Lies We Tell Mothers: A True Story

by Suzy K Quinn

  I didn’t care to visit historical English towns and ponder exactly when that castle was built, then have a nice cup of tea and a buttery slice of cake. And Mum and Dad didn’t shout ‘TUUUUNE!’ to drum-and-bass music, drink beer on stony Brighton beach or try experimental cider flavours at music festivals.

  My parents live in my home town of Colchester, Essex – a lovely historic place with a castle and authentic chunks of Roman wall, and the proud documentary subject of Squaddie Town: Do Essex Girls Sleep Around?

  Brighton, on the other hand, had no Roman wall whatsoever – just a bunch of quirky, colourful little knick-knack shops, vegetarian restaurants and pubs with ironic, cool names like ‘The Office’.

  Let me tell you a little bit about my parents.

  My mum is a trailblazing feminist who worked full-time WITH BABY TWINS AT HOME, while renovating a house and still finding time to be a political campaigner. She enjoys wholemeal bread, cycling in the countryside while wearing a high-visibility jacket, and doing community garden projects. She was head girl at her school.

  Dad, on the other hand, went to juvenile detention as a teenager for letting all the animals out of a zoo. He is absolutely unable to follow rules and will often walk on the road, just because the rule is he should be on the pavement. He puts on really fun, popular events in parks, is extremely generous and makes extravagant, dairy-rich meals – often cooking twice as much food as is needed. He is very big-hearted and kind and has so many friends that it’s impossible to walk anywhere with him in a timely fashion because he gets stopped every five minutes.

  Here is my dad, featured in the local paper after resuscitating a homeless man. Note: he is so well known that the headline uses his actual name.

  I could say much more about my parents, but in summary they are awesome.

  Pre-baby, sometimes Mum and Dad visited. Mum talked (complained) about how crowded Brighton was and how much cups of tea and buttery slices of cake cost. Dad bought obscene quantities of cheese from Brighton’s Cheese Cave and talked (complained) about parking issues.

  My parents tentatively suggested that I might need help ‘when the baby came’, but I was sure this wouldn’t be necessary.

  ‘I’ve read Parenting for Control Freaks,’ I explained. ‘Everything will run to schedule. I know what I’m doing. I’m an adult now.’

  Still, my parents insisted, wouldn’t I at least want them around for the birth, just in case? Births aren’t always straightforward. What if I ran out of cheese?

  ‘Come if you like,’ I said. ‘But the birth WILL be very straightforward. I’m reading about hypnobirthing and I don’t envisage any pain or difficulty.’

  My parents visited Brighton soon after Lexi’s birth and came straight to the hospital, excited to meet their new granddaughter.

  My mum picked Lexi up, changed her and helped rock her to sleep.

  Dad dumped a load of cheese on my lap, aka my C-section incision, and told me I looked ill and needed more dairy.

  I decided that Dad should drive me home while Demi stocked the house for our arrival.

  I can’t remember where Mum was.

  (Demi: ‘Your mum was cleaning our house from top to bottom. She is wonderful.’)

  Demi was instructed to buy lots of carbohydrates. I’d prepared many wholesome, healthy freezer meals, of course. Food to nourish us for the long months ahead. I hadn’t considered that tired, hormonal women do not want nourishing food. They want chocolate and tubes of Pringles.

  Demi seemed pretty relieved to be given early release from the hospital, having spent three days and nights on the overly warm maternity ward, sleeping on upright old-lady chairs. In fact, I think he may have skipped out of the ward.

  ‘What are you going to do with the baby in the car?’ Dad asked. ‘Hold her on your lap?’

  This innocent suggestion resulted in a lot of swearing on my part.

  ‘Stupid, dangerous idea . . . safe CAR seat! . . . It’s not the fucking 1970s . . .’

  The midwife, overhearing this, said, ‘You do have a proper car seat, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I have a car seat,’ I snapped. ‘I worked out how to use the thing MONTHS ago.’

  The midwife walked briskly away, probably resolving not to give me any of the free wet-wipe samples.

  ‘I’ll bring the car to the front of the hospital,’ said Dad.

  ‘That’s where the ambulances pull up,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll only be for a few minutes,’ said Dad. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  Ten minutes later, with Lexi in my arms, I staggered out of the hospital, grey-faced and wincing as my C-section incision tugged and pulled.

  Dad waited outside by his car, beaming with pride at the arrival of his granddaughter, and blissfully unaware that three ambulances were behind him, flashing their lights and beeping their horns.

  ‘Dad,’ I said. ‘You haven’t fitted the car seat. You’ve just sat it in the back without strapping it down.’

  ‘Oh, it’s safe enough,’ he said with an airy wave of his hand. ‘They didn’t even have car seats when you were born.’

  ‘How could this possibly be safe!’ I exploded. ‘If the car stops suddenly, the seat will fly forwards.’

  Behind us, an ambulance gave a loud beep.

  ‘Well, I don’t know how to fit the seat,’ Dad snapped. ‘You’ll have to do it.’

  I’d practised fitting a baby car seat. I had not practised fitting a car seat with a C-section incision while holding a newborn baby and hearing three ambulances beeping their horns.

  Perhaps I didn’t need to swear at Dad so much. But honestly, I was not being ‘obsessive’.

  Back home, Mum had cleaned and tidied our whole house (thanks, Mum). The fridge was stocked with mountains of cheese (thanks, Dad). Demi had bought lots of crisps and cake and made me a cup of tea (thanks, Demi).

  Once inside, Demi and I showed our lovely little baby daughter our home, believing her to be far more cognitive than she was, in that idiotic way first-time parents do.

  Lexi cried.

  I felt a worried pang in my chest.

  What should I do? There was no midwife to ask.

  It occurred to me that I had absolutely no experience with babies. No little brothers or sisters. No nieces or nephews. Nothing.

  I grew up with a twin sister who, as twins tend to be, was exactly my age. When I was a baby, she was a baby, and I certainly wasn’t qualified to do any sibling childcare at the time.

  My sister hadn’t had kids yet and was similarly ignorant about newborns.

  It dawned on me that Lexi was the first baby I’d ever held.

  And come to think of it, I wasn’t really a baby person.

  My parents tried to give helpful (useless) advice, the brunt of which being, ‘It’s a long, hard, horrible job and you’ll just have to get used to it. Stick the baby in the bedroom, close the door and walk away.’

  My parents, as mentioned previously, brought up twins in the 1970s. Their child-rearing philosophy was simple: ‘Keep the baby alive.’

  Any grander goals (sleep training, bathing, etc.) would risk exhaustion.

  I, on the other hand, had a baby sleep schedule to put in place. If this didn’t happen, I was certain the world would crumble.

  Unaccustomed to needing help, I took on the role of angry dictator. When my parents asked what they could do, I gave vague, fatigue-gnawed instructions, then barked at them for not reading my mind and getting things exactly right.

  My parents were very kind when I shouted that they were overstimulating Lexi with their chatter. They never once told me to stop being so horrible and ungrateful. They were just happy to help, and I think they understood I was struggling with a lot more than just a baby.

  My whole life had changed.

  I oscillated between snappy, irritable, ‘I can do it, I’m fine, it was only a C-section,’ to wailing, ‘I can’t cope. Why is she crying again? My stitches hurt. I need emergency chocolate. This baby absolu
tely isn’t telling me what it needs.’

  I’ve always been a ‘can do’ person – someone who mucks in and doesn’t cause problems. The sort who walks home with heavy shopping bags cutting their hands rather than accepting someone’s offer to drive five minutes out of their way.

  ‘Really, the bags aren’t that heavy. Just a few kilos of potatoes, twelve cans of Guinness, a couple of solid gold bars and some lead . . . it’s fine.’

  I got emotional on my wedding day when so many people travelled ‘just for me’.

  Needing help from others, asking for advice, leaning on people . . . it was hard. I felt so selfish. Plus, other people weren’t doing it right.

  My parents stayed with us for a week. Then, they selfishly abandoned us. When they headed back home, all the safety nets were gone.

  We would have to survive with this baby by ourselves. Do our own washing-up. Buy our own cheese.

  After one day on our own, I began to panic.

  ‘Lexi isn’t telling us what she needs,’ I told Demi. ‘I strongly suspect we’re getting it all wrong, misinterpreting Lexi’s cries, not giving her what she needs and consequently making her cry more.’

  I began obsessively re-reading baby books, searching for answers to my many, many questions.

  It was all very well to schedule feeds, sleeps, etc. but not one book indicated how these things could be achieved.

  Lexi seemed to need feeding every hour and then she’d sleep for ages – only to wake up at the most inconvenient times like 3 a.m. or right in the middle of The Real Housewives of Orange County.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked Demi. ‘We need to make this sleep schedule work or I’ll go mad. I can’t do random.’

  ‘Why don’t we work out when Lexi feeds and sleeps, and see if there’s a pattern?’ Demi suggested. ‘That way, we can maybe work out something with the breast pump.’

  This seemed like a good idea.

  We would monitor and record Lexi’s habits, much as a naturalist (not the naked people – the wildlife people) studies animals and comes to definite conclusions about their habits and needs.

  We created an Excel spread sheet. Yes, we really did that. The spread sheet recorded Lexi’s feeds, sleeps and toilet habits, with a helpful space for notes.

  After a few days, the notes were fuller than any of the tick boxes – many of which I couldn’t tick with any real certainty.

  ‘Fed?? Seemed to feed for three minutes, then she stopped. Does this count as a feed?’

  ‘Slept?? Think she may have fallen asleep on my shoulder for a few seconds, but when I laid her down she woke up.’

  There was a further problem – a lot of the time I failed to recall what had happened five or ten minutes previously.

  Hormones, morphine and tiredness conspired to make me a slack-jawed simpleton.

  I couldn’t tell you what day it was, let alone fill in tick boxes with any accuracy.

  Demi filled in the sheet as best he could, but really it only gave us one tangible fact: babies are random. Totally, utterly random. Especially in the pooing and weeing department – it’s unpredictable, and we have the Excel spread sheet to prove it.

  We resorted to Plan C: obsessive Google searching.

  Why wasn’t our baby feeding every four hours like the other sleep-scheduled babies? Was there someone who could come in and ‘fix’ our baby?

  After searching terms like ‘baby feeding nightmare’, ‘erratic feeding baby’ and ‘rebel baby’, we discovered that random feeding patterns do have a name – ‘cluster feeding’. In this case, cluster wasn’t a good thing. Not like those nice clusters of nuts in granola.

  Some babies are more random than others. Ours was one of them.

  Lexi fed every hour or so, then took a nice long six-hour nap right in the middle of the day, giving her energy to torture us during the cold, dark, wintery nights.

  Cluster feeding sounded like bad news. But if something had a name, it could be fixed. Right?

  Acceptance wasn’t OK.

  We needed a nice scientific solution.

  We didn’t find it.

  In fact, quite the opposite. Science was at odds with the random world of babies.

  The breast pump, which should have been a simple ‘extract milk and feed in millimetres’ concept, sometimes extracted half a pint, sometimes nothing at all – there was no rhyme or reason to it.

  The sleep app that made hairdryer noises sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. You could never tell whether to bother with it.

  (Demi: ‘I also remember making a recording of the tap running. That worked a few times, then Lexi got wise to it.’)

  And all that feeding . . . how much was Lexi getting out exactly? Too much? Not enough? Who really knew?

  Nothing in this brave new world could be measured or quantified.

  I watched lovely, soft-faced, smiling mothers at baby groups – you know, the naturally nurturing ones. The ones who want nothing more in life than babies. Who probably worked in a nursery at some point. Who grew up with baby brothers and sisters and a Tiny Tears doll.

  I’d watch those women and think, ‘You’re wonderful. The world needs more of you. But I find all this baby stuff tremendously confusing. Yes, yes – of course I love my baby. But enjoy? Not so much right now.’

  In fact, I felt very, very sad and trapped. And tired. So, so tired.

  ‘My boobs hurt and nothing can fix it. I need to sleep at night. And our baby isn’t doing what other babies do,’ I’d complain.

  ‘What about seeing a midwife?’ Demi would suggest. ‘Or the doctor?’

  ‘What can they do? If all those baby books won’t give us answers, how can they? All they’ll tell us is “Baby will lead the way, your baby will tell you what it needs.”’

  ‘They might—’

  ‘No, they can’t. No one can fix this. I shall be uncomfortable and tired forever. Lexi’s very cute, but let’s face it: we’re not baby people and we’ve ruined our lives.’

  Our shiny new baby, although lovely, was clearly broken. We had it so much worse than anyone else in the world.

  My sister, who was studying a nutrition course, suggested I take vitamins to ease my mental hormones.

  ‘I don’t have time for that!’ I raged. ‘Don’t you understand how much work this is? I’m trying to figure out something totally random!’

  ‘It’s just one pill. I’ll buy them for you. All you need to do is—’

  ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand. I wake up, I feed the baby. I try to get the baby to sleep. She won’t sleep. Then she wakes up all night. I’m confused. There’s no time for vitamins.’

  ‘It’s really only a few minutes—’

  ‘I’ll forget.’

  ‘But I could set an alarm.’

  ‘An alarm could wake the baby! How could you suggest such an insensitive thing?’

  I was a Negative Nellie. A Debbie Downer. A Stressy Bessie.

  (Demi: ‘You weren’t that bad. It was a very tough time and you were doing the brunt of the work. I thought you coped very well.’)

  Maybe it was hormones. But also I’m pretty sure I was quite rationally upset because my previous fun self had been shat all over by Mother Nature (that bitch).

  Where had my life gone?

  I was home almost all the time. There were no trips to quirky cabaret waffle restaurants. No paddleboard experiments on Brighton beach. No fun day trips to cider festivals. My greatest adventure was a dash to Tesco for wet wipes, clinging on to my sore boobs on the way.

  I now know that all those clichés (‘This will pass’, ‘You’ll learn to love it’, ‘They’ll be at school before you know it’, blah blah blah) turn out to be true, but I didn’t know that then. I thought there was something wrong with me and I was destined for a life of misery.

  Other mothers didn’t seem as trapped or unhappy as me. Some of them even smiled when I spoke to them at baby weigh-ins. They were coping. More than coping – it looked very much
like they were enjoying motherhood. How, if they weren’t drinking beer, eating sushi and going on Brighton Pier roller coasters? What on earth was left?

  I phoned my mum to complain, dressed up as, ‘Oh, I just phoned for a chat.’

  ‘Your social life moves to your home when you have kids,’ Mum advised. ‘Why not invite some other mums over?’

  ‘I’m at home too much already,’ I moaned. ‘The last thing I want to do is spend more time looking at our swirly, brown carpet and crap storage heaters. We can’t have people round our house. We barely fit in it ourselves. There’s only one small sofa. I’m not sitting on the floor – I have breastfeeding backache. And you can’t make guests sit on the floor. It’s rude.’

  ‘Well, you could always move to a new place,’ Mum suggested. ‘Somewhere bigger. A bit more suitable for a family.’

  ‘In the city?’ I shrieked. ‘Bigger than a one-bedroom flat? We’re not millionaires.’

  ‘What about moving out of Brighton, then?’ said Mum. ‘Move nearer your dad and me. We’ll help you out.’

  But I didn’t want to move into a ‘family area’ back then.

  I just wanted my old life back.

  #11 LIE – BABY BLUES ONLY LAST A FEW DAYS

  Lexi was born in November, which is usually a fun time of year. Fireworks night. Christmas on the way. Starbucks sell those frou-frou ‘white-chocolate, Christmas-cake, gingersnap’-flavoured lattes. Twinkly lights go up around the Brighton clock tower.

  Lexi was lovely. Aww . . . her little head, hands, etc. However, life at home with a newborn baby was still a little bit shit.

  First off, I was having something of an ego crisis. I’d gone from doing a job I was reasonably good at (depending on which reviews you read) to one I was totally not suited to. I had zero experience of motherhood but some idiot had OK’d my job interview and given me a security pass to Baby Towers. Now I was failing miserably. Well, no wonder! I wasn’t qualified.

  According to the midwife, I had baby blues.

  When I told Demi this, he tried his best to make everything cheerful. He surprised me with aforementioned frou-frou flavoured lattes from Starbucks, sent me funny text messages and delivered glasses of water and cups of tea to wherever I happened to be sitting. He told me if he could borrow my boobs and do the breastfeeding he would, and sympathised hugely with the unfairness of it all – the fact I had to do most of the work when he was clearly the most nurturing of the two of us.