and five vests, and survive perfectly well for several weeks with a new baby, just adding disposable nappies and a warm little blanket. If you have knitting grannies, aunties and well-wishers, it would help to steer them on to something actually useful: lacy cardigans are terrible, because the baby gets its fingers caught in the holes; most cardigans have far too narrow sleeves for easy dressing, anyway. Wide, loose-armed square sweaters are simpler, and quite smart; best of all is to set the knitters to making a supply of tank-tops (sleeveless slipovers). They look wonderful in stripes, pastel or bright; you can drag them on in seconds over a Babygro, or pyjamas, or another sweater, just to keep the baby a bit warmer without the ordeal of sleeves.
If you find a good source of secondhand clothes to lend or buy, hang on to it!
Finally, consider your duty
The responsibility of a baby can seem huge, vague and impossible at times. Too much reading about infant care and bonding and imprinting and early influence can stampede you into a tearful panic. It can depress you into feeling that life will be a dreary round of nappy-changing and fiddling around with sterilizers, broken only by earnest coffee mornings with other sick-stained Mums in a litter of hideous toys. Clinics hand out leaflets about parenthood, carrying frightful ‘Specimen Daily Routines’ like this one:
| 0630 | Mother gives baby early feed, settles baby. Prepares nourishing breakfast for husband and self. Rinses out overnight nappies, pegs to dry. |
| 0730 | Mother eats breakfast, feeds baby, loads washing machine, changes Napisan, cleans kitchen, prepares vegetables for midday meal. |
and so on, all day, with never a line suggesting: ‘Mother reads paper, walks round garden, goes out and gets haircut, goes to drunken lunch with friend.’ It is fatally easy to confuse the baby with the bathwater: daily routines, crossover vests, coffee mornings and the peeling of nourishing vegetables for husbands are all no more than bathwater. All that is really going to happen is that you will become responsible for a small, highly entertaining, amazingly tolerant and self-contained person. Your only duty is to keep this person fed, clean, warm and entertained. There is no reason why you should stay in the house, ironing sheets or baking like a ‘real’ mother, if you don’t want to. New babies are completely portable, and care very little where they doze and wake and feed, as long as you are there. Things will change later, but by then you will be expert enough to adjust matters to suit yourself. It is pretty rare for a normal, sober, undrugged woman to do a baby any actual harm; as long as it is fed and clean and warm and has a place to sleep in peace, it will do fine, and probably not even cry much.
Incidentally, if you have doubts about whether you will love your baby, because you think other people’s children are horrid, squirmy, snotty, damp pink things, do not worry. It is quite possible to have babies of your own (sweet-smelling, perfect and brilliant) and still perceive other people’s as revolting and dull. Nature is very crafty. And the actual tasks of babycare are not bad at all, once a real baby is involved; you may be repelled by ‘parentcraft’ classes with a grinning plastic doll and frayed terry nappies, yet really enjoy bathing and changing a real, kicking baby of your own.
Your baby’s father needs to know all these things, too. He may be feeling as uncertain, excited and nervous as you are. I have deliberately kept fathers in the background in this book; not because that is where they ought to be, or where my own husband is, but only because the moments when a mother most needs support are precisely those lonely times when fathers are off somewhere. The office day, the factory day mean long stretches of paternal absence. The promptings of biology mean that in the first year, even the first three years, and even when both parents have jobs, mothers move fast and urgently towards a child’s distress even if father happens to be moving that way too (couples in which the father gets up at night to the baby frequently report that the mother lies awake anyway until he gets back). Some inbuilt tolerance seems to make women more patient with whiners and clingers and vandals and food-flingers. But even so, the more closely a father is involved from the start, the more he will enjoy his babies and the less isolated and solely responsible you will feel.
Men do have a different style of babycare; I never got a child back from my husband complete with the same number of shoes, socks, hats, gloves, etc. that I handed it over with; but what the hell? Socks are not everything. If he is the sort who baths the baby in hospital, plays, tosses, bounces, gets the first smile to himself, and confidently takes charge of a tiny baby round the clock, then you are lucky and he is lucky and the baby is very lucky indeed. But it doesn’t always happen like that; I am writing about under-threes, and some men just can’t do much with them, or won’t. If that happens, the babies still have to be looked after by someone, and you are the one who is left with no choice. That is why I have written for mothers, about mothers, and with the help of mothers; any father who picks up anything useful from the book is more than welcome, and any father who shoots it down in scorn is, at least, involved. Good luck to him.
If the whole prospect still overwhelms you, do something small and absorbing. Go out, buy some unbreakable fishing line, and restring all your favourite bead necklaces on it. Then you have something the baby can play with and hang on to while you carry it around; and you keep your favourite beads.
Or else earn some extra money, or sell something, and set up a baby fund; there is no time in your life when a few extra pounds will make more difference. One friend combined the problems of no storage and no savings, booked a market stall for a day, looted the house, and made £300 in one afternoon. She still thinks that the sight of a hugely pregnant woman standing on an orange-box shouting her wares (‘a sixties Beatle scrapbook … a personal stereo … a wok …’) was enough to intimidate the population of South London into buying it all. Besides, it was an adventure. Just because you are about to have The Biggest Adventure of a Woman’s Life doesn’t mean you can’t have a few small ones as well.
My first child was born in November, when the sellers of Remembrance poppies were out on the streets. I was days overdue; one gloomy evening, my mother-in-law rang for a bulletin. ‘Have they come yet,’ she enquired lugubriously, ‘to take her away?’ On being told that they hadn’t, her response was electrifying. ‘Aye,’ she said, generations of old wives’ lore quivering in her voice. ‘I bought a poppy t’other day. I thought of Libby.’ And having thus memorably equated my coming confinement with the mud, blood and mortality of the trenches, she left us to wait on, amid the howling winter winds and the chilly fog curling off the river.
We were glad of it, really. It made a nice counterpoint to the breathless optimism of the National Childbirth Trust classes, where an upbeat teacher had stripped away all the mystery from the abdominal events to come, trained us never to refer to ‘pain’, and generally raised our expectations. We had been comfortably looking forward to a supremely interesting, mildly tiring Life Experience, and it was salutary to be reminded of the other point of view: the howling, heaving and bedpost-gripping made familiar by a hundred historical novels, and warned of (with graphic hand gestures) by generations of grannies.
For years they told us that when A Woman’s Time Has Come, she moans and grips her husband’s hand; then comes an interlude of black terror, screaming, sweat, agony and struggle; followed by exhaustion necessitating