The Yummy Mummy’s Survival Guide. Liz Fraser

the following:

      

Giving birth is the most painful thing you should ever experience. It is agonisingly, excruciating, faint-inducingly painful.

      

Once you have done it, no other pain will ever seem as bad (until you do it again).

      

Doesn’t the fact that some women go through it more than once show it can’t be that bad? Actually it is that bad, but Mother Nature has solved this by ensuring that…

      

You will forget how awful childbirth is almost immediately.

      

Not all women find childbirth terribly painful.

      

The drugs work. No pain; lots of gain.

      

Put it in perspective: when the result of this pain is your own baby, who will grow into a child, an adult and then the bearer of your grandchildren, and will fill your life with more joy and love than you can imagine yet, what’s twelve hours of pain, really? I would go through a month of pain to get the children I have now. Ahhhhh.

      

The pain stops abruptly once the baby is out. Most discomforts and pains linger on for ages and gradually just peter out. Not childbirth: it’s excruciating one minute, and then it’s completely gone the next. And that feels fantastic!

      

Going through childbirth gives you the automatic and unquestionable right to have the tapless end of the bath, never take the bins out and have a foot tickle every night for the rest of your life. If he does question this right, suggest you shave his testicles with a cheese-grater, and see how fast he moves.

       What if things go wrong between me and my partner?

      Not the most optimistic way to approach motherhood, but if you will examine every depressing possibility then I guess I would agree that having a baby puts a vast amount of strain on the relationship you have with your husband, or partner, or whatever we’re calling him or her. Whatever your relationship is now, it will be completely different once you have a baby, and even well before that moment actually comes. The only way of succeeding is to TALK about EVERYTHING and to know where you stand before you get too far down a road you’re not happy with. There is more about this in New Relationships in Part Eleven, but, until then, perhaps telling your partner about your concerns is a good idea, as is setting out to make it work instead of preparing for it to fail.

       I’m too old/ I’m too young

      Well at least you can’t be worrying about both of these!

      There is no ‘good time’ to have a baby—what suits some people doesn’t suit others. I did it very young, which means I had tons of energy (never underestimate how important this is), my body didn’t suffer very much, by the time I was thirty I had all my child-bearing days all over with, (I think, but I still have all the baby clothes in the attic) and I will be able to wear my daughters’ far more fashionable clothes very soon. BUT, I missed out on my carefree, childless twenties, I didn’t manage to get my career going as I might have liked, my husband and I had very few years alone together, and I now have to do the career and kids things at the same time.

      Older mums have the advantages of enjoying a successful career first, often having more money, being more self-confident and sure of what they want and wanting the time away from work to enjoy being a mum. BUT, it is harder to get pregnant as you get older (tick-tock, tick-tock); you will find the exhaustion harder to cope with; your body will probably suffer more and be harder to get back into shape; you will find all those years of independence and smart, child-free living very hard to leave behind; and you may find it harder to get back to work at the same level in your late thirties or early forties.

      Both ways are good and both are bad. I would just urge as many women as possible to remember the biological clock. Science is great and everything, and there have been some huge advances in fertility treatments, but the wobbly bottom line is that, in the same way that 8 inch stilettos are not designed for rock climbing, so we are not designed to have babies in our fifties. We can still do it, but it’s a heck of a lot harder. Just wanted to get that off my pert-ish chest.

       PART TWO Pregnancy—The Early Days…

      On your marks, get set…what?

      Here’s where our little journey into Yummy Mummyhood kicks off, and I start waffling about nipples, hormones, pelvic floor muscles and elasticated waists. Once we’ve started, there’s no turning back (which is one of the key concepts to grasp when you’re going to have a baby), so if you need a little Dutch Courage, go get it now, while you still can.

      Ready now? Let’s go.

      The first few weeks of your pregnancy can be the most exhilarating, debilitating, confusing and terrifying weeks you have ever experienced. Yippee. With your emotions bouncing around like Zebedee on speed, your body starting to do the most peculiar and unpleasant things, and your list of worries growing as fast as your certainty that this was a Good Plan is shrinking, you can be left wondering whether you really are only pregnant, or whether you have been transported to a parallel, less pleasant universe.

      Things will get a lot easier, so if you can just get through the initial shock, everything will be cool…

      Getting Pregnant—A Brief Biology Re-cap What’s the best way to conceive?

       Have sex.

      That really is all there is to be said on the matter, and anyone who gets themselves bogged down with sexual positions, moon phases, eating certain fertility-boosting foods, the right music, positive mental vibes or other mumbo-jumbo is wasting a lot of shagging energy. In my humble opinion. If you have sex, you might become pregnant and that’s the end of it. Having difficulty conceiving is no laughing matter at all, and it’s one of life’s cruellest tests. Unfortunately life is how it is, and some people are just more fertile than others. How you decide to go about raising your chances is up to you, and there is a lot of detailed information out there on the subject. For now, here are some tips which might help you out a little:

      

The more you worry about it, the less likely you are to get pregnant. I don’t know why it is, but this really seems to be true. Look at all the women who try for years with no luck, and the second they adopt a baby they find themselves expecting twins. Those who want a baby can try desperately for ages in vain, while the reckless, highly fertile singleton who just fancies a quickie in the stationery cupboard is pregnant in less time than it would have taken to actually get the printer cartridge she pretended to be fetching. It’s unbelievable and very unfair, but the mind is a powerful thing. So, if you can, try not to be desperate for a baby, and you might find yourself knocked up in no time. Well, a few minutes maybe.

      

Forget predictor kits. These are supposed to tell you when the most likely time to conceive is, but they feel like a big con to me. The manufacturers are preying on our nervous, befuddled disposition and our desperate need for anything which seems like it might help. I took