Advice to my sister who has just had a baby

Or how you need to ignore a lot of advice

I came to motherhood late. I had my first baby at 40 and my second at 46.

The first time, whilst I was still pregnant, I read a book and it convinced me that if you just rocked the baby in a particular, very specific motion, all your problems would be solved. It was called something like ‘Swaddle/Rock/Sleep: The Secret to Success.’ I remember feeling so good after reading this book. You swaddle. You rock. They sleep. I was cocky about the whole motherhood malarky because I knew the secret. I had lapped up so much self-help in one lifetime, that I firmly believed that there was a unique piece of advice that would make motherhood work.

Six days into life with a newborn, and I realised that this person, this author, THIS KING OF ALL FUCKWITS had no idea.

I’d had a traumatic birth, lost two litres of blood, and gone through an entire pregnancy being told I was geriatric (at 35 you are defined as old so I was seen as nursing home old). My daughter lost weight when we bought her home. This happens. It’s normal but nobody seems to have told me that. I couldn’t breast feed. I watched tutorials. I went to a woman who specialised in this kind of thing. After a few days I had scabs on my nipples, and there was blood in my daughters mouth. I kept thinking she was bleeding. I kept feeling in her mouth for a wound.

It was clearly my fault that it wasn’t working. The midwives who came to visit were keen to blame me too.

‘You need to try harder.’

‘You must persevere.’

‘What about swaddle/rock and sleep?’ I mumbled hopefully.

‘What’s that?’ they said impatiently.

I had a birth injury which meant I couldn’t go to the toilet without crying. I was too scared to even look at my vagina and wrote it off. No more vagina hey ho! Nobody was interested anyway apart from one midwife who told me that I needed to make sure I washed myself properly.

‘If you don’t wash yourself then you’ll get an infection.’

‘But what about swaddle/rock and sleep?’ I said, ‘Does it work?’

She looked angry.

‘Are you holding her in the right way?’ she said, ‘You look a bit awkward.’

Eventually I ran barefoot one morning to a lovely neighbour who lived up the street and asked for help. I was barefoot because I didn’t even know how to dress myself, and my daughter had blood in her mouth again.

She was a qualified senior midwife with many years of experience, and she took one look at me and saw me, the mother rather than rattling on about the baby over and over, and that I was possibly in danger of losing my power to think rationally. In fact I was babbling. Incoherent really. I was looking at her son and he was about eight and I was asking her how she’d managed to keep him alive that long. It seemed like a miracle. My daughter was still losing weight. I hadn’t slept in days.

All that anyone asked up until that point was whether the baby was feeding. I was writing down the times of feeds on scraps of paper. I was timing everything. I was also now plotting to murder my partner. I decided that pushing him in the canal would be a good idea. It was his fault! I had to blame someone. The lack of sleep didn’t help.

Such a lovely time.

Such a peaceful time.

Enjoy this time.

It’ll pass and then you’ll be sad.

So precious this time is!

Eventually the feeding started to work because of this one helpful midwife who steered me in the right direction. Still the advice kept coming though. This time related to every other aspect of motherhood.

Don’t let her fall asleep on your breast.

Don’t let her sleep in the bed.

Make sure she doesn’t sleep too much.

Make sure she naps in the day.

Stay in the house so you can bond with her.

Get outside so you can get fresh air.

Establish some kind of routine.

Sleep when she sleeps.

Try white noise.

Try the hoover.

Take her for a drive in the car.

The fuckwittery book had of course been tossed in the bin, but still I held onto any piece of advice people dolled out. I became disorientated because there was so much. It was like a dance routine that I was trying to learn, but the instructions changed just when I thought I'd got the hang of it. Friends, relatives, strangers. I took her to a baby yoga class and the yoga teacher told me that my anxiety would rub off on her and that was why she wasn’t sleeping. Sleep was the next thing to become obsessed with. Or lack of sleep.

She doesn’t sleep.

Enjoy this time.

Such a precious time!

Now she is 10 and she sleeps but there were years and years of no sleep. I have learnt that I can survive on much much less. I can function.

Things have changed now, and I think there is a bit more understanding around the impact having a baby can have on a mother’s mind. But there is also more advice out there and much of it is confusing.

Echoing in the back of my brain is the knowledge that I lost my stepmother because of post partum depression and pyschosis. I lost my baby sister. Back then I felt if I could stay alive for a year, and not give in to the catastrophic thoughts whirling around my head, then that would be a giant win.

Last week my youngest sister (I have two surviving sisters) had a baby. I felt some of those fears coming up again. I am now a mother of 2 and I’d say that it is easier, far easier than it was, but that some of the things are harder. It now feels like I’m trying (with my partner) to hold a door shut on a world that wants to make my daughters grow up too fast. It wants them to see themselves as problems that need to be solved. I labour over small decisions that others probably don’t even bother stressing about. I feel sad that I cannot control everything. This is one of the biggest lessons of motherhood. You cannot control very much at all.

I was careful, very careful about any advice for my sister. I thought about the wild-eyed woman. The one with blood on her bra. With no socks. The one padding up the street trying to survive, but scared. I thought about her lying in the dark and trying to organise her thoughts so she could survive. The same words my stepmum needed to hear. That all mothers need to hear.

I am so proud of you right now.

This is hard.

Let me hold the baby whilst you sleep.

It’s okay. I’m here.

You are magnificent.

I love you.

Did anyone tell you this today?