Libby Purves - How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

There are a few things, however, that I wish I had known earlier:

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.

Cured by sleeping with your shoulders propped up on four pillows, like El Cid lashed upright stone-dead on his horse. But:

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:

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?

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.

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!)