Gina Ford… hmmm. I am all for instruction manuals and am the first to reach for the rules when my family play Monopoly, but where motherhood is concerned, I am a strong believer that you already have all the answers if you just listen to and trust your own instincts. Why is this so hard for women to do today? Is it because we are all (generally) older when we have families to start with and so have spent more of our lives being in charge and like the illusion of control that a book like: “The Contended Little Baby” gives us? Or is it because we are all far removed from babies when we have our own (and I am the first to admit that the first time I ever changed a nappy was when I had a baby of my own) that we don’t even know where to start? Or, in a world where we are so removed from nature, are we dependant on official instructions and rules because we have never learnt to discover our own instincts to trust them?
I worked for a girl just recently who had twins and was absolutely floored by the experience. She had had a scheduled Caesar, and was recovering from a major abdominal operation as well as experiencing motherhood for the first time and had read Gina Ford’s book. She was as prepared as she could be (in her mind), but was still side swiped by the experience. Evidently, her twins had omitted to read Gina Ford and didn’t understand the rules, and as the twins were fraternal, one was a boy and tended to be more hungry and more needy; where the other was a girl who just happened to be much more easily settled and less demanding. She was beside herself and overwhelmed with guilt about her daughter who she felt she was short-changing. Having twins had meant that she could not spend her early days enjoying her babies, she believed, as she was so distracted by each of them that she was unable to enjoy either of them “properly”. I did try to explain that everyone is overwhelmed in the first few weeks of having a new baby whether it is a singleton or twins, but sadly this fell on deaf ears. (for the record I have not had twins and my heart goes out to her as I cannot even imagine the challenge she faces. I honestly thought it was a miracle if I managed to be showered and dressed by four pm in the first few weeks of my eldest being born.)
I am seriously in favour of reading books, and Gina Ford has a good deal of excellent advice if you can take it as you need it and discard anything that doesn’t work for you. By all means, seek out information if you are embarking on an experience you are unfamiliar with, and motherhood is no different. That said, in a perfect world, I would so much rather that reading books is done in conjunction with advice from a kindly friend with children of her own who could offer you hugs and cups of tea and a shoulder to cry on than for women to rely on a cold and rather clinical approach in book form from someone who as a nanny has never experienced the ravages of mounting sleep deprivation or surges of hormones, or the unbearable love you feel for your new baby. As a new mother, you need to find like-minded souls who can honestly understand and reflect back to you what you are experiencing, who can laugh with you and empathise in a non-judgemental, uncompetitive way. Who can share, truthfully, their experiences of being a mother in a way that makes you feel more normal and more able to cope.
I spoke to a fellow doula yesterday who said she thought being honest about birth and motherhood and breast-feeding was almost impossible; that if you sat a pregnant woman down and tried to tell her the truth, she would by definition be unable to believe you. This friend said she knew she had been told in advance so many of the things that shocked her on becoming a mother, and could only explain that she had dismissed them as “not going to happen to me” rather than take them on board. (Less generously, I believe I was “never told” the TRUTH!) I know for myself that reading Rachel Cusk’s brilliant, yet bleak, book “A Life’s Work”, was almost impossible for me until my children were sufficiently old that their babyhood was a fading memory which I could afford to be nostalgic about. I actually decided not to recommend it to my sister who was pregnant when I read it for fear she may actually come unglued. Perhaps though she would have thrown it away believing it to be a horror story, not pertaining to her at all…
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