Libby Purves - How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

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 :

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.