Rules for a better birth

I hesitate to say that my first experience of birth, or rather the days after it, weren't that great, because you always know someone who had a worse time than you - a worse injury, a sicker baby, a meaner midwife, a more intense hormonal response, a longer labour. Nevertheless, the first time I had a baby it was very hard. Operations (immediately for me, in the near future for our child), health worries, possible infections, no sleep, five nights in hospital and the panic of first time motherhood made everything difficult. Wonderful, because our daughter was with us, but ever so fraught with fear and worry and exhaustion.

This time, everything has been easier, though it is still early days and I don't wish to count my chickens. But as a result I have come up with a list of things completely beyond your control that can lead to a better experience all round.

1) Go into labour in the morning after a proper night of sleep so you don't start the whole process tired.

2) Do not have an operation straight after birth taking you away from your partner and new baby and pumping you even more full of drugs. The drugs are great at the time, but there is a come down, and there is guilt at not being with your new baby from the beginning.

3) Get rid of any drips and catheters as soon as possible. Then have a shower, even if it's 3am.

4) Have a baby that can feed from the beginning. Or rather, feed your baby from the beginning, using bottle if breast not working. Contrary to the scaremongering breastapo, you can give your baby a bottle in the early days and still breastfeed later (as long as you don't stop breastfeeding or expressing completely). Unless I  am a freak of nature.

5) Go home after one night in hospital.

6) Accept that all of this is luck of the draw and that you cannot control it. A bad experience once does not mean you will have a bad experience a second time. None of it is your fault, or your achievement.

7) Despite the above rule, allow yourself to feel shit, or proud of yourself, or both. One day it will fade to be just part of your story. My mum said to me after my first birth, you will retell it and retell it and one day it will  lose its emotional hold on you. She's not right yet, but I see that she might be one day.

I shall talk about my child

I'm conscious, when being out with people who do not have children, to try not to be "baby this and baby that" in my conversation (that, after all, is what this blog is for), and I am aware that people without children often moan about people who do talk about their kids.

But I've been giving this some thought and I've decided to stop being so accommodating in my topics of conversation. After all, having a child is the biggest thing in my life. It impacts on all that I do and how I participate in the world. These people who moan about parents talking about their kids - do they moan about pet owners the same way? After all I've had two conversations about other people's pets this week. What if I spoke about a holiday, or a new car, or buying a house? This, I suspect, would be considered 'normal' conversation. If I were buying a houe and having difficulties, ground down by estate agents and surveyors and gazumping and gazundering, I would be pretty peeved to meet a friend for a drink and not be asked about it and sympathised with and and made to laugh about it and given advice and generally engaging with it. Well guess what? A child is much more important than that.

So I've decided - I shall stop making the effort to keep it in and I shall talk about my baby. And those who don't like it will just have to tolerate it the way you might listen to me talk about a failed romance while internally rolling your eyes and thinking I'm a sap, or a work situation where you think I'm unreasonable, or a novel I like that you think is crap.

Except of course when I'm with other parents - after all, we're the ones who most need a good chat about wine, or travel, or culture, or anything other than babies.

Is it a girl or a boy?

Above is a picture of one of my favourite of my daughter's outfits. True, the patterns are somewhat contrasting, but the flowery trousers captured summer beautifully, and, well, what's not to like about construction vehicles? (For those who are interested in such things, the trousers are from Tu at Sainsbury's, and the top is from Mothercare.)

Buying clothes that are not all pink or all blue is, as anyone who has tried to buy for a baby in recent years will know, very difficult. Where other colours creep in to girl's ranges, nice reds for example or bright yellows, they are girlified with bows or glitter or hearts (because as everyone knows, boys don't have hearts).

I started my maternity leave ten weeks before my baby was due, and used nearly every day of that leave online searching for baby clothes in primary colours. There are some out there, but they are nearly always expensive. I allowed myself one - a beautiful striped ensemble from Toby Tiger. It was the outfit I dreamed of bringing my baby home in. Alas it was too big and footless, no good for a teeny baby in the middle of winter. She wore it eventually, including for one of those cringey photoshoots we 'won' at Snappysnaps (if winning is the word when what it is is winning the opportunity to have a photoshoot and then be offered the chance to buy the results on massive canvases costing several hundred each. We declined of course, opting for two small prints, also extortionate, and I don't even like them. My husband had taken his glasses off to avoid glare and doesn't look like him and the Toby Tiger outfit - it just looks a bit odd.)

Anyway, I work very hard at making sure not all the clothes my daughter wears are pink. She's had t-shirts with lions on and brown corduroy trousers and owls and stripes and coats that look like they belong on a football manager circa 1984. They are all from the boys' sections of shops. And of course she's worn her fair share of dresses and bows and pinks too - I don't disallow them, I just want her to grow up knowing there is a choice. (Even Marks & Spencer, who did a lovely five pack of brightly coloured vests last year, branded them for boys, with the girls' version being, well, girlier, turquoise not blue, pink not red, etc).

The thing is, if she's wasn't wearing pink, strangers on buses and in queues and in shops would ask me all about my little boy. (This happens less so now her hair is longer). And much as gender doesn't matter, this riled me a little. It hasn't changed how we dress her, but it does explain why this was one of my favourite outfits of last year - it baffles strangers at first but they usually rightly concluded that while a girl would be dressed in construction vehicles, a boy would probably not be in flowery trousers.

Choosing between risks

I'm still thinking about risk. I needed to go to the post office today and pick up a parcel. The baby was asleep in the back of the car having just dropped off after a slightly troublesome night. I needed the parcel but was loathe to wake her.

The road outside the post office has three lanes of traffic and is just after a bend that cars often take too fast. The parking bays are on the right hand side of the car and the baby sits in the back on the left hand side. So I had two choices if I was to pick up my parcel: leave her locked in the car, which was visible from the post office or take her with me but get her out of the car with traffic zooming past me on a busy road.

I took her with me of course. But I did wonder for quite a while what to do. Truth is I suspect taking her out of the car was more dangerous than leaving her in it alone, with an accident more likely than an abductor. Perhaps it is because I am a journalist though that my brain works in headlines. Mother Leaves Baby in Car would be worse than a headline about a road accident.

I was of course influenced by the fact that she was asleep. Any parent knows that sleep is sacrosanct. I have an image of a cartoon in my head in which a mother holds a sleeping baby while the house is on fire. "Come on," says the firefighter, "we need to get you out of here". "Later" says the mother, "She's just fallen asleep."

But where do you draw the line when it comes to risk? If you are buying petrol and you need to go to the kiosk to pay, can you leave your child in the back of the car? At ten years old? At five years old? At ten months old? I have always done this at the petrol station yet wouldn't outside the supermarket. What about if you need the loo when you are out shopping? Can you ask a stranger to watch them much as you would your bag or coat? I would not dare just in case the worst happens. Yet what is more likely - she is abducted by that stranger or she gets ill from licking the toilet floor as she sits in the cubicle while I pee?

Raising a child is about gradually allowing them the independence to weigh up and take risks. I'm fine with that (until she wishes to do as I did and backpack around the world alone anyway). But goodness me the risks we take with them are many and the chances we take are abitrary.

Related posts:
The risks you dare not take
Searching for lost children
My baby, my daemon

Being a parent does change you

One of the compliments non parents often say about new parents is that "having a baby hasn't changed them". They mean it nicely - they mean you can still talk about things other than babies, that you manage to go to the occasional party, that you are still the kind of person they want to be friends with - but they are wrong. Becoming a parent does change you, absolutely and entirely.

It's not just that your responsibilities and priorities change, though they do. It's that something changes your very being to the core.

The experience of having a baby changes you physiologically and emotionally. You carry the weight of responsibility for another person, and a responsibility towards society to do a good job bringing up that person. But more than that, it changes your identity. However good or bad a job you do of it, the answer to whether or not you are a parent irreversibly changes and with it the way other people look at you and judge you and analyse who your are.

Your personality may stay the same, you may (if you are lucky) look the same. You may do the same job and read the same books and laugh at the same jokes, but fundamentally and profoundly who you are has changed. You are a different person. You are a parent and with that comes all the judgements and responsibilities we associate with that word as well as a sense of complete untouchability, for though you are vulnerable now in a way you have not been before you are also untouchable, for as long as your child is okay you know you will be okay.

So when people say "you haven't changed" it's not really a compliment, but it also cannot possibly be true. You have changed, utterly and completely, and so you should.

Related post: My baby, my daemon

The risks you dare not take

I've been thinking about the cases of Ben Needham and Madeleine McCann again. Both happened when the person looking after them took a risk. Ben Needham played outside while his grandparents were inside. Madeleine McCann was asleep in the holiday apartment while her parents had dinner a short distance away. 

And I've been thinking how easy it is to judge them for this but also how easy it would be to do the same. There are some evenings when the baby is asleep and I am home alone when I think I could really do with picking something up from the corner shop, or posting a letter, or feeding next door's cat. And I think to myself that the baby is asleep and will probably be asleep when I get back, and that even if she wasn't she's safely in her cot and can't get out. 

I never do of course. Fear of fire and abductors and foxes and dingos and fits and choking and me being run over or locked out all prevent it. But I think it would be easy to do, and once you had done it successfully it would be easy to do again, going a bit further, staying out a bit longer. And what I think about the Needhams and about the  McCanns is just what poor poor people, paying such a horrendous price for taking such a small risk - one that I reckon we've all considered, and one that because of them we'll now never take. 

Related:

Searching for lost children
My baby, my daemon

The truth about breastfeeding

A lot of articles and blogs I have read about breastfeeding difficulties are either defensive or apologetic. I am going to attempt to be neither.

Both my baby and I struggled with breastfeeding. Hand problems (Carpel tunnel syndrome followed by tenosynovitis) meant I struggled to hold my baby to the breast. Post birth surgery meant my body was tired and full of drugs. My baby was a little poorly and also a little sleepy. Sucking was difficult. Even without all of this we may have found breastfeeding hard. Many mums and babies do. 

But when the paediatrician said yes, breast is best but really the key thing is to feed your baby, we had no choice. We gave her formula. This gave her the strength to learn to breastfeed. But my supply was low. The way to raise it, said the health visitors and midwives, is to feed the baby at least every three hours and express in between. As each feed could take an hour this left very little time for anything else. I gave up on it quickly. 

A health visitor told me to massage my breasts while feeding to encourage milk flow. I was already tired and emotional with low milk supply. After that I was tired and emotional with low milk supply and bruised breasts. 

The baby lost weight. Lots of weight. Then we started formula feeds as a matter of course, starting with breast and 'topping up' with formula. The baby started to put on weight. Since then in fact we have mix fed. At nearly ten months we still do. It works for us. 

Breast is best. I get that. It has huge benefits for the baby and it's convenient. When it works that is. But the adverts that say this, the ones with peachy looking breasts and rosebud nipples attached to a perfect baby looking blissed out, they do us a huge disservice, because they make it look so easy that if we struggle we think we've failed. Far better a campaign that says breast is best but boy is it hard and please persevere anyway. Have a picture of a mum with bags under her dull sleepless eyes and bulgy veins on her breasts and raised nodules on her nipples and a slogan that says 'It might be shitty but it might get better if you carry on.' Such ads might stop women feeling like failures. 

We're led to believe that breastfeeding is so natural that it's like one of those crafts we've lost in the modern age, like thatching a roof, painting frescoes and making our own soap from horses hooves. We feel that before formula existed women must surely have found it easy because they had no choice. 

Actually here's what I think happened to those women and babies for whom it wasn't easy.  Women whose babies had died acted as wet nurses for some babies. Other babies were fed cow's milk, water and other liquids and some of these got ill and others didn't. Some women had the village wise woman or an older relative sit with her day in day out helping her, tweaking the nipples into shape and helping her hold the baby, until they could do it alone. And some babies, well some got weaker and weaker and died. We're lucky to live in a time where there is an alternative. 

The more people who, head held high, say breastfeeding is difficult and you are not a failure if you struggle and you are not a failure if you stop, the better. Breastfeeding rates in the UK are low and I know the authorities are keen to increase them. But lying to us about breastfeeding and pretending it is easy and pretending it works for everyone is, I am sure of it, the wrong way to encourage people to do it. 

You can do it: babies, students and the need for cliches

I teach journalism at Goldsmiths College (surely a line that should be in a Pulp song) and term starts this coming week. The teaching is mainly classroom based and practical and I enjoy it a lot, especially seeing students' work improve over the course. 

But what I am most proud of is the few occasions over the six years I have done the job where I feel I have really made a difference to someone's life, not by teaching interviewing skills or sending an assignment back until the apostrophes are in the right place, but by being encouraging about a job interview or a competition entry or an internship so that they decide to go for it. Where this results in success the course of their lives can be changed, and where it doesn't it often gives them the enthusiasm and fire in the belly needed to apply for other things which then changes the course of their lives. 

So many students I meet seem to have never been told they have as much chance as anyone else, that they have to be in it to win it, that they'll miss 100 percent of the shots they don't take, and all the other cliches which mean the same thing. While they have already done well getting into a competitive university and onto a competitive course, me saying this about jobs and work related opportunities is sometimes the first time they have heard it. 

I remember having dinner in my mid twenties with a man who was older than me and enjoying success with his journalism and books. How was it I was so confident, he asked me. Much of that confidence is a facade of course - isn't that the case for everyone? - but I realised that the confidence I do have is from my parents and grandparents (and now my husband), and to some extent teachers, consistently encouraging me, saying well done and showing an interest in things I was applying to do. 

A baby and a student are different in many ways of course. But playing with my baby just before term starts has caused me to reflect a little on the similarities. Because every day with the baby is about encouraging her to achieve what it is she can already do - this jigsaw, that peepo, this rollover, that waving - and pushing her to achieve more - hand clapping, crawling, chewing etc. Some of these, crawling for example, other babies can do already. But encouragement is not about saying 'they can do it so why can't you', it's about saying 'work hard and one day you'll be able to do that too.' And though the goals are different, the method, despite the 18 years or so age gap, is exactly the same. 

Ways to improve postnatal care #1: Don't call me mum

This is a plea to midwives, nurses, doctors and health visitors who see women in the hours, days and weeks following the birth of their baby. Don't call me mum. There is one person in the world currently allowed to call me mum, and she can't speak properly yet. 

I know it's easier to just call everyone by the same name, but you manage to use names in every other ward so let's do it in maternity too. You may have put your hands up our most private bits, you may have seen us grunt and cry and bleed and push and poo as our babies came out, but pretend for a moment we're not just on the birth conveyor belt and that we're individuals with names and feelings. That way we might just feel your plans for our health and the health of our babies are individualised too. 

Ways to improve postnatal care #3: Help us buy the basics

Ways to improve postnatal care #2: Change the sheets

For whom the tears flow

We had a difficult beginning, our baby and us. No more so than many people and quite a lot less so than lots of people but it was difficult nevertheless. Feeding issues and possible illnesses and moments of intense worry plus all the tiredness and emotions everyone who has just had a baby feels.

When I tell friends the detail, and the detail is what everyone wants to hear, I often find myself in tears. I'm a crier so it's not that unusual, but also it's incredibly easy to imagine myself back in those moments and to feel everything I felt then again.

And sometimes people say to me that yes, it sounds horrid, what a difficult beginning you had, but look at your gorgeous girl and how well she is now and how beautiful and lively and amazing she is, and how she thrives, so don't cry.

But what they don't realise is that much as life as a mum is bound up with a willingness to give up anything necessary for the wellbeing of your child, it is not an entirely selfless life. For at these times the tears aren't for her - she is indeed beautiful and lively and amazing and oh how she thrives - the tears are for myself.

Related post: Best of times, worst of times

My baby is a genius!

My baby has now been out longer than she was in and I'm not sure which is more mind-blowing, that she went from nothing to a living human being whilst in my womb or all the things she has done in the nine months since being born. 

These include, but are not limited to: learning to use her hands, smiling with her mouth and her eyes, learning the difference between night and day, recognising her mummy and daddy and other key players in her life, wondering about the nature of objects and touching, licking and smelling them to find out more, eating and showing preferences and dislikes, having a sense of rhythm, working out mirrors (something I'm not sure I understand myself yet), making herself laugh with peepo, making us laugh with peepo, allowing herself to be comforted, comforting me with a stroke if she thinks I'm upset, knowing if she is hungry or thirsty, opening things, closing things, getting our attention with noise, being quiet to avoid attention if she is doing something naughty, making choices about what to play with, playing, concentrating (with an intensity that has led my mum to say the baby has the greatest concentration of any person she knows), understanding the word no, ignoring the word no, forgiving us when we mess things up, recognising whatever it is that makes humans human and responding to them differently to animals, turning pages of books, getting to grips with the idea of animal, vegetable or mineral, working out the difference between solid, liquid and gas, being wary of weird people, sharing, possession (ie not sharing), using language, making a plan, enjoying sensations such as the warmth of the sun, getting cross, bouncing and watching the world go by. 

What a clever clever baby I have. 

She's perfect, we kept her.

A friend used to tell me I thought too much to which I used to reply "You can't think too much" by which I meant "You CAN'T think too much" rather than "YOU can't think too much."

But it is possible that I have been thinking too much about our current favourite book. By current I mean for the past six months with no signs of falling out of favour - and that's just me, though the baby likes it too. 

It's Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo. In it the narrator, wanting a pet, is sent various animals by the zoo but there is something wrong with every one - the elephant too big, the lion too fierce, the frog too jumpy - and the narrator sends them back until they send the perfect match. 

It's a lovely lovely book. It was a 'being born' present from friends and we read it most days. But sometimes I worry that it's giving the baby the message that if something isn't quite right you just get rid of it. "We love you despite any imperfections," I tell her. "You can be as jumpy, fierce or big as you want and we'll still keep you." She looks at me, quite rightly, as if I'm mad. 

(It really is lovely. And it has flaps. I recommend it as a present for any parent child.)

Not smug, relieved

Sometimes when I am walking down the road with the buggy (and baby), even if it is grey and wet and in a less than nice part of Tottenham, and even if I am tired and grumpy and harumphing with every step, out of nowhere comes the realisation that I found my man, we had a baby and this is exactly what I always wanted. 

And though when I was single well-meaning friends told me I'd meet him one day, and though when we were trying to conceive well-meaning friends told me it would happen eventually, for some people it doesn't, and I always felt these well-meaning friends would probably turn out to be wrong. 

So on those days when I realise I got what I wanted I can't help but grin inanely as I wander, and whoop internally (and sometimes, to the consternation of passers-by, externally) and breathe sighs of relief. And it's not because I am what Bridget Jones would call a 'smug married', because I am not smug, I promise, nor do I believe that being married is important (though my marriage is important to me), but rather I can't believe my luck that it did happen. I am so so thrilled and relieved.