How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

Well, you may be; once out of two births, I was; the other time I was being sick and fancied a cup of tea more than a slimy baby. This is no tragedy; my husband held both of our newborns straight away, while I got myself together, and there were no ill-effects on any of us. Which leads to the most dangerous legend of all …

‘For a mother to hold and suckle her child immediately is essential to the “bonding” of mother and child. If a mother is stopped from doing this, she may suffer postnatal depression and her relationship with the child will not develop.’

This is an awful thing to say to a mother who may end up under general anaesthetic, or ill herself, or with a desperately sick baby in an incubator. What is she supposed to do? Bond with the tea-trolley instead? Human beings have brains and hearts as well as bodies; it is time the ‘bonding’ lobby admitted this.

It is an even worse thing to say to a mother who has no medical crisis, but simply doesn’t want to hold her baby instantly, after her hours of exhausting labour and months of exhausting pregnancy. Why the hell should she? When my happy, healthy, untroubled baby daughter, now the apple of my eye, was first born I took one look and said, ‘My God, it looks like a bloody shark’ (which she did: underslung jaw and peculiar squashed nose). I let my husband do the cooing. After 20 minutes I fed her, quite successfully; then she went to sleep and I was wheeled off to a side ward. The nurses came in agitatedly, to say that my ward was too cold for a newborn, and they couldn’t find a heater; could they possibly leave the baby in the warm nursery until morning? Would it upset me? I said no; and Rose’s first night, fast asleep, was not spent beside my bed. With the first baby, he and I had lain staring at one another for six hours, wide awake, and that was very nice too, in its way; but as for ‘bonding’, it made no difference whatsoever. Of course it is unfortunate to take a new baby right off to an incubator or a nursery for hours; but it is just as unfortunate to expect a tired, cross, sleepy woman to put on a big act of instant love for her baby when she doesn’t feel like it. Love comes more slowly than that, to many women; you can depress a mother horribly by making her feel like an unmaternal monster for not cooing and staring into the cot all the time.

Irrelevant campaigns

No offence intended to the campaigners; but there are certain, once excellent, causes which have become rather bigger than the problems they set about solving. In my first childbirth, I was educated by the pioneering books on natural birth, and fired by the feminist spirit. On my first visit to the clinic, almost my first words to the surprised midwife were, ‘I’m not having an enema, you know!’ I vowed to chain myself to the hospital railings before I submitted to a shave (‘ritual humiliation of women’), I argued about episiotomies when I was only two months gone, and recited statistics on induction and its fearful side-effects to any baffled trainee midwife who would listen. I cornered obstetricians at parties, jeering about foetal heart monitoring and scalp-clips while they tried to spear sausages on toothpicks; I was a terrible, terrible bore.

Quite rightly, I got my come-uppance on the day. For impeccable medical reasons I was induced, put on a drip, and prescribed an epidural anaesthetic to keep my blood pressure down; and a slightly distressed baby was rescued, hale and hearty, by way of a lift-out forceps delivery and an episiotomy. I had the enema and shave quite willingly because I happened to like the rather bawdy, extrovert old midwife who offered them; as for ritual humiliation of women, Sister Hubbard would not have put up with any of that for a minute. (Her own technique of ritual humiliation of arrogant young male doctors on the ward was wonderful to behold.)

The irony is that, when it came to the second birth in a very liberal, natural-childbirth-minded hospital, I spent half my labour saying things like: ‘What about an epidural, eh, nurse? Are you sure I shouldn’t be shaved? If a little episiotomy would speed things up, I’m sure … Suppose you broke the waters now, eh, doctor? I’m sure I should have had a colonic irrigation by now …’ In short, I was an even worse bore. I had no anaesthetic at all, except for a happy interlude with the gas-and-air cylinder (a pretty exciting experience for a girl who has gone nine months without a drink); I had a tear instead of an episiotomy, and felt no particular difference afterwards.

The moral of all this is: relax. Or, if you want, be a bore. The great thing about childbirth is that it is the last time you can behave appallingly, swear, lay down the law, shriek, groan and bash your husband in the chest, and be forgiven. You are the star, the primadonna; make the most of it. Once the new star arrives, to the sound of your last furious swear-word, you will have to behave again, and be gentle and self-sacrificing. Enjoy your last fling.

Practicalities

Hospitals give you lists of things to bring with you; the one thing never mentioned is paper knickers; or, if you can’t find them in the shops, the worst old Mummy-pants in your drawer, to throw away. Take 20 pairs, and you’ll never regret it. And however lissome you are, this is absolutely not the moment for thongs. Enough said.

Understandably, hospitals don’t encourage you to bring anything much into the delivery room, but various groups like the National Childbirth Trust will recommend amusements and comforts, ranging from sponges to light reading. Here are some less conventional items that women have taken into the delivery room and been glad of:

• A pair of thick woolly socks (hot face, cold feet).

• An aerosol spray of ‘Fresh Air’. (One friend says, ‘I farted like a mad thing all the way through, very embarrassing smell.’ Sorry.)

• A small plastic plant-spray for when your husband gets bored with sponging your face all the time.

• A cassette machine of music. (But beware. Just as the obstetrician approached with his forceps to extract my first, Paul switched on our machine to take my mind off it all, and it happened to be set at a sea song: ‘Haul away Joe’. Not very tasteful, but it made the doctor laugh.)

• A camera. (Pictures of your baby at ten minutes old are wonderful. For some reason they look more grown-up than a week later: wise and amused.)

• Lip salve.

• A guitar. (One girl tried to get permission for a Hammond Organ, but failed.)

• A mirror (to watch the head born, if you fancy. I don’t).

• Harpers & Queen. (Not a magazine I normally read, but Jennifer’s Diary, performed in a high posh voice by Paul, kept me laughing immoderately into the gas-and-air mask right up to the start of second-stage labour.) Hello or OK! magazine would do as well. Nothing serious is going to get through your defences, so don’t assume this is the moment to tackle Stephen Hawking for the first time.

• A laptop and a stack of DVD films (if you’re that techno-friendly. Anything with Goldie Hawn in it is a good bet, I am told).

• A picnic for afterwards (miss hospital mealtimes and you’ve had it for six hours).

• A Marybean (tropical seed from the West Indies, believed to be lucky in childbirth).

• A horseshoe (same reason).

• A game of Scrabble. (But one mother reports that it easily gets a bit close to the bone. ‘Blood … conception … tubes … then we gave up!’)

Above all, or instead of it all:

• A father. If he won’t come, he won’t, and a girlfriend or sister or mother would do. Better a willing partner than a groggy, reluctant one. But if the baby’s father will come, he might surprise you: men are often so good in the labour room, contrary to daft old legends, that the midwives are lost in admiration. (It can go too far, even. The young nurse breathed admiringly to me, after Rose was born, ‘Your husband is wonderful. Anyone would think he had been at dozens of confinements.’ I replied, a little sourly, that this was unlikely. Unless he has a hobby of which I know nothing. Perhaps he slips on a white coat and creeps into maternity wards on his days off.)

Afterword

The days in hospital with a newborn, and the first fragile week back home, are a strange, limbo-like time. Selfishness is absolutely essential. Don’t keep trying to please everyone; it’s your time. If you don’t want a difficult relative to visit you, say so. One girl, who had lost a baby at four days, had suffered all through her second pregnancy from her mother-in-law’s insinuations about genetic defects (‘If it happens once, it’ll happen again’). She was frantic to keep this dreadful old bag away, at least for five or six days; but had been advised by all sorts of well-meaning professionals that hospital visiting was vital to ‘family bonding’. I am afraid I sneakily advised her to hold her ground, and, if necessary, ban her own mother as well, just to even things out diplomatically.

Accepting help is also essential. Independent, strong, healthy women feel stupid at being brought meals in bed and having their babies’ nappies changed by nurses, or back home by kindly sisters-in-law or paid maternity nurses. But take advantage. If you looked around in an old-fashioned hospital where mothers stay in for several days, you could always tell the first-from second-time mothers on a ward; all the novices would be struggling tearfully with the fifth nappy of the morning, sticking pins in themselves and annoying the baby, just to prove they can cope. Meanwhile the old lags lie back on their pillows, murmuring, ‘Well, sister, I do have a little backache, if you’d be terribly kind and change him I’d be so grateful …’ They don’t have to prove that they can cope alone. They’ve done it. Anyway, everybody, except the very subnormal, can cope alone eventually, tough though it may be. Why start work early when you could be lying back eating grapes and cuddling a nice, clean, changed baby? If you feel ropey, are incontinent, in pain from stitches, piles, sore nipples, engorgement or whatever, it will pass; there is no point in feeling that you have to win your maternal spurs now, in the first couple of days, by changing every nappy.

By the way, bursting into tears on Day Five is so common a phenomenon that nobody who looks after new mothers is remotely surprised by it. But don’t time your most unnerving and demanding visitors for Day Five, and tell your partner in advance that it may happen, and does not mean that you are sinking into the lowest abysses of real post-natal depression.

The only thing worth fighting about, in hospital, is demand-feeding. These days you rarely even have to fight for it. Appalling though it may seem to feed a baby every 45 minutes round the clock (each feed lasting 15 minutes … or more … ), if that is what it wants, then that is the best thing to give it. It keeps the baby from crying, and speeds up the moment when it will feed at sensible times (the more sucking, the more milk). Top-ups of formula are no help at all. But because you are demand-feeding, which is the most supremely unselfish action one human being routinely does for another, you are entitled to be as selfish as hell for the rest of the time. Consider yourself, for a few days. Insist on comfort, rest and peace. Take advantage. Lean on everybody. The baby, after all, is leaning on you. Hard.

Chapter Three (#ulink_37d28739-df40-5e5a-940c-5c2338b26169)

Basket Babies: Infancy (#ulink_37d28739-df40-5e5a-940c-5c2338b26169)

Everything was ready in the tiny flat. The slight matrimonial tension which had blown up over the wine-rack had now abated (the baby was to sleep in the dining-room, and while the books prescribe a temperature of 68°F for babies, wine needs to be cooler. She had favoured letting the wine take its chance; he favoured putting the baby to bed in a woolly hat and snowsuit. Eventually they moved the wine). Suddenly, up to their door came the Health Visitor, prim and smiling, her alert little eyes roving everywhere. My pregnant friend welcomed her, all unsuspiciously, made her a cup of tea, and sat down anxiously to listen to whatever advice might be forthcoming.

‘Now, Mrs D____’ said the lady in uniform, with that offensively breezy confidence so often displayed by childless twenty-two-year-old health professionals towards anxious primagravidae ten years their senior; ‘are you planning to use terry nappies, or disposables?’

‘Good God, disposables, of course,’ said the mother-to-be, startled. Moving the wine-rack was one thing – compromises have to be made, after all – but dabbling around all day in a bucketful of wet sewage was quite another matter. Out of the question.

The health visitor smiled indulgently, making a note.

‘Disposables,’ she said. ‘Well, Mrs D____’ (another terrible smile), ‘you mustn’t feel at all guilty about that, you know.’

My unfortunate friend, into whose cheerfully optimistic picture of motherhood the idea of guilt had never yet intruded, was struck dumb. Guilt suddenly loomed on the horizon, glowing like a nightmare moon, illuminating every aspect of parenthood with rays of uncertainty and fear. Over the coming weeks hospitals and grannies, doctors and strangers and sisters-in-law and so-called friends would combine to intensify that gloomy and deceptive light. (Actually, there are now so many high-tech terry nappies on the market, and in urban areas so many nifty nappy services, that this particular issue is no longer such a hot one. But the point is the health visitor’s use of the G-word.)

You can be made to feel guilty about not using terry nappies; if you do use them, guilty about their being a bit grey after a couple of washes. You can be made to feel guilty about bottle-feeding, and even about breastfeeding (‘Poor little chap, he’s hungry again, are you sure you’ve got enough?’). Guilt lies in wait behind the bathroom door (‘Of course, I always use cotton wool on their poor little bottoms, with warm boiled water, not those horrid chilly chemical baby wipes’). It haunts the chest of drawers (‘These modern clothes are terribly easy for the mother, of course, but their poor little bottoms could at least breathe, in the days when they wore pure wool leggings’). Guilt can hover when the baby cries, yet pounce when you pick it up for comfort (‘Making a rod for your own back, dear, spoiling that child – it isn’t the kindest thing, in the long run’). Guilt squats down in the kitchen, watching you tearfully wrenching the lids off baby-food jars (‘Not very like real food, is it?’). Guilt peers at your baby lying quietly in his basket (‘Poor old chap, a bit boring for you, isn’t it? They do say that understimulation slows them down later’), but it clicks its tongue disapprovingly when you prop him up to watch you round the kitchen (‘Well, it’s a lot of strain on their poor little backs, of course, with the bones so soft’). To resist the sense of guilt entirely, you have to become a sort of John Wayne of motherhood: tough, opinionated, self-confident and contemptuous of the world. Outlaw Mum, ridin’ her own trail. Alternatively, you just have to take a long calm look at your baby, and realize that despite your many shortcomings, it is perfectly all right. It likes you. It is cleanish, and not particularly hungry just now. It takes life as it comes. The fact that it is also wearing a paper nappy, odd socks and one of its two-year-old brother’s sweaters rolled up to the elbows is irrelevant. So is the fact that it is sitting propped on sofa-cushions in a cardboard box, watching MTV, and hasn’t been weighed at the clinic for weeks. (I took my first baby down there religiously once a week, and filled in a chart recording every ounce and centimetre of growth. But the second one did not see a set of scales after she was four weeks old and is thriving to this day. Both ways, though, I was really pleasing myself: I liked clocking up the pounds on the first baby, and ignored rude suggestions that I was ‘a bit over-fussy, it does no good in the end, you know’. With the second baby I just didn’t feel like it, and any fool could see she was healthy, so I didn’t do it. When a brief pang of guilt returned and made me murmur to the health visitor that perhaps I ought to bring Rose down to the clinic soon, she – a genuine, card-carrying parent – just said, ‘Oh, don’t be silly. Look at her!’)

The important thing about new babies is that they don’t want much; but what they do want, they want very fiercely. And there is no point whatsoever in making them wait for it. They will only get crosser and crosser, make you furious yourself, and eventually get so upset that they don’t want whatever it was any more, but only to scream with rage for half an hour. It seems incredible, but there are qualified hospital sisters and experienced mothers (presumably amnesiacs) who still say things like ‘The baby’s got to learn who’s master – leave him to cry,’ and who advocate strict four-hourly feeding even for brand new babies who have never heard of clocks. Some even talk smugly about ‘a nice strong pair of lungs’ while a red-faced furious infant shrieks defiance in their bland, stupid faces. All this discipline and learning-who’s-the-boss comes much later; what these morons have forgotten is the time-scale of babyhood. A newborn is not a six-week-old who can be distracted from food with rattles; a six-week-old is not a crawler; nor is a crawler much like a wilful two-year-old. It takes nearly two years before a baby actually gets clever enough to ‘try it on’ or play power games with you. If you start to ascribe older children’s motives and morals to a young baby, you are going to be driven mad. To its mother, a baby’s crying is a dreadful sound. (Interestingly, it is less dreadful to everyone else. I have sat in friends’ houses and had a mother apologize for the background mewling of her baby when I hadn’t even noticed it. To her, it was a deafening torment.) So for your own sake, short of smothering or drugging, anything which stops a baby from crying is a good idea.

I have made breakfast while dancing around the kitchen with a Sooty glove-puppet on one hand, singing ‘Paper Roses’ in a forced baritone, to stop a wakeful son grizzling with boredom at three weeks old. I have sat in the bath with the Moses basket positioned under the towel-rail and a mobile hung above it, swiping the string with the loofah once a minute to keep the butterflies moving and the baby interested and quiet. I have fed at thirty-five-minute intervals all around the clock and have let a new baby suck at the breast for a whole hour; I have made weird squeaking noises in crowded railway carriages to distract a two month-old daughter. I have actually resorted to changing an infant’s clothes unnecessarily twice in an afternoon, just because the said infant seemed to find it entertaining. All mothers, and many fathers, do these mad things just to stop the crying. They have to, because even the smallest babies want more than food and sleep: they want entertainment and company. ‘It is the central crucial fact of early motherhood’, said a journalist friend bitterly, ‘that all is well, until you want to do something else.’ That cross little blob, eyes only just open, is as avid for amusement as any Broadway boulevardier or teenage raver. Nor will he be fobbed off for long with the old stand-bys, like dangly mobiles and musical-boxes. I asked a collection of mothers and fathers to be honest about how they had amused small babies too young to hold rattles.

The methods included:

• Watching dancing flames (fires have been lit in July for this purpose alone).

• Lying under washing-lines (clean clothes have been strung up, indoors, just for babies to watch).

• Watching budgies (‘Only you must have two, so they are active and noisy enough’).

• Looking at Op Art patterns in books. (At last, a use for the 1960s. New babies are programmed to be more interested in complicated things than in the simple, bold patterns which toddlers enjoy. Something to do with enabling them to enter a complex world.)

• Putting the carrycot on a washing-machine on fast spin (mind it doesn’t vibrate off).