Lies We Tell Mothers: A True Story

by Suzy K Quinn

  Breastfeeding is Magic and You Should Do It All Day Long was very against routine, assuring mothers that babies tell you when they need breast milk.

  Sometimes, the book said, babies need breastfeeding three times an hour, all day and all night long. And this is fine. All perfectly normal.

  A previous book borrower had underlined the word ‘normal’. Obviously, her big concern was abnormality.

  This was not my concern. I couldn’t care less about being abnormal. I cared about sleeping at night and not being anxious.

  Breastfeeding is Magic and You Should Do It All Day Long did have one suggestion for a better night’s sleep – it recommended putting the baby in bed with you. This would make feeding easier, it said, and everyone would be more relaxed and happy.

  Breastfeeding is Magic and You Should Do It All Day Long pointed out that parents all over the world sleep with their babies in the bed. It is very normal (that word again). To be fair, it does feel natural to sleep with babies in the bed. But lots of things are natural and also a bad idea. Relying on breastfeeding as contraception, for example. Or cleaning your teeth with twigs.

  The book went on to compare a baby cot with bars to a prison – isolating a baby from its carers, depriving it of the loving warmth of its mother and potentially causing psychological meltdowns later in life.

  Shit.

  We’d been putting Lexi in a cot for months now.

  I informed Demi that we were being very cruel and that a change in attitude was necessary.

  Demi gave his tired assurances that my new demands would be met, with the patience of a man who knew these demands would probably change in a few hours.

  As I bossed Demi around, Lexi started crying.

  I followed the Breastfeeding is Magic and You Should Do It All Day Long advice and let Lexi feed for a minute, even though she’d only just fed.

  It worked.

  Lexi stopped crying.

  This felt great. Just go with the flow, man! Magic boobs!

  By the end of the day, my boobs were sorer than ever. I mean, agonisingly sore. Being used as a human pacifier was taking its toll.

  Also, our household was out of tea, eggs and hot-chocolate powder, since the ‘stick a boob in your baby’s mouth every time she cries’ approach meant I couldn’t go to the supermarket. It was bitterly cold outside and there was no way I was sitting on some freezing garden wall, whacking my poor, goosebumpy bare skin out to breastfeed.

  Night-time came – and ended up being the worst night’s sleep I had ever had.

  Lexi fed voraciously. Every hour, pretty much. And she seemed really unsettled, pulling her knees to her chest as if her tummy hurt.

  I followed the Breastfeeding is Magic and You Should Do It All Day Long advice and put Lexi in bed beside me so she could just ‘roll on to the feed’ whenever she liked, but this made my own sleep impossible.

  Every muscle in my body was tense as I worried that I’d crush little Lexi in my sleep. I opened my eyes at every noise – and babies make a lot of noises.

  Three days of ‘on-demand’ feeding resulted in eye-wateringly sore boobs and eye-twitching, manic tiredness. It was a great technique for turning a normal(ish) woman into a psychopath.

  Reality began to dawn on me: I was not an easy-going, go-with-the-flow baby mama. I just wasn’t. Maybe this wouldn’t work for me.

  Tired and brain dead, I delved further into Breastfeeding is Magic and You Should Do it All Day Long for further advice and possible phone numbers for psychiatric therapists.

  I found anecdotal stories of mothers who’d been breastfeeding on demand for three years or more. Some mothers had been doing on-demand feeding for five years and turfed their partner out of the bed to accommodate the all-day, all-night feedathon.

  FIVE YEARS of interrupted sleep!

  No fucking way was I giving up five years of my life or kicking Demi out of bed. Lexi would be lucky to get six months of breastfeeding out of me. If that.

  After many crying fits (mine), I decided there must be another way. If the schedule didn’t work and the on-demand approach was awful, surely there was a middle ground? An app, perhaps?

  I studied every book I could get my hands on, between manic Google searches.

  Other people had done this baby stuff. Other people like me – obsessive, anxious, controlling people.

  Surely someone had the answer?

  Lexi, wide awake as usual. The little tinker.

  #14 LIE – SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS

  In the depth of my baby confusion and misery, I did what any sensible person would do.

  I complained a lot on Facebook.

  Of course, I dressed up the complaining with beautiful new-baby pictures. I’d post a cute picture of Lexi, then write something like, ‘This innocent little face kept me up all night, ha ha ha! AGAIN! Ha ha ha. IT’S BEEN MONTHS NOW. WHY WON’T SHE GIVE IT A REST?’

  ‘Sleep when the baby sleeps,’ people replied. ‘Then you’ll get enough rest.’

  Sleep when the baby sleeps?

  Impossible.

  I’d tried many times to sleep in the daytime, my heart pounding with anxiety as I wondered just when my boob services would be called upon.

  Would Lexi cry in half an hour? An hour? Three hours? Not knowing was stressful and stress is the enemy of sleep.

  Many a time, I’d lie in a sunlit room, my eyes squeezed closed and willing myself to fall asleep, knowing full well I was exhausted and badly needed rest. But telling yourself, ‘GO TO SLEEP! SLEEP NOW! QUICK – BEFORE THE BABY WAKES UP’ doesn’t work. So I just stayed awake and complained on Facebook.

  One of my friends, Big Gay Rob, suggested trying semi-scheduled feeding. It was quite the thing these days, he said. A moderate middle ground. None of this ‘all or nothing’ stuff. Don’t be a slave to your baby, but don’t totally ignore its cries either.

  I was sceptical. After all, I’d read so many baby books and heard so much ‘good advice’. None of it was working. It was all awful! Nothing was fixing our broken baby. Nothing!

  I was also dubious about Big Gay Rob’s ability to give baby advice. He didn’t have kids and didn’t want kids. In fact, I’d never seen him anywhere that would be suitable for children. As a handsome gay about town, his natural habitat was a bar or club.

  But it turned out Big Gay Rob had helped out a lot with his baby sister and knew a thing or two about parenting. Probably more than we did, actually. It’s surprising what hidden talents your friends have, isn’t it?

  The advice on semi-scheduled feeding went something like this: ‘Most babies don’t know how to sleep, so the first step is teaching them how to sleep.’

  This was sort of a revelation. The missing piece in the baby sleep-training puzzle.

  Teach Lexi how to fall asleep? I thought sleeping was a natural thing. If a baby was tired, she would drop off. Right?

  Apparently not. Apparently, babies often cry when they’re tired. But confused, sleep-deprived mothers often confuse this with hunger (or just want to shove anything in their baby’s mouth to shut it up while they cling to the last few moments of sleep before dawn).

  Feeding babies when they’re not hungry starts an overfeeding cycle, which gives the baby an upset tummy and an even more disturbed night. Babies who are overfed and overstimulated have trouble drifting off, work themselves into hour-long screaming fits and are very unsettled – waking regularly at night.

  Whoa.

  This was us! This described our baby exactly!

  Fancy that. Newborns – along with being colour blind, incontinent and unable to stop attacking themselves with their own limbs – don’t even know how to fall asleep!

  It got more interesting.

  Breastfeeding is a tremendous source of comfort for a baby, whether they’re hungry or not. Once a baby is in the habit of overfeeding, they get too much ‘fore milk’, which is watery. This gives them wind and tummy ache and causes them to feed even more.

  It’s a vicious
circle, apparently. Little feeds create wind. And wind creates a desire for more feeding to ease the pain as breast milk has a painkiller in it.

  All this ‘overfeeding’ stuff was making a lot of sense. And teaching a baby how to sleep . . . this would explain why Lexi got all eye-twitchy, red-faced and screechy but didn’t ‘seem’ tired.

  I made myself a cup of non-caffeinated tea (caffeine goes into breast milk and causes wakefulness), held a sleeping Lexi on my lap and proceeded to learn all about semi-scheduled ‘moderate mother’ feeding, via the weblinks Rob sent me.

  Of course, being tired and sleep-deprived, not much of the information sank in the first time around. But on the third look, I got the gist of it – how to escape our sleep torture prison.

  When Demi came in from work, I told him the escape plan.

  ‘We need to teach Lexi how to sleep,’ I told him. ‘Be all calm and laid-back and make the bedroom super-dark and cosy.’

  We proceeded to make our bedroom VERY dark at night, and I mean WARTIME blackout. The kind of dark where you trip over the nappy-rash cream and swear at whichever idiot left it there (must be Demi – I don’t live with anyone else. Oh no, wait, it was me . . .).

  Yes, we were tired. We did not want to measure windows and hang new curtains. But we did it, and also pushed clothes into the big door gaps to shut out the light. And put cotton wool in the keyhole just to make absolutely sure.

  Perhaps I was a little obsessive. But wars are never won by the half-hearted.

  Following the semi-schedule feed advice, night-time now began at the same time EVERY night, and EVERY night we brought Lexi into a dark room, fed her and put her in her cot.

  This was similar to stricter sleep-training advice, but this time it worked because we worked really hard to make Lexi calm and keep her environment noise- and stimulation-free for a good hour before bedtime.

  After three days or so, Lexi pretty much fell asleep within five minutes without any rocking or shushing. Then we became the envy of every parent on the block.

  (Demi: ‘Three days? It took a lot longer than that. But it’s lovely you remember it happening so quickly. Your brain is a nice place.’)

  ‘Good god – you just put your baby down and she SLEEPS?’ people would ask incredulously. ‘No rocking? No shushing? No half-hour of walking her around, making Darth Vader breathing noises in her ear? This is a miracle! You have given birth to Christ himself!’

  (Anyone offended by this statement – please note, my friend said this, not me. I do not believe I gave birth to Jesus Christ.)

  The counterbalance to the night was a BRIGHT daytime. I became vigilant about this too. Perhaps a tiny bit crazy.

  ‘NO! Don’t close the curtains in the bedroom! This is NAP TIME, not NIGHT-TIME! No, I’m not being obsessive – we have a system!’

  In the daytime, I woke Lexi up if she slept for longer than three hours. The internet gave some nice advice about this – stroke Lexi’s hands and squeeze them gently. Yes, it did seem cruel picking up a sleeping baby, holding her under a bright light and singing ‘Uptown Girl’ at volume. But it’s also cruel to sleep-torture people.

  Sometimes, interfering elderly women would say things like, ‘Never wake a sleeping baby!’

  Doreen, Jean or Dot would be treated to a verbal tirade about bad sleep habits and how some people (me) couldn’t cope with lack of sleep and ended up doing things like putting a duvet over their partner and hitting that duvet because the partner had been out for ‘one’ beer and ended up having three.

  I would sum up this verbal ear-bashing by relaying the quote I’d pinned on my bathroom mirror: ‘Babies need happy, well-rested mothers.’

  There was a second part to the escape plan – tanking Lexi up in the daytime with breast milk.

  In the daytime, I brought Lexi to me for feeding rather than waiting for her to cry. I did this every three hours or so. Sometimes a little earlier.

  Semi-scheduled feeding is all about creating a relaxed, gentle routine, but it is also against overfeeding. The advice is not to breastfeed a baby more than every two and a half to three hours. Or four hours if you’re formula-feeding, you lucky thing.

  Semi-scheduled-feeding mothers recommended walking baby, jiggling baby or giving baby to someone else during the three-hour feeding break – just while everyone gets used to things.

  This was great news.

  Lexi’s reign of boob terror was over.

  I was taking charge.

  Me!

  In caveman times we lived in harmony with the sun and the moon and yes, we probably fed our babies whenever they cried. But we also didn’t have hospitals or toilet paper. And I like both those things.

  So feeding approximately every three hours, bringing Lexi to me rather than waiting for her cries, suited me just fine.

  I mustn’t whack my sore boobs out every ten minutes. No.

  But similarly, I needn’t worry about an exact schedule.

  The moment I freed the Boob Two from baby prison, life started getting better.

  I stopped feeling sore. I could leave the house much more regularly and plan trips. I slept for big stretches at night-time. I stopped slowly going insane. Those little toy cars racing around the toilet seat were a thing of the past.

  Within a few weeks, Lexi sometimes slept from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.

  This felt pretty good.

  Pain-free and getting a full night’s sleep – what parent could ask for more?

  Our old life back, perhaps?

  Well, yeah. But that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Actually, it wasn’t going to happen ever again. But I didn’t know that then.

  Two loves of my life: Demi with Lexi. He was always so calm with her. I absolutely was not. Please note – the tasteless Arsenal pillowcase was not my bedding choice.

  #15 LIE – YOU’LL LOOK BACK ON THIS AS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE

  When Lexi was three months old I received an invitation from some friends who lived in London. It was for one of those lovely, catch-up, reunion-type things. You know – we’re all busy these days, but let’s dedicate a little time to checking in and seeing where life has taken us. And having a few drinks while we’re at it, ho ho ho!

  London is an hour away from Brighton. The reunion-type thing was at 8 p.m.

  For about three seconds, I considered it. Maybe I could shove Lexi in the pram, breastfeed her on the train and . . .

  No.

  It would be too exhausting. I just couldn’t. Fancy hosting an event at 8 p.m. in the evening, anyway. That’s bedtime.

  Reality hit me like a Bumbo thrown across the room in a hormonal rage. Life had changed and the change wasn’t temporary. I mean, it had been months already and I was still going to bed at old-lady time. The baby had not slotted into life and life wasn’t going on as before.

  Could it be that there would be no more nights out like we’d had before? That every evening from now on would be cut short – either because we needed to get back to the baby or because we needed a good night’s sleep to endure the following day’s onslaught?

  Could it be that we would have to start enjoying different things? More wholesome activities like family walks in the woods and a nice roast dinner on a Sunday?

  Could it be that I might actually look forward to a nice cup of tea and a buttery slice of cake, followed by a BBC crime drama and a nice early night?

  God, I hoped not.

  (Demi: ‘Personally, I enjoyed little baby Lexi and loved this special time. You are a monster. However, I did feel really guilty about not being able to help. I know what you’re going to say, Su. Guilt is a pointless emotion. But knowing that doesn’t make it go away.’)

  Before I had Lexi, I assumed I’d still be able to have nights out. I’d just breast-pump some milk, stick it in the fridge and off I’d go.

  I didn’t realise Mother Nature would be very erratic in my case, never once giving me a consistent milk-pumping result. Add to that the fact I just didn’t know how
much milk Lexi was taking because I couldn’t measure her stomach contents, and you get a tired new mother screeching: ‘It’s always me! It always has to be me. The breast pump doesn’t work like that. I can’t predict how much milk these boobs are going to pay out and anyway – I’m not getting up at 6 a.m. to breast-pump.’

  I suddenly realised that this was for the long haul now – no days off, no sick leave, no holidays. Every day a little human being needed us for survival and we just had to be there. I mean, we wanted to be there, obviously. We were very invested in the survival of our baby. But we were also exhausted, sometimes ill, and in need of a break.

  A few weeks later, the ‘big night out’ pictures appeared on Facebook. It was really nice, seeing all my friends having fun. I mentally inserted myself into the picture.

  Who would I have been if I didn’t have a young baby? The one giving the camera a happy thumbs-up? The one hilariously drinking wine straight from the bottle? The one holding a half-eaten, crescent-shaped poppadum over her mouth as a smile?

  As I viewed these Facebook pictures, Lexi was sleeping on my giant stomach.

  I was in a dressing gown. The T-shirt underneath was covered in boob milk. My eyebrows hadn’t been plucked in a while and my hair probably needed cutting but who could say for certain? It had been in a ponytail since Lexi was born.

  I did not fit into those Facebook pictures. I was not cut out for night-time public gatherings. Even if I’d been able to squeeze into nice clothes, I had breastfeeding backache that would make train travel on those thinly cushioned, itchy seats uncomfortable.

  I was slowly realising that having a baby changes so much more than I’d ever imagined. It changes your body. It changes your lifestyle. And it also changes your friendships.

  Kids do funny things to friendship. I don’t mean they put on comedy glasses and squirt Silly String over it. I mean that my friendships changed when I had kids.

  Pre-Lexi, I had many lovely, beautiful, special, kind and thoughtful friends. I assumed I’d still see lots of these friends when Lexi was born. Turns out, not so much. If their homes were devoid of parking or city-centre located or over three miles away then they may as well have lived on the moon. Plus, a lot of them were sleeping off hangovers during the daytime.