“Take Your Fancy Flowers, Fluffy Animals, Intrusive Photoshoot and Leave Me The F*ck Alone” – How Hounded New Mothers Really Feel , guest post by Denise Marshall
Before I had my first son I knew nothing about babies. I adored them, and never missed an episode of One Born Every Minute, but one thing I wasn’t under any illusion about was that taking a little human being home so soon after birth, without much chance to recover, isn’t easy. I won’t bore you with the birth story, but it was a bit grisly. In the hospital ward I was
deliriously happy, but two days later with gaping stitches, and a failure to get my little one to latch, I was struggling.
But the hardest, most unnecessary part, was the mounting pressure to welcome all family members and close friends immediately, so they could take lots of pictures and make comments that made me want to sear them with my own eyes. “The pain just melts away doesn’t it…” And “oh you look soooo tired.” If I’d only said, “look people this is the thing; I've had my vagina cut open. I can’t sit down so that’s why I’m perching on my folded right leg. I can’t walk very far. I need to be topless at the drop of a hat to try and improve my baby's latch because my raw nipples are really not working right now. So basically I need to be naked. And I feel faint because I am literally not sleeping, at all. So funnily enough I don't want my cousin's gormless boyfriend in my front room because he's ‘sort of family’.”
But I didn’t, because very quickly I realised in the hysteria that comes with the first baby in the family for decades, no one was that interested, so I just muddled through, enduring severe social media harassment. “When can I come for a cuddle? When can I visit? Oooh I've got a day off (the implication that you are doing nothing), so I can come over…” What and take even more snaps of my baby and grab him from my arms once again? Yippee!” And so it continued, over and over.
And I’m not the only one that felt a burning need for space.
“Why do you get up off the sofa so weirdly?” asked one friend’s sister-in- law after her C-section. A particularly patronising observation is; “you don’t seem yourself…” No shit!
Today in the doctor’s surgery, the fatigued mother of a three-week- old croaked, “she never sleeps at night. I didn’t realise you could be this tired.”
“And everyone wants a piece of you,” I sympathised. “They just don’t understand,” she sighed.
Another irritating part of the situation is being questioned about the labour by people who don’t really want an answer. The mere mention of my Ventouse delivery was greeted by; “oh that’s when it’s sucked out,” and howls of laughter.
Often, the trouble with our generation is the one before. Our mothers healed in hospital for up to a fortnight after birth. Visitors were limited so they got all day to bond with their bundles, got their laundry done, food served and lessons in how to bath tiny humans. They even had their offspring wheeled off into a nursery each evening so they could get plenty of kip. But in today’s NHS stretched world, unless you’re on deaths door, mums are lucky to get a cup of tea before being slung out of their stirrups.
I heard of one poor mum that even had a nervous breakdown because relatives popped in every single day for six weeks. But apparently they still didn’t get why.
A few months later while fidgeting on the sofa with nagging episiotomy ache, comedian Shappi Khorsandi came on the television and made a joke about the post birth bubble feeling like someone has taken to your genitals with an axe. I snorted. She immediately became my favourite stand up, one of the few women in the public eye admitting her first stroll with the pram had been a painful shuffle.
With baby number two everyone backed off, terrified too many texts would tip me over the edge. It was heaven. Complete no pressure bonding. Bit by bit, supportive callers were summoned. Not when it was convenient for them, but when it was right for our new family of four.
So don’t feel swamped by the impending stampede to secure a time slot. Over-excitement clouds judgement, but a newborn comes first, and then you do, because you’re the mother goddammit. And if your motherly instinct in the early days is that everyone bugger off, then so be it.
By Denise Marshall
Denise is a former senior editor on the Daily Express Saturday magazine, now a freelance journalist and content creator specialising in celebrity, parenting and travel. She is mum to Hayden, six and three-year-old Finley. Follow her over at Twitter, she is @nisecmarshall
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