your tubes honeymoon fresh!’

On the whole, reading ‘birthing’ books is more useful than listening to your mother-in-law delivering the Gypsy’s Warning, or your overconfident friends telling you how their system was best (all mothers have to think their own choice regarding babies has been best, at every stage. It’s a safeguard against the gnawing guilt we all feel most of the time. You learn to discount it). When it comes to choosing which hospital, you can get some good information from friends, though, and the underground network of mothers’ groups, and the hearsay evidence of your classmates at the heavy-breathing sessions. I heard, this way, that a certain hospital has one obstetrician who is gay and can’t stand the sight of women’s breasts; that another plays country ‘n’ western muzak in the delivery rooms (babies’ heads, emerging, feel exactly as if they had concrete Stetsons on anyway, without any such uncomfortable musical suggestion); and that yet another hospital has a tendency to bring in six medical students at a time to gaze at your perineum and gasp at your language. (The woman who told me this had actually raised herself on her elbows, between pushes, and demanded ticket money from the growing crowd at her feet. Two of them were so startled they actually began fishing in their white coat pockets.) At least if you know all this, you are prepared.

One awful warning came my way about home births. These are so difficult to organize, for a first baby in Britain, that one couple dedicated two months of lobbying, changing doctors, persuading and campaigning to win permission to be tended at home. Finally they got it; and as soon as the thrill of the chase had worn off, misgivings set in. The woman confided, a little shamefacedly, that in her excitement at beating the system, she never once thought about the work and disruption it would cause – not to the medical staff, but to her own house. On the day she got the official list of things to prepare (like high blocks to put the bed on, and vast quantities of plastic sheeting for the bedroom carpet) she longed to recant, but didn’t have the face to. Her husband eventually spent half the delivery night clearing up, and the next morning washing the dozen teacups and biscuit plates emptied by the community midwife (the doctor had most of the Scotch afterwards). Both parents, occasionally, still have wistful thoughts about nice clean hospitals with unlimited laundry and professional tea-ladies.

My own husband, having cheered me on through two hospital deliveries and revelled in the fact that someone else would clear up, now says after ten years of farming that these matters are best carried out in outdoor lambing-pens, with all present in Wellington boots. So, round here, only sheep are allowed home births.

(I should admit, though, that I am not the most impartial person to discuss home births. With my first child, I discovered to my shame that I am a complete hospital junkie; I loved every moment, became institutionalized within two days, had to be dragged out, complaining, at the end of eight days; and for months afterwards, I indulged in yearning fantasies about going back to the lovely maternity ward. One weary night, when Rose was two months old, I announced this longing; my husband asked, ‘What is so special about hospital, for heaven’s sake?’ and I apparently sobbed: ‘They bring a trolley of laxatives and sleeping pills round at nine o’clock sharp every night. I never actually have anything, but at least it shows that someone cares.’ Mystified, the poor man took to offering me a laxative every night, just before the nine o’clock news, to show he cared; but it wasn’t the same, somehow.) But then, I was lucky in my hospitals. Not everybody is; and more recent practice is to chuck the new mother and baby out pretty sharply after the birth, to go through the rest of the recovery stage at home.

So, to the birth itself: every birth is slightly different. All I can usefully say is: beware of Legends, and beware of Irrelevant Campaigns.

Legends

‘A woman always knows when she is in labour.’

Oh no, she doesn’t. Hospitals get women arriving two minutes from birth, still wondering vaguely if anything is amiss; and countless others turning up a fortnight early with indigestion and nerves. Keep an open mind about it, and don’t be too easily fooled by the spectacular Braxton-Hicks contractions which sweep over you while you’re watching Big Brother.

‘Your waters will break, embarrassingly, in thesupermarket, with no warning at all.’

Well, they may. Possibly. It is still not worth going around for weeks on a knife’s edge of uncertainty, avoiding supermarkets. I drove down for some Sunday papers just before Rose was born, and suddenly found myself sitting on a sodden car-seat. Panicking, I drove carefully home again, feeling false labour pains rack me every two minutes, and shrieked for my husband, for an emergency babysitter for my elder child, for pethidine or a Caesarean or a community midwife or anybody at all. Paul leaped into the driving-seat, paused, and began to laugh immoderately. ‘My waters have gone as well,’ he gasped. Before any domestic violence could set in, he explained: someone had left the car window open in the rain overnight; the water had soaked deep into the foam upholstery; the seat was now dry to the touch, but immediately became soaked when someone sat heavily down on it. Strained laughter all round.

‘When you are ready or overdue, you can induce the baby naturally by massaging your nipples.’

It produces some useful hormone, they say. But only if you do it for several hours. There are few things a hugely pregnant woman feels less like doing than massaging her nipples all day. Take my word for it.

‘A bumpy car ride will bring a baby on.’

It would have to be very bumpy indeed, if 20 miles round the Lincolnshire back-lanes in a reconditioned Russian army motorcycle sidecar failed to have any effect on my sister-in-law in the 41st week …

‘When the moment comes, you will feel anoverwhelming urge to push.’

I would never have dared to dismiss this great universal belief until I had my second baby without feeling the remotest wish to push anything at all. Since then, I have met other women and got them to admit it, too. We all pushed our babies out quite efficiently, waiting for contractions and just doing it; but felt no urge, just a sullen boredom with the whole process, and a desire to get it over with. Nobody should be bullied or stereotyped by everybody else’s biology.

‘You will be overwhelmed by love and wonderment atthe sight of the baby, newborn and laid on yourstomach.’