How Not to Be a Perfect Mother. Libby Purves

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      ‘Now, Mrs D____’ said the lady in uniform, with that offensively breezy confidence so often displayed by childless twenty-two-year-old health professionals towards anxious primagravidae ten years their senior; ‘are you planning to use terry nappies, or disposables?’

      ‘Good God, disposables, of course,’ said the mother-to-be, startled. Moving the wine-rack was one thing – compromises have to be made, after all – but dabbling around all day in a bucketful of wet sewage was quite another matter. Out of the question.

      The health visitor smiled indulgently, making a note.

      ‘Disposables,’ she said. ‘Well, Mrs D____’ (another terrible smile), ‘you mustn’t feel at all guilty about that, you know.’

      My unfortunate friend, into whose cheerfully optimistic picture of motherhood the idea of guilt had never yet intruded, was struck dumb. Guilt suddenly loomed on the horizon, glowing like a nightmare moon, illuminating every aspect of parenthood with rays of uncertainty and fear. Over the coming weeks hospitals and grannies, doctors and strangers and sisters-in-law and so-called friends would combine to intensify that gloomy and deceptive light. (Actually, there are now so many high-tech terry nappies on the market, and in urban areas so many nifty nappy services, that this particular issue is no longer such a hot one. But the point is the health visitor’s use of the G-word.)

      You can be made to feel guilty about not using terry nappies; if you do use them, guilty about their being a bit grey after a couple of washes. You can be made to feel guilty about bottle-feeding, and even about breastfeeding (‘Poor little chap, he’s hungry again, are you sure you’ve got enough?’). Guilt lies in wait behind the bathroom door (‘Of course, I always use cotton wool on their poor little bottoms, with warm boiled water, not those horrid chilly chemical baby wipes’). It haunts the chest of drawers (‘These modern clothes are terribly easy for the mother, of course, but their poor little bottoms could at least breathe, in the days when they wore pure wool leggings’). Guilt can hover when the baby cries, yet pounce when you pick it up for comfort (‘Making a rod for your own back, dear, spoiling that child – it isn’t the kindest thing, in the long run’). Guilt squats down in the kitchen, watching you tearfully wrenching the lids off baby-food jars (‘Not very like real food, is it?’). Guilt peers at your baby lying quietly in his basket (‘Poor old chap, a bit boring for you, isn’t it? They do say that understimulation slows them down later’), but it clicks its tongue disapprovingly when you prop him up to watch you round the kitchen (‘Well, it’s a lot of strain on their poor little backs, of course, with the bones so soft’). To resist the sense of guilt entirely, you have to become a sort of John Wayne of motherhood: tough, opinionated, self-confident and contemptuous of the world. Outlaw Mum, ridin’ her own trail. Alternatively, you just have to take a long calm look at your baby, and realize that despite your many shortcomings, it is perfectly all right. It likes you. It is cleanish, and not particularly hungry just now. It takes life as it comes. The fact that it is also wearing a paper nappy, odd socks and one of its two-year-old brother’s sweaters rolled up to the elbows is irrelevant. So is the fact that it is sitting propped on sofa-cushions in a cardboard box, watching MTV, and hasn’t been weighed at the clinic for weeks. (I took my first baby down there religiously once a week, and filled in a chart recording every ounce and centimetre of growth. But the second one did not see a set of scales after she was four weeks old and is thriving to this day. Both ways, though, I was really pleasing myself: I liked clocking up the pounds on the first baby, and ignored rude suggestions that I was ‘a bit over-fussy, it does no good in the end, you know’. With the second baby I just didn’t feel like it, and any fool could see she was healthy, so I didn’t do it. When a brief pang of guilt returned and made me murmur to the health visitor that perhaps I ought to bring Rose down to the clinic soon, she – a genuine, card-carrying parent – just said, ‘Oh, don’t be silly. Look at her!’)