Ideas that add up #8

Ideas that add up #8

Friends and relatives seemed to have signed an agreement to keep secret about the whole thing, so either they forgot because it was a long time ago, or they are just trying to protect you from the stark reality of what it’s going to be like. But they’re not doing you any favour, I think, by not telling you.

Interviewee for item on early motherhood, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, January 8th 2013

An emailer later in the programme described her undiluted happiness nursing a new baby for the first few months, but aside from her lone voice the on-air consensus was that the early months of mothering are an ordeal, cruelly under-acknowledged. It’s as if society imposes a tacit embargo on the truth so that future breeders don’t opt out.

Sleep deprivation, boredom, feelings of inadequacy and loneliness, not to mention piles. “There is a lot of desperation, and sometimes an inability or unwillingness to ask for help”, noted the presenter. For some new mothers the experience of caring for a baby, especially in the first three months or so, is overwhelmingly tough. Enough to drive anyone nuts, enough to make them mistrust the motives of those around them, enough even for them to doubt their own feelings towards the baby.

Has it always been so? I mean, is this a near-universal phenomenon for mammal mothers, the story of which has been somehow buried and ignored in human culture? A significant part of the female burden, the inescapable price for being designated by biology as a specialist nurturer? If so, then there is a blank in public awareness about the real cost to women of motherhood, and a blind spot about the influence of this on children at the beginning of their lives.

Or – heretical thought – could the traumatic experience of post-natal adjustment be to some degree be a reflection of our times? We in the “developed” nations have after all been reprogrammed en masse, during the past one or two centuries, to conceive of ourselves primarily as autonomous, atomized “consumers” rather than as interdependent, unfree constituents of a round-the-clock 360-degree community – which is how most people have lived for most of our species’ time on the planet. By today’s thinking why should any of us have to endure the imposition of life-and-death responsibility for a loud, inconsiderate, selfish, voraciously-demanding new member of the household? We want the adorable baby, sure, but would rather it came plug-and-play: self-feeding, self-cleaning, ready-civilized.

I write this as a dad who believed, when and after his children were born, that he was giving his partner full physical and emotional support – only to find out later that she claimed to have been let down by him in that period and had become bitterly resentful. If there is a conspiracy of silence about the magnitude of the ordeal of early motherhood, then it is something that men need to know about as much as women.