motherhood, one year on

My baby turned one last week. Of course, she had little, if any, idea about what it all meant, beyond the fact that she quite liked the balloons we blew up and playing with (or, more accurately, near) her friends for a couple of hours. I’d been told more than once that the first, and even second, birthday is more for the parents than the baby. I definitely felt the force of this in our case, not least because we were offered just as many congratulations for making it through the first year of parenthood as our baby was offered ‘happy birthdays’.

Given that the birthday girl didn’t register the significance of having lived for one whole revolution of the earth around the sun, what might it all mean? The day itself, beyond the event we made it into, was a day like many others: wake up, get dressed, feed, play, sleep, and repeat. Next year, she is likely to be more aware of the cake, the decorations and the presents - if only to feverishly unwrap them so she can play with the wrapping paper. Commemorations - of which birthdays are one example - are solidified by repetition: as she grows older she will start to look forward to this annual event, eventually counting down the days and looking forward to her presents in the way that I was this year.

It certainly felt like a significant milestone to me. Through the days that sometimes dragged every second, or the weeks that sometimes flew by, it really does feel like we’ve come a long way. Even though I haven’t forgotten the major details of her birth a year ago, the trauma of it all is fading from my mind. I’m reminded of a passage in Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, when the narrator observes a woman giving birth:

Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. (p 68)

I don’t know about the ‘going straight home and starting another baby’ - good lord! - but this November it has become increasingly harder to remember how I experienced her birth last November. Forgetting is part of commemoration too. When countries stage national commemorations, that which doesn’t fit with the narrative of solemn remembrance or joyous celebration is erased or downplayed.

So what do I choose to remember and emphasise for this commemoration?

Seeing the angry bruise on her cheek and cuts on her forehead from the forceps which pulled her out of me.

Marvelling at the ease with which she latched on to feed. She had been kept waiting for nine hours while I was in surgery, so learned the benefits of delayed gratification early.

Hearing her first cries, one of which had a distinct ‘no, no’ sound to tell me she didn’t like something.

Having to call for help from the midwives to pick her up out of the see-through bassinet by my hospital bed to feed her, because I wasn't able to do it.

Being reprimanded by one of the midwives for having a messy room and not picking my baby up myself.

Feeling pleased that breastfeeding was going well, largely without me leading the way.

Feeling dismayed when we were told the she had lost 11 per cent, not the allowed ten, of her birthweight when she was weighed on day four, and being hooked up to an industrial breast pump so my ‘output’ could be ‘measured’ and ‘charted’.

Listening to my husband remonstrate with the paediatrician about the breast pump, and being granted twenty-four hours to feed from my breast to get her weight-gain back on track.

Feeling devastated when she didn’t appear to have gained any weight the next day, until my husband pointed out the scales were not zeroed properly. Then feeling vindicated when they showed that she had gained more weight than was expected.

Wanting desperately to get out of the hospital and feeling jealous of the everyday people I could hear talking and laughing outside my window.

Being granted permission to leave, after yet more checks, and a temperature scare - it had momentarily dipped, and they wouldn’t let us leave until she was nice and warm and ‘normal’ again.

Buckling her into the taxi on a beautiful blue sunny afternoon for her first trip into the outside world after six days that felt like forever, and feeling every bump and corner of that journey home.

Settling her down to sleep in our room and feeling both more normal and more petrified than ever.

Holding her head up for her.

Hearing her snuffly breathing in the night, which my mother thought would bother us. It didn’t. Instead, I felt reassured that she had lived through another twenty-four hours.

Worrying that she wasn’t feeding every two to four hours like she was meant to.

Hoping that she was getting enough food.

Sleeping when she slept.

Moving her around the house - from bedroom to living room and back again - in her bassinet on wheels.

Watching her sleep, which she did a lot.

Having visitors.

Being congratulated.

Drinking kiwi crush and dreading going to the toilet.

Bleeding.

Being threatened by the Department of Internal Affairs - with one such letter being dated 26 December - for not registering her birth the split-second after she had been born.

Feeling her sleep on my chest.

Trying to carry her in a sling, freaking out when it seemed like she might get squashed, and realising that baby-wearing wasn’t for me.

Looking at her fists curled up above her head in triumph as she slept.

Mentally running through everything from starting solids, to toilet-training, to learning to drive, to moving out of home, and feeling stressed.

Realising, finally, that all she wanted for now was food and sleep, and everything else would happen in its own time.

I could go on, but I wouldn’t want to bore you. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of her first few days.

I’ve been asked a lot in the last year whether or not I am enjoying motherhood. It’s a question I don’t really know how to answer, and am probably, knowing me, way overthinking. But I can’t quite reconcile ‘enjoyment’ with motherhood, in the way I might enjoy a movie, or a nice chilled glass of sauvignon blanc (both of which I dimly recollect from the distant past). My experience of motherhood so far has been both less and so much more than mere enjoyment. It has fundamentally challenged me on every level: physical, for sure, emotional, definitely, and even intellectual. I’m still not sure of so many things - how I will juggle work and childcare being the most pressing - and I’m starting to question some of the things that I thought I fundamentally believed - like whether I should go back to work at all.

Some new parents momentarily feel envious or dismissive of people without children. But I don’t. I just feel like they’re at a different place in their lives, and they should treasure what they are experiencing in the here and now. If motherhood has taught me nothing else, it is to focus on the present. The future will work itself out in good time.

More than anything else, I feel transformed. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, life will never be the same again. I will never be the same again. And learning who I am now, as she learns who she is full-stop, is a shared journey that I can’t imagine not taking. Am I enjoying it? No, I’m cherishing it. And missing each moment as they pass by too quickly, with only photos to look back on to try and re-capture them.

'I'm pregnant, now what can I eat ...?'

Once my initial doctor had managed to get past the automotive metaphors, and started to engage a little more with me as a pregnant woman rather than a sprained ankle attached to a sportsperson, he started giving me the hard word on what I should and shouldn’t eat. His nurse, who was only marginally warmer than he was - at least she congratulated us - handed me an envelope full of guidelines and advertisements dressed up as information to wade through on the subject of good nutrition in pregnancy. There was specific information on the risks associated with certain foods.

With a heavy heart, I had already forsworn sushi. Not being a meat-eater and rarely having the opportunity to eat shellfish (which was also banished), I had thought I was pretty much OK with everything else. So it was with an even heavier heart, that I read through the list. Soft cheeses were out, even if pasturised, as were eggs with runny yolks (bye bye eggs benedict, it was nice knowing you). Any deli food, including salads, which had been standing rather than freshly cooked was off the menu. My work lunch options were starting to narrow alarmingly. As I read further, I was surprised to note that hummus - made from cooked chickpeas, pounded sesame seeds, lemon juice, garlic and olive oil - was out too. I realise it is about risk rather than intrinsic harmfulness, but is it really possible to catch listeria from the humble chickpea? Then I thought it must be the anaemic kind that you buy at the supermarket, and momentarily cheered myself with the thought that this was the moment to start making it myself. Not so, according to the food police, even the home-made variety was suspect.

At this point, I started to panic. What on earth was I going to eat? I couldn’t just live on biscuits (which, being thoroughly cooked, were surprisingly OK), rock-hard scrambled eggs and rice for nine months. Not to worry, however. The morning sickness soon kicked in with a vengeance and I was lucky if I could keep down some plain pasta and peas.

Little did I realise that this was the first in a slew of attempts to police my body and appetites in the guise of being ‘for the good of the baby.’ Given that most pregnant women are concerned for the health of their unborn child, what is particularly insidious about this long list of dos and don’ts is that it guilt-trips women into policing themselves and each other. How shocking is it, for example, to see a pregnant woman having a sip of wine, and God forbid, having a tasty slice of brie with it? You can practically hear the CYFS hotline number being punched into a hundred mobile phones.

But it doesn’t end there. Far from it. I have an acquaintance who is determined to breastfeed for as long as possible till her child is possibly even three or four, not, apparently, because she wants to (though I presume she does), but because the ‘World Health Organisation recommends it’. The WHO actually states:

Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond (my emphasis).

So it’s hardly an edict. It seems a little over the top to continue breastfeeding because some suits in Geneva recommend it (and that’s not exactly what they say, in any case). I note that it is the World Health Organisation too: they offer best practice advice to mothers all over the world, not just those in wealthy nations. So it’s probably preferable to continue breastfeeding in places where the alternatives are to drink formula or powdered milk made with unsafe water (hang your head in shame, Nestlé) resulting in disease and death.

In New Zealand, we have the luxury of not having to make that ‘choice’. Given that it’s not such a life or death situation, I can’t help but feel that the food police and the breastfeeding zealots are part and parcel of the same thing: the control of women’s bodies and appetites. Of course, some expectant mothers do eat soft cheese, hummus and have the odd cheeky glass of wine, probably with the added frisson of doing something they shouldn’t. A bit like having a piece of cake when you’re meant to be on a diet: a transgression against the regime of disciplining the body into society’s expectations of it. Only, pregnant women aren’t meant to diet. So it seems that food dos and don’ts offer a replacement regime to which women should either rigidly stick or from which they guiltily fall off the wagon. It seems that there’s no escape from the beauty myth.

Of course, it is also tied up with perfect mother syndrome. Falling into line with the prevailing wisdom on appropriate nutrition for you while pregnant, or for the baby once it is born, is a way of ensuring that you are doing the right thing, even while others may not. That it’s also submitting to someone else’s idea of how you should run your life might not even enter the frame.

I have to confess that I was one of the more scrupulous pregnant women: I sadly passed the sushi counter sniffing the air like a melancholic puppy, passed on the blue cheese and camembert at work functions, and didn’t even think about wine, let alone hummus, that horror of horrors. I even consulted a book called I’m Pregnant, Now What Do I Eat?

In retrospect, I am a little surprised at my docility. At the time, however, I felt apprehensive. I was worried that something I might do, whether inadvertent or intentional would harm the baby. Of course, there are some risks, but, as I am increasingly finding, babies are more resilient than we are led to believe. Mothers I know who did eat hummus and soft cheese while pregnant delivered healthy babies, with no sign yet of their having suffered through exposure to chickpeas and processed milk in utero. So is it the baby we are protecting by being so vigilant or dominant cultural values that primarily define women according to their bodies?

'i can honestly say it wasn't painful'

Nearly a year ago, I went to ante-natal classes that focussed on natural birth and how to prepare for it. While there were many positives about this class - not least the wonderful women who I met through it - there were also some moments that I found a little difficult to process. I won’t go into them all here, but one that has stayed with me occurred during the class on the stages of labour.

We were met at the start of that evening’s class by the affirmation ‘every contraction brings my baby closer to me’ written on a large piece of cardboard. ‘O ... K,’ I thought to myself, wondering what on earth we were in for. ‘I guess that’s true ...’ My husband and I took our seats, and listened to a midwife go through the various stages of labour. After this, the course facilitators then spoke about their own birth experiences. It was during these narratives that one of the course facilitators - who, incidentally, ended up having an emergency caesarean - said of her labour ‘I can honestly say it wasn’t painful.’ My first thought was, ‘really?’ and ‘is that even possible?’ We had talked somewhat during the class about productive pain - the kind that brings your baby closer to you - and I was trying to psyche myself into managing this with only some combs, a swissball and a hot water bottle for help. And yet here was one of the facilitators saying that it honestly wasn’t painful. What to believe?

I should add that this facilitator was not making a general claim. She didn’t say labour is not painful, or that she was talking about anything other than her own experience. But, given that was the case, I was left wondering why she said that to us at all. What was to be gained by telling us her labour wasn’t painful? Were we meant to feel envious? Hope that our labours would be similarly blessed? Feel that if we admitted it was pain almost beyond belief that we were letting the side down?

Perhaps there are some lucky women whose labour isn’t painful (and not just the ones with epidurals), but I strongly suspect for most women that natural childbirth is intensely painful. In fact, when I mentioned this exchange to my midwife - a proponent of natural childbirth, but not one to sugar-coat - she said firmly ‘it’s painful.’ Or, in other words, ‘don’t kid yourself, love - you’re in for quite an ordeal'. Her view was that ‘women can do it,’ especially with the assistance of a good, supportive midwife.

I’m aware that some women don’t like to use the language of pain - like ‘contractions’ - when discussing childbirth. Instead, they refer to ‘rushes’ (sidenote: this always confuses me somewhat, as it makes me think of pregnant women getting high on amyl nitrate or something ). I acknowledge that it certainly helps to be in a positive frame of mind when giving birth, and if this is a way that some women get into that frame of mind, well, more power to them. I just question the wisdom of foisting that on to unsuspecting expectant mothers.

It’s about this point that the Kate Figeses and Eleanor Blacks would probably start exhorting the facilitator to ‘tell the truth’ about childbirth. But, again, I’m not sure that truth is the issue. The facilitator may well have been as honest as she claimed about her own experience. I have no way of knowing that. And, as I have discussed before, women’s embodied experiences are not the same and can’t be reduced to one monolithic narrative. Positive experiences that go as mothers planned, home births in specially-bought yurts, and even orgasmic births can and do happen.

But I can’t help but feel that this unthinking comment, made not just by anyone, but by the facilitator of an ante-natal class, was in some ways setting us up for failure. By that I mean that it planted the seed (no pun intended) that labour might not be painful. That if we did experience pain at the limits of our capacity to endure it, we were somehow not doing it right, were not being brave enough, would send other expectant mothers careering into the arms of doctors with big needles. That’s a lot of unconscious baggage to be loading up on when you’re about to enter into one of the most transformative experiences of your life.

On the flipside, there are those who seem to think that the more pain you experience, the more noble your sacrifice. In this view, suffering is an essential part of the process, recalling God’s alleged punishment to Eve once she was expelled from the Garden of Eden that ‘in sorrow, she would bring forth children’ (I say ‘alleged’ because some feminist Bible scholars have argued that this is a mistranslation of the original texts. But I digress.) If we follow this thought to its conclusion, then it’s almost as if you can’t properly belong to the mummy club, or really know what it means to love your child, unless you’ve been ripped to shreds.

Both narratives position women as masochists, and buy into hegemonic notions that women are only defined by their bodies. There is nothing noble about pain and suffering, which will, more than likely, be a defining feature of labour and birth. It doesn’t make you a better mother to have suffered. It doesn’t make you a worse mother to admit that it was painful either.

My own experience was, in the end, comparatively pain-free. Because my labour didn’t progress, and my waters had broken several hours earlier, I was considered to have moved into an ‘abnormal’ labour. After attempting to ride through the artificially-induced contractions, and still remaining at one centimetre dilated after what felt like forever, even my midwife was suggesting I should have an epidural. I did have one, and ended up spending a pleasant day high as a kite, eating sandwiches with my husband and and listening to jazz. Like the course facilitator, I can honestly say that my labour wasn’t painful. As for what came afterwards, however, well that’s another story ...

review: Making Babies

I like books. My baby does too: Where Is Baby’s Belly-Button? and the collected works of Spot have long been favourites of hers. Such is her enjoyment of books that she even allowed me to read without interruption during her marathon 90-minute breastfeeding sessions. I’ve even managed to keep the reading up - though at a much reduced pace - as she has continued to grow, and become much less malleable to my will. This liking of books is not completely random - I do have a point and I’m getting to it.

There are many, many books around on the subject of pregnancy and childbirth, which I would’ve thought I would devour when my time came. Yet I felt strangely uninterested in reading them while I was pregnant. I dipped into things like What to Expect When You’re Expecting if I needed an answer to a specific question, or just wanted to check in as to what kind of fruit the baby had turned into that month. But I hardly read any of the many books on offer cover to cover.

From this distance, it reads kinda like denial, and maybe it was, in a way. But throughout most of my pregnancy, I had a strange sense of calm and an unusually upbeat frame of mind. On some level, I seemed to have intuited that reading a lot about all the many things that could go wrong during pregnancy and birth - and encylopaedic books like What to Expect ... usually cover everything, no matter how rare - would just be a massive downer. Of course, I didn’t give up reading all together: I decided that I would collect all of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries - my literary equivalent of comfort food - and read them all again for about the twentieth time. Mercifully, I managed to find out who murdered Roger Ackroyd before I went into labour.

This long preface about my pregnancy reading habits is by way of introducing novelist Anne Enright’s essay collection - is that what it is? - Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. This is one of the few books that I did read on the subject - and read from beginning to end - while I was pregnant. I think the reason that it proved an exception to the ‘everything you needed to know from ectopic pregnancy to pre-eclampsia’ type of book is that it was a) witty, b) personal and c) made no claims to be talking about every woman’s experience. I was beguiled from the first sentence of ‘Breeding’: ‘Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t need aliens - we already had a race of higher beings to gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will: we called them priests (p 5).’ How could I not be won over by a first essay on the parallels between pregnancy and alien abductions?

Each piece is a little different. ‘Nine Months’, for example, mimics the What to Expect ... month-by-month narrative, and lyrically details the first nine months of her baby’s life. She tells us what her baby’s stage of development is that month, paralleled with her own ‘regression’. In the eighth month:

The baby is in flying form, lying on her back and just laughing and kicking for no reason. I don’t know what she is laughing at. Is this a memory? Is she imagining, for the first time, tickles, even though there are no tickles there?

She may be the only truly happy person on the planet. I look at her and hope she isn’t bonkers. (p 62)

‘Babies: A Breeder’s Guide’ contains several mini-topics: idiosyncratic thoughts on everything from God - ‘all religions ... prize and praise the figure of the mother ... which makes up, in a way for being skipped in shop queues and looking like a heap‘ - to Buggies - ‘pushing a buggy makes you look like you’re on the way to the methadone clinic’ - to Poo - ‘often, when a mother is whispering to her baby, she is whispering about shit’. (pp 111-35)

Looking at the comments on the back of the book, Enright has received praise for her ‘truth-telling’, giving the ‘true facts’ and being an ‘effective contraceptive’ (presumably because of that truth-telling). While these commentators may be picking up on the same intimate tone to which I responded, or the many pithy turns of phrase, these comments also seem to echo the obsession with ‘truth-telling’ that marks many other books about pregnancy and birth. I should also add to my growing list that I am currently reading feminist Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions at the moment, and she is another ‘truth-teller’. I’m wondering why we need so many truth-tellers when it seems like every new mother with a pen is telling it like it is.

But I digress. Back to the book at hand. While Enright’s recounting of the birth of her first child sounds horrific, and the maternity care she experienced somewhat appalling, it strangely didn’t act as a downer in the way that those other ‘truth-telling’ books seemed to threaten. Part of the reason is because it wasn’t patronising, in that she never implied that because something was a certain way for her, then it would be like that for anyone else. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was uplifting, but it felt considered, and, in a strange way, intimate. By that I mean, it felt almost a privilege to have someone share such a personal experience and give a ‘warts and all’ account of it. Like a friend who trusts you enough to tell you something that they’ve never told anybody else. Except, of course, she had told anyone who cared to read the book.

I say ‘account’ deliberately. These pieces may have been crafted in snatched moments while her baby was asleep, but they are most definitely ‘crafted’ narratives in the way that her short stories, in particular, are. Perhaps what sets this book apart, then, is that it pays tribute to the singularity of Enright’s embodied experience. The tender descriptions of her daughter’s development are not those that another mother could, would or should give. And, in my view, the book seems to be just as much about exploring how to write a new life - both hers and the baby’s - as well as how to live it. The mix of styles offers a patch-work approach that doesn’t attempt to represent the totality of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. In recognising the limits of representation, but also pushing those limits, Enright doesn’t so much ‘tell the truth’, as write herself into being in the subject position of new mother.

'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.