How Not to Be a Perfect Mother. Libby Purves

down in the kitchen, watching you tearfully wrenching the lids off baby-food jars (‘Not very like real food, is it?’). Guilt peers at your baby lying quietly in his basket (‘Poor old chap, a bit boring for you, isn’t it? They do say that understimulation slows them down later’), but it clicks its tongue disapprovingly when you prop him up to watch you round the kitchen (‘Well, it’s a lot of strain on their poor little backs, of course, with the bones so soft’). To resist the sense of guilt entirely, you have to become a sort of John Wayne of motherhood: tough, opinionated, self-confident and contemptuous of the world. Outlaw Mum, ridin’ her own trail. Alternatively, you just have to take a long calm look at your baby, and realize that despite your many shortcomings, it is perfectly all right. It likes you. It is cleanish, and not particularly hungry just now. It takes life as it comes. The fact that it is also wearing a paper nappy, odd socks and one of its two-year-old brother’s sweaters rolled up to the elbows is irrelevant. So is the fact that it is sitting propped on sofa-cushions in a cardboard box, watching MTV, and hasn’t been weighed at the clinic for weeks. (I took my first baby down there religiously once a week, and filled in a chart recording every ounce and centimetre of growth. But the second one did not see a set of scales after she was four weeks old and is thriving to this day. Both ways, though, I was really pleasing myself: I liked clocking up the pounds on the first baby, and ignored rude suggestions that I was ‘a bit over-fussy, it does no good in the end, you know’. With the second baby I just didn’t feel like it, and any fool could see she was healthy, so I didn’t do it. When a brief pang of guilt returned and made me murmur to the health visitor that perhaps I ought to bring Rose down to the clinic soon, she – a genuine, card-carrying parent – just said, ‘Oh, don’t be silly. Look at her!’)

      The important thing about new babies is that they don’t want much; but what they do want, they want very fiercely. And there is no point whatsoever in making them wait for it. They will only get crosser and crosser, make you furious yourself, and eventually get so upset that they don’t want whatever it was any more, but only to scream with rage for half an hour. It seems incredible, but there are qualified hospital sisters and experienced mothers (presumably amnesiacs) who still say things like ‘The baby’s got to learn who’s master – leave him to cry,’ and who advocate strict four-hourly feeding even for brand new babies who have never heard of clocks. Some even talk smugly about ‘a nice strong pair of lungs’ while a red-faced furious infant shrieks defiance in their bland, stupid faces. All this discipline and learning-who’s-the-boss comes much later; what these morons have forgotten is the time-scale of babyhood. A newborn is not a six-week-old who can be distracted from food with rattles; a six-week-old is not a crawler; nor is a crawler much like a wilful two-year-old. It takes nearly two years before a baby actually gets clever enough to ‘try it on’ or play power games with you. If you start to ascribe older children’s motives and morals to a young baby, you are going to be driven mad. To its mother, a baby’s crying is a dreadful sound. (Interestingly, it is less dreadful to everyone else. I have sat in friends’ houses and had a mother apologize for the background mewling of her baby when I hadn’t even noticed it. To her, it was a deafening torment.) So for your own sake, short of smothering or drugging, anything which stops a baby from crying is a good idea.

      I have made breakfast while dancing around the kitchen with a Sooty glove-puppet on one hand, singing ‘Paper Roses’ in a forced baritone, to stop a wakeful son grizzling with boredom at three weeks old. I have sat in the bath with the Moses basket positioned under the towel-rail and a mobile hung above it, swiping the string with the loofah once a minute to keep the butterflies moving and the baby interested and quiet. I have fed at thirty-five-minute intervals all around the clock and have let a new baby suck at the breast for a whole hour; I have made weird squeaking noises in crowded railway carriages to distract a two month-old daughter. I have actually resorted to changing an infant’s clothes unnecessarily twice in an afternoon, just because the said infant seemed to find it entertaining. All mothers, and many fathers, do these mad things just to stop the crying. They have to, because even the smallest babies want more than food and sleep: they want entertainment and company. ‘It is the central crucial fact of early motherhood’, said a journalist friend bitterly, ‘that all is well, until you want to do something else.’ That cross little blob, eyes only just open, is as avid for amusement as any Broadway boulevardier or teenage raver. Nor will he be fobbed off for long with the old stand-bys, like dangly mobiles and musical-boxes. I asked a collection of mothers and fathers to be honest about how they had amused small babies too young to hold rattles.

      The methods included:

      • Watching dancing flames (fires have been lit in July for this purpose alone).

      • Lying under washing-lines (clean clothes have been strung up, indoors, just for babies to watch).

      • Watching budgies (‘Only you must have two, so they are active and noisy enough’).

      • Looking at Op Art patterns in books. (At last, a use for the 1960s. New babies are programmed to be more interested in complicated things than in the simple, bold patterns which toddlers enjoy. Something to do with enabling them to enter a complex world.)

      • Putting the carrycot on a washing-machine on fast spin (mind it doesn’t vibrate off).

      • Propping the baby up in a lean-back seat to watch kitchen activity, front-loading washing-machines, or just about anything. (I have long thought that a lean-back seat with a slowly revolving turntable might find a market.)