Flawed motherhood

Some people come to motherhood very well prepared. Either by inclination, exposure, or sheer experience, they enter this stage of life with a wealth of useful skills at their disposal. I had none. Not only was I the youngest in my own family, but I had never even held someone else’s baby. Probably other mothers’ sixth sense warned them that I was flawed and lacked the requisite abilities.

So, when my first child arrived, I knew nothing, had zero experience, and was terrified of the responsibilities that were now mine. I remember, in hospital, asking the midwife to put the baby back in his cot, as I wasn’t sure I could walk and carry him successfully at the same time. In my defence, new-borns are weirdly floppy, particularly their heads. It was my first day of being a mother, and it was evident to me that I sucked at the whole business.

There was, however, an abundance of love for this tiny entity, and the universe seemed to have swung on its axis. But as we left the hospital with this vulnerable little baby, it felt as though the entire health system was vastly overrating our ability to keep him alive. I really felt someone sensible should have stopped us.

Thankfully, he was an easy baby who slept, ate, and grew normally. Heaven knows how I would’ve coped if he hadn’t been so very reasonable. Not that I didn’t make mistakes. When holding my six-month-old baby in a queue at the nearby post office, I was ridiculously upset that he would hold out his arms and lean into any passing person. On some level, I assumed he sensed my total incompetence and was hoping some random passer-by would rescue him. In reality, he was just a remarkably friendly chap who beamed at the world with infinite good grace.

One day he would not settle. I tried changing his nappy, feeding him, winding him, and even carried him around to no avail. Exhausted and somewhat exasperated, I put him in his cot and let him cry. He was obviously becoming spoiled, I told myself. But his cries drove me to distraction, and I decided to give him a bath to try to settle him. When I undressed him, I discovered that the zip of his baby suit was lodged tightly in the flesh under his neck. That was the reason for all the tears. The poor chap had been in agony. The baby suit had zippers at the legs to allow you to change the nappy without removing the entire suit. My guilt was epic. Surely no one deserved a mother like me! Fortunately, once I freed the zip from his red, sore flesh, he didn’t take long to return to his normal, good-natured self.

I suspect that as parents we often fail our kids—thinking we’re doing everything right while inadvertently choking the very life out of them. It’s all the things we miss, mess up, or misinterpret. I suspect every child could construct an encyclopaedia of their parents’ failings. Thankfully, my children have shown no resentment. They remind me of the walks, laughs, and fun we had too. The truth is we all come to things in life either incompetent, expert, or somewhere in between.

The journey of life as a parent is awesome. You experience a huge love that erupts, volcano-like, when they enter your life, and then you get to accompany them as they learn new skills and abilities. There are some tricky years when they seek independence and weather the tumultuous rapids of hormones, but finally the adult emerges. If you’re lucky, you discover that they are a much, much better human than you could ever hope to be. Then gratitude becomes the only appropriate response for this epic privilege of having children.

Eating Sand and Ballooning Heads

I remember being on the beach in Portrush with my three children when my youngest son, under two years old, began eating great fists full of sand.  No remonstration on my part could persuade him to stop.  At one point my mother suggested I was making it worse by drawing attention to it and it would be better by far to ignore the practice.  I tried, and sat as if totally unconcerned while he seemed to spend the entire afternoon enjoying the beach as if it were fish and chips!  Later, his nappies were full of this disgusting grit filled paste, so I suspect most of what he digested went straight through his system.  Nowadays, the chances of animal poo/glass/syringes/heavy metals/pollution in the sand is higher and I would have found it impossible to ignore his determined efforts.  At the time, however, I remember it was the oddity of it that disturbed.  Other people’s children paddled in the sea, dug in the sand, made sandcastles and ran to and fro, while mine focused on eating all the sand within reach.  It was like a judgement call, spot the disturbed child, the mother who obviously has screwed up.  Where had I gone wrong?  How far back had I made fundamental mistakes in my child’s upbringing that he had this emptiness needing to be filled with the nearest dirt he could cram in?

Mothers are filled with such thoughts of ill ease.  There was a baby clinic opposite that I attended with each new born.  We would stand in rows handing over our little ones to be inspected and weighed by trained personal.  I remember with the first one, the woman weighed him and told me he was not putting on enough weight.  I cried all the way home mortified with my failure and apologising to my starving baby.  A month later his weight had improved but his nappy was filled with a liquid coffee-like poo that she told me meant he had diarrhoea and that this was very serious indeed.  More tears followed along with a growing conviction that I was not a fit mother.  It took an experienced friend to point out that the clinic was used to bottle fed babies whose quick weight gain and solid stools bore no similarity to breast fed babies, such as mine, to calm me.  By the time it came to my third baby I could watch mothers retire in tears from the row in front of me, while steeling myself not to be upset by what the nurse would say to me!  Then my turn came and she put a measuring tape around his head and showed me on a graph just how far outside normal his head size was.  There was a lot of discussion about brain development, concerns expressed about what was going on inside his colossal head.  I walked home sobbing in panic and fear as usual, while my baby’s head seemed to inflate like a balloon before my very eyes. 

Which all goes to show that as mothers we can feel we are on an impossible mission and are always ready to believe the worst and then blame ourselves bitterly for it all.  So if you happen to spot a baby stuffing handfuls of sand/dirt into his mouth, please just smile and act as if it is totally normal, you will sooth a troubled soul.

PS this June’s edition of Scientific American (2012) “The Scoop on Eating Dirt” highlights the fact that eating dirt, geophagia, is found in 200 species of animals including baboons, gorillas and chimpanzees.  Humans have been doing it since Hippocrates in 460 BC and the Mesopotamians and ancient Greeks used it to treat ailments, especially of the gut.  Soil contains minerals such as calcium, sodium and iron, an invaluable source especially in times of famine.  Soil’s detoxifying properties are also noted in this article and pregnant women who eat soil may be not only cleansing their system of toxins but also boosting their immune system.  Kaolin, a clay mineral, is used by the pharmaceutical industry to treat nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.  It is found to bind to not only harmful toxins but also pathogens.  So I put forward the hypothesis that my youngest son, he with the enormous brain, was fully aware of the therapeutic benefits of soil/sand eating at the time of his visit to the beach.  As such, he was an early genius, not demonstrating mental instability at all!  Oh, the folly of motherhood!  Is there no end?

PPS (mind you don’t go eating the soil or sand around you as it is likely to also contain bacteria, viruses, parasitic worms, lead and arsenic) – according to same article