I Wish Someone Had Told Me: Realistic Guide to Early Motherhood - Softcover

Barrett, Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0897334426 ISBN 13: 9780897334426

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1997

Synopsis

There's no shortage of 'expert' advise for the new mother: books, doctors, and well meaning grandmothers liberally give opinions on what you should be doing and how you should be feeling. But I Wish Someone Had Told Me is not a book of shoulds: it is a book about how women really handle the joys, the challenges and the problems of being a mother. During the course of her interviews with more than sixty new mums, Nina Barrett made an important discovery. No one knows the secret: we are all putting our motherhood together from scratch. This collection of tales from the front addresses universal topics from labour (yes, it hurts), to marriage (babies may create strain rather than bond), to child minding (there is no Mary Poppins), to everyday life with a baby (what exactly does a new-born do?).

About this title

About the Author

Nina Barrett

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I Wish Someone Had Told Me

A Realistic Guide to Early Motherhood

By Nina Barrett

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 1990 Nina Barrett
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-89733-442-6

Contents

Introduction, 
one, 
IDEAL: Labor should be painless, natural, and emotionally fulfilling., 
FACT: Labor can be unbearably painful, medically assisted, and emotionally traumatic., 
two, 
IDEAL: "Don't worry, the baby will be fine.", 
FACT: Sometimes, the baby isn't the perfect infant you dreamed of. And whether the problem is a minor infection or a major birth defect, coping with the medical treatment and your own anxieties can be difficult., 
three, 
IDEAL: Once you give birth, your body quickly returns to its pre-pregnant form and function., 
FACT: If you thought recovery was simply about watching your stomach flatten and your bleeding diminish, you may be surprised at the number and complexity of the adjustments your body has to make. And the process may continue well beyond the six-week, 
four, 
IDEAL: You might feel a little weepy in the days following the birth, but it's hormonal, and it will pass., 
FACT: You will probably go through more emotional ups and downs than your occasional weepy fits indicate, and for many external, as well as hormonal, reasons., 
five, 
IDEAL: Everything you need to know about raising children is in some child-care book, somewhere., 
FACT: Mothering is about learning to trust your own instincts, regardless of what Spock, Brazelton, Leach, and others have to say on the subject., 
six, 
IDEAL: Nursing is the best possible choice for feeding your baby., 
FACT: While experts almost universally promote breast-feeding, it may not work out for you., 
seven, 
IDEAL: The baby will sleep peacefully in a basket for the first few months, while you get your body back in shape, cook gourmet meals, and learn to play the violin., 
FACT: Just feeding and diapering a newborn takes all day. If the baby is colicky, you'll be overachieving if you get your thank-you notes written before he's sitting up., 
eight, 
IDEAL: Having a baby cements the bond between husband and wife., 
FACT: A new baby may severely test even a close marriage., 
nine, 
IDEAL: Becoming a mother makes you feel so much closer to your own mother., 
FACT: This may be the occasion when your mother — or mother-in-law — finally does drive you nuts., 
ten, 
IDEAL: There's so much less social pressure on women today about whether they should stay home or go back to full-time jobs., 
FACT: There's more social pressure than ever, much of it contradictory, so whichever choice you make is bound to include days of self-doubt., 
eleven, 
IDEAL: During your maternity leave, you'll simply find a Mary Poppins or a well-situated, developmentally stimulating day-care center, and then you'll get right back to work., 
FACT: Finding day-care can be complicated and intimidating, and you usually have to work with what's available and affordable, not with what's ideal., 
twelve, 
IDEAL: There is such a thing as a Good Mother, and if you try hard enough and make all the right choices, you can be one., 
FACT: It is possible to be a good mother — if by "good" you don't really mean "perfect," which many women do. This chapter takes a closer look at where our images of ideal mothers come from: Mythical Mothers, Memory Mothers, and Media Mothers., 

CHAPTER 1

IdealLabor should be painless, natural, and emotionally fulfilling.

FactLabor can be unbearably painful, medically assisted, and emotionally traumatic.

* * *

You bought the pregnancy books. In your last and longest month, you read the chapters on labor over and over, wondering whether you'd recognize a contraction when you had one or whether you'd be one of those lucky women who does most of her dilating in her sleep.

You did Lamaze, attending classes religiously, reading the handouts, practicing the breathing at home. You overcame your squeamishness and kept your eyes open during the birth movie; you cried when the head crowned. You toured the hospital.

In short, you were as prepared for birth as anyone could ever be. If labor had been a final exam, you would have aced the course.

Perhaps you did. Your labor progressed pretty much as you expected, with a degree of pain you found perfectly manageable, or no pain at all. You may have wondered what all the fuss was about.

But perhaps you feel you blew it. You went through hell. You lost control. You yelled at your husband or threw up on a nurse or screamed and screamed or accepted a painkiller or needed forceps or ended up with a cesarean. Or all of the above.

If that was the case, it's not unusual to emerge from the delivery room feeling shocked, embarrassed, guilty, betrayed, and disappointed in yourself. "Why didn't anyone tell me it could be like that?" you think one moment, and the next, "Was it supposed to be like that, or did something go really wrong?"

The fact is, not only is it possible to do all your reading and studying and practicing and still not be prepared for the reality of labor, it's possible that all the reading and studying actually set you up with unrealistic expectations about labor. Today, women get much of their information from advocates of a particular technique of childbirth, who tend to present drug-free, intervention-free, painless labor as the goal all women should aspire to.

Unfortunately, as a quick look back through history shows, this is merely the newest Utopian vision in a long line of fads dictating what a woman's labor should be like. And all these visions — of births painful and painless, drugged and undrugged — have been promoted by their advocates as the most "natural" method.

In the Beginning

Many childbirth writers insist on a scenario in which our uncivilized ancestors had an "intuitive" knowledge of the childbirth process, allowing them to give birth "naturally," without pain or fuss. But since our ancestors didn't leave memoirs, it's a hard theory to prove.

However, we do know that as far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek playwright Euripides gave his character Medea the comment: "They say that we lead a life without danger at home, while the men go to war — but they are wrong: I would rather stand in the hoplite ranks three times than give birth once."

And the writers of the Old Testament had seen enough childbirth agony to feel compelled to explain its origins — in Eve's bite of apple. "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children," God proclaims in Genesis, implying that not only is the pain "natural," women deserve it.

This biblical attitude sailed into America with the Puritans, and women continued to redeem their sins with suffering. Wrote one nineteenth-century mother, "I went down to death's door to bring my son into the world, and I've never forgotten. Some folks say one forgets, and can have them right over again, but today I've not forgotten, and that baby is thirty-six years old."

Then, in the mid-1800s, medical science stumbled upon anesthesia, which was immediately adopted for surgical use and was shown to reduce labor pain. But an enormous debate ensued among "experts" of the day who felt that anything used to reduce pain in childbirth was undesirable because it was "unnatural." In Pain, Pleasure and American Childbirth, Margarete Sandelowski writes that many clergymen denounced anesthesia for interfering with the divine will that women suffer. Doctors, meanwhile, worried that "childbirth pain was necessary to the physiological course of labor, to act as a cuing device for physicians in the proper management of labor, to the development of normal female emotions, and to the establishment of a healthy mother-infant bond."

But by the 1920s, Sandelowski writes, attitudes were completely reversed. Convinced that childbirth pain and its anticipation interfered with the ideal experience of pregnancy and motherhood, women flocked to doctors who offered them Twilight Sleep. This was a combination of drugs that induced semiconsciousness during labor, allowing the woman to feel pain but not to remember it afterward. One doctor gushed that Twilight Sleep restored "the truly natural conditions of birth by allowing a woman's natural reflexes to predominate" (emphasis mine).

The pendulum swung back again in the 1940s, when a book by the British obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read called Natural Childbirth (in later editions, Childbirth Without Fear) helped, spark a popular rebellion against anesthesia. Dick-Read was a profoundly religious man who did not believe God could have intended a process as miraculous as childbirth to hurt women. Pain, he argued, was a direct result of the fear and tension surrounding labor in the civilized world. Educated about the facts of labor and supported by a doctor or midwife who believed in his method, he said, at least 95 percent of women would have drug-free, pain-free birth, the way "nature" had intended.

The French obstetrician Fernand Lamaze agreed with Dick-Read that pain in labor was caused by fear and tension. Basing his theories on Pavlov's experiments with dogs (Psych. 101: dogs who naturally salivated when food was present were conditioned to salivate at the sound of the bell that signaled the food), Lamaze argued that a woman who was conditioned by his breathing and relaxation techniques could control her responses during labor and eliminate pain. When Marjorie Karmel, who popularized Lamaze in America with her 1959 book, Thank You, Dr. Lamaze, first went to Lamaze's assistant to learn the techniques, she was told that the system was not called "natural" childbirth because "the final result should be better than nature."

Ironically, today Lamaze's name is synonymous with "natural" childbirth. The birth-preparation classes that bear his name consist, for the most part, of his conditioning techniques watered down to a level at which they hardly constitute conditioning and are mixed with bits and pieces of other childbirth philosophies. These classes also usually attempt to prepare you for hospital birthing practices — which are often in direct contradiction to the "natural" childbirth principles.

The result is an "education" that may have left you with a jumble of expectations and hopes about birth which were sadly removed from reality.

When You Can't Get Over Your Labor

This section is not for or about those women who do have painless or bearably painful labors, nor is it intended to argue that such labors don't happen. What it is meant to do is to provide an antidote to all the "reassuring" material about labor you'll find in most pregnancy and birth guides, for those women who think their "birth experience" ran amok and wonder if they're to blame.

If you and your baby both emerged safely from the delivery room, but you can't shake the feeling that something went wrong, consider the expectations you went in with, where you got them from, and whether they were reasonable in the first place.

[] "I Read and I Took Classes, So I Should Have Been Prepared." All those years in school have convinced most of us that doing our homework pays off; and in school, it does. But majoring in political science doesn't prepare you to be president any more than watching a swim meet prepares you to swim the English Channel. For labor, there is no real preparation other than having gone through it before. Even obstetricians and nurses who deal with childbirth on a daily basis have no advantage.

I was an obstetrical nurse before I had the baby, so I figured I was an expert. I had seen women screaming hysterically in labor, but the other nurses told me those were the wimps. For myself, I assumed Lamaze would take care of everything, that I'd just sit back and take a few breaths and everything would be fine.

But I learned that when people talk about pain — even when they watch women in pain, as I had — they just can't comprehend the type of pain it is. I got my contractions in couplets, with no relief in between. And I was only at 3 or 4 centimeters when I couldn't stand it anymore and asked for drugs.

It took me three or four months of comparing my labor story with other women to make me feel I'd done "okay." Even though my nursing background had convinced me that the medication wasn't a problem for the baby, Lamaze had really put down drugs. So I ended up feeling like a wimp.

There was a female obstetrician who had a baby at the hospital where I worked. I'd seen her with patients and she wasn't particularly sympathetic when women got upset during delivery. But she herself was screaming and totally out of control at 3 centimeters. So it just goes to show, you can know it all, and still not have a good labor.

[] "I Thought I'd Have an Easy Time." A favorite image among pregnant women is that of the hearty peasant who squats in a corner of the field to give birth, then plops the infant into a shoulder sling and goes back to hoeing the ground. That same little mechanism that pumps hope eternally into the human breast convinces many of us that we'll be like that peasant woman.

It's hard not to hear labor horror stories, even when you're pregnant, but many of us manage to hear them without listening to them. And most of what we hear and read during pregnancy is quite consciously presented in a "nonthreatening" way, since many experts believe fear increases the pain of childbirth. And because most of this material also implies that we have control over and responsibility for our labor (a debatable assumption), it's quite natural to assume we'll do as good a job at it as we do in all the other areas of our lives.

I have an hourglass shape, and my husband always used to say that my body was built for childbearing. It was sort of a joke between us, but somewhere deep inside I really believed it. After twenty-one horrible hours of labor, the doctor finally pried the baby out of me with forceps.

On the first day of my Lamaze class, the teacher looked around the room and said, "The statistics indicate that at least one of you is going to have a cesarean." I remember feeling sorry for that poor person. It never occurred to me that it would be me.

[] "I Underestimated the Pain." It's hard not to underestimate, since all we have to go on is the memory of pain we've suffered in the past — cramps, headaches, backaches, dental work. But the intensity and duration of labor pain is hard to predict. Some women say they honestly didn't feel anything they would describe as pain, while others emerge from the experience happy to be alive and determined never to go through it again. Some women say their contractions felt like menstrual cramps; other describe feeling as though their stomachs were about to explode.

At the same time, your manuals and childbirth education teacher may have ignored or denied the reality of pain in childbirth. Grantly Dick-Read, one of the earliest natural childbirth enthusiasts (and, like many childbirth "experts," a man), believed that fear of pain was a direct cause of pain for laboring women. If women were not conditioned to expect labor to be painful, he argued, then with some prenatal education and a lot of support from birth attendants, they wouldn't suffer pain. So, to this day, natural childbirth advocates deliberately airbrush their language, referring neutrally to "powerful sensations" and "hard work."

Clearly, no one wants to terrorize legions of unsuspecting pregnant women. But if you went through that stage said to be characterized by "some discomfort" in mortal agony, the problem is not that you overreacted. You felt what you felt, and the majority of laboring women feel like that, too. (See box: Does Prepared Childbirth Work?)

The terms used in parents' classes should be those they may hear used in the hospital. Commonly, the term medication refers to analgesics and tranquilizers; terms such as painkiller should be avoided because they have a negative connotation.

— Textbook for Childbirth Educators.

[] "I Overestimated My Control over the Pain." There are several good reasons you may have done this. The first, if you took a Lamaze class, is that you were exposed to breathing and relaxation techniques which, you were told, would enable you to "stay on top" of your contractions.

Aside from the question of whether these techniques actually work when taught the way Dr. Lamaze intended them to be taught, the fact is that in America they rarely are taught the way he intended them to be taught, nor are women who labor in most hospitals given the support Lamaze made sure his patients had. Six evenings of lectures about stages of labor and degrees of dilatation do not produce the level of conditioning required to discipline the body into automatic response. It is interesting to note that various studies of American and Canadian women who've taken Lamaze classes have shown that, although they described their labors as slightly less painful than women without the preparation, between 80 and 90 percent still requested some form of pain medication.

That leads us to the second reason. You probably assumed that if things got really bad, you'd just take the drugs and feel better. But many so-called "painkillers" don't actually kill the pain; they simply make you too relaxed, tired, or limp to really care about it. Even epidurals can fail to take.

[] "I Overestimated My Control over Myself." All of us know in our hearts what beautiful movie heroines do when captured by the Gestapo and tortured for their secrets: No matter what happens, they remain tight-lipped and beautiful — just as the heroines of Lamaze films do. Under similar circumstances, we hope we'd behave the same way.

Whether you went into labor confident or fearful, you may have been shocked at what you became capable of while in extreme pain. You found yourself moaning, crying out, screaming bloody murder, swearing, or thrashing. Perhaps, God forbid, you were even rude to the resident who decided to conduct an internal exam at the height of your contraction.

After the birth, or perhaps even between the contractions, you were ashamed of how you acted, and you apologized right and left.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from I Wish Someone Had Told Me by Nina Barrett. Copyright © 1990 Nina Barrett. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0897334426
• ISBN 13: 9780897334426
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252