parenting - Stockport Birth Services

5 Ways To Parent Your Way Over The Holidays

With the holidays approaching our thoughts are turning to nights in front of the fire with our loved ones, twinkling lights and laughter filling the room, adults sipping mulled wine while the children play excitedly with their new eco-friendly toy which they’re extremely grateful for. Ha! The reality for most of us is Christmas24 on marathon, several arguments a day and plastic beeping toys discarded in favour of wrapping paper. And along with this rather more real family picture if you’re a new parent or one going through a challenging situation you might be feeling anxious over the public parenting you’ll be doing over the season.

In a truth universally acknowledged by every single parent that has ever existed, you will be given unsolicited advice from the moment your pregnancy becomes public knowledge. While this is often easy to ignore when it’s a stranger in your local supermarket telling you to start giving rusks to your 3 week old, it’s a lot more difficult when it comes from somebody you love and whose heart you know is in the right place. Dealing with the ‘helpful’ advice can be difficult enough but the added anxiety that can build in anticipation of the interference can set even the most confident parent’s nerves on edge. So here’s your guide to navigating the tricky dynamics whilst maintaining your authenticity as a parent and avoiding a family drama that would rival the great GravyGate of 1998™.

Pick your battles

It helps to think ahead and if you don’t want to spend all your time sniping at your Great Aunt Beryl then working out in advance what you’re willing to let slide is a great tool. Knowing that you’ll allow the sugar content to rise but bedtimes will remain steadfastly the same, or that you’ll let your minimum two vegetables per meal requirement go but you won’t enter into any discussion about how yes you’re still breastfeeding your 8 month old and have no plans to stop thank you very much will do wonders for your mental health. Pre-planning the areas that you’ll concede will keep your blood pressure stable and has the added bonus of allowing people to think they’re getting their own way, at least sometimes.

Enlist an ally

A problem shared is a problem relative that doesn’t get both barrels over the turkey for pushing you right over the brink. Having someone who can step in to distract and deflect a conversation or who can reaffirm your stance is invaluable. This ally might not be who you’d expect; look for someone who allows what’s happening to wash over them – a genial personality or a predilection for gin is ideal.

Have an escape plan

Sometimes biting your tongue proves too much and you just need space before you explode. Whether you conjure up a forgotten item that’s desperately needed from a shop at least 45 minutes away, a catch-up with a friend who you only have one more opportunity to see before they leave for Timbukto, or a child who suddenly and unexplainably will only have their nap while being driven round the outskirts of your town, some time on your own away from the source of contention will do you wonders. Plus you’ll get to scroll through Facebook and eat rustled After Eights without interruption.

Practice your defence

Freedom of speech might exist but that doesn’t put you under any obligation to listen, let alone act, on what’s being said. Especially if that advice goes against your principles or is so old-fashioned it’s downright dangerous. Unfortunately much advice that’s given to parents by well-meaning individuals comes from what they did when they were raising their young folk; early weaning, dipping dummies in anything let alone whisky, leaving them to cry, feeding them on a four-hourly schedule, creating a rod for your own back are all things older generations like to trot out and are all things which are unequivocally, backed-up-by-science wrong. If a dignified silence is too much to ask have a couple of stock phrases that you can resort to. “Thanks for the advice, that doesn’t work for us”, “We’ve researched our methods and this is what we believe is right for our family”, “We don’t believe that’s going to work for us” all work and the slightly ruder but definitely final word is “You’re not the parent so butt out, buttinski”. Practice makes perfect!

If all else fails, remember you are your child’s advocate.

Often when we attend family gatherings we revert back to the dynamics that existed in our own childhoods, making it hard to speak up or against the adultier adult. But your child knows only you as the ultimate authority in their life and sometimes that must give us the strength to act in their best interests. That could mean speaking loudly and insistently that yes even a little bit of milk will hurt your CMPA child, or stepping in when Granny insists that your unwilling child simply must kiss her goodbye when you’re trying to teach the concept of consent from an early age. Some things transcend politeness and will help shape your child’s identity so let this give you strength when dealing with tricky situations.

Time with family is the greatest gift over the holiday season, along with liebkuchen and pigs in blankets, but it’s rarely as idyllic as our favourite Christmas films would have us believe. Stay calm, prepare in advance and if all else fails dive right into the bottle of Irish cream lurking at the back of the cupboard. Good luck!

Breastfeeding, And Why Smugness Came Before A Fall

This was originally written for Professor Amy Brown who was compiling one of her books. I don’t think it’s been used in print and I’ve re-discovered it on my hard drive so I thought I’d share here.

When I got pregnant with my first child I went into research-mode and looked for THE best way to do every single aspect of pregnancy and baby-care. (Unfortunately, I was also a smug first-time mom to be and didn’t hold back in telling everyone why my way was going to be THE best way and questioning why on earth wasn’t everyone doing the same as me. God I cringe so hard. Sorry, everybody I came into contact with then!)

A huge part of this was, of course, how I was going to feed my baby. Breast is best hun, so despite having no clue whatsoever of what breastfeeding entailed I decided that was that and I was going to breastfeed my son. I wasn’t breastfed myself – a fact I knew only because my mom took great delight in telling everybody that I never cried as a baby and just stood in my cot waiting for a bottle. We’ll just skip past that little attachment issue in waiting there…In fact, to the best of my knowledge I only ever saw one person breastfeeding during my childhood; a friend of my mom’s giving her newborn twins milk. Now I look back and know how much hard work that would have been and I’m slightly in awe!

Of course, smugness goes before a fall. Literally, in my case. I fell down the stairs on my due date and damaged my coccyx which set the scene for a really traumatic-feeling end to my pregnancy, and my labour couldn’t have deviated further from my birth plan if it had tried. It traumatised me so much it nearly stopped any future children from being considered, and it definitely impacted on my ability to bond with my son in those early days. Frankly, I wanted nothing more than to hide in bed until all the pain went away. So having a baby who didn’t immediately latch on and do something “natural” was more than I had the ability to cope with at that point. I just didn’t have the stamina or desire to add fighting to feed my baby into the mix – and it really did feel like a fight. He wouldn’t latch, every position hurt, my nipples hurt, my coccyx hurt, my stitches hurt, I was too anaemic to sit upright. In my drug, hormone and tiredness addled state I thought expressing would be the best option in the short-term. So that’s what I started to do. My very first time at the pump produced about 10mls of colostrum which would have been great except it was red, so of course I thought I was poisoning my baby with infected milk. It really wasn’t easy this parenting lark.

I carried on pumping, putting baby to the breast as often as I felt I could which in hindsight is nowhere nearly enough to have done anything particularly useful. And I carried on pumping. And I carried on thinking that we’d crack breastfeeding soon. And I carried on pumping. And I started to think that perhaps one of us just couldn’t do it. And I carried on pumping. And I stopped putting him to the breast. And I carried on pumping. And I carried on pumping.

Thankfully I responded well to the pump. I could nearly always keep up with his demand, despite him taking so much milk each day. He was diagnosed with reflux and drank milk to soothe the pain, invariably vomiting it across the room in an exorcist-style propulsion of milk and mucous. When your hard-pumped milk was so rapidly discarded there really was a point in crying over spilt milk.

I don’t know how I kept up the regime of expressing for 5 months. One of the overriding memories I have of those early months with him is frantically rocking his bouncer to stop him crying while I urged my boobs to be faster at filling those bloody bottles. It was intense. Having gone through the newborn period with two subsequent children I’m filled with regret at how much I missed with the pump-feed-wash-sterilise routine. Even more regret that I was never told things that would have eased the intensity of exclusive pumping – like the fact you don’t need to sterilise breast pump paraphernalia! (note: current NHS guidelines have been revised to say that now it is recommended to sterilise breastmilk equipment).

My husband was as supportive as he could have possibly been and made it as easy as he could possibly have made it (apart from that one fatal misunderstanding where he binned an entire freezer drawer full of milk stash – that one still smarts!) but he didn’t ‘get’ it. It would have been really nice to be able to talk to people who had been there. People who had breastfed, people who had expressed, people who I didn’t mind being vulnerable in front of. But there was nobody. None of my friends had yet had children and my family weren’t breastfeeders. Even the most well-intentioned support doesn’t quite hit the spot when it’s from somebody with no experience of the issue.

Years have passed and more babies have happened. After success feeding my second-born I trained as a breastfeeding peer supporter and have been volunteering at community support groups for several years. She was breastfed until the hallowed WHO guidance of 2 years, self-weaning shortly after her birthday. My third-born is showing no signs of stopping, we’ll address weaning if and when it becomes a problem. A small, irrational part of me probably thinks longer-term breastfeeding makes amends for the fiasco that was my son’s first months. The bigger, more rational part of me knows that’s bobbins and I did the best I could have done, which is all any of us can do, really, isn’t it?

Ten Years Ago I Became A Mother. And I Became Friendless.

Becoming a mother was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not just birth, although that left me wishing the baby would disappear halfway through the experience and I could go back to not having a baby at all thank you very much. But the act of becoming a mother, that transition time between having a baby and being a competent parent (ok, I’m still not sure I’m that ~~some~~ most of the time), the time where we grow into our roles. Jeesh that was hard.

I was overwhelmed. We had no family support close to us. We had no friends with children to learn from. We only had books like The Baby Whisperer and Gina Ford to tell us what to do. We had the narrative from society that babies should be seen and not heard, but only sometimes, when it was convenient and as long as they didn’t interrupt your plans. The rest of the time it felt like they were supposed to be shut into a drawer and forgotten about so you could go back to doing the things you used to do in that mythical time BC. We were promised we would make lifelong friends at NCT classes and Early Days groups but they passed in a blur of trying not to cry because you’re exhausted, wishing desperately our babies were sitting quietly like the others, and wondering if you left early could you time the nap with lunchtime so you could actually eat that day.

The initial flurry of visitors post-birth soon stopped. The token gestures of still being invited out with childless friends came to an end. The resentment that they didn’t understand that I had a 4 week old, or a 2 month old, or a 4 month old, or a high needs baby, and hadn’t slept properly for more than a hundredbillionty years built. The photos of them going out enjoying themselves without me appeared. I didn’t want to see them ever again. Dumped and ignored. Meeting up with other new moms happened, but these passed in a blur of poo and sleep issues and much as friendships with colleagues stall as soon as you leave the company, there was an expectation that these wouldn’t last either.

The reality was my life HAD changed from what it was before, and going backwards is never an option. Their lives hadn’t. My world had ripped apart and theirs was exactly the same. And that wasn’t their fault. And it wasn’t mine either. Becoming a parent can be hugely overwhelming but it’s compounded by the expectation we put on ourselves. We expect babies to slot right in and for us to carry on as normal. We expect a week of no sleep and then it becomes a problem to be solved. We expect to feed our babies a lot but we only have what the side of a tin tells us is the right schedule. We buy cots and Moses baskets and we expect our babies to sleep in them. From before a baby is even born we’re sold the idea that babies will be satisfied with milk, burp and a nappy change before going to sleep (like a baby ) and we can continue our lives with wild abandon.

And when we find out that we need to do more than that, and it’s relentless and gruelling and lonely, when we need friends more than ever just to get through the hardest part of our lives, just as we’re finally ready to raise your head above the parapet and come blinking into the world again, that’s when the cruellest trick happens and we realise that the world has carried on turning and although our own plot line has changed dramatically everyone else is still playing out their own movie. And their movie doesn’t have babies. Being the mature, resilient person I am I didn’t talk this through with my friends, who would no doubt have been devastated to hear what I was feeling and would have done what they could to counter it but a tired and traumatised brain doesn’t think logically.

Finding out I had a lifelong chronic condition at the same time, exacerbated the loneliness, hurt and worthlessness I felt. It felt like my body was doing it just out of spite but the reality is it was my body’s way of dealing with the trauma I’d gone through. The reality is if I’d not shut down, if I’d opened up a bit I’d have found it all easier. But that’s the quirks of the human brain, isn’t it?

Telling someone in the throes of this that it doesn’t stay like this forever is useless. But it doesn’t. Slowly you realise that those fabled friends-for-life that you make at NCT really are becoming your trusted confidantes and are willing to step into whatever emergency you throw at them. Slowly you understand yours and your baby’s rhythm and can adjust to it. Slowly you start getting sleep on a regular basis and can commit to an evening that doesn’t feature an 8pm bedtime. If you’re lucky you’ve thrown the baby books away and are parenting peacefully with the baby you have, not the baby the books tell you that you should have. And those friends who have loved you since school and who have suffered you pushing them away when life got hard will accept the baby steps you make back to friendships and welcome you with open arms.

It gets better. Open your heart and let people in. And if you’re on the other side of it, check in with your friends who have had babies – they might just be glad of that friendly text (even if they do bail on plans at the last minute and sleep instead!)