Mothering the Mother Within

When I first announced my pregnancy, I had a message from a client and friend where she said 'But who is going to "Daisy" you?'

While it's true that in terms of birth preparation there is very little that I need from another person, there is still that desire for support and care during my pregnancy. When I did my doula training we discussed the different 'hats' that we all wear. My concern was how I was going to combine newly single-motherhood, teaching, consulting AND doulaing, exchanging these different hats many different times in a day.

I am busier than ever and I yet I am finding my attention drawn further and further inwards, as all pregnant women do, retreating from the other concerns and winding the processes down. Unlike with my first pregnancy, I am dreading going on maternity leave and taking a break from this job I love so much. This time, the only thing I wanted more than another child was to do my job. A baby I wanted in my heart and yet at the time wasn't quite ready for. 

I have been guilty of neglecting the mother role in my life. It is hard to be self-employed with a child who is not yet in full time school. Yet it has been exactly a year since I stopped breastfeeding and bed-sharing, my son is never carried in the sling and sometimes is now away seeing his father. It feels like this role has been on the backburner even as I frequent soft plays and answer work emails on my phone, or chat to Google analytics as my son falls asleep next to me on the sofa. I find it harder and harder to relate to mothers of newborns. Judah has been accepted to the local primary to start from September, then full time from January.

It feels right. I have spent my time this pregnancy doing the things I never got to, or thought to do, with Judah. Taking weekly pictures, announcement photos, finding birth music, planning a mother blessing. I've treated myself to two new carriers in anticipation. I think once you have had one pregnancy you know how precious and fleeting it is - I feel like I want this one to last forever. We don't know how often we'll get to experience it.

How to transition from mothering other mothers to focusing on yourself? I thought I was prepared when pregnant with Judah but really only now do I feel fully informed. I am not the same person who prepared nothing for her home birth and didn't have a birth plan, believing instead in blind optimism and positive thinking. Do I have a stronger belief in my body's ability to birth now? Perhaps, as this belief has been affirmed by Judah's birth. But I am also far more aware of the various emergencies in birth that do not discriminate between women. I am aware of coerced consent and the various bullying behaviours that can occur at a birth.

I am having a doula for this birth. I could talk about oxytocin and endorphin and the proven benefits of doulas, but why I really want a doula is because birth work is tiring. I want some of that mothering for myself. I want somebody who is just there for me, with no agenda, who I respect and admire as a colleague and a friend. I want this transition into motherhood again to be as gentle and empowering as I know that it can be. I want to share the burden of birth support that has landed on my partner with somebody else, to allow us to relax and enjoy our child entering the world. Before I begin again with breastfeeding, bed-sharing, babywearing, nappy changes, weaning, first words, first steps and immerse myself in motherhood once more. It will be a shock to me to find myself back there.

This is my gift to myself, the mothering of my own mother. Taking time, reflecting, and asking for the essential help that so many consider a luxury, but I know is priceless.

YES, you need to obtain informed consent!

Informed choice is the big catchphrase in the birth world. All birth workers claim to uphold informed choice and decision making. How lovely that people are finally giving the agency back to women, right?

It would be nice to think that we do have choice, but as it stands we don't. How many of our choices are taken from us before we have even begun? When you attend your antenatal appointments and are designated midwife-led or consultant-led, more often than not that dictates your place of birth. How many second time mums know that statistically the evidence says if they want to avoid intervention they should birth at home and far away from an obstetrical unit?

Even worse if you go overdue, have a prior caesarean section, carry multiples, have premature rupture of membranes, are older, or with a raised BMI. You can expect to have your choices whittled away into something considered acceptable by somebody else. To be told that you HAVE to do things a certain way. Bullying phone calls and letters through the door demanding you relinquish your right to choose.

Then maybe you arrive at the hospital in labour and have your choices completely disregarded. Perhaps you get sidelined into something you didn't want by emotive language, emotional blackmail, even tricks. Consent not clearly obtained to do procedures on you, the need for a solid yes or no hidden by ramblings about obscure risks and guidelines. How many women have been assaulted by a medical professional, be it via a vaginal examination, monitoring device or drug administration as true consent was never properly obtained?

Let me be clear on what consent is.

Consent is not... I'm just going to do this now.

Consent is not... You need to listen to ME now as the medical professional.

Consent is not... You can't do this without this pain relief.

Consent is not... You are at risk and your baby WILL die.

All of these things have either been said in my presence or witnessed by colleagues.

Consent is... Do I have your permission to do this?

Consent is... You have options. These are the percentage risk factors involved. What would YOU like to do?

Consent is... I am suggesting we do this. These are the benefits and the risks. These are the alternatives. Yes or no? What would YOU like to do?

I would really like to know... what is so threatening about a woman exercising her right to choose? Is it so inconceivable that she is capable of making her own decisions? Why do you think just because she is not doing what YOU want then she clearly must be under the influence of somebody else? Yes, record that she is declining whatever if it makes you feel better and protects you professionally, but don't force her to say it to you ten times before you'll actually stop harassing and scaring her.

Until women are seen as people and not just a set of risk factors we will not see any change. I am exhausted by this whole thing. Every day women are bullied, coerced and demeaned into things they do not want by those who claim to be protecting them and their baby. Let us be completely clear - nobody in that birth room cares more about that baby than the mother. She is the one who will live with her birth experience for the rest of her life. So many women telling their stories are angry, and rightly so. They felt that their rights were taken away and they were coerced in their most vulnerable moments. 

Informed choice, informed consent, they're great phrases to bandy around but I'm beginning to believe they are worthless.

Nobody Is Coming To Rescue You, And That's Okay

The first time I realised that nobody was coming was Christmas Eve 2017.

My mother has so many stories about me playing pretend and dress up, wearing princess dresses to nursery and talking to a huge “Grandmother Willow” (from Pocahontas) that I’d constructed with about 20 sheets of A4 paper stuck together. I am a huge romantic and all I’d ever wanted was to be married and have a family. I wouldn’t say I had high expectations from life – I like simplicity, honesty, love. I am a giver. I had always wanted a man to look after me, to build a life together. I am a feminist but I hadn’t relinquished that notion. I wanted it, was still able to trust. This is what I believe made me most vulnerable.

I now believe it to be gone.

On Christmas Eve my parked car slid all the way down a steep hill and crashed into somebody’s wall. It was oddly fortuitous, it had somehow swerved outwards and not hit anybody else’s car. The entire back was smashed, sending glass all over my teaching kit and breaking one brake light. I didn’t have any nappies with me and the prospect of waiting for recovery on Christmas Eve miles from Cardiff was a grim one. The young male police officer advised me that I could drive it to my mother’s house as long as I just made that one trip but we would have to tape the back window up with binbags. The man and woman whose wall I had smashed taped it up while I bobbed and breastfed the baby in the sling. They were all so kind. Then they all disappeared.

As I drove home with my eight week old baby in the backseat in the drizzling rain, coming down the motorway to Cardiff, I realised I had nobody. I didn’t know what I was going to do about my car. I felt totally lost. There was nobody whose voice would be on the other end of the phone telling me it was okay, that they loved me, to get home safe for cwtches. Nobody to help me work out a solution. I burst into tears as I realised that the buck really stopped with me, that nobody was coming to rescue me, it was just me driving my falling apart car back to Cardiff and working out what I was going to do next. Alone, nobody to depend on, to come home to. Solely in charge of mine and the children's destiny. I sobbed - I didn't want it.

I don’t think that longing to be rescued has completely gone away. I remarked to a friend in a conversation recently that although I am on my own with the children indefinitely now, I can’t shake this feeling that somebody is just going to come along and lift me out of it. Some childish fancy that flitted across my mind as I gazed across the city… living on the top floor, like a tower. I haven’t lived on the top floor since before I was a mother. Taking a long time to process that this actually is it, this is my life, the romantic part of the story has already ended. In fact, it was never real to begin with.

You say I’ve been strong, and I thank you for it, but I feel like I’m on automated.

More recently, with my new car, only had it two weeks and it’s having problems. Taking it back to the garage again and again. The man who has been helping me look at it – an ordinary guy, the mechanic. We realise it’s leaking fluid, I would have to come back another day, and I saw myself through his eyes, briefly, as he said something about gaskets and then “Sorry, when you’ve got your kids out of the car and everything…”I see the chatterbox blond child with the steely glint in his eye, over half my size, the fat-cheeked baby in woollens, me in my long skirt, stressed out, strung out, begging - I drive it every day, I can’t be without it, without my car I really can’t cope... He was kind, men in general are always kind to me, he topped up the fluid and told me to just drive it home for now and use public transport until I had time to book it in for a couple of days. Advice I ignored afterwards, I admittedly am headstrong… again I was brought to tears by the futility of it all, I don’t know what more I was expecting than that, why am I forever casting men in the role of rescuers when it comes down to it, it’s always been just me?

Nobody is coming. More often than not it's the women around that support and give aid, more than any man actually ever has really - but that integral other half, that partnership, that safety net, that happy ever after is never going to be.

Nobody is coming to rescue you, and that’s okay.

And I connect this to birth work, in that life is scary and so is birth… women often look to people like midwives and doulas, even consultants, to save them – but all these external people can only ever be support, ultimately it is the woman who has to go through it herself. That belief, that looking outward for a saviour is detrimental and disempowering, in birth as in life—

And birth is life.

So stand on your own and call your power to you.