Читать книгу How Not to Be a Perfect Mother - Libby Purves - Страница 20

Hospitals give you lists of things to bring with you; the one thing never mentioned is paper knickers; or, if you can’t find them in the shops, the worst old Mummy-pants in your drawer, to throw away. Take 20 pairs, and you’ll never regret it. And however lissome you are, this is absolutely not the moment for thongs. Enough said.

Understandably, hospitals don’t encourage you to bring anything much into the delivery room, but various groups like the National Childbirth Trust will recommend amusements and comforts, ranging from sponges to light reading. Here are some less conventional items that women have taken into the delivery room and been glad of:

• A pair of thick woolly socks (hot face, cold feet).

• An aerosol spray of ‘Fresh Air’. (One friend says, ‘I farted like a mad thing all the way through, very embarrassing smell.’ Sorry.)

• A small plastic plant-spray for when your husband gets bored with sponging your face all the time.

• A cassette machine of music. (But beware. Just as the obstetrician approached with his forceps to extract my first, Paul switched on our machine to take my mind off it all, and it happened to be set at a sea song: ‘Haul away Joe’. Not very tasteful, but it made the doctor laugh.)

• A camera. (Pictures of your baby at ten minutes old are wonderful. For some reason they look more grown-up than a week later: wise and amused.)

• Lip salve.

• A guitar. (One girl tried to get permission for a Hammond Organ, but failed.)

• A mirror (to watch the head born, if you fancy. I don’t).

• Harpers & Queen. (Not a magazine I normally read, but Jennifer’s Diary, performed in a high posh voice by Paul, kept me laughing immoderately into the gas-and-air mask right up to the start of second-stage labour.) Hello or OK! magazine would do as well. Nothing serious is going to get through your defences, so don’t assume this is the moment to tackle Stephen Hawking for the first time.

• A laptop and a stack of DVD films (if you’re that techno-friendly. Anything with Goldie Hawn in it is a good bet, I am told).

• A picnic for afterwards (miss hospital mealtimes and you’ve had it for six hours).

• A Marybean (tropical seed from the West Indies, believed to be lucky in childbirth).

• A horseshoe (same reason).

• A game of Scrabble. (But one mother reports that it easily gets a bit close to the bone. ‘Blood … conception … tubes … then we gave up!’)

Above all, or instead of it all:

• A father. If he won’t come, he won’t, and a girlfriend or sister or mother would do. Better a willing partner than a groggy, reluctant one. But if the baby’s father will come, he might surprise you: men are often so good in the labour room, contrary to daft old legends, that the midwives are lost in admiration. (It can go too far, even. The young nurse breathed admiringly to me, after Rose was born, ‘Your husband is wonderful. Anyone would think he had been at dozens of confinements.’ I replied, a little sourly, that this was unlikely. Unless he has a hobby of which I know nothing. Perhaps he slips on a white coat and creeps into maternity wards on his days off.)