The Yummy Mummy’s Survival Guide. Liz Fraser

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СКАЧАТЬ very organised person yet—I was never organised at all, but having a baby changes all of that. You learn very quickly how to keep on top of things, and you develop your own system of doing things which works for you.

       Isn’t it selfish to be a Yummy Mummy?

      No.

      Real Yummy Mummies dedicate huge amounts of their time and emotional energy to loving and caring for their children—but always reserve some time to make themselves feel special too, which generally involves bottles of sweet-smelling lotions and gorgeous things to hang in their wardrobes.

      Real Yummy Mummies would rather spend time with their children than anything else—but realise that spending no time away from them is very unhealthy and can lead to lifeless hair and a deeply wrinkled brow.

      If you are simply too selfish to look after your children properly then you are a Rotten Mummy, not a Yummy Mummy, and you don’t need a book, just a good telling off.

       I’m too embarrassed about people poking around ‘down there’

      Not much I can say to this one, except ‘Oh grow up.’ Doctors have seen it all before, and they really don’t (or shouldn’t) get a kick out of examining your cervix. Your vagina looks like the millions of other vaginas your midwife has already inspected, and there’s almost nothing which can embarrass them.

      That said, there does seem to be an unfeasible amount of prodding, poking and measuring involved throughout pregnancy, and also well after the birth, and even the least prudish and most patient of you will be pushed to the limit. I never got used it, and I still hate being asked to ‘lie down on the bed and bend your knees up’. Except by my husband. Unfortunately it’s just part of being a woman, and the only way to deal with it is to stop thinking of yourself as a person and throw yourself into the glamorous role of ‘car going in for a service’. If you can be an Aston Martin rather than a Ford Mondeo that will also help.

       I’m scared of all the pain

      This is a very good sign. It shows you are a normal, healthy, sensible woman who knows that squeezing a hard object the size of a basketball through your very small and delicate parts will hurt like hell. It also shows that you have put some considerable thought into the ‘motherhood’ issue, and have already reached the critical stumbling block. Good. Now you progress past this point by realising the following:

      

Giving birth is the most painful thing you should ever experience. It is agonisingly, excruciating, faint-inducingly painful.

      

Once you have done it, no other pain will ever seem as bad (until you do it again).

      

Doesn’t the fact that some women go through it more than once show it can’t be that bad? Actually it is that bad, but Mother Nature has solved this by ensuring that…

      

You will forget how awful childbirth is almost immediately.

      

Not all women find childbirth terribly painful.

      

The drugs work. No pain; lots of gain.

      

Put it in perspective: when the result of this pain is your own baby, who will grow into a child, an adult and then the bearer of your grandchildren, and will fill your life with more joy and love than you can imagine yet, what’s twelve hours of pain, really? I would go through a month of pain to get the children I have now. Ahhhhh.

      

The pain stops abruptly once the baby is out. Most discomforts and pains linger on for ages and gradually just peter out. Not childbirth: it’s excruciating one minute, and then it’s completely gone the next. And that feels fantastic!

      

Going through childbirth gives you the automatic and unquestionable right to have the tapless end of the bath, never take the bins out and have a foot tickle every night for the rest of your life. If he does question this right, suggest you shave his testicles with a cheese-grater, and see how fast he moves.

       What if things go wrong between me and my partner?

      Not the most optimistic way to approach motherhood, but if you will examine every depressing possibility then I guess I would agree that having a baby puts a vast amount of strain on the relationship you have with your husband, or partner, or whatever we’re calling him or her. Whatever your relationship is now, it will be completely different once you have a baby, and even well before that moment actually comes. The only way of succeeding is to TALK about EVERYTHING and to know where you stand before you get too far down a road you’re not happy with. There is more about this in New Relationships in Part Eleven, but, until then, perhaps telling your partner about your concerns is a good idea, as is setting out to make it work instead of preparing for it to fail.

       I’m too old/ I’m too young

      Well at least you can’t be worrying about both of these!

      There is no ‘good time’ to have a baby—what suits some people doesn’t suit others. I did it very young, which means I had tons of energy (never underestimate how important this is), my body didn’t suffer very much, by the time I was thirty I had all my child-bearing days all over with, (I think, but I still have all the baby clothes in the attic) and I will be able to wear my daughters’ far more fashionable clothes very soon. BUT, I missed out on my carefree, childless twenties, I didn’t manage to get my career going as I might have liked, my husband and I had very few years alone together, and I now have to do the career and kids things at the same time.

      Older mums have the advantages of enjoying a successful career first, often having more money, being more self-confident and sure of what they want and wanting the time away from work to enjoy being a mum. BUT, it is harder to get pregnant as you get older (tick-tock, tick-tock); you will find the exhaustion harder to cope with; your body will probably suffer more and be harder to get back into shape; you will find all those years of independence and smart, child-free living very hard to leave behind; and you may find it harder to get back to work at the same level in your late thirties or early forties.

      Both ways are good and both are bad. I would just urge as many women as possible to remember the biological clock. Science is great and everything, and there have been some huge advances in fertility treatments, but the wobbly bottom line is that, in the same way that 8 inch stilettos are not designed for rock climbing, so we are not designed to have babies in our fifties. We can still do it, but it’s a heck of a lot harder. Just wanted to get that off my pert-ish chest.

       PART TWO Pregnancy—The Early Days…

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