![]()
Part I
BECOMING A PARENT
These first six chapters are about the process of becoming a parent. Your own experiences, particularly of being parented, will all inform the kind of parent you will become. This section explores the biochemical changes that pregnancy and bonding can trigger in both parents and the inevitable changes to identity that ensue. If this is all sounding rather pre-determined and making you feel uncomfortable about a loss of control, then you might be relieved to know that those uncomfortable feelings, and many others, are part of what we explore here.
![]()
1
LIFE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN
Creating a new life
Apart from being born oneself, having a baby is probably the most momentous event in any mother’s life and usually in the father’s too. You are creating new life. Then you will be responsible for that life, for keeping a dependent little human being alive. You will also become officially part of the adult/parent generation.
You are bound to have mixed feelings about all this. On the one hand is the excitement, perhaps the feeling that this is the crux of all worthwhile creativity; on the other hand is the loss of independence and of identity. These mixed feelings do not mean you will be a ‘bad’ parent. In fact you are more likely to be a good parent if you can ‘own’ all these feelings. Your baby needs parents who are not set upon being perfect (see Chapter 4). If you don’t have too fixed an idea about how you should be, you can be spontaneous and follow your instincts, and your baby will have real people to respond to.
In pregnancy you may feel like the star of the show. This might feel like a privilege at times, a burden at others. Perhaps you feel overlooked – just a vessel for the all-important baby. It may seem like your body is enhanced by the new life growing inside you, or that you have a little alien eating up your resources.
From parents …
‘I felt besieged from within by the baby and from without where suddenly I was public property.’
‘I loved being pregnant. I felt like a queen, honoured by the world for my services to humanity – being given a seat on the bus, my husband having to put my shoes on, but also joining the human race – being claimed by strangers from different communities who would never usually talk to me at a bus stop.’
‘I felt potent and powerful and I loved the feeling. I wanted to do it all over again almost straight away – it felt addictive and I remember thinking: no wonder men want to conquer countries – they’re just trying to get this feeling.’
Having a baby is of course different for each of you. Mothers have the direct responsibility of ‘growing’ the baby and giving birth. A father’s contribution, beyond the physiological one of impregnating the mother with his sperm, is the enjoyable unselfishness of looking after both mother and the developing foetus. This can be equally heroic but is often less well acknowledged.
However you feel about it, there will be many physical changes and much hormonal upheaval. You probably knew all this was likely. What can be more surprising is the way that at times you feel like a baby yourself, especially in the company of your own mother. The feelings aroused by having to look after the little baby inside you can stir up infantile feelings of needing to be looked after. These ordinary feelings can be indulged in if your mother is available. It can be a particularly sad time if you haven’t got such a relationship. How you, as an expectant mother, feed the baby inside depends partly on your relationship with your mother and how you feel about the way you were nourished as a child. If you felt physically and emotionally well fed by your mother, it is often easier to take pleasure in what you eat now in order to help your baby grow inside you.
From research on the physiological ‘tugs of war’ of pregnancy …
While the common fantasy of being host to an alien may seem fanciful, Graham Music describes the physiology of pregnancy in such a way as to show that it isn’t actually that far off the mark: ‘The foetus sends hormones into the mother’s blood steam that can raise maternal blood pressure, sometimes giving rise to symptoms ranging in seriousness from swollen calves to preeclampsia, all to increase its own supply of nutrients. The foetus re-models the mother’s arteries so that she can no longer constrict the vessels that supply the embryo without starving herself. In effect the foetus establishes control of the territory and can then start to grow’ (2011: 15).
Pregnancy can be a time of hope but also great anxiety. Fear of miscarriage, especially if you have already experienced this loss, can be quite powerful at the beginning. Routine ante-natal testing can bring fears for the baby’s health to a peak twice during this period but it usually leaves couples reassured and able to move into later pregnancy more confidently, although some continue to worry about their capacity to produce a healthy baby.
Pregnancy can be a scary but exciting time for other reasons too. You and your partner are having to re-evaluate your relationship. This may be the moment for committing yourselves to each other in a major way. Women may worry about their partner leaving at this point. It can be hard to believe that he will happily adjust from the romantic twosome that you may have previously enjoyed or that your changing body will still be attractive. These are ordinary thoughts and perhaps they serve as a warning to the mother about not getting too privately absorbed into thoughts about the baby, thus shutting her partner out. Men may well feel tempted to escape to the familiar world outside. The challenge is to pull together at this stage and support each other through all that is new and uncertain.
From parents …
‘My husband and I do not have big confrontations but the night before I was due to do a pregnancy test I picked a fight with him, pulling at all the loose threads in our relationship and finally storming off to sleep on the sofa. He was utterly bemused and actually so was I. In the morning we took the test and were delighted to discover that I was pregnant. Perhaps I was just scared and looking for an excuse to bolt.’
With unexpected pregnancies, parents who have not yet committed themselves to be partners may have a difficult task of deciding whether or not to get together permanently. They can feel trapped by the baby or relieved to have a reason to stay together but complicated feelings may linger after the decision is made. Unmarried fathers in an accidental pregnancy are often treated as ‘naughty boys’. The woman who decides to go ahead with the pregnancy may mature in the process. The young man may have no one pay attention to him, or tell him he is important and needed. He has no help in growing into a responsible father. If he and the mother can agree on him being involved, even if not wanting to continue their own relationship, he may become a valuable support to mother and baby. He may then find his self-respect increase as a result.
The personal dreams and worries, and the memories of childhood that flood in, need to be shared. Talking about this is part of shaping your lives together, and how you will co-operate as parents. It helps to start this before the hard work of parenting bombards you. Worries about the responsibility for the baby, about giving up freedom, the mother’s concerns about losing control of her body, are all important things to share. Trusting your partner with your deepest feelings is the first stage of trusting him or her to be the co-parent of your baby. These need not be gloomy conversations – humour can help get to the essence of your feelings.
Remembering the past
Pregnancy is a time of looking backwards as well as forwards. Many mothers-to-be find themselves remembering all sorts of strange things that they have not thought of for years. Some describe the experience as a sort of ‘stock-taking’ of life up to now. For others it is more difficult, they find themselves trawling through painful or embarrassing times that they would prefer not to remember. Two friends in conversation came up with an interesting theory to explain this experience.
Friend 1: ‘I keep thinking of all the stupid things I’ve ever done, you know, every humiliation relived. It’s awful.’
Friend 2: ‘I know exactly what you mean, I call it rummaging around in the shit cupboard, I can spend a whole afternoon in there!’
Friend 1: ‘Yeah, maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s like a spring clean of the mind, you know, so everything’s all cleared out and ready for the baby.’
Revisiting your childhoods
Most prospective parents find themselves remembering and thinking about their own childhood, with pleasure, with resentments, probably both. These memories are important, they are part of the information about how to be parents with your own baby.
You may still be going through a necessary time of growing away from your own parents. You need to think for yourself, to work out your own values and philosophy, otherwise each generation would be clones of the last one. It can then be difficult to give up this questioning and get back in touch with the positive in what you learnt from your parents. Having said that, many people find they have a sort of ‘reconciliation’ with their parents at this time.
It is more difficult if you had an unhappy childhood or were actually neglected or badly treated. In fact if you can remember and think about this, it can be easier than if it is all a blank. Telling someone you trust can help you recover from its effects and get it into perspective. You then have a better chance of a happy relationship with your own baby (see Chapter 4).
Being pregnant can feel like its own state, divorced from the reality of the coming baby. ‘Not many parents realise they’ll get a baby as a result,’ said a health visitor running ante-natal classes.
Coming to the end
It is fortunate that pregnancy usually takes nine months – there is so much to do in the time. Not only is it a growing period, physically and emotionally, but also a time for conflicting feelings to be reconciled. Pregnancy means two parents having to learn to get together about an inescapable responsibility. There are two families with different histories converging about their shared hopes for the future. It is not just the baby that you will need to take on after conception, you have also created prospective grandparents to the baby and they may feel strongly involved.
Childbirth and after the birth
After nine months you finally get to the birth. This is a time of excitement, fear and huge emotions. Preparing for the birth involves making lots of decisions and managing your own hopes and fears. If you are informed and have thought through the choices, you have a better chance of keeping some control over the process. You may, however, have to ‘let go’ and trust that the medical team will make sure that you and your baby will be OK. One doula said that she recommends women write a birth plan, mean it and then burn it so that they can meet the actual birth with an informed but open mind.
Talking over your feelings and fears about the labour, with your partner, a friend or with a helpful professional, is part of the preparation for birth. Most women probably feel as they start to give birth, ‘Help, I’m not ready yet,’ and wish this was the rehearsal, not the real thing – but if you have seriously ambivalent feelings, and haven’t let anyone else know about them, it may be harder to go through the birth in an uncomplicated way. It would be foolish to suggest that difficult births are all psychologically based – but how a woman responds to difficulties can depend on her emotional state. The loss of control over what is happening to her body and who gets access to it during labour can be particularly difficult for anybody who has suffered physical or sexual abuse in the past.
Giving birth is a very strange time – it is both an end and a beginning – the end of the time when you and your baby had a unique, almost secret relationship. She was inside you, and only you. As she comes out, the rest of the world can see her. She belongs to her father, the rest of the family, and you can see her as herself, as an individual.
From parents …
‘Sometimes, when I greet my own adult children a wave of memory will come over me and a disbelief that their large persons were once tucked inside me. It’s hard to imagine it now, but impossible to forget.’
So, the labour is the end of this special relationship with the baby. Mothers can have a strong feeling of loss of the baby inside; the outside visible baby can feel to be somehow less special.
If the baby is premature, there may be feelings of upset at not having ‘kept hold’ of the baby inside for longer. There will be fears, sometimes for good reasons, that the baby was not really ready for the world and is vulnerable.
Of course it is harder for anyone who has had late miscarriages, or has reason to think something may be wrong with the baby, to go through the birth process optimistically. But there is something about pregnancy and birth that can carry optimism with it.
Fathers and the birth
It really matters that fathers are not marginalised out of this significant moment in the history of their family.
From fathers …
‘It was a traumatic birth and I felt so helpless, but I kept telling myself how important it was for my wife, myself and our baby that I should be there and stand it.’
‘The midwife was brilliant and boosted our confidence. We phoned her at the beginning of labour and she left me responsible for monitoring when to call her to the house. When it got under way, I felt my role was to just be around and to be encouraging but at times I didn’t know what to say. It was dreadful to witness her pain. I kept feeling like bursting into tears. Then there was the elation of her birth. It is a real privilege to be in a position to grapple with life and death. Although come the second stage my wife was more fixed onto the midwife than me.’
‘When I heard her making noises that I recognised from the late stages of our first daughter’s birth I phoned the midwife, then 999 to say we needed an ambulance. Meanwhile my wife tried to climb into the pool, which at this stage only had about one inch of scaldingly hot water in it. She swore at me like a docker. As I described the situation to the guy on the phone it became apparent that the baby was coming. The next thing I remember is seeing my daughter’s whole head appear. I told my wife to give one more push and then I was holding my daughter. The guy on the phone heard her cry and said: “It sounds like you’ve done it. Congratulations!” We all shuffled over to sit on the sofa in a daze of laughing and crying. Then the ambulance crew all steamed in saying “Right, so your waters have broken … oh I see we’re a bit late!”’
It shouldn’t take events as extraordinary as those just described for fathers’ relevance and competence to be realised. However, there does also seem to be a special point in having another woman present at the birth. It may be sufficient for this to be the midwife, especially if she has become known and trusted during the ante-natal period as in the ‘one-to-one’ midwifery care system. Many women find that to have a woman who has had a baby – mother, sister or friend – can be particularly supportive in the hours leading up to the birth. Something about women’s experience through the generations perhaps gets handed on. It is vital, however, that this does not hustle out the father and make him feel he is in the way. He really does belong in there.
Talking aloud about what is going on during the birth is important and this is where fathers are essential, in listening to mothers and making sure that the professionals are keeping you both informed. Afterwards good midwives and doctors will want to help you de-brief and get the process of the birth into perspective by exchanging recollections. You may then want to tell whoever will be looking after you and your ...
