have the face to. Her husband eventually spent half the delivery night clearing up, and the next morning washing the dozen teacups and biscuit plates emptied by the community midwife (the doctor had most of the Scotch afterwards). Both parents, occasionally, still have wistful thoughts about nice clean hospitals with unlimited laundry and professional tea-ladies.
My own husband, having cheered me on through two hospital deliveries and revelled in the fact that someone else would clear up, now says after ten years of farming that these matters are best carried out in outdoor lambing-pens, with all present in Wellington boots. So, round here, only sheep are allowed home births.
(I should admit, though, that I am not the most impartial person to discuss home births. With my first child, I discovered to my shame that I am a complete hospital junkie; I loved every moment, became institutionalized within two days, had to be dragged out, complaining, at the end of eight days; and for months afterwards, I indulged in yearning fantasies about going back to the lovely maternity ward. One weary night, when Rose was two months old, I announced this longing; my husband asked, ‘What is so special about hospital, for heaven’s sake?’ and I apparently sobbed: ‘They bring a trolley of laxatives and sleeping pills round at nine o’clock sharp every night. I never actually have anything, but at least it shows that someone cares.’ Mystified, the poor man took to offering me a laxative every night, just before the nine o’clock news, to show he cared; but it wasn’t the same, somehow.) But then, I was lucky in my hospitals. Not everybody is; and more recent practice is to chuck the new mother and baby out pretty sharply after the birth, to go through the rest of the recovery stage at home.
So, to the birth itself: every birth is slightly different. All I can usefully say is: beware of Legends, and beware of Irrelevant Campaigns.
Legends
‘A woman always knows when she is in labour.’
Oh no, she doesn’t. Hospitals get women arriving two minutes from birth, still wondering vaguely if anything is amiss; and countless others turning up a fortnight early with indigestion and nerves. Keep an open mind about it, and don’t be too easily fooled by the spectacular Braxton-Hicks contractions which sweep over you while you’re watching Big Brother.
‘Your waters will break, embarrassingly, in thesupermarket, with no warning at all.’
Well, they may. Possibly. It is still not worth going around for weeks on a knife’s edge of uncertainty, avoiding supermarkets. I drove down for some Sunday papers just before Rose was born, and suddenly found myself sitting on a sodden car-seat. Panicking, I drove carefully home again, feeling false labour pains rack me every two minutes, and shrieked for my husband, for an emergency babysitter for my elder child, for pethidine or a Caesarean or a community midwife or anybody at all. Paul leaped into the driving-seat, paused, and began to laugh immoderately. ‘My waters have gone as well,’ he gasped. Before any domestic violence could set in, he explained: someone had left the car window open in the rain overnight; the water had soaked deep into the foam upholstery; the seat was now dry to the touch, but immediately became soaked when someone sat heavily down on it. Strained laughter all round.
‘When you are ready or overdue, you can induce the baby naturally by massaging your nipples.’
It produces some useful hormone, they say. But only if you do it for several hours. There are few things a hugely pregnant woman feels less like doing than massaging her nipples all day. Take my word for it.
‘A bumpy car ride will bring a baby on.’
It would have to be very bumpy indeed, if 20 miles round the Lincolnshire back-lanes in a reconditioned Russian army motorcycle sidecar failed to have any effect on my sister-in-law in the 41st week …
‘When the moment comes, you will feel anoverwhelming urge to push.’
I would never have dared to dismiss this great universal belief until I had my second baby without feeling the remotest wish to push anything at all. Since then, I have met other women and got them to admit it, too. We all pushed our babies out quite efficiently, waiting for contractions and just doing it; but felt no urge, just a sullen boredom with the whole process, and a desire to get it over with. Nobody should be bullied or stereotyped by everybody else’s biology.
‘You will be overwhelmed by love and wonderment at the sight of the baby, newborn and laid on your stomach.’
Well, you may be; once out of two births, I was; the other time I was being sick and fancied a cup of tea more than a slimy baby. This is no tragedy; my husband held both of our newborns straight away, while I got myself together, and there were no ill-effects on any of us. Which leads to the most dangerous legend of all …
‘For a mother to hold and suckle her child immediately is essential to the “bonding” of mother and child. If a mother is stopped from doing this, she may suffer postnatal depression and her relationship with the child will not develop.’
This is an awful thing to say to a mother who may end up under general anaesthetic, or ill herself, or with a desperately sick baby in an incubator. What is she supposed to do? Bond with the tea-trolley instead? Human beings have brains and hearts as well as bodies; it is time the ‘bonding’ lobby admitted this.
It is an even worse thing to say to a mother who has no medical crisis, but simply doesn’t want to hold her baby instantly, after her hours of exhausting labour and months of exhausting pregnancy. Why the hell should she? When my happy, healthy, untroubled baby daughter, now the apple of my eye, was first born I took one look and said, ‘My God, it looks like a bloody shark’ (which she did: underslung jaw and peculiar squashed nose). I let my husband do the cooing. After 20 minutes I fed her, quite successfully; then she went to sleep and I was wheeled off to a side ward. The nurses came in agitatedly, to say that my ward was too cold for a newborn, and they couldn’t find a heater; could they possibly leave the baby in the warm nursery until morning? Would it upset me? I said no; and Rose’s first night, fast asleep, was not spent beside my bed. With the first baby, he and I had lain staring at one another for six hours, wide awake, and that was very nice too, in its way; but as for ‘bonding’, it made no difference whatsoever. Of course it is unfortunate to take a new baby right off to an incubator or a nursery for hours; but it is just as unfortunate to expect a tired, cross, sleepy woman to put on a big act of instant love for her baby when she doesn’t feel like it. Love comes more slowly than that, to many women; you can depress a mother horribly by making her feel like an unmaternal monster for not cooing and staring into the cot all the time.
Irrelevant campaigns
No offence intended to the campaigners; but there are certain, once excellent, causes which have become rather bigger than the problems they set about solving. In my first childbirth, I was educated by the pioneering books on natural birth, and fired by the feminist spirit. On my first visit to the clinic, almost my first words to the surprised midwife were, ‘I’m not having an enema, you know!’ I vowed to chain myself to the hospital railings before I submitted to a shave (‘ritual humiliation of women’), I argued about episiotomies when I was only two months gone, and recited statistics on induction and its fearful side-effects to any baffled trainee midwife who would
