Читать книгу How Not to Be a Perfect Mother - Libby Purves - Страница 21

The days in hospital with a newborn, and the first fragile week back home, are a strange, limbo-like time. Selfishness is absolutely essential. Don’t keep trying to please everyone; it’s your time. If you don’t want a difficult relative to visit you, say so. One girl, who had lost a baby at four days, had suffered all through her second pregnancy from her mother-in-law’s insinuations about genetic defects (‘If it happens once, it’ll happen again’). She was frantic to keep this dreadful old bag away, at least for five or six days; but had been advised by all sorts of well-meaning professionals that hospital visiting was vital to ‘family bonding’. I am afraid I sneakily advised her to hold her ground, and, if necessary, ban her own mother as well, just to even things out diplomatically.

Accepting help is also essential. Independent, strong, healthy women feel stupid at being brought meals in bed and having their babies’ nappies changed by nurses, or back home by kindly sisters-in-law or paid maternity nurses. But take advantage. If you looked around in an old-fashioned hospital where mothers stay in for several days, you could always tell the first-from second-time mothers on a ward; all the novices would be struggling tearfully with the fifth nappy of the morning, sticking pins in themselves and annoying the baby, just to prove they can cope. Meanwhile the old lags lie back on their pillows, murmuring, ‘Well, sister, I do have a little backache, if you’d be terribly kind and change him I’d be so grateful …’ They don’t have to prove that they can cope alone. They’ve done it. Anyway, everybody, except the very subnormal, can cope alone eventually, tough though it may be. Why start work early when you could be lying back eating grapes and cuddling a nice, clean, changed baby? If you feel ropey, are incontinent, in pain from stitches, piles, sore nipples, engorgement or whatever, it will pass; there is no point in feeling that you have to win your maternal spurs now, in the first couple of days, by changing every nappy.

By the way, bursting into tears on Day Five is so common a phenomenon that nobody who looks after new mothers is remotely surprised by it. But don’t time your most unnerving and demanding visitors for Day Five, and tell your partner in advance that it may happen, and does not mean that you are sinking into the lowest abysses of real post-natal depression.

The only thing worth fighting about, in hospital, is demand-feeding. These days you rarely even have to fight for it. Appalling though it may seem to feed a baby every 45 minutes round the clock (each feed lasting 15 minutes … or more … ), if that is what it wants, then that is the best thing to give it. It keeps the baby from crying, and speeds up the moment when it will feed at sensible times (the more sucking, the more milk). Top-ups of formula are no help at all. But because you are demand-feeding, which is the most supremely unselfish action one human being routinely does for another, you are entitled to be as selfish as hell for the rest of the time. Consider yourself, for a few days. Insist on comfort, rest and peace. Take advantage. Lean on everybody. The baby, after all, is leaning on you. Hard.