How Not to Be a Perfect Mother. Libby Purves

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       Chapter Two

       Hard Labour: Birth

      My first child was born in November, when the sellers of Remembrance poppies were out on the streets. I was days overdue; one gloomy evening, my mother-in-law rang for a bulletin. ‘Have they come yet,’ she enquired lugubriously, ‘to take her away?’ On being told that they hadn’t, her response was electrifying. ‘Aye,’ she said, generations of old wives’ lore quivering in her voice. ‘I bought a poppy t’other day. I thought of Libby.’ And having thus memorably equated my coming confinement with the mud, blood and mortality of the trenches, she left us to wait on, amid the howling winter winds and the chilly fog curling off the river.

      We were glad of it, really. It made a nice counterpoint to the breathless optimism of the National Childbirth Trust classes, where an upbeat teacher had stripped away all the mystery from the abdominal events to come, trained us never to refer to ‘pain’, and generally raised our expectations. We had been comfortably looking forward to a supremely interesting, mildly tiring Life Experience, and it was salutary to be reminded of the other point of view: the howling, heaving and bedpost-gripping made familiar by a hundred historical novels, and warned of (with graphic hand gestures) by generations of grannies.

      For years they told us that when A Woman’s Time Has Come, she moans and grips her husband’s hand; then comes an interlude of black terror, screaming, sweat, agony and struggle; followed by exhaustion necessitating a month in bed and a ritual visit to the nearest temple for purification of her foulness. Old bags in launderettes still mutter joyfully about Auntie Helen who was Never the Same Again after what she went through with her second; about Our Brenda who never had a day without pain (and it was Twin Beds from the day she came out that hospital until the day he passed on, the dirty beast); about dropped bits and ruptured bits and Specialists down from Lunnon who had never seen anything like it in 40 years. The advantage of this great female legend in its heyday was presumably that when the terrified young girls actually came to have babies, they found it nowhere near so bad as they expected; and in their subsequent relief felt positively light-hearted about the few residual aches and pains. The disadvantage was (and is) that the more frightened the mother, the worse it hurts. The legend was thus enabled to live on, with ever more refinements of detail (‘Ooh, you should have seen my stitches. I tore 3inches. Doctor said he’d never seen anything like it …’).

      The great legend took a bashing with the advent of the childbirth movement. New childbirth, natural childbirth, Birth without Fear, whatever you call it, the symptoms are much the same. They include a refreshing blast of technical knowledge, a refusal to admit that it hurts much and, at the more extreme limits, the claim by Sheila Kitzinger that ‘birth is the most exciting sexual experience of a woman’s life’ (depends on all the others, I should say … ). The new prophetesses use ‘birthing’ as an active verb, admire Leboyer’s vision of a child drifting into the world to gentle music and dim lights and warm water and love. They point with enthusiasm at Michel Odent’s squatting, naked mothers and athletically involved fathers at the Pithiviers clinic, and publish books of exercises to stretch every useful muscle. They write blow-by-blow accounts of their own beautiful labours, surrounded by friends playing guitars, nourished by ancient honey-and-raspberry-leaf infusions, and culminating in the joyful eating of the placenta in an iron-rich stew.

      This approach, like the other one, has its disadvantages for the nervous, bone-idle, easily confused primagravida. The pursuit of knowledge is useful; being urged to frenzied activity during labour is a very good thing. (Hospitals ought to have ping-pong tables. At least husbands might, for once, let their wives win as they approach 5 cm dilation, and it would be less boring than flinging yourself on a beanbag.) And the scorn poured on painkillers has at least stopped medical staff from their famed practice of shooting women full of pethidine to make them shut up groaning.

      On the other hand, all that fulsome praise of Nature tends to infuriate the large minority whose babies, in Nature, would not have had a lot of fun getting out; Caesarean, drip induction, epidural anaesthetic and forceps victims have developed a tendency to complain bitterly about being ‘cheated of the experience of birth’, which must sound incredible to the howling-and-bedposts school of obstetrical fantasists. Like complaining about being cheated of the rack or the thumbscrew. Almost as bad is the awful guilt, felt by the likes of me, that no baby can have a calm and silently magical Leboyer delivery if the first sound to assail its little slimy ears is the sound of its mother swearing like a Billingsgate porter and punching its father in the neck.