I was recently ensconced with a coffee and a chocolate bar and enjoying my daily dose of Standard Issue magazine when for the first time, instead of nodding sagely and chuckling wryly in agreement, I found myself getting a bit het up and annoyed. (No bad thing.) The culprit was Kate Fox in her excellent article “Happily Embracing Otherhood”. Her crime was reducing parenting to dirty nappies, sleepless nights and tantrums in the supermarket.
Of course she didn’t do that. What she did, in an article about the frustration felt in having to constantly defend a lifestyle that doesn’t involve parenting children, was to identify three parenting experiences she was content to miss out on. And I truly couldn’t agree more with Kate. While I’m a babymaker, I have plenty of friends who are not interested and when I try to explain that to other people it is nigh on impossible. If it was my own preference I was trying to defend, I’d go insane and harm someone.
Having thought it through rationally, however, I was still prickling. What gives? I had a bit more chocolate and a think (while my three-year-old next door, sensing mum’s level of distraction, systematically siphoned all the raisins and apricots out of a bag of trail mix while performing an exploratory reinstall of my laptop) and I think it’s this:
It is now against the law to parent a child without trauma and pain.
Certainly all over the internet it is, and certainly in the area where I live, Middleclasshavingbabiesville, where everyone signs up to the parenting support group on the date of conception to get the worrying and untenable principle-forming started nice and early. Round here, All-The-Other-Mothers-And-Equally-Participating-Fathers-Of-Course, will make sure you know in plenty time:
- You will never sleep again until your child leaves home.
- Mealtimes will be a battle and a trauma, always, forever.
- You and your partner will never again have sex or even like each other.
- If you choose to breastfeed you will never be able to leave your child for more than two hours until they are six years old.
- Your child will tantrum and scream all day and you will duly suffer nervous collapse.
- You will have no money ever again and you will never have another night out.
- You will henceforth experience constant guilt and uncertainty about everything you do, say or feed to your child.
But my goodness, you’d be pretty unlucky to get a full set, forever, and the guilt and nervous collapse are not compulsory. And you are a functioning and resourceful adult: you can actually solve problems and work through a lot of mire and come out the other side. I’m not going to go on about how wonderful children are and how that makes up for everything: parenting takes effort but it’s also enjoyable and rewarding most of the time - enough said for now - but that list up there does not constitute reality or the norm.
The thing is there seems now to be a parenting code of trying to get everyone else to be as miserable as you are. Dare I say, to validate your own perceived failure by getting everyone else to ‘fail’ the same way and painting it as the norm.
What’s behind this? Why are we even miserable and thinking we’re failing? I reckon if we are managing to muddle through and the infant is still extant then we're succeeding. I think there are a few issues at play but they all contribute to one big issue: that perfectly capable and high functioning adults no longer recognise the amazing superpowers they possess for raising babies: instinct and common sense. As I said before, with these tools and time you can solve most problems and work through the rest without driving yourself to distraction.
There are a few trends/phenomena nowadays that I think contribute a lot to this:
- Living far from our relatives. We don’t tend to have our mum or our grandpa on hand when faced with the blood-pressure-spiking sound of our overtired baby crying to say, “He’s just having a wee moan. He’s tired. Wrap him up and let him moan for a minute and he’ll sleep.” Older people are the best resource and reference point for common sense and sanity. When you tell older people you have a baby on the way, they tend to say, “That’s lovely. They’ll keep you fit.” When you tell your peers, especially those who already have children, they are wont to rub their hands and cackle, "Oh ho ho! It's all about to change!"
- Overinformation and undereducation. In the absence of people we trust to ask we turn to books and manuals. Books and manuals tend to give one side of an argument. If you don’t feel confident, you have to pick one and stick to it. It might work. Great news until it stops working (babies are fickle and they stop working all the time). You won’t trust yourself by then and you’ll find that your critical skills in reading can’t bubble through the soup of guilt and uncertainty. “She’s always cried for a minute before she sleeps, but tonight I’m sure there is something else wrong. It’s not in the book though…”
- The Bloody Internet. I’ll be the first to say there is a lot of support to be found out there on the web when you feel alone and lost with your baby, but my goodness, pity help you when you run into someone feeling self-righteous (probably to make up for something or other they don’t feel so good about) about the issue you’re considering. You ask your honest question - “My boy always has a wee cry before he sleeps, but I wonder if he has sore ears tonight. If I cuddle him tonight will he learn how to settle again or will I ruin his routine?” - and you won’t believe the takedown you get from someone who is 100% certain, forever, no deviation, that letting your baby cry for a second will damage him irreparably.
- Marketing. I never felt the pressure of advertising and marketing like a goblin on my shoulder beating on my skull until I fell pregnant and had a baby. The message could not be clearer, stronger or more constant: if your baby is broken it’s because you’re not buying her the right thing. You've already bought it? Must have been the wrong brand, not organic, synthetic fibres, etc. I’d like to pretend I can see past these things but I once stood in a baby shop for 40 minutes swithering over whether I could buy a baby sleeping bag that was not of the one approved brand. And I genuinely wondered whether I ought to stop happily breastfeeding my thriving baby at 7 months because a formula milk advert used a certain tone when they said, “Should you choose to move on…”
No wonder it’s tough. No wonder we embrace the guilt and sense of failure so readily, even the guilt and sense of failure of others. There’s another unwritten rule but you’ll soon pick it up: if it’s working and you’re happy, you keep that to yourself. Don’t let on that you got that baby to sleep by sleep training him and you’re fine with it. Or that you never got him to sleep so he’s now in your bed every night but you’re fine with that. Just make sure everyone else knows that babies never sleep so they will ‘fail’ too and make you feel OK that you did (didn’t).
Isn’t this very strange? Why on earth do we do it to one another? Because, I suppose, all those things above take power away from us and this is one way to claw a bit back. We should do better. We should be the older relative. We should tell the rooky parents and our peers how great it is, tell them about a problem we solved or a habit we broke with a bit of work, tell them the things that aren’t as bad as you think, tell them when we conquered the guilt, tell them when we’re still unsure but we know we’ll work it out. We should tell them to use their instinct, shake off the guilt and have a go.
Kate Fox, none of this vexation of mine is your fault, but here you are. Dirty nappies? Can’t be any worse than bagging Norbert poo. Sleepless nights? They come and go. Tantrums in Tesco? Worse things happen at sea. The truly crap bits of parenting that you truly are winning by missing out on are the enforced guilt and sense of failure and, worst of all, the other bloody parents.
Kate O’Hara @1meanhousewife
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Kate Fox’s article is here.
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