review: Life After Birth

British journalist Kate Figes’ 1998 book, Life After Birth: What Even Your Friends Won’t Tell You About Motherhood was recommended to me by my boss when I was about eight months pregnant. She’s a very busy woman, but, on a number of occasions, she made a point of mentioning this book to me. The last time I saw her before going on parental leave, she wrote down the title for me and apologised that she couldn’t lend me her own copy, which was currently in the possession of a friend. She handed me the title details - minus subtitle - somewhat furtively, as if there was more she could say, but that she’d thought better of it. I thanked her for her trouble and went about my business.

Shortly before my due date, l found the book cheap online and decided to buy it on the strength of her recommendation. When it arrived, I read the back and decided it wasn’t really for me. The back of the book read:

Pregnancy and childbirth radically alter a woman’s body and metabolism - it’s virtually impossible to ‘bounce back’ quickly after childbirth. And many new moms discover that their sex lives and social lives - and, with them, their self-esteem, evaporate with a new baby, whom they somehow seem to have been made wholly responsible for.

Life After Birth doesn’t cloak the truth in pastel colors, but explores the actual physical, psychological, and emotional consequences of giving birth ...

I should add that my usually anxious character had been replaced somewhere about the end of my first trimester with an extremely calm and beatific one, which didn’t disappear until about 12 weeks after birth. In my zen-like state, I decided the book sounded all together too depressing and filed it at the back of the bookshelf. This didn’t seem like quite the encouragement I needed at that moment in time.

Fast-forward a month or two to me sitting on the couch, weak from severe loss of blood and extensive tearing, and looking for something to read during marathon breastfeeding sessions. I remembered my boss’s recommendation, and instructed my husband to locate the book. Far from depressing me, it was exactly what I needed to read in those early days.

Divided into various sections - childbirth, health after birth, adjusting to motherhood, working and the ‘good’ mother, emotions, exhaustion, relations with the father, sex and sensuality, friends and the outside world, and family life - Figes draws on both historical material and her extensive interviews with new mothers to 1) paint a picture of life after birth and 2) ‘expose the mythology’ that has grown up around motherhood. So, for example, in the chapter on work, she looks to the past to provide evidence that the ‘stay-at-home’ mother is a relatively recent invention. Prior to the 1950s, she argues, most women worked, and balancing this work with motherhood was the norm. While I support the political point she makes - namely, that staying at home shouldn’t be the default option for the ‘good mother’ - I found her use of historical material a little selective and the conclusions she drew from it sweeping. She neglected to account, for example, for the kind of work that women were doing while balancing motherhood, such as poorly-paid piece work that could be done in the home, and was seen as an extension of household duties. This strange tension between the selective use of evidence and the general sweeping statement marked most of the chapters of the book.

Where the book was strongest, in my view, was when it drew on the contemporary interview material concerning how women had managed, for example, the return to work, the division of household labour with their partners, and their own return to health post-partum. I found myself relating to these experiences, even if they weren’t the same as mine. Until I started to meet regularly with other mothers around the three-month mark - when, it seemed, we all emerged, blinking, into the sunlight - this book provided the important insight of fellow-travellers who were going through what I was going through.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with Figes’ conclusions about the importance of women knowing the ‘truth’ about childbirth. She positions herself as the ‘truth-teller’, the one who will pull the pastel-coloured wool from women’s overly sentimental eyes. Rather, I wonder if the impulse that both propelled her to write this book and me to read it, was the experience of coming into overwhelming contact with the corporeal. While I am suspicious of the reification of the ‘natural’ in child-birth, the fact remains that it is women’s bodies that go through this profound process. After years of having my mind in the driving seat, it was quite a shock when my body finally started asserting itself. My reaction - and I’m sure I’m not the only one - was one of ‘why didn’t anyone tell about this?” But, as my midwife wisely informed me, most women don’t want to hear it before they go through the birth process. I do know that my unnaturally positive ante-natal frame of mind probably helped me cope with what I ended up going through.

I’m not a huge fan of pschyoanalyst Jacques Lacan, but my birth experience did put me in mind of his concept of the ‘real’. Unlike ‘reality’, the real - like death - is something that we cannot encounter, we only ever approach it obliquely, separated from it by language, or ‘the symbolic order’. The moment my daughter was born with the use of forceps was so profoundly shocking to me that I do not have the language to describe it: Lacan’s account of ‘the real’ is the only concept that has come close. I’m not sure women could be told ‘the truth’ about birth and afterwards. But now, I think, I have a better understanding of why my boss was so furtive when she recommended this book to me.