How NOT to Be a PERFECT MOTHER

Dedication

To my children, and Paul

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface, 2004

Introduction

1. Pregnant, Proud and Panic-stricken

2. Hard Labour: Birth

3. Basket Babies: Infancy

4. From Bundle to Vandal: Bigger Babies

5. The Leaving of Little Ones

6. Double Shift: Working Mothers

7. A Tale of Two Nannies

8. Toddlers and Tornadoes

9. The Second Lap: Siblings

10. High Days and Holidays

11. Last Word

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface, 2004

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

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
Pregnant, Proud and Panic-stricken

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:

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:

0630 | Mother gives baby early feed, settles baby. Prepares nourishing breakfast for husband and self. Rinses out overnight nappies, pegs to dry.
0730 | Mother eats breakfast, feeds baby, loads washing machine, changes Napisan, cleans kitchen, prepares vegetables for midday meal.

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
Hard Labour: Birth

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 at the sight of the baby, newborn and laid on your stomach.’

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
Basket Babies: Infancy

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).

• Propping the baby up in a lean-back seat to watch kitchen activity, front-loading washing-machines, or just about anything. (I have long thought that a lean-back seat with a slowly revolving turntable might find a market.)

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