Welcome to Mother’s Gonna Work it Out – a newsletter not just for mothers with children, but for everyone who cares for anyone.
A friend rang me in tears this week. She has a newborn baby and is having trouble breastfeeding, and her son is losing weight. She was upset because she felt like her body had failed her.
I listened quietly as my friend enumerated the benefits of breastfeeding as told to her by various people, her words stuttering with sobs.
Breastfeeding is a particularly emotive topic, it being such an intimate and hormone-fuelled endeavour. Which is why strongly flavoured opinions such as ‘breast is best’ hold such sway, even when the practicalities demand other approaches, such as feeding your baby with formula.
In the delicate, liminal space of the first few weeks of parenthood, unbalanced, unwelcome and unsolicited options can be particularly damaging. It’s very hard to take the emotion out of the equation – in my friend’s case, this being to crack on with some formula to get her son’s weight up and then see if breastfeeding can be maintained in the feeding mix. It sounds simple, but it’s not.
I felt like I’d failed at childbirth because I had an intervention and an epidural, so tangled up I’d become in the opinions of those who suggested that, with the ‘right’ approach, you could breathe your child out. It took me a long time to get my head straight on that one. I know someone who prevaricated for months over whether or not to have a caesarian birth, even though the natural route presented some potentially serious health consequences.
‘I don’t want to tell you what to do,’ I said to my friend, but she pressed me for advice, so I suggested she put the stick down. Her body had performed a miracle and beating herself up was no good for anyone.
A few days later, another friend popped round for a chat, panicked because she hadn’t yet researched any local nurseries for her toddler. I asked what the problem was – last I’d heard, her daughter was very happy with her childminder. She told me a rather vocal parent had instructed her that toddlers should be exposed to lots more older children at their age, so my friend was stunting her daughter’s development by keeping her with the childminder.
‘What are you going to do with Dexter?’ she asked me, her eyes pools of concern.
I responded with a battle-weary laugh, explaining that a good few meddling mothers I’d met in parks had suggested our choice to have Dexter with a childminder rather than at a nursery was the wrong one, for all manner of unhelpful reasons. The worried lines on her face began to soften. If her daughter was thriving, as was Dexter, then why upend this upwards trajectory because of someone else’s opinion?
Not to say I’m immune to other people’s views. I’m trying to surround myself with like-minded souls who respect a multiplicity of approaches, and don’t seek to justify their decisions by lambasting others for theirs. I recognise that, as my confidence as a parent grows, so the power of those opinions diminish, and I’m steering well clear of mean mums as best I can, especially when feeling vulnerable.
A week on and my friend’s newborn baby is back to his birth weight. He’s healthy, she’s calmer, and everyone is happier. ‘The stick has rolled somewhere under the sofa,’ she texted me. Long may it stay there.