Nikki Walsh brings us more rants from the regions. This week she chats to Ciara, 33, from Dublin.
“The other day I met a friend of mine who has just had her first baby. The labour was quick, the baby – a boy – is healthy, and breastfeeding has been easy. In other words, she’s off to a flying start.
The baby is even sleeping for four or five hours at night. The only hitch is that he doesn’t like to sleep in his Moses basket – he prefers to be in her arms or in a sling. As a mother whose baby was whisked into special care after a brutal delivery, who experienced colic, low milk supply and repeated bouts of mastitis, I thought this was pretty good going. But when I said this to my friend she stared at me.
“Do you think so?” she asked. “The midwives don’t think so. They told me I have to get him into the basket. They say we are getting into bad habits.” She looked at me, ashamed. “But I have tried. I mean I would put him in the basket if I could. But he screams the place down. What am I supposed to do? I can’t leave him. He’s two weeks old.”
This brought back so many memories of those first few weeks when the midwives lectured me constantly about bad habits. ‘He’s using you as a soother’, one of them said to me accusingly when I said he fed for hours. ‘He’s comfort sucking’, cried another, as if this was the worst thing in the world. I looked at them horrified, for it seemed to me in my shocked, traumatised state that getting into bad habits was the worse thing I could possibly do – akin to shouting at the baby or smothering it. And worse than that, if I continued this way we were all doomed.
Two years on, can’t help thinking: Where do midwives get off intimidating new mothers? And why aren’t they telling mothers what is considered basic knowledge: that for the first three months your main objective is to settle the baby, not train it? And more than that – that you can teach a baby out of a bad habit when it is more settled, a process that can take as little as three days?
I am not sure at what point in the first year of my own son’s life I realised that getting into bad habits can be an essential part of mothering, and that all too often they are not bad habits at all, just a compromise a smart mother brokers with her child because best practice isn’t possible. And it seems to be that this compromise can be the essence of good mothering for it doesn’t always pay to meet your children head-on. You go around them, and that is why motherhood is more of an art than a science, more of a dance than a stand off.
But back to my friend.
Strap her onto you and get on with your life, I said. Women have been doing it for centuries.
Nikki Walsh is a writer and editor with a passion for what makes us tick. She lives in Dublin with her husband, her son and a heap of books, mostly on psychology.
