Photo by Benjamin Manley
Hands up if you’re a mother. Now, hands up if you’re a good mother. Fewer of those I imagine. I don’t know many women who would categorically state that they’d done a great job. Whatever we do and however we bring our kids up, most mums spend an inordinate amount of time feeling guilty and worrying they could have done better. Even when we might be feeling a little chipper that things with our off-spring have been going rather well, a big banana skin will be right around the corner, waiting for us to step on it and slip up - reminding us, yet again, that we really haven’t got a clue about this parenting lark and are just making it up as we go along. And, frankly, this never stops: even when they’re ‘grown up’. Everything seems fine, then suddenly, we are blind-sided by another challenging situation that makes us hit the buffers and question whether we have made a complete hash of motherhood.
DECIDING TO BECOME A PARENT
When we first decide to become a parent, it is a thrilling moment, and conception, for most, is a doddle. Nurturing a child, we imagine, must be just as simple. Look at all the other women who’ve done it, we think - millions of them, every day. It must be the case, that when that tiny infant is first laid on our breast, instinct kicks in and we immediately understand what is required of us. But no. We realise very quickly that anything we learned in anti-natal classes seems irrelevant and that we are on our own. No-one has given us a map and we haven’t a clue what we’re doing. And boy is it tough – or at least it was for me.
I had never been sure I wanted to have babies. I had a very happy existence with my partner: we’d met in our early twenties at Art School in London and enjoyed the same creative pastimes – doing up houses, going to exhibitions, scouring vintage shops and markets for quirky finds – and we both worked in magazine publishing, he as an art director, me as a stylist and writer and eventually as an editor. We had a beautiful home, ate out several times a week and didn’t want the inconvenience or messiness of having children around.
Then there was a moment, in my mid-thirties, when something changed. I was making the Christmas pudding from my grandmother’s recipe, as I did each year and feeling sentimental. Handed down to my mother and then to me, it is written out, in my late-mother’s hand, on a well-thumbed sheet of blue Basildon Bond. I suddenly realised that, when I died, there would be no-one to hand the recipe onto and that my branch of the family tree would not continue. A crazy reason I know, but procreation suddenly seemed important.
My partner was surprised and more than a little perplexed by this turnaround but agreed that we would go ahead and have children. We assumed, of course, it would be easy. It wasn’t: I was 37 and two pregnancies both ended in miscarriage. I had fallen, I felt, at the first hurdle. IVF followed and finally, at the age of 41, it was confirmed that I was pregnant with twin girls. I was delighted. “Now we can get on with looking forward to being parents” I thought. But I had no idea of the tsunami that was about to hit me.
IT’S A BIT LIKE LEARNING FRENCH
Despite all the advice people give you and the books you read, you don’t really take it in. It’s a bit like learning French but never really getting the hang of it until you live in France. Pregnancy was such a shock. The whole thing. From beginning to end. I was huge – my frontage was torpedo shaped and entered the room before me like some sort of comedy act. I felt nauseous all the time and ate ginger biscuits endlessly. When I found I couldn’t put my own shoes and socks on, I had a complete sense of humour failure. I was working full time as the Editor of British Country Living magazine and a colleague who’d had twins advised me “Whatever you do, don’t move house”. Too late! We were already in the throes of selling up and moving to a doer-upper in a tiny village in rural Hampshire. I had decided that for authenticity’s sake, I needed to actually live in the countryside and see what it felt like to be part of a rural community with all the experiences that brings. The only problem was that the Country Living offices were in central London. My commute to work each day was two hours there and two hours back - tiring enough for the years when I wasn’t pregnant, but hellish when I felt like I was lugging around a sack of potatoes.
Then came labour and the birth. While a fellow IVF mum had opted for an elective caesarean - “There was nothing natural about how this baby got in here” she told me firmly, so there’s going to be nothing natural about how it gets out”, I was planning to do it all as naturally as possible. Best laid plans………The breathing exercises I had practised diligently – and everything else I had learned on cold Tuesday evenings at the NCT class, went out the window, when I was rushed in for an emergency caesarean and they started rummaging around in my abdomen like they were doing the washing up. Afterwards, I was shaking so violently, due to the anaesthetic, that I couldn’t hold my daughters until I had been stitched up and moved out of the operating theatre and onto the ward.
Once they were cleaned and wrapped in their tiny blankets, my girls needed feeding. “Not a problem”, I thought, “breast feeding is the most natural thing in the world and I’m keen to get on with it”. I quickly learned the term “latching on”, because they wouldn’t. Whatever I did seemed not to work. My babies were hungry and I, their mother, couldn’t work out how to feed them. They wailed. I wailed. Then one of the nurses, an old hand at this game, grabbed my left nipple, twisted it 90 degrees anti-clockwise and firmly stuck it in the baby’s mouth. “That’s how you do it” she declared. I was speechless, but at least the baby was sucking and getting the milk she needed.
LEARNING THE HARD WAY
Once we left the hospital, we were truly on our own. Nothing had prepared me for the terror of trying to bath a new born baby, the cack-handed attempts at changing nappies (we made life more difficult for ourselves by choosing fabric ones with pins instead of non-biodegradable disposables) and the colic-induced, nightly screaming, until another mother introduced me to gripe water. I had to learn the art of feeding twins. The diagrams in the books showed how to hold one under each arm like a rugby ball, legs facing backwards, head level with each of the breasts. I hated it and chose to feed my babies one at a time cradled in my arms, to try to bond better with each of them. The other waited, lying in a wooden cradle that I rocked to and fro with my foot to try to stop her crying. Then I swapped them over. It felt like a production line. I didn’t get out of my pyjamas for two weeks!
And so, it continued. Many women learn from their mothers who are on hand to dispense valuable advice and offer support. Sadly, my mother was no longer alive by the time I had my kids. This is a source of great regret, as she would have loved it and, being an experienced mother of four, would have calmly instructed me in the art of motherhood, from caring for new-borns to how to make them eat their greens, how to get them to sleep at night, how to stop them running rings round me (I never mastered that one) etc. etc. etc. Every time I learnt something new, from books or other mums, I’d think “Result! At least now I know where I was going wrong with that” and then it would dawn on me that this learning was of no further use to me, as I wasn’t planning to have any more babies.
DOING THE BEST WE CAN
So, we do the best we can, trying to cater for our children’s physical and emotional needs, from birth to adulthood. We career from one crisis to the next, making friends with the receptionist at A&E because we know we’ll be back again next week; staying up till midnight trying to fashion costumes for the nativity play out of a pair of old tights and a t-shirt; offering comfort and advice when someone breaks their heart for the first time and helping write their CV when the job-hunting begins. And all this, for those of us who choose it, alongside doing a full-time job. Frankly, I found being a magazine editor so much easier than being a mother. At least, in the office, people did what I asked!
I don’t know why we assume we will automatically be any good at being mums – this hugely complex and multi-faceted role, that no-one has taught us how to do. I pay an accountant to sort out my tax, a mechanic to fix my car, a window cleaner to do my windows and I venture to suggest that all of these combined are not as complicated as being a mother. Before I had children, I remember laughing, rather unkindly, with friends, about a colleague who’d sought expert help when she was expecting her first child “Parenting Classes!” I scoffed, “seems a bit unnecessary!”. Turns out she was the savvy one.
I spent years worrying I had made the wrong decision in choosing to have children. It's taken me until now (my daughters are 23!) to accept that I didn't do such a bad job after all. Oh hang on a minute, is that a banana skin I see……..?
If you enjoyed my Home Truth and think others will too, you can share it by clicking here
I would love to hear your home truths too. If there is something you’d like to tell me, please leave a comment
If there’s a subject you’d like me to write about, you can email me directly. I can’t promise I will be able to cover all suggestions, but if it strikes a chord with me, then it may become the subject of my next newsletter. You need to be a paid subscriber to make a suggestion. Join up by clicking the button below