'i just don't know where the time goes'

A little while ago, in the depths of a phase of baby sleeplessness, I bumped into an acquaintance at the supermarket. She had had a baby not long after I had, but, with one thing and another, I had not seen her since we had both given birth. Unlike me, she was not shopping with a grumpy baby in tow. Unlike me, she had returned to work two days a week. Unlike me, she had family around to help her out with the childcare. And, unlike me, she didn’t look completely knackered (although I’m sure she was, since it goes with the territory).

Breezily, she asked after the baby - mistaking her for a boy - and how old he was. Then, without really waiting for an answer, she told me how she was getting on, how she was really enjoying being back at work - ‘because it’s something for me’ - and how her mother-in-law was looking after the baby - ‘it’s so lovely to see them developing such a close bond.’ Continuing in this vein for a while, she wound up her monologue with the the exclamation, ‘I just don’t know where the time goes!” Before I had a chance to summon up enough energy to strangle her, she said ‘well, I better be off. So much to do,’ and left.

It felt somewhat like a drive-by: while I was struggling to do much of anything, I encountered the one woman who apparently was managing to do it all. Her ‘my life is so great’ speech lodged itself somewhere in the recesses of my brain to be taken out and reflected on at a more suitable time. Seeing as there never is a more suitable time, now will have to do.

The comment that struck me most about what she’d said was not how much she was enjoying work nor how wonderful it was that she had family on tap to look after her baby. Rather, it was the cliche, ‘I just don’t know where the time goes.’ My sluggish mental response to that would’ve been something along the lines of ‘really? I spend all my days breastfeeding, dressing the baby, changing nappies, doing laundry, cooking food, cajoling the baby to eat the food, washing the dishes, trying to settle the baby to sleep, and then starting all over again. It’s like Groundhog Day, only without Punxsutawney Phil’. Instead, coward that I am, I just gave a weak laugh and said ‘mmm’.

The incident got me thinking about an early classic of second-wave feminism, namely, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Written at the end of the 1950s, Friedan reports on a ‘problem with no name’ besetting affluent suburban housewives, many of whom had had a university education before getting married and having children. Unlike their mothers, who had gone out to work during the second world war, these women did not ‘remember painfully’ giving up their dreams of having a career, and were peachy keen to settle into their mommy roles. Even despite this, Friedan traced a malaise among them. Freed of a lot of domestic drudgery, thanks to the advent of labour-saving devices, Friedan described these women as experiencing:

a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"

I think there’s still something in this, particularly as the wider culture is encouraging women (well, middle class women anyway) to once again re-embrace their ‘natural’ mothering role. Whether it’s the exhortation to breastfeed and exprience natural childbirth - things Friedan also identified - or use cloth nappies, make home-made food, and sew hand-made clothes. Not only this, but there seems to be an article every other day in the newspapers castigating older mothers - usually ones who have had something of a career - for all their failings biological (‘your baby will have birth defects!’) and nurturing (‘you’ll have died of old age when your child still needs you!’). While statistics show that mothers in New Zealand are, on average, getting older, the message still seems to be that it’s best to have babies young, and devote your life to them.

But, way back in 1959, Friedan was warning against this devotion to the ideal of the domestic goddess. She considered that resolving the ‘problem with no name’ was the ‘key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home."’

Trying to do the right thing before my baby was born, I chose to take eighteen months off work. I met with much approval for this; many women told me ‘you never get those early years back.’ I’m still glad that I have taken the time off, but I do find myself getting bored. It’s hard to get much intellectual stimulation from cooking cheese sauce, changing nappies, and reading Maisy Likes Driving for the umpteenth time. Like a latter-day Prufrock, I feel like I’m measuring out my life with soft plastic baby spoons. Far from not knowing were the time goes, some days I can feel every single nano-second drag by. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy time with the baby, just that it would be nice to feel intellectually challenged and vaguely productive in a non-mummy sense once in a while. Oh, and earn my own income too.

I’d venture to speculate that my acquaintance’s balancing of some work, with some baby time, plus a childcare arrangement she felt comfortable with, meant that she had little time to count the hours. As for me? I’ve forgone the dubious pleasures of Valium and cooking sherry to which bored suburban mummies of yesteryear turned, and discovered blogging on the internet instead. It's cheaper and the hangover is not nearly as bad.

review: Confessions of a Coffee Group Drop Out

On a typically blustery Wellington spring day, I had no choice but to take the baby to the local library so that we could get out of the house. If we had braved the playground there’s no telling if either of our hairdos would recover. Given that the baby has virtually no hair, this is really saying something. So, as she rampaged around the shelves, trying her best to get in the lift and upend the rubbish bin, I surveyed the Bestsellers shelf. In between the most recent Booker winner and Jamie Oliver’s latest offering, I happened upon Eleanor Black’s Confessions of a Coffee Group Dropout: Navigating New Motherhood, which was published this year. I had a quick flick through it and discovered that it was a New Zealand journalist’s reflections on new motherhood: wry, highly personalised, and sprinkled with soundbites from interviews with other new mums.

From the cover, you could be forgiven for thinking it was chick lit, especially given the predominance of (do I even need to tell you this?) Barbie pink. So much so, that I was kinda embarrassed to go and get it out. I had to get out Julian Barnes’ Sense of Ending as well, just to restore my credibility to myself (with Julian Barnes? Oh dear). Although I did start reading Black's book first.

It reads like a light version of both Life After Birth - but without the historical research and overt political agenda - and novelist Anne Enright’s Making Babies - but without her idiosyncratic brand of witty bleakness. Which is not to say it is all kittens and puppies. Far from it. Black’s book tackles such subjects as unwanted advice, dropping out of coffee groups, competitive mummy wars and trying to do it all. I can imagine her as an amusingly negative alternative mum, rolling her eyeballs behind the backs of the other mothers in her coffee group who are comparing notes about their favourite preserving methods. It was an entertaining read, despite the not-too-promising cover.

But, like Kate Figes, Black seems concerned with ‘truth-telling’, and trying to reassure both expectant and new mums that the perfect ‘supermum’ doesn’t exist and that everyone lies about childbirth and childrearing. Although she doesn’t overtly espouse a feminist politics, her myth-busting certainly seems to have a pro-woman agenda. She uses the trope of ‘lying’ a lot, which I found kind of intriguing. Black almost goes so far as to posit that there is something of a conspiracy about childbirth, where mums don’t tell expectant mums what to really expect. Even though childhood seems to be increasingly wrapped up in crass sentimentalism, I’m kind of wondering who these new mums are who really think that childbirth will be a piece of cake, and that doing the lion’s share of bringing up a baby is going to be easy. I mean, it’s not called labour for no reason, right?

There’s no doubt that the actual experience is not something you can really prepare for - whether it’s a birth that doesn’t go anything like you thought it would, or a child who cries all day for no apparent reason, or feeling like your identity has been eroded because you don’t have an income and no-one looks you in the eye anymore. But I’m not sure that the opposition of lying and truth really captures it. I wonder if the emphasis on ‘truth-telling’ is a - perhaps unconscious - attempt to construct a universal shared female experience (ignoring the fact, of course, that not all women have babies). If we were all honest about what having babies was like, then we would all be able to find that womanly solidarity that continues to elude is, and would just stop all these competitive mummy wars and dull domestic chitchat.

Nice as that desire is, I think it’s just as limiting as the more sentimental narratives around, because it attempts to erase difference at the same time as insisting on it. What I mean is that, on the one hand, Black tells us that there are many different ways to be a mother and you have to find what suits you (so far, so good), but on the other hand, she’s also kind of dismissive of coffee groups and various other activities that some women find essential to getting through the day.

I wonder if the crux of the issue is less about an opposition between truth and lies - which begs a lot of questions, not least who’s truth? - and more about embodiment. By that I mean both emphasising the material aspects of lived human experience, and remaining focussed on the differences that embodiment necessarily entails. And those differences - which could be related to class or race, or location, or support networks, or eduction (to name a few) - are determining. Something as profound as giving birth marks women’s bodies - which are already different - in different ways, and alters the ways in which they perceive themselves, and others. While the experience gives women things in common, it doesn’t make them the same, and never will. Perhaps the mistake is imagining that it might?

‘there’s not enough fluid ... the baby’s too small ... no wait, too big

One way or another, we ended up seeing a lot of the baby before she was born. At the end of the twenty-week anatomy scan, after I had mentally relaxed upon noting all four chambers of a beating heart and a grinning skull with shadowy brain, the radiologist said that she thought my amniotic fluid was low. She mentioned it in passing, as if she’d just noticed that I had the beginnings of a cold.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’

She responded casually, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, but you might want to mention it to your midwife next time you see her.’

‘OK,’ I thought, mentally noting to mention it, and then didn’t think too much more of it.

Cut to the next morning when I received a hurried call from my midwife, telling me to be at the hospital the next day. ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘I thought it wasn’t anything to be too concerned about.

‘They need to check it out,’ said my midwife. ‘As I was already at the hospital when the results came through, I’ve managed to get you an appointment for tomorrow.’

With a third ‘oh’ to really showcase my witty repartee, I put the phone down and then quickly rang my husband to let him know what was going on.

‘Oh,’ he said. Then, ‘I thought the radiologist said it wasn’t anything serious?’

So I explained to him what little my midwife explained to me, and we agreed that we should go and get it checked out. Just to be on the safe side. Boy, was I going to get sick of that phrase before too long.

The next day, Friday, was the first in a long series of dates with the hospital radiology department. They decided to do the entire ultrasound again, so they could read off their own measurements as a baseline. And, let me just say, the taking of some of those measurements was a little more invasive than others.

It turned out that low fluid amniotic fluid - or Oligohydramnios - can have an impact on fetal development, and would require an ‘intervention’ (now that’s a euphemism and half!) to help ameliorate it. It also turned out that I didn’t have it. ‘Phew!’ we foolishly thought. ‘Everything’s OK for the moment then.’

‘Not so fast,’ they said (well, sort of). Having taken the baby’s measurements, they decided that she was on the small side. One of her head measurements was below the smallest percentile, and didn’t tally with the others.

‘Does it matter if her head is small?’ I asked. ‘That seems kinda good if I’m having to push a pumpkin out of me in a few months.’

‘Well, maybe we should keep an eye on her. We’ll have you back in a few weeks and take all the measurements again. Just to be on the safe side.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

We ended up having several more ultrasounds. Given that I didn’t seem to have the condition that we’d initially gone in for, we first thought we’d look on the bright side and enjoy the chance to have a few more blurry peeks at the baby. The novelty pretty soon wore off. She continued to have small head measurements, and they continued to call us back every few weeks for one thing and another. Just to be on the safe side.

We also asked to see copies of our records, with all the graphs and percentiles and so forth on them. I didn’t really understand them at first, but as we racked up about six graphs by the end of our visits, we could see the baby’s ‘normal’ development being plotted before our eyes. Our midwife took great delight in the fact that we had asked for copies. Most people don’t, and we had thrown the radiologists into a bit of a loop by wanting to see them.

In our last appointment, after checking that the placenta was where it was supposed to be - it was, but they managed not to notice that the cord was in the wrong place (a fun discovery during the birth) - a different radiologist took all her measurements again.

‘She’s going to be a big girl!’ he exclaimed.

‘What?’ we said, surprised. ‘We’ve been told all along that she’s going to be small.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, sounding very jolly. ‘Look how long her femur measurement is. She’s going to be very tall.’

‘Oh,’ we said.

We had a final meeting with the consultant before we were discharged. He seemed relaxed about her size - small or large - and told us about a baby he’d seen with a huge head. Apparently, that baby’s Plunket nurse had called in the doctor because she was concerned that his head was above the top percentile. I’m not sure what condition that might indicate, but the baby was checked out. Just to be on the safe side. Now the nurse had only met this baby with his mother, but the whole family turned out to meet the doctor, including the baby’s father. The doctor walked in, took one look at the baby, and one look at his father, and said ‘The baby’s got a big head? Well, he’s got a huge head!’

After listening to a few more jokes, we were free to go. I felt curiously relieved. Even though nothing had really seemed that wrong, I realised that I’d been feeling a low level of anxiety over the weeks that I was prodded and measured. Once we were in the system, it was hard to get out. By the end of it, I certainly had a deeper appreciation of why some women choose home births. As pleasant and thorough as the consultant and the radiologists had been, it was hard not to feel like an object, one who was being measured, graphed, categorised, labelled and treated according to a pre-determined criteria of which I had little knowledge.

The experience called to mind Michel de Certeau’s comparison of the development of history with that of medicine:

Modern medicine and historiography are born almost simultaneously from the rift between a subject that is supposedly literate, and an object that is supposedly written in an unknown language. The latter always remains to be decoded.

Certeau describes both history and medicine as ‘heterologies’ or discourses of the other. When it was professionalised in the nineteenth century, medicine was an overwhelmingly male preserve, which, as I have mentioned in a previous post, marginalised the predominantly female care of pregnant women by midwives. In obstetric care, the literate subject was the male doctor, the object, the pregnant woman. Of course, medicine is not as male-dominated as it was then, and most health professionals attend more solicitously to their patients, but, at times like this, the power relation becomes apparent. Thankfully, it turned out that when this object was decoded, it had nothing of much interest to say.

on striving for mediocrity

It seems a contradiction in terms: how can one strive to be mediocre? Surely being mediocre means not doing much beyond the bare minimum and leaving ambition, determination and sacrifice to one side? In the capitalist west, such values are lauded: if you want to succeed and get ahead in life, you need ambition, drive - and you might have to make some hard choices along the way about what you really want. Of course, if you don’t want to be uber-successful, you can drop out, but you run the risk of being labelled as lacking in direction, being selfish or lazy, or a loser. So who would strive to be mediocre?

Why do I ask? Because I have been pondering the concept of ‘mediocre mothers’, as opposed to ‘perfect mothers’, and wondering whether it might not, in fact, be better for women to strive to be the former rather than the latter. The article about Elizabeth Badinter that I mentioned in an earlier post - must read that book soon! - has been continuing to resonate with me. Badinter argues that the prevalence of so-called ‘mediocre mothers‘ is an important part of the reason that France has bucked the trend of declining birthrates in Western Europe. New mothers - and, more importantly, the wider culture - apparently don’t set impossibly high standards for themselves, and then beat themselves up if they fail to achieve them. There may be some truth to this, but I’m sure the extensive welfare state, which has generous paid parental leave provisions and all kinds of support systems that are free (at the point of service) in place is pretty helpful too.

But back to this concept of ‘mediocre mothers’. It’s kind of depressing to me how mothers are almost in competition with each other, even over things that we largely have little control over, such as baby’s developmental milestones. I can’t make my baby grow teeth any faster in order to keep up with the ones who have a practically full set of gnashers before their first birthday. It’s not like there’s a prize for the best, most perfect, mother. And, even if there were - God, I hope there isn’t! - by the time the beautiful baby is a teenager, if not before, they’re sure to burst that particular bubble.

I’ve read columns which opine that women who have babies later in life, after having climbed the career ladder somewhat, can be especially prone to ‘perfect mother’ syndrome. The argument goes that such mothers put all their energy and time management skills into raising their children, so that they tie themselves up in knots breastfeeding as long as possible, scheduling all kinds of developmental classes, buying the latest educational toys, preparing the most nutritious food from scratch and so on. The quest for perfection - whether physical, emotional or moral (intellectual is not really required, sorry ladies) - is a particular curse of womanhood. I blame the two millennia of Eva / Ave patriarchal thinking for this. When the perfect mother - Mary, the mother of God - is also a virgin, everyday women are bound to fall short.

I’m not excepting myself from a tendency towards ‘perfect mother’ syndrome. It’s so easy to be judgemental about what others are doing, if it’s different from what you’re doing. Even if it doesn’t matter at all if the baby has an all-organic food diet or not, as long as he or she is getting enough nutritious food. I guess the reason new mums are so hard on each other is that, if someone does things differently, it can be interpreted as an implied critique of what you’re doing. Surely, only one person can be right?!

Let me give you an example of ‘perfect mother’ syndrome. My baby was having some issues with sleeping a few months back, so naturally I read a lot of information and got plenty of advice - some useful, some less so - about how to tackle it. During this time I read Elizabeth Pantley’s book, The No-cry Sleep Solution. There were several good tips in this book, but I was particularly struck by an anecdote that she related hear the the end. She described being at her son’s little league game with her new baby, and how the baby was being passed around, held and generally cooed over by everyone at the game, and how great this was for the baby. So far, so good. And then she goes to talk to another new mother at the game, whose baby is strapped into a buggy rather than being held by all and sundry. This mother is having sleeping issues with her baby and is talking about ‘self-settling’ and ‘controlled crying’ and various other techniques. What was Pantley’s response to this? I have no idea what she did in person, but in her book - that’s right, in writing, for everyone to see - she scolded this woman for being cold and controlling! It certainly left a sour taste for me that Pantley felt the need to finish her otherwise useful book with a touch of moral superiority and judgement. So much for solidarity. In my limited experience, those of us who have had to ride out sleeping difficulties, no matter how short-lived, have sought solutions from all corners, even the ones we might have been ideologically opposed to in the warm glow of a good night’s sleep.

It seems to me that Badinter offers a much more affirming vision - both for a mother’s sanity and her solidarity with other mothers - with her take on mediocre motherhood: "My only advice would be to listen to your own desires and know that no one knows the secret of good motherhood. Moreover, don't let yourself be influenced by fashion. If you don't want to breastfeed, there is a good bottle to use; and if you breastfeed, well that is good too. Don't follow fashion, fashion changes."

Hear, hear.

review: The Millstone

Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965) was one of two books that I read when I was seventeen that I loved so much I re-read them obsessively (the other was The Bell Jar but perhaps it’s best not to go there just at the moment). The novel tells the first-person story of Rosamund Stacey, an aspiring academic whose friends think she is the last word in promiscuity. She is quite the opposite, in fact, and finds herself pregnant after her first diffident sexual encounter with an acquaintance she had assumed was gay. She fails not to have the baby, and the rest of the book details her pregnancy, birth experience, interactions with the nascent National Health Service, and a final meeting with the baby’s father. Rosamund’s narrative is almost out-of-body she sounds so detached - although I have discovered, after seven years of living in the UK, that this is also called ‘being English’. She comments on this herself in the novel’s first line that ‘my career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say, made by it.’

But this is not a blog for adolescent reminiscences. The reason I am writing a post about it, is that I happened upon a podcast of Margaret Drabble being interviewed this year on the subject of The Millstone when my own baby was four months’ old. I thought it would be interesting to return to this novel nearly - cough - twenty years later, and read it from the point of view of having given birth myself. It was an interesting experience, perhaps as close to speaking to your younger self as it is likely to get.

When I first read it, I remember being beguiled by Rosamund’s mix of confidence and cowardice, which seemed to me like worldliness, and her self-assurance about her intellectual abilities. I had admired how she was, in some ways, able to live the Superwoman ideal: she could work in her chosen profession, while single-handedly raising her baby. And, for good measure, her body blithely ‘bounced back’ quickly after giving birth. If I thought much at all at seventeen about having children, which I didn’t, I’m sure I would’ve thought Rosamund offered some kind of positive role model.

All of which goes to show how little we know about anything when we’re seventeen. This time around, I was a little irked by Rosamund’s confidence-bordering-on-arrogance - not every solo mum gets to live rent-free in their parents’ Marylebone flat - and frustrated at her cowardice, especially in regard to her failure to re-connect with George (the baby’s father). I could interpret the class codes in the novel that passed me by as a teenager. I was intrigued to note the different mores regarding acceptable behaviour while pregnant i.e. drinking and smoking. I was somewhat shocked that she thought it perfectly all right to leave her baby at home asleep, while she popped out to the chemist. And I felt like I wanted to slap her when she met George again in the novel’s final chapter.

Of course, this is a novel, not a how-to manual on perfect pregnancy and parenthood, for which I think we can all be grateful. But once I had gone through in fact what Rosamund had gone through in fiction, I could no longer read and identify with the character in the way I had when I was seventeen. Then, I found it a feminist narrative of liberation: Rosamund is able to defy social convention and succeed on her own terms. Now, I was more acutely aware of the advantages that accrued to her because of her class and academic privilege. I was more aware of the embodied experience of being a mother, and acutely aware of how fortunate I was to have a supportive partner.

So is it a feminist novel? In some ways it is: Rosamund does defy social expectation and succeeds in her career, while caring for a sick child. In some ways it isn’t: is Rosamund as Superwoman really a relatable character? Does she set unrealistic expectations for women, particularly those who do not share her privileges? Does her failure to connect with other people, due to her ‘flawed character’, mean that she is martyring herself?

More importantly, did I enjoy the novel? It’s hard to say, as it was labouring - no pun intended - under the weight of my high expectations. It still has narrative urgency, and Rosamund’s voice is as direct as ever. The reader is like a confidant listening to a young mother make several rods for her own back. Indeed, as Rosamund observes early in the novel, ‘I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us.’ I had previously found Rosamund’s refusal to re-connect with George at the end of novel, choosing to go it alone with her baby, a refusal to submit to patriarchy, and, hence a satisfactory ending. Now, I found it intransigent, and difficult to fathom. It left me wondering whether or not a feminist narrative can only be about women going it alone. Isn’t there room to connect with others - male or female - and re-define supportive relationships so that they do not re-inscribe traditional gender roles and uphold patriarchal values? In short, does it have to be all or nothing?

'and what is your birth philosophy?'

I told the car mechanic story outlined in my last post to my new midwife, who laughed along with me, sharing my outrage, or at least I thought so. When we had finished laughing, she said, ‘if the obstetrician is the mechanic, what is the midwife?’ I was gobsmacked. Hello?! The point of this story is that I was being compared to a car! A car. An inanimate piece of machinery. That doesn’t give birth to little cars. To my face! (Can you tell that I’m still gobsmacked by this?)

A few months later, when she brought a trainee midwife with her on one of her visits, she got me to repeat the story, and the trainee’s response was the same, ‘what is the midwife in this scenario?’ At which point, I replied, half-jokingly, ‘I don’t know, perhaps the tea-lady?’ My midwife sardonically thanked me.

I know the two midwives were only picking up the ball of the metaphor and running with it to figure out what the analogue for their role was, but it still made me feel kind of like an object. I was not a chassis hovering up near the ceiling on a mechanical hoist, I was a pregnant woman. For that moment, it seemed that even the people who were most supportive - in the non-mechanical hoist sense - sometimes lost sight of that in the long-standing doctors versus midwives conflict.

I’m not sure how many stories I heard from my midwife about how great it was that the law had been changed - and no, I’m still not sure what law that was - so that midwives had more autonomy to practice how they wanted. It was like I was supposed to be vicariously thrilled that they’d won their battle. Not that I’m not, I just didn’t want to hear about it all the time. This was the first - and possibly only! - time I was pregnant, and I wanted the focus to be on me, me, me. Oh, and the baby, of course.

Let me be clear. My midwife was excellent. I have few complaints about the care that I received from her. And I was aware that, as childbirth became more medicalised in the nineteenth century, midwives, who had primarily looked after women in childbirth until then, were marginalised in the process. Women’s bodies became subject to the authority of male doctors, who presumably knew better because, well, they were men. If the original car incident with my former GP had taught me nothing else, it was that some male doctors a) still viewed women as objects (a car!) and b) still pathologised what is a natural process.

As I have mentioned before, I have some skepticism concerning the reification of the natural in childbirth and child-rearing. But pregnancy, as that feminist bastion Netball New Zealand confirmed when Adine Wilson played in the losing New Zealand side in the 2007 world championships final three months pregnant, is a state of health. (side-note: there was a storm in the teacup over this pregnancy when it was announced after New Zealand lost 42-38. Would it even have been an issue if they had won?) It is a natural process, but one that is not left solely to nature.

When I was trying to select a midwife, several asked me about my ‘birth philosophy’. ‘My what?’ I thought to myself. Am I supposed to have concluded whether or not my birth would be an affirmation of Platonic Idealism, Cartesian dualism, or even Derridean deconstruction? It turned out that a birth philosophy is more along the lines of whether you’re a ‘give me an epidural with everything’ type or ‘I want to feel every mind-blistering painful moment’ type. The midwife who I had personally gravitated to most told me that she practised natural childbirth i.e. the ‘pain and lots of it’ kind. I really wanted her to be my midwife, as I thought we had got on well when we spoke, but I was unsure if I would be able to cope with an unmedicated birth experience.

I thought about it a lot as I wondered whether to go with her or not. The number one consideration for me was to be with someone that I could trust, and I had felt this way straightaway with the midwife I liked. I also intellectually liked what she said about ‘woman being able to do it’ without help. I liked the idea that the pregnant woman should be in control of her own destiny as much as possible. It sounded like an empowered, even feminist, birth experience. On the other hand, I am a big chicken when it comes to pain - and that goes for big epidural needles too. In choosing a midwife, was it finally time to put my uterus where my mouth was?

In the end, I decided to take the leap of faith and commit to having a natural birth. I felt daunted by it, but hoped that I would be proud of what I had achieved when it was over. Before the labour started, I had even convinced myself that all the pain would be productive and, even though it would hurt, it would be better for the baby and mean a better recovery for me.

But as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. Far from a natural childbirth, I ended up having an almost completely medicalised experience: induced labour, epidural, antibiotics, forceps, lots of surgery, general anaesthetic, blood transfusions, the works. My midwife stayed with me the whole time, encouraging and supporting me, even though the doctors took over in the end. The baby was fine. I was not, for a long time. It turns out that if we had really let nature take its course, it’s possible one or both of us wouldn’t be here.

I think I have a birth philosophy now, having gone through the experience, and having had eleven sleepless months to think about it, but it isn’t ‘give me lots of drugs’ or ‘I’ll die before I mainline anything’. It’s ....

Nope, sorry.

It's gone.

'an obstetrician is like a car mechanic'

Continuing my non-linear approach to blogging, I want to look back at when I first entered the health system after finding out I was pregnant. I had already taken an over-the-counter pregnancy test, which came back positive. Not really knowing what to do next, but feeling that health professionals should be involved, I made an appointment with my GP. When I say ‘my’ GP, he wasn’t really, just one of the doctors at the local practice, who I hadn’t actually seen before. My husband and I both went along for the appointment, feeling both nervous and excited. That didn’t last long.

My first clue should have been that he was a sports doctor. His wall was papered in images of him attending prone rugby players in a natty shell suit, which dwarfed his practicing certificates. I’m guessing too that his clients didn’t include netball players or other female athletes, as, when I mentioned that I thought I was pregnant, he looked like he didn’t know the meaning of the word. Instead of offering congratulations, he asked what we’d like to do about it. Feeling my good mood start to evaporate somewhat, I said, ‘um, that’s what we’ve come to you to find out about.’ He looked startled, as if he would much rather have had to deal with an injured hamstring or a misplaced metatarsal.

As we looked at him expectantly, he started mumbling about obstetricians, and trying to think of names of golfing buddies who weren’t holidaying in the Caribbean, I presume, that we could see. Feeling confused, we asked whether we had to see an obstetrician or whether we could go with a midwife. Being asked a direct question seemed to at last provoke a semi-coherent response.

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Seeing as this is your first pregnancy, and I’m not sure how it’s going to go, you’re really much better off being seen by an obstetrician.‘ Well, seeing as it was my first pregnancy, and I wasn’t really sure how it was going to go either, I wanted to know why he was so dismissive of midwives. Having done a short research project on midwives about fifteen years earlier, I suspected gross institutional sexism and a reversion to the Dickensian Sairey Gamp stereotype. I wasn’t too far off, as he then proceeded to tell me that there had been a few cases in the Wellington region where babies had died under a midwife’s care. He also noted that midwives didn’t even have to be nurses these days, and some had only trained for six months.

I wasn’t exactly sure what the situation was, but felt pretty strongly that this was a load of crap (side-note: it was, as we later found out). At this point, I should also add that maternity care for women in the New Zealand public health system is free. The primary care-givers, known as Lead Maternity Carers (LMCs) are either midwives or GPs who also deliver babies. If we had elected to go with an obstetrician, we would have to pay private fees, running to thousands of dollars.

I could tell my husband was not impressed by the doctor’s answers so far either. Rather than feeling stonewalled like I was, he attempted to get some more information. ‘So what exactly is the difference between an obstetrician and a midwife?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ replied the doctor, speaking slowly as if he were addressing someone who was a bit thick. ‘One is a doctor, who has trained for several years, the other one isn’t.’

Suppressing the urge to say, ‘no shit Sherlock,’ my husband persevered. ‘The course you’re recommending could cost us a lot of money. What’s the benefit of going with an obstetrician as opposed to a midwife?’

The doctor searched around for something to convey the difference. ‘Well, an obstetrician is like a car mechanic ...’ he began.

At this point, I can’t even remember what he said next, as I reeled from the shock of being compared to a car. That’s right, a car. An inanimate piece of machinery. That doesn’t give birth to little cars. To my face. I think we both decided then and there that we were 1) not going to take any advice from him and 2) going to change doctors asap.

Unfortunately, this visit left us floundering somewhat as to what to do next. We didn’t even have a list of midwives in the area that we could ring, much less any idea of whether they were any good or not. This then led to a merry dance over several weeks where we actually tried to get some information to help make this decision. I contacted the Ministry of Health and they supplied their list, which didn’t list every midwife in the area. The Midwifery Council’s list was voluntary and didn’t contain contact details, although it did list qualifications, where they had been provided. In the end, we asked around friends and colleagues who had given birth in the last couple of years, to see if they could recommend someone. In the end, we took a colleague’s recommendation and were cared for by an excellent midwife. While we had a good outcome in the end, it was an unnecessarily protracted and stressful process.

This incoherent state of affairs is dressed up in the language of choice. Women can choose what kind of care they want, where they want to give birth, and which midwife to use as their LMC. It sounds good, doesn’t it? As a middle-class, well-educated professional, however, I found all this choice overwhelming, confusing and scary as the weeks ticked by and I didn’t have a midwife. I wondered how people who didn’t have my advantages managed. I support some choice, especially concerning where and how to give birth, which I do believe should - as far as is possible with such an unpredictable event - be driven by women. But I question the value of such a piecemeal system, where no one place even has the full information about services available in the region. Is using the language of the free market really empowering, or is it, rather, importing its stratification and actually limiting choices for some? I guess it works for those whose GPs aren’t certified idiots, and can point them in the right direction in the first place.

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.