Confident parenting

From the moment you get pregnant, people feel it is their opportunity, nay their duty, to share with you their most invaluable advice about how to parent the tiny tadpole who will soon be running your life. Some of this advice is plain loopy, some is downright irritating, but almost all of it is couched in terms of “This is what I did, and look how brilliantly my kids have turned out”. And heaven help you if you dare to think differently!

 All of this is very difficult for the first time parent. Especially if you have that golden glow of enthusiasm for being a truly wonderful parent, and bringing up a child who will be a credit to the family – your child will suckle frequently (but not too often), smile charmingly at ugly relatives,  poo such sweet smelling faeces that no one minds at all that it ends up all over the sofa, sleep through the night even before he/she is born (never dreaming of waking you with a sharp kick to bladder at 2am), take herself off to the loo as soon as she can walk, and put herself to bed as soon as she can climb the stairs and reach the door handle to shut the bedroom door. And through all of this, you will naturally feel entirely happy and contented about the way it’s all turning out so splendidly...

And then your child is born. If you thought you’d been given plenty of advice before, brace yourself for the tsunami of maddeningly contradictory advice you will receive. You should feed on demand/every 2 hours/every 4 hours, put your child in a moses basket/hand-built cot/pram at the end of the garden, you’ll need 6 of this and 12 of the other, disposables, re-usables, bio-degradables... Everyone else seems so confident! How is it that you are the only one who doesn’t know what to do?

My first pregnancy was normal enough; I thought I knew roughly how to parent (I have plenty of younger siblings and already knew how to change a nappy, how to clear up sick, and which way up to hold a newborn). But then I gave birth, in a ghastly grey, windowless room with swing doors at each end like a corridor, with two midwives who spoke to each other but largely ignored me except when they had to attach belts or probes to me or the baby, or take yet another lot of blood from my pin-cushion arms. Nothing about it was how I’d imagined or hoped, and I came out of the experience with a baby who felt like a stranger, and with a sense of deep trauma. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, and rest was hard to come by. There wasn’t a bed free on the ward for another three hours so I missed supper. I was awake nearly all night listening to other people’s babies cry, but then fell asleep at 6.30am and missed breakfast. They woke me an hour later to check my blood pressure and panic that I hadn’t fed my baby for 9 hours (no-one told me she might not wake to feed – I thought babies scream when they’re hungry. Everyone else’s was screaming, so if mine wasn’t, she was fine, no?) By this time I’d had precious little sleep or food for 48 hours, and still felt like I’d been in a car crash. And now I also felt indescribably guilty for not feeding my child. I was in no fit state to look after myself, let alone a baby. I had no idea how to feed her, when to feed her, what to do if she didn’t feed, what to do if her poo looked like spinach mousse, or how to deal with the fact that when she cried, I cried too, inconsolably. And so they said I could go home.

Back at home, I read all the baby books I could find, increasingly desperate for something that made sense, or sounded like my child. Nothing felt right, or made sense. I couldn’t sleep, even when the baby did, and I completely lost my appetite. I’ll draw a veil over the next year or so, but suffice to say it involved anti-depressants and a resignation letter when maternity leave expired. I remember saying in despair that being a mother felt like trying to play ping pong in the pitch dark with people shouting instructions at me in Chinese (and for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t speak a word of Chinese). But eventually I began to feel human again, and to form a bond with the little creature who’d caused all this trouble. I was sent a baby book that actually sounded as if it was written about a baby like mine, and somewhere around 9 months I found some other parents whose ideas and methods sounded like the sort of thing I was trying to do. Little by little, I put together my own jigsaw of parenting. I began to stop automatically feeling stricken with anxiety or guilt by other people’s opinions, and started to believe in my own. It took a long time. You might still call it a work in progress.

And then, a few years down the line, we decided to do it again. This time I was armed and on the defensive. This time round I really did know what I wanted, and I was determined that everything that could be different from the first time, would be so. Miraculously, it was everything I’d hoped for, first time round.

Labour was 3 hours, not 14. It was at home, not in hospital (though I should admit this was by accident; it was all so fast we’d barely got the ambulance crew there in time to catch the baby, never mind take us anywhere) – but hallelujah it was wonderful to be at home! We had arranged help with the housework in the first few months, and it was a godsend. And most importantly, I knew what I wanted in terms of practicalities, so I wasn’t blown in the wind by other people’s advice. I knew which bits of kit were useful, and which could stay in the loft gathering dust. I knew my own mind about feeding, sleeping, weaning, and the latest must-have gadgets (smart-phone app to tell you which boob to use for the next feed, anyone?)

For anyone who’s interested, that baby book that finally made sense is Dr Sear’s The BabyBook:

and my favourite piece of kit is a bright pink ring-sling (like these from Pouchlings). The path we chose involves continued breastfeeding, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, and not worrying too much about domestic goddessness. (Is that a word? It should be.) Oh, and throwing away all the books whose advice confused me the first time round (yes, actually throwing them in the bin. Giving them to a charity shop would have meant some other poor sod had the chance to be panicked by them too). Those of you who know how much I love books, and how many I have around the house, will understand the magnitude of this! It was surprisingly liberating. And because I love books, I have now, inevitably, collected some more parenting books, but this time I’ve found some that seem to be about people like me, and children like mine. 

I’m sure some people are perfectly confident parents from the beginning (you’re the ones who wrote those wretched books I ended up throwing away, aren’t you?), but I’m guessing a lot more people take a while to find their own parenting style. What’s your story?