How Not to Be a Perfect Mother. Libby Purves

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      If you find a good source of secondhand clothes to lend or buy, hang on to it!

      Finally, consider your duty

      The responsibility of a baby can seem huge, vague and impossible at times. Too much reading about infant care and bonding and imprinting and early influence can stampede you into a tearful panic. It can depress you into feeling that life will be a dreary round of nappy-changing and fiddling around with sterilizers, broken only by earnest coffee mornings with other sick-stained Mums in a litter of hideous toys. Clinics hand out leaflets about parenthood, carrying frightful ‘Specimen Daily Routines’ like this one:

      and so on, all day, with never a line suggesting: ‘Mother reads paper, walks round garden, goes out and gets haircut, goes to drunken lunch with friend.’ It is fatally easy to confuse the baby with the bathwater: daily routines, crossover vests, coffee mornings and the peeling of nourishing vegetables for husbands are all no more than bathwater. All that is really going to happen is that you will become responsible for a small, highly entertaining, amazingly tolerant and self-contained person. Your only duty is to keep this person fed, clean, warm and entertained. There is no reason why you should stay in the house, ironing sheets or baking like a ‘real’ mother, if you don’t want to. New babies are completely portable, and care very little where they doze and wake and feed, as long as you are there. Things will change later, but by then you will be expert enough to adjust matters to suit yourself. It is pretty rare for a normal, sober, undrugged woman to do a baby any actual harm; as long as it is fed and clean and warm and has a place to sleep in peace, it will do fine, and probably not even cry much.

      Incidentally, if you have doubts about whether you will love your baby, because you think other people’s children are horrid, squirmy, snotty, damp pink things, do not worry. It is quite possible to have babies of your own (sweet-smelling, perfect and brilliant) and still perceive other people’s as revolting and dull. Nature is very crafty. And the actual tasks of babycare are not bad at all, once a real baby is involved; you may be repelled by ‘parentcraft’ classes with a grinning plastic doll and frayed terry nappies, yet really enjoy bathing and changing a real, kicking baby of your own.

      Your baby’s father needs to know all these things, too. He may be feeling as uncertain, excited and nervous as you are. I have deliberately kept fathers in the background in this book; not because that is where they ought to be, or where my own husband is, but only because the moments when a mother most needs support are precisely those lonely times when fathers are off somewhere. The office day, the factory day mean long stretches of paternal absence. The promptings of biology mean that in the first year, even the first three years, and even when both parents have jobs, mothers move fast and urgently towards a child’s distress even if father happens to be moving that way too (couples in which the father gets up at night to the baby frequently report that the mother lies awake anyway until he gets back). Some inbuilt tolerance seems to make women more patient with whiners and clingers and vandals and food-flingers. But even so, the more closely a father is involved from the start, the more he will enjoy his babies and the less isolated and solely responsible you will feel.