Why are you crying mummy?

During the first evening of my baby’s life she nearly died. A passing midwife noticed that she wasn’t just coughing, as I had thought, but was turning blue. The midwife grabbed her and, yelling ‘crash’ and pressing a button on the wall, ran from the ward taking my baby with her. I was left tied to the bed by my catheter for seconds? minutes? hours? Long enough to know that the worst had happened. Long enough to think about having to send a message to everyone cancelling the birth announcement I had sent out a little earlier.

When I realised my catheter would unhook and my legs, numbed by a spinal, would carry my weight, I found my baby in a side room. “Is that my baby?” I asked the midwife. I had not known her long enough to recognise her yet, something that haunts me still. That was my first question. “Is she alive?” was my second. She was. They had a question for me too. “Why are you crying mummy?” asked the midwife, the hero midwife who saved my baby, the monster midwife who could not understand why I might be upset.

I still do not know how to answer that question. Is it because I thought my baby was dead or is it because she was alive?

Over a year later mostly I manage to put this to the back of my mind. I have a healthy baby who has become a wonderful mischievous loving toddler. The world is her oyster, which easily becomes lobster, which is tantalisingly close to the Yiddish word lobus which means little monster, in an affectionate cheeky way, and which although conventionally only used for boys is used in our household for our beautiful girl. The world is her lobster, and this lobus is our world.

A healthy happy baby is all anyone wants. That we have one is magical. Every day I appreciate it and most days I choose not to remember the moments when I thought it had been taken away just as it began. Yet sometimes, in the shower, driving alone with the radio on, walking through the park, I remember that night, and anyone who sees me and my tears may well also ask that question, “why are you crying mummy?” And still I cannot really answer.

Should you cry in front of your children?

After a difficult phonecall this week I was in left in tears and left with a quandary - should I let my daughter see I was crying. She's only a baby but she can definitely tell when I'm upset, getting upset herself at the sight of me crying. 

Parents are supposed to be strong and capable of anything. We are the sorter-outers not the quivering wrecks. And though I'm good in a crisis I'm a crier the rest of the time. 

The first time I cried in front of my daughter was during one of our nights in hospital when in the middle of the night, both of us beaten by attempts to get my breasts to work, I sat on the bed with her in my arms and we both bawled, possibly for hours. But that was us against the world together. This time it was her normally happy encouraging mummy having a moment. And while children need to learn that not everything goes well all the time, some problems in the adult world should be kept adult.

So all I could do was brush the tears away, force my voice to normal and get on with our day. And because nothing else actually matters to me as much as the wellbeing of my family, this made me feel better anyway. 

Wow - it's a powerful protection having a family. I felt it when I met my husband, and remember thinking that if things went badly at work or in friendships or anywhere else, it was okay now because someone loved me and I loved them and that's what mattered. And now the baby is here that feeling has multiplied. 

This protection makes everything else less powerful and I think sometimes people sense that and can feel threatened by it. They can only hurt you a little bit, unless they hurt your family also. It's why films are right when good people will do bad things if the baddies have their child or their partner. I had always thought this was just a cheap plot device, but I see now that it is true. For you are there to protect your family, but they protect you too. Which means there should have been no need to question whether my daughter should see me cry, because there really was no need to cry in the first place.  

(Now I just have to put this into practise. I am a crier. From sad things on the telly to stubbing my toe to thinking about mortality to seeing a pretty picture to having a frustrating conversation with someone being stupid. I must learn to take my own advice.)

In this together

I try not to judge people for the techniques they use getting their baby to sleep. Those sleepless nights can be so hellish that if you discover your baby will only sleep on a mattress covered in Egyptian cotton held by you at a 45 degree angle, or with you laying beside her your breast 5mm from her nose, or after you singing thirty verses of Coming Round The Mountain, well you'll do it. You may have sworn you'll instigate a routine, you may have said you won't look your baby in the eye at night or interact with them so they learn night from day, but if that's what you have to do to get them to sleep, believe me you'll do it. This is because there is no sound worse to a new parent than the piercing scream of their baby, especially if it has gone on for more than, oooh, about six seconds. 

But though I am striving for non judgeyness, and that includes parents who let their child cry themselves to sleep, I just don't get people who take perverse pleasure in their baby giving someone else a hard time. I'm thinking specifically of the medical professional I was talking to recently who told me, in a conversation about soothing babies after procedures and whether it is the mum or dad who does it, that there's nothing she likes more than hearing her husband upstairs with their screaming baby while she sits downstairs with a magazine and a glass of wine smug in the knowledge that now he knows what it's like. 

Now I'm all for sharing the work, but there seem to be some people who fall into the 'if I have to suffer then he should too' camp. While this is tempting, especially when you want them to share your up-five-times-a-night pain, surely no one is a winner. I don't want my baby to scream at my husband for twenty minutes. I don't want my husband to be screamed at for twenty minutes. And I don't want to hear it myself from a distance  for any amount of time. It's the quickest way for all three of us to end up in tears. Sure, my husband might understand better what it is I do all day and why I am emotionally fragile even once the crying stops, but he and the baby are the two people I love most in the world and I never want either of them to be upset, let alone both of them.