Category Archives: Mummying

Return to Oz

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“I think I’d like to make today’s session my last.”

Recovering from PND

Quiet words. Too small for how huge I feel inside. I have a moment of panic, where I imagine my therapist falls off his chair laughing and tells me I’ve still got a long way to go. But the truth is, I haven’t.

“Agreed,” he says instead. “I think that’s great.”

And that’s it. I’m free. Out in the big, wide world and all on my own again. Except that I know I’m not on my own, this time. PND has taught me more things than I could possibly list here, but probably the most important is that I am not – and have never been – alone.

I’ve recovered. Recovered. I used to have PND. I had PND once. I am better.

I turn the words over in my mind, trying them out. I’ve done that before, when they still felt hollow and hung like a weight about my shoulders. Now, they seem full of promise. I realise I don’t even need to say them out loud; not to myself, nor anyone else.

Being better is terrifying. Funny as it sounds, postnatal depression was, at times, a comfort blanket. It was my disorder. My please-may-Charlee-be-excused-from-class-today note. If I lost my temper or cried or worse, it was the PND. If I disappeared into a hole for weeks on end, there was nobody to blame but my illness. Now I have to take responsibility again. Realising that a Bad Day is just a bad day – a regular, common-or-garden bad day, like everyone else has from time to time – is both liberating and frightening. There are no more excuses; no more second tries; no more capital letters. If I get angry, I’m just another sleep-deprived mama having a meltdown in Sainsbury’s.

I am full of hopes and fears right now, after eighteen months of numbness. You know that bit in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy first steps out of the crashed wooden house and into the glorious Technicolour land of Oz? Yeah: that.

Pregnancy: You’re Doing It Right!

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That’s it. I am absolutely sick and tired of reading the most terrible horse shit about pregnancy and birth.

Every five minutes, it seems, I read an article or a tweet, see a YouTube video or hear some “parenting expert” handing out crappy, one-size-fits all advice. One size doesn’t fit all when you’re talking about gardening gloves, for Christ’s sake. Why on earth would it work any better on actual, tiny human beings?

The bombardment of expectant mothers with unadulterated nonsense is breath taking. I noticed it the first time around, but now I’m on Baby Number Two, I’m truly infuriated by it (can you tell?).

Pregnant women are disempowered at every turn, being given totally unrealistic expectations of labour, birth and motherhood, fuelled by the media’s ridiculously unattainable images of perfection. We are constantly advised on how to avoid stretch marks (just because you’re pregnant, don’t forget to drive yourself insane worrying about how you look!); how to achieve a zen birth (epidural? So last decade dahling, it’s all about the natural birth now!); why you should be babywearing (pushchairs turn your children into serial killers, obviously); and a million other stupid, trite idiocies. I’d like to think that most of this advice is ultimately well-meaning, but I can’t: most of it is designed to sell you something – and then perpetuated by people who have no idea how to actually evaluate whether something they hear is even true, let alone helpful.

So, if you’re pregnant, do something for yourself today. Take your clothes off and take a good, long look in the mirror.

You are beautiful. Your body is beautiful. Every mark on it is a story about your life’s journey. Every mark of pregnancy is a badge of honour: wear it with pride.

No cream you use will change whether you get stretch marks or not, so who cares if you forgot to moisturise? If you don’t feel zen in your labour, scream so loudly you shatter the windows instead, and then demand an epidural. It’s your birth experience. You will still have a baby at the end of it. How you get there only matters if you let it.

Shout in the face of anyone who tells you what should be important to you. Call out pregnancy bullshit whenever and wherever you see it. Smile, because you are fantastic just the way you are.

Turns Out I Do Like Parenting

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Coming out of the bad parenting closet

Turns out I do like parenting!For a long time, I have been harbouring the dark thought that maybe I Just Don’t Like Parenting.

There, I said it.

Obviously, I’m only leaping out of the closet now that I realise it isn’t true.

I’ve been trying, for weeks, to figure out what was causing me to feel so much resentment about being at home with my toddler. It certainly couldn’t be her: she’s adorable (and a future Nobel Prize winner, natch). It turned out to be – ta da! – me. Again. I am my own worst enemy: this much we know, by now.

Specifically, here’s what I do to sabotage my own time with my child. Witness, if you will, a snapshot of a random five minutes inside my head:

    • “I’m useless at leaving the house on time. Perhaps her development will be stunted because she’s indoors too much. I need to get out earlier.”
    • “I shouldn’t be letting her watch Zingzillas. TV makes kids stupid. I should be reading to her instead.”
    • “I only read to her for fifteen minutes today, and we read the same book three times. I’m not giving her enough stimulation.”
    • “I shouted at my husband this morning. She’s bound to be emotionally scarred. She’ll grow up thinking that’s the only way to communicate with people and all her relationships in life will be messed up.”
    • “I must have frightened her when I told her off about touching the plug sockets. I bet she’ll grow distant from me because she thinks our relationship is aggressive and confrontational.”
    • “She doesn’t respond to “No!” – I must be doing something wrong. Why can’t I get the right tone of voice to make her stop kicking me? If I was a better mother, she would just stop.”
    • …and so on.

Spotting that I do this, all day every day, was the hard part. After that, it got easier. Whenever I spotted a Bad Mummy moment, I simply told myself to SHUT UP, out loud. I got some funny looks on the bus, I can tell you. It was worth it, however, because I have just had three Good Mummy Days in a row. And that’s a record.

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Parenthood and Children

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…but that it would’ve been Really Handy to know.

  1. Giving birth is the easiest – and quickest – bit. If you have a particularly long and/or complicated labour, you will think this can’t possibly be true. You’re wrong.
  2. Routine is not some Gina Ford construct that can be opted out of. Trust me on this one. Guardian reading, liberal minded sandal weaver you might be, but if you don’t have at least some semblance of routine, two things will happen. One: you will never, ever, ever get anything done. Two: your child will be a douchebag.
  3. You will think, at least once during the first six months and several times in the first year, that divorce is inevitable. Don’t sweat it. Not only will your marriage survive, but at some point you’ll probably end up having sex with each other again.
  4. Babies are buttheads. They stay awake all night, go to sleep when you need to be somewhere, make you late for everything, scare away all your childless friends, make you cry at the dinner table (and in the supermarket, and in restaurants), punch you unexpectedly in the side of the head and shit noisily all up their back when they’re squished against you in the baby sling and you’re on a crowded bus where no-one can escape the stench. Inexplicably, you will continue not just to love them, but to believe them to be the most perfect being ever to walk the earth. They might even be the messiah. Or at the very least, a future world leader.
  5. You will sit, in perfect rage, at three o’clock in the morning, casting around for the most inventive and descriptive insult with which to offend your partner. Brush up on your swearing in advance. The universal rule of marriage and parenthood is that anything said in the heat of the moment between midnight and 5am cannot be counted, on grounds of diminished responsibility – so you might as well make it good.
  6. Holidays, which were once very relaxing, will now be several thousand times more stressful than just staying at home.
  7. You will get kicked in the eye so hard that you are afraid to take your hand away from your face in case your eyeball falls out. Your partner will find this hysterical. This will probably happen more than once. Buy goggles. Or a riot shield.
  8. You will discuss poo with complete strangers on the bus. Usually your baby’s, sometimes your partner’s, occasionally your own. This will seem like Perfectly Normal Behaviour.
  9. This.
  10. There is a strong possibility that one day, sometime after you emerge from the first year, shell shocked and blinking and wondering how in the name of all that is holy you survived the apocalypse, you will be so utterly out of your mind that you turn to each other, smile your Smug Parent smile and decide to do the whole thing again. And if you don’t, you’ll be perpetually badgered about when you’re planning to “Start work on Number Two.” (Pro tip: this is not a bathroom code. They are asking about your plans for future children – not to be confused with point 8 above.)

“I Think I’m Better Than You.”

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The World Wide Web: Eroding Subtlety Since 1990

I wrote a post recently on Facebook, in which I congratulated myself on doing a damn good job of parenting my daughter. I’d had a particularly cruddy day, filled with a variety of Unpleasant Things. Sick of the crushing weight of mummy guilt, I had a moment of why-the-hell-not proudness. Why shouldn’t I feel good about myself?

The problem is, it didn’t make me feel good about myself. The following morning, I back-tracked and took my post down. Saying that I was brilliant hadn’t made me feel proud at all. In fact, I felt like a bit of a shit bag. I realised I’d overstepped a line – and, thanks to the dear old internet, I’m certainly not the first.

Call me old fashioned, but I can’t seem to get comfortable with the concept – peculiar to social media – of “bigging oneself up.”¹ It took me a long time even to feel at ease with the mummy blogging medium – which is, by its very definition, an utterly self-absorbed pastime. The idea that anyone else should be even slightly interested in any of my stream-of-consciousness tripe still fascinates and horrifies me in equal measure.

Without meaning to perpetuate the Oh-I-Say British stereotype here, I’ve always thought it’s rather better to have someone else point out your successes than to hold them up yourself and order everybody to look at them (“GO ON: LOOK AT IT!”). I prefer my humour – and the people whose company I keep – self deprecatory and wry. Which leads me nicely to today’s God That Annoys Me award, which goes to this puke-inducingly smug baby vest.

It embodies all the reasons why, while self confidence is something to be admired and aspired to, it’s also something one ought to be a bit humble about. It oversteps the same line I did: the line between being proud, and being offensive, divisive and judgemental. The message it carries – ostensibly that breast is best² – is a well known and scientifically endorsed one. But it’s the undertone of the message that offends. It’s inherently smug, and implies that the mother of the vest-clad little monster is somehow better than any passing mother who might have bottle fed her baby with formula. Using your baby to advertise your parenting politics is a dangerous business indeed. I don’t think the message bears any true malice; it’s just a misguided joke.

But isn’t that the problem? I wonder if the world in general – and the emotive realm of parenting, in particular – might be a nicer place if we all chose our words a bit more carefully. It makes all the difference between, “I’m better than you,” and “I think you’re doing a great job.” I’m all for saying what you think when it really matters, but the internet is so full of people talking so hard and fast and loud, that the power of someone’s words to make or break a person’s day seems to have been forgotten in the furore.

¹ I still do it. It’s a pitfall of social media, and a hard one to avoid. God only knows how many people have snorted in disgust at my self important status updates and blog posts over the years.

² Oh, don’t even get me started on this. The UK’s astounding lack of savvy about encouraging people to breastfeed is my current soapbox subject. And hardcore “lactivism” can kiss my ass, for starters. Yeah, I said it (breaking all the rules of the post I just wrote. It’s my blog and I’ll be a hypocrite if I want to.).

Awakening

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I had a blog entry going round and round my head last night in bed, and no laptop to hand, so I scrawled it in my journal instead.¹ Please excuse the lack of style, but I tend (as I think I’ve mentioned before) to exercise a laborious and time-consuming edit-as-I-write process on the computer, so I find the permanence of the biro a bit daunting. It does have advantages – economy of words being the main one; but I digress. Here it is, in all its handwritten glory. Sorry if my dreadful handwriting takes a little deciphering…

This post is dedicated to my good friend, M, who embodies the idea of living in the everyday world whilst living, at the same time, somewhere altogether nicer, better than anyone else I know.

¹ One of my dearest friends bought this journal for me. Her eclectic – and somewhat French – tastes are a constant source of joy to me, as is the journal itself. I am a stationary fetishist, of course.

Diary of PND ~ 15 Nov

Aside

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How many good days do you have to have before you’re “cured”? One? Three? Seven? Sixty-four? Six hundred? I’m going to decide, and pick a date, and on that day I shall wear a t-shirt that says, “I survived childbirth, the first year of mummying and Postnatal Depression!” (It may also say, “Yay me!” on the back.)

Because if you think for one second that I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a “recovering” PND-er, you’re sorely mistaken. And if I catch myself thinking that, there’ll be some Very Stern Words.

Today’s outlook:

Not enough sleep followed by a little light yoga. Regularly spaced meals and a nice work/life balance. I am doing this. I am doing it!

Today’s mood:

Cautiously optimistic.

Postnatal Depression – One Day at a Time

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My experience of Postnatal Depression

I’ve been promising you – and therefore myself – that I’ll write something on the blog about my Postnatal Depression. I kept saying it, but the more I wrote, the further away from my own experiences I got. The last time I tried, in a genius bit of avoidance, I came up with this well received but ultimately impersonal article about Postnatal Depression charities.

Then, on Saturday night, a simple dinner with my husband opened some doors that I have kept shut since the birth of my beautiful daughter. I let somebody else in. And the next day, I wrote about my experience of Postnatal Depression. I cried while I wrote it. It sounds dramatic to say that it changed my life, but it feels like a new beginning. I woke up on Monday feeling maybe not any better, but different, and after nearly a year of Bad, Different is as welcome as Good.

For a long time, I didn’t want to acknowledge Postnatal Depression as a part of my life. I didn’t want it to define me, become all I could talk and think about. I wanted to shut it out of my life and ignore the hammering on the door until it got bored and went away. Now I realise it doesn’t – can’t – work like that. A friend told me, “You have to embrace it as a part of who you are and stop fighting against it.” At the time, I didn’t want to hear that, but now I am grateful for his wise words and I think I am beginning, slowly, to understand what that means.

I realise, at last (although I think I really knew all along), that my NaNoWriMo novel is going to be about Postnatal Depression. It’s what I know. It’s my reality. If I accept it, I can recover from it.

So, please head over to The Baby Show and read the article I wrote for them about my experience of Postnatal Depression. It is my eureka moment, even if it doesn’t sound much like one:

Postnatal Depression – One Day at a Time at The Baby Show (part of their season on Ante- and Postnatal Depression)

Five Things to be a Good Parent

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After writing about the government’s five-a-day guidelines for how to be a good parent a few weeks ago, I was surprised to see that “five things to be a good parent” is one of the top searches bringing people to the Bump blog. I guess a lot of that traffic is driven by people looking to find out more about the coalition government’s proposed campaign, but I also read this article about so-called parenting experts, and it got me thinking about why we feel we need so much advice these days¹…and how reliable all this advice we get actually is.

Back when I was pregnant – in those heady, care-free days before I understood the true meaning of the words “not enough hours in the day” – I bought every parenting book on the market. My appetite for information was voracious. I believed that in parenting, like in every other area of life, if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.

I think I realised I’d been labouring (no pun intended) under a misapprehension when I handed the Birth Plan to my midwife. She gave me a wry sort of smile and said, “Ah, a first timer…” and that was the last I saw of that.

Nearly eleven months later and 99% of the books I bought either lie unread (and now under a thick layer of grime slightly dusty) on the shelf in the nursery, or are missing, presumed borrowed/puked on/eaten. I’ve been so busy learning to be a parent that I’ve had no time to learn to parent. While I remain steadfastly jealous of anyone who has managed to follow The Plan and eke out a little oasis of calm in the howling, shrieking, oh-god-oh-god-oh-god confusion of early parenthood, it just wasn’t for us. Partly because I never seem to have the time to read any parenting books, but mostly because I’m a lazy arse by nature, who is more likely to spend my meagre free time lolling in front of Stargate SG1 than swotting up.

Despite my lack of studying, however, it’s fair to say that some truly great advice has poured in from all quarters. Some of it has really saved my bacon at times, so I thank everyone who has been forthcoming (you know who you are). But good advice is boring boring boring, right? So instead, here are my top five pieces of advice about pregnancy and parenting that have turned out to be Absolute Horse Shit.

1. “Just relax! Stressing out about getting pregnant will only make it harder!”

Okay, first off, I’m not stressed, I’m excited. If I was stressed, I’d be drinking gin in the pub like any normal human being, not weeing on a stick every forty-five minutes. Secondly, the effect of stress on the luteinizing hormone required for ovulation is questionable, at best, and even then you’re talking about death-divorce-moving-home stress, not just getting a bit enthusiatic about having a baby. Some people take it as it comes; some people chart and temp and POAS. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: judge not, lest ye be judged.

2. “Your vegetarian baby is probably lacking in iron/protein/vitamins/meaty goodness [delete as applicable].”

Not one single health professional that I have spoken to about bringing up a vegetarian baby has ever had anything bad to say about it. In fact, quite the opposite. According to one, most babies have too much protein in their diet anyway. Another told me that vegetarian babies have a lower instance of illness. Yet another had three vegetarian-from-birth children of her own. So no. I’m not going to “try them on a little bit of chicken (’cause some vegetarians eat chicken, you know).”²

3. “Make bath time part of your baby’s bedtime routine to relax her before she goes to sleep.”

Does this baby look relaxed to you?Bathing a baby: not relaxing Yeah, we have baths in the morning now.

4. “For a more natural breastfeeding experience, lay baby on your chest while you lie down and let them find the nipple themselves.”

Wait, what? You want me to take one of the most agonising, infuriating, technically complicated things I’ve ever done in my life and try to do it UPSIDE DOWN? Find it themselves? Honey, I love my baby, but at six weeks old, I honestly think my cat knows more about life, the universe and nipples. (Not that I breastfed my cat. I went a bit fucking loopy for a few months there³, but not That Loopy.)

5. “Give your baby some Nappy Off Time to help clear up her nappy rash.”

This is actually brilliant advice. But it should always, always, ALWAYS have the caveat, “…but on your own head – or, as the case may be, favourite rug – be it.”

God, now I’ve started, I can think of hundreds more. There was the woman who told me off in BHS for eating a cheddar cheese sandwich while pregnant(!); the advice I found online that told me my baby would surely suffocate if she shared a cot with her beloved Roo, but that propping her bottle while I did the housework was fine; the NHS video of a water birth where the mother smiles serenely the whole way through (yep, even the Ring of Fire bit). Being a parent is a manure-strewn minefield.

So come on: share your stories of hilariously bad parenting and pregnancy advice. Perhaps I’ll even turn it into a regular feature on the blog. Those are the kind of parenting tips worth searching Google for…

¹ If you’re interested, I have this comment on BabyCalm that sums up some of my views on parenting advice.

² No they don’t. They really, really don’t.

³ I will get around to writing about my PND. I will.

Mama C vs Reusable Nappies: The Rematch

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A few weeks ago, I wrote this post about my struggle to get on with washable nappies. Lots of you gave me some brilliant feedback and advice, and I went away more determined than ever that we could make them work for us – without anyone having to wash poo out of their hair.

Several weeks later, I felt that we were finally there. I’d fiddle-faddled about with the pre-folds (so much that I’d made several origami frogs) and settled on folding them into four instead of three. Interesting note: the shape of your prefold roughly corresponds to the shape of your baby. My baby is tall and skinny; thus, long and skinny prefold.

It took a while to figure the pre-folds out, to be honest. In the process, I announced to my somewhat skeptical husband that the “cheap wraps” were to blame (“Which bit is the wrap again?”) and flounced off to Mothercare to buy some new ones. Initially, they seemed to do the job but, in actual fact, they sandpapered all the skin from TS’s thighs. Yet another product, clearly manufactured by someone who has never even seen a baby.

After pissing a whole lot of money up the wall, I finally found a working combo (if you’re that interested, you can read about the reusable nappies I use) and came to accept that, yes, I really do have to change her every two or three hours and yes, failure to remember this will result in strangers hastily handing back my baby and saying, “I think she’s had a little accident…”*

* Note to nappy wrap manufacturers: Water resistant? Water RESISTANT? Please explain to me what the hell is wrong with water PROOF.

So far so good. Then, just as my husband was coming around to the idea (“I’m not convinced it actually works out any greener.” “We might as well set fire to forty quid every month.” “I’ve got poo on my ACTUAL HANDS.”), TS contracted rotovirus, and all hell broke loose. Reusables have limits. We didn’t just retreat to eco-disposables; we regressed all the way back to we-stamp-on-kittens-for-fun Pampers. Two weeks of dark, dark times followed. I’ll save you the gory details, except for these four words: Febreeze is my friend.

Now we’re on eco-disposables again. I can’t seem to get us back into reusables, and Hubby is less convinced than ever.

“You can’t use them on swimming days, and you don’t use them when you go out (and you’re never home!). You can’t use them when she’s sick. They leak if you use them at night. You won’t use them when other people look after her, and you don’t use them when you stay at your mum’s. You use two reusable nappies – that have to be collected and washed and dried – for every one disposable, and half the time they give the baby nappy rash. You spend £30 a month on disposables and hardly use the reusable nappies, but we still pay £40 a month for the service. You’re bat-shit crazy – and definitely not very green.”

He makes a good point.