Mother's Day

It was Mother's Day here in the US on Sunday, so I was thinking about, well, being a mother. I know. Pretty original, huh?

I have a confession to make. I cyber-stalk people about to have babies. I do. Not many - just one or two, here and there. If I come across a blogger about to drop, I add them to my reader, and await the birth. I love the excitement. Ooh, there's a post! Has she had that baby yet?... No, just another post about being fed up with waiting, and a trip to the hospital for monitoring... Ooh, another one! This time?... (Hello, Stockholm.)

I used to love waiting for friends' babies, but now I'm of an age and stage where there aren't too many of those in my immediate life. So I have to get my fix of enjoying babies arriving via the internet (the fix arriving via the internet, that is, not the baby - though in this galloping century, who knows? maybe that will be the next thing).

I love those first exuberant announcements. I love seeing the photo, and the details, and the boasting comments of the parent. We become all childish in our excitement, don't we, when we see them? It's a bit ridiculous, honestly. I mean, take the photo. Let's be honest, that photo of your beautiful newborn... it looks like, well, a baby, doesn't it? Not very different to all those other photos of newborns. Maybe less or more hair, maybe sleeping or awake, maybe scrunched up or not quite so scrunched up. But there's not a whole lot to remark upon, is there?

Then we read the details. Weight, length, and um... there's not much else to say about a baby at this stage. Usually these days there's not even a surprise regarding the gender. Weight - well, there's not a huge variation, honestly, is there? Length - no-one ever even bothered to measure my babies so we couldn't tell people their length, but I didn't feel it was a huge loss. (Isn't it interesting, incidentally, that we talk about length, rather than height? I suppose you have to be able to stand up to have a height.)

So it can't really be the photo and the information. No. I'll tell you what it is. It's the pride of the parents. The bursting, unembarrassed, overwhelming pride that they can hardly contain, in this little scrap of humanity. When we sent out an email announcing the arrival of our third, a friend emailed back "May you always be as proud of her as you are today".

I have often thought of that comment. With a newborn, it's pride at its purest. You're not proud because your child has learnt all his spellings, or because she's got into the netball team, or because he's been nice to his brother and shared his lego, or because she's on the podium at graduation, or because she looks unbearably sweet with her first pony tail, or because he's managed a poo in the potty. You're not proud because anything. You're just proud that the baby is who he or she is - which actually, you know almost nothing about at that point. In fact, all you know about this creature is that it has caused you 9 months' worth of pregnancy complaints, then a few hours of exquisite pain, and that it has the ability to yell, blink a lot, and fill a nappy. It's not a great list of endearments.

Pure unprocessed pride. When you are wanting to throw open the door of the maternity wing, and say to the assembled company "Look, look, LOOK at my baby!... MY baby!..." surely that is parenthood at its finest. Unconditional, all-accepting, unquestioning pride. Dare I say it reflects the divine? Yes, I think I dare.

Of course some people don't feel the parent pride thing straightaway. It may take hours or days to feel much for that scrap of their own, that everyone else seemed so excited about. And that's fine too.

I wonder if animals feel it. I saw a duck with a brood of 10 ducklings in the park the other day. She kept a watchful eye on me as I stopped to watch them, but I didn't think she was very afraid. I wondered if she was actually enjoying showing off her brood (and yes, I did talk to her, out loud, congratulating her on her fine off-spring and saying what a good job she'd done with the eggs, and that's why I like being anonymous in my blog, so that I can confess to weird behaviour like that).

Mother's Day. Well, I wasn't at my best on Mother's Day. I shouted at my kids, and I'm never proud of that. So I'm preaching to myself here. "May you always be as proud of her as you are today." Of course it gets a bit more complicated as life trots on. It is part of the job of a parent to teach good behaviour, good attitudes, spelling, so it becomes appropriate to be proud of your children's achievements and efforts (though can't we just drop the spelling, now they've invented Spellcheck?). But it's good to remember, as much as we can, the more important pride that undergirds it all: pride in them just because they are. And now I sense I'm beginning to ramble, so I'm going to go to the park and see if I can find a few more mother ducks and geese to talk to.

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Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part lll

I thought I’d find one or two kindred spirits on the views expressed in my previous three posts, but on the basis of experience to date, I’ll be surprised if I find anyone alongside me on this one. This is, I think, my unique wonderfully weird moment in parenthood.

My three babies were all late. Gloriously late. Frustratingly late for everyone else, but gloriously late for me. Each one was, give or take, two weeks late, born around the 42 week mark. And here’s the weird bit. I LOVED those last two weeks.

I was lucky. At that stage of pregnancy, life can be uncomfortable for many women. If that’s you, then I have to tell you, it’s because your abdominal muscles are too tight. Don’t worry: you’ll reap your rewards in the years to come. Decades to come. Women like me, with abdominal muscles the slackness of a lettuce leaf (and I’m talking lollo rosso, not iceberg), let the baby hang out in front , and our internal organs have their usual space and go about their usual business uncompromised. I never had heartburn, I had a huge appetite, I never had to get up in the night to wee, I slept like a proverbial baby (and I was soon to find out how proverbial that baby was). I felt full of health, and surprisingly energetic. It seemed like a reward for the miserable early weeks of nausea and fatigue. I did have to counter comments such as ‘you are HUGE, oh my goodness, look at the SIZE of your BUMP, are they sure it’s not twins?”, which under other circumstances might have been a little upsetting, but in late pregnancy, a happy hormone is released in huge measure into my body, which turns me into a cow-like creature. I could serenely chew the cud all day long, watching the world go by, and crowds of onlookers could hold placards and chant slogans about the size of my bump, without me really noticing them at all.

During those two weeks, I would roll my eyes appropriately in response to the ubiquitous question “are you still here?”, and accept people’s kindly-offered sympathy. But inside, I would be hugging to myself my delicious little secret: this was the best bit of all. Being pregnant isn’t a picnic, but there is a loveliness to it, and to me, labour would inevitably mean loss as well as gain. I loved those kicks and squirms, the hidden relationship with my baby, the moments spent wondering whether it was a boy or girl, what he or she would look like, how much it could hear of my voice, the traffic, the radio. The complete and perfect ownership of a priceless treasure, which, once out in the world, would never belong solely to me ever again. I think this is why we never settled on a name before our babies were born. Somehow naming them was giving them a public identity. Until birth, they were all just mine.

Another factor in my contentment during those final two weeks, was that I loved my body. I loved my huge, huge bump. I would wallow in the bath, waddle along the street, sink irrecoverably into sofas, rejoicing in my whale-like being, and loving nothing better than to run my hand over the stretched, soft skin of my bump. For all of our lives, as women, we feel so inadequate for not having the perfect body. Along comes pregnancy, and, for me, the realization each time that my body is a marvelous thing, feeding and nurturing another human life, keeping it safe, giving it all it needs. In pregnancy, as never before or since, my body feels to me purposeful, beautiful, sufficient, perfect. I feel so sad for new mothers these days, all so obsessed with losing baby weight, getting their bodies back to how they were. Is no time of a woman’s life safe from the grinding competition and pressure for a toned body?

But back to me. Picture me, if you will, huge and happy, fending off any doctor’s attempt to induce labour, each day wondering “is this the day?” and toying with the date in my mind. Would this be a nice birthday to have, for life? I'd see the changing mat on the chest of drawers, all ready for the tiny bottom and tiny indignant cries. I'd touch the waiting baby clothes, clean, sweet-smelling, and impossibly small. I'd shut my eyes and try to remember that delicious eau de newborn, and know that it didn’t matter at all how impossible that memory is to recreate, because it wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, more than a few days until I had a soft head to bury my nose in for real. I like anticipation. I think I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day.
Perhaps that’s it. The last gasp of pregnancy is the ultimate in anticipation.

I expect it was all my doing. Midwives say that both baby and mother have to be ready, and maybe my babies were in there, head down, champing gummily at the bit, and it was me resisting the trigger of labour. Midwives know that women can do that kind of thing. I told them it was genetic, that my mother’s babies had all been late, but that was something of an exaggeration. She had one 42-weeker out of four; the rest of us were a respectable 2 or 3 days late. All I know is that I have never met anyone else who has actually hoped for a late baby, and I just can’t understand why. Anyone out there?