Miffed about Miffy

When I was pregnant I found the entire set of Miffy books in our local Oxfam Books for £1 each. I loved these Dick Bruna books when I was a kid and wanted to get them for our baby to enjoy, so I bought the set. Except for one - it just didn't feel right buying Goodbye Grandma about the funeral of Grandma Bunny for a baby whose Grandma and Nan are both very much alive. Not only that but the book focuses on a church funeral and, well. let's just say the word rabbit only contains one religious word within it and it's not vicar.

Turns out the stories aren't quite as scintillating as I'd remembered and the rhymes seem to have lost something in translation from their original Dutch. Maybe that's why reading them now as an adult my favourite is the entirely wordless Miffy's Dream in which Miffy floats off on a cloud. meets another bunny, slides down the moon and watches shooting stars. Surreal, yes, but makes me cry every time.




I was particularly proud of my bargain when I saw the same books for sale for more than £1 each in a bookshop on Lamb's Conduit Street in London. The shop has a lovely selection of children's books and I suspect many of its customers are people buying presents for children they know who are being treated round the corner at Great Ormond Street Hospital. That's what we were doing. Which is why I found it a pretty cynical marketing ploy that all the Miffy books cost the same except for one - Miffy in Hospital. Now that's cheeky.

Practising what you preach

Apparently my ante-natal teacher, yes the one who counselled us against opting for an epidural, who told us to while away the early hours of labour by building a 'nest' of pillows and duvets in the corner of a room to retreat into, who suggested we might like to go through birth using hypnotherapy techniques we could pay her to teach us, let slip that she had a boob job and a tummy tuck after having her kids. 

The general message her classes put across (and I will blog another time about the misogyny of the ante-natal lobby) is that intervention is bad, painkilling drugs are for the weak and medicalised is a dirty word. So all I can say is I hope, when the scalpel was cutting open her tits to insert silicon bags under the skin, when they were stitching together skin on her belly and separating strands of muscle (I'm making this up - I have no idea how surgeons tuck tummies or expand breasts), well I hope she practised what she preached and said "thanks for the offer of anaesthetic but I will just breathe through it while visualising my childhood home."

In recovery

A few weeks ago a friend asked me if I felt physically and emotionally recovered from birth and, without thinking about it, I said no, which was odd because until that point I'd been feeling that I was ready to start trying for another baby. What did I feel like then, she asked. 

Actually I recently started to feel emotionally near to normal again which, no coincidence I'm sure, was almost exactly when sleep improved so that I started to get at least a six hour chunk more nights than not. 

Physically however I feel wrecked. This isn't directly from the birth. That was, well, birth, gruesome and yukky but the right bits stretched in the right way and the bits that didn't do as they should (that pesky placenta!) were dealt with by doctors. But my body was so run down, pummelled by pregnancy and never given the chance to get a full night of restorative sleep, that it has had a litany of minor complaints since. Coughs and colds and fungal things, wheezes and infections and tender tendons, stiffnesses and cramps and aches and things just not being right. Bits creak. I am weary. 

When I was little I remember my parents stretching their joints in the morning, groaning the way grown ups groan, preparing their bodies for the day, and my young elasticy limbs not needing teasing into life like theirs. And I realise the answer to her question, what do I feel like, is that I feel like a parent, like my parents, like every parent. I suspect there is no recovery, just condition management. 

A baby's touch

Years ago when I was backpacking in Australia, straight after graduating, after a couple of months making my way through tropical Queensland and its barrier reef and rainforest and sandy beaches, I ended up, like all backpackers in Australia do, in a town in northern New South Wales called Byron Bay. It's where cool kids hang out, surf and party. And I took a day long massage course run by a lady called Amanda that I had been hearing about in every youth hostel along the way. Backpackers paid what was about a week's budget for me but was probably not very much, and we learnt to give each other massages and, as we all practised on each other, to receive them too. And I remember at one point Amanda saying that she thought the hardest thing about backpacking, if you were not doing so in a couple, was the lack of touch in your life, and how people often cried on her course as their bodies, and minds, remembered what it is like to feel a human touch.

She was right. Casual sexual encounters aside, backpacking is characterised by a lack of touching. If you travel the world alone there are no pats on the back from mates, no hugs when you meet old friends, no arm squeezes from siblings and no strokes of the cheeks from your mum or other relatives. You can very easily not touch, or be touched, for months. Amanda's philosophy was that we all have 'touch needs', not of a sexual nature but as part of what it is to be human and part of society, and that without it we get stressed and emotionally cut off.

I'm reminded of this having a baby. How wonderful it is to have all this touch, every day, whenever I want it. How amazing that I can swoop in to my baby's cot and pick her up and cuddle her and smother her with kisses and stroke her soft skin and put my nose to hers in an 'eskimo kiss'. And I can pat her bottom when it has just been cleaned and squeeze her lovely thighs and rub her tummy and sniff her newly washed hair and give her what the midwives call skin-to-skin, where I cuddle her my naked skin against her naked skin. And I think Amanda might be right - for however stressful parenting is, however exhausting, however anxiety ridden, there's a different type of calm you have too, a kind of humanising and knowing your place in the world, and I think it might come from all this touching. Soon my baby will be able to wriggle away from me, and these touches will be hers to allow or not. But for now I am making the most of it, and it really is quite wonderful.

These books saved my life

Well, not my life, but my sanity. The first, What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing, was a present from a very good friend of mine. I started reading it when my baby was about two weeks old. Already I was reeling from the shock of it all, and here was a book full of anecdotes from other women like me about how hard it was. It wasn't that it said things would get easier (though they do), rather what helped was knowing the thoughts and feelings I was having were normal. I could read bits to my partner and show him I was normal too. Thank you Naomi Stadlen, and thank you very good friend who got it for me. I shall buy it for other friends in return.



The second, Life After Birth by Kate Figes, I found in a charity shop when the baby was a couple of months old. It talks about the shock of both birth and of having children and again it showed me I was not alone, that the highs were normal and the lows were normal and that having a baby (birth), and having a baby (it actually being here) is difficult. Wonderful, but difficult. Thank you Kate Figes.

A day off?

We've been ill - nothing serious, a cold or virus making our ears fuzzy and our necks achey and our throats swollen. The baby has been fine but less so the parents. If we were our pre baby selves a good night's sleep, a day off work and a hot toddy would have sorted it. But we're post baby selves and guess what, turns out the parenting doesn't stop. The baby still needs to be fed, kept clean and entertained. She still needs (yes, needs) enthusiastic parents telling her several times a day that she is beautiful and clever and the most wonderful person ever created, reminding her that even if all the container ships in the world were piled high with containers and filled with densely packed love, it wouldn't be a patch on how much we love her.

I cried when Goodynuff Dad said he was ill too. I wanted to be allowed to be ill myself, to have a day where I could be looked after and to have just a short break from the nurturing and the enthusiasm. So I turned to Goodynuff Grandma who looked after all three of us. When, I asked, would I be allowed to be ill myself, to not have to worry about looking after others, to take a teeny tiny day off from the responsibilities of being a mum. Oh how the gods must laugh hearing me ask this just eight months in. Goodynuff Grandma is 61 and turns out she was feeling a little under the weather herself, yet still had to look after us. So I guess the answer is never.




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This reminded me of another blogpost by When you ARE that woman about her own mum in which she says:

"Last time I stayed at my parent's house I wanted to borrow a pair of scissors. I walked to my Mum's room. She was in the loo. I called in and asked her where the scissors were. I had to search carefully for the memory, as it was so commonplace I missed the importance of that non-anecdote, and every other time I've done it. Her personal space, her body, her bedroom, doesn't really exist in the mind of me, her child. I am as boundary-less as a toddler, and my mother, even 33 years on, still can't have a piss in peace. No wonder she went to work." 
Read the whole post here.

The way you make me feel

You know how much you love your children, that primal animalistic way that means you would quite literally rip the throat of any predators out with your teeth, the way that means you can stare at them for hours congratulating yourself on how clever you are to have made them, the way their cry makes you cry in an instant, the way you cannot believe that someone as flawed as you can make someone as perfect as them, the way that if they look at something with longing you want to buy it for them, and how you can't bear the thought they will be old one day except the alternative is so much much worse, how you take anything anyone says that isn't an out and out compliment as a judgemental slur, and how if we didn't have running water you would be prepared to lick them clean, even the icky bits, and how your ambitions are now all for them and not for yourself, and the way you look at their face and see in it everybody who has ever been before them and everyone who will ever come after them and how even though you may be an athiest it's almost enough to make you believe in God. Well just a thought but that's probably how your parents felt, still feel even, about you. Mindblowing isn't it?