Libby Purves - How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

Hospitals give you lists of things to bring with you; the one thing never mentioned is paper knickers; or, if you can’t find them in the shops, the worst old Mummy-pants in your drawer, to throw away. Take 20 pairs, and you’ll never regret it. And however lissome you are, this is absolutely not the moment for thongs. Enough said.

Understandably, hospitals don’t encourage you to bring anything much into the delivery room, but various groups like the National Childbirth Trust will recommend amusements and comforts, ranging from sponges to light reading. Here are some less conventional items that women have taken into the delivery room and been glad of:

• A pair of thick woolly socks (hot face, cold feet).

• An aerosol spray of ‘Fresh Air’. (One friend says, ‘I farted like a mad thing all the way through, very embarrassing smell.’ Sorry.)

• A small plastic plant-spray for when your husband gets bored with sponging your face all the time.

• A cassette machine of music. (But beware. Just as the obstetrician approached with his forceps to extract my first, Paul switched on our machine to take my mind off it all, and it happened to be set at a sea song: ‘Haul away Joe’. Not very tasteful, but it made the doctor laugh.)

• A camera. (Pictures of your baby at ten minutes old are wonderful. For some reason they look more grown-up than a week later: wise and amused.)

• Lip salve.

• A guitar. (One girl tried to get permission for a Hammond Organ, but failed.)

• A mirror (to watch the head born, if you fancy. I don’t).

• Harpers & Queen . (Not a magazine I normally read, but Jennifer’s Diary, performed in a high posh voice by Paul, kept me laughing immoderately into the gas-and-air mask right up to the start of second-stage labour.) Hello or OK! magazine would do as well. Nothing serious is going to get through your defences, so don’t assume this is the moment to tackle Stephen Hawking for the first time.

• A laptop and a stack of DVD films (if you’re that techno-friendly. Anything with Goldie Hawn in it is a good bet, I am told).

• A picnic for afterwards (miss hospital mealtimes and you’ve had it for six hours).

• A Marybean (tropical seed from the West Indies, believed to be lucky in childbirth).

• A horseshoe (same reason).

• A game of Scrabble. (But one mother reports that it easily gets a bit close to the bone. ‘Blood … conception … tubes … then we gave up!’)

Above all, or instead of it all:

• A father. If he won’t come, he won’t, and a girlfriend or sister or mother would do. Better a willing partner than a groggy, reluctant one. But if the baby’s father will come, he might surprise you: men are often so good in the labour room, contrary to daft old legends, that the midwives are lost in admiration. (It can go too far, even. The young nurse breathed admiringly to me, after Rose was born, ‘Your husband is wonderful. Anyone would think he had been at dozens of confinements.’ I replied, a little sourly, that this was unlikely. Unless he has a hobby of which I know nothing. Perhaps he slips on a white coat and creeps into maternity wards on his days off.)

The days in hospital with a newborn, and the first fragile week back home, are a strange, limbo-like time. Selfishness is absolutely essential. Don’t keep trying to please everyone; it’s your time. If you don’t want a difficult relative to visit you, say so. One girl, who had lost a baby at four days, had suffered all through her second pregnancy from her mother-in-law’s insinuations about genetic defects (‘If it happens once, it’ll happen again’). She was frantic to keep this dreadful old bag away, at least for five or six days; but had been advised by all sorts of well-meaning professionals that hospital visiting was vital to ‘family bonding’. I am afraid I sneakily advised her to hold her ground, and, if necessary, ban her own mother as well, just to even things out diplomatically.

Accepting help is also essential. Independent, strong, healthy women feel stupid at being brought meals in bed and having their babies’ nappies changed by nurses, or back home by kindly sisters-in-law or paid maternity nurses. But take advantage. If you looked around in an old-fashioned hospital where mothers stay in for several days, you could always tell the first-from second-time mothers on a ward; all the novices would be struggling tearfully with the fifth nappy of the morning, sticking pins in themselves and annoying the baby, just to prove they can cope. Meanwhile the old lags lie back on their pillows, murmuring, ‘Well, sister, I do have a little backache, if you’d be terribly kind and change him I’d be so grateful …’ They don’t have to prove that they can cope alone. They’ve done it. Anyway, everybody , except the very subnormal, can cope alone eventually, tough though it may be. Why start work early when you could be lying back eating grapes and cuddling a nice, clean, changed baby? If you feel ropey, are incontinent, in pain from stitches, piles, sore nipples, engorgement or whatever, it will pass; there is no point in feeling that you have to win your maternal spurs now, in the first couple of days, by changing every nappy.

By the way, bursting into tears on Day Five is so common a phenomenon that nobody who looks after new mothers is remotely surprised by it. But don’t time your most unnerving and demanding visitors for Day Five, and tell your partner in advance that it may happen, and does not mean that you are sinking into the lowest abysses of real post-natal depression.

The only thing worth fighting about, in hospital, is demand-feeding. These days you rarely even have to fight for it. Appalling though it may seem to feed a baby every 45 minutes round the clock (each feed lasting 15 minutes … or more … ), if that is what it wants, then that is the best thing to give it. It keeps the baby from crying, and speeds up the moment when it will feed at sensible times (the more sucking, the more milk). Top-ups of formula are no help at all. But because you are demand-feeding, which is the most supremely unselfish action one human being routinely does for another, you are entitled to be as selfish as hell for the rest of the time. Consider yourself, for a few days. Insist on comfort, rest and peace. Take advantage. Lean on everybody. The baby, after all, is leaning on you. Hard.

Everything was ready in the tiny flat. The slight matrimonial tension which had blown up over the wine-rack had now abated (the baby was to sleep in the dining-room, and while the books prescribe a temperature of 68°F for babies, wine needs to be cooler. She had favoured letting the wine take its chance; he favoured putting the baby to bed in a woolly hat and snowsuit. Eventually they moved the wine). Suddenly, up to their door came the Health Visitor, prim and smiling, her alert little eyes roving everywhere. My pregnant friend welcomed her, all unsuspiciously, made her a cup of tea, and sat down anxiously to listen to whatever advice might be forthcoming.

‘Now, Mrs D____’ said the lady in uniform, with that offensively breezy confidence so often displayed by childless twenty-two-year-old health professionals towards anxious primagravidae ten years their senior; ‘are you planning to use terry nappies, or disposables?’

‘Good God, disposables, of course,’ said the mother-to-be, startled. Moving the wine-rack was one thing – compromises have to be made, after all – but dabbling around all day in a bucketful of wet sewage was quite another matter. Out of the question.