I decided I wanted to write about the joy of birth, being able to work with my body and feeling the great waves of contractions sweep through me. Though painful, they are exciting; like surf riding. I thought, Why can’t all other women feel this exhilaration too? Why do many think of birth as like a surgical operation? Why do they approach it as if it were a road accident? As if they can’t make decisions about their bodies and their babies and other people must make them for them?
Six weeks later I began writing The Experience of Childbirth. Polly was waking at 5.30 a.m. in the morning to breastfeed, and it was an ideal opportunity to write before everybody else woke up. Writing early in that precious time in the morning, in the first light of dawn, has stayed a habit – a quiet, peaceful time when my mind is still rich with waking thoughts, ideas and phrases. That first draft took me six weeks. Then I read it through aloud (that was important, I think, because I wanted to speak to women in my own voice, not to harangue them, and not to be literary) and amended it over another few weeks.
The challenge I faced was to create a language to convey the multi-faceted sensations of labour and birth, physical and emotional, to find words for the rush of energy as contractions welled up and squeezed the uterus, and the power that builds mountains was released in your body, for the feeling as the baby’s head crowned as if in a ring of fire, and the birth passion. I have been criticised for discussing giving birth in terms of sex, as if I were imposing on women a kind of sexual performance, birth with orgasm. But for me birth was an intense psycho-sexual experience. This is not surprising, since both childbirth and lactation involve the same hormones as in sexual arousal, and both are an expression of what is going on in the mind, not just the body.
Nothing like this had ever been published before. Grantly Dick-Read had written Childbirth Without Fear.7 But that was from a kindly male doctor’s point of view. He couldn’t describe the amazing energy that poured through a woman’s body. He taught that birth ‘shouldn’t hurt’ if the mother relaxed. But of course it did! Though the pain was a side-effect of the creative process, of muscles tightening and stretching as the baby’s head pressed down to be born – positive pain, pain with a purpose. He had photographs, too, but the women’s faces were all stamped with black rectangles so that they couldn’t possibly be recognised. They looked like brick-headed robots.
In France, psychoprophylaxis was the latest fashion. An American, Marjorie Karmel, wrote Thank You, Dr Lamaze8 – to my mind a sycophantic book extolling the benefits of his method of strict training in breathing and relaxation. It was an enthusiastic instruction manual. If a woman obeyed his teachings she ‘should’ have no pain. If she did feel pain, however, it was evidence that she had not obeyed the obstetrician’s instructions, conformed to the ‘correct’ number of huffs and puffs, or did not hold her breath long enough when pushing, failed to practice assiduously, and lacked commitment. In his book Painless Childbirth,9 for example, Lamaze discussed the second stage of labour as taking place ‘under the command of the obstetrician-in-charge. One parturient has defined this very well: “The obstetrician was the conductor; I was the first violin’.’’ And went on to say, ‘The woman, having settled down to her delivery, will inform the obstetrician each time she has a contraction. He will then direct her thus: “Breathe in, blow out”; then, ‘“Breathe in, hold it, pull on the bars, bring your chest out and push well down.”’ This was nothing to do with what I believed, or my experience. I was fed up with women being blamed for everything that happened to them.
I had no agent, but knew that the firm of Victor Gollancz was innovative and idealistic. Gollancz published detective stories with bright yellow covers and radical sociology and politics. I sent the manuscript off to him, with several photographs taken by Uwe of me giving birth, breathing my way through contractions, smiling as I reached down to stroke the top of a glistening head that was just emerging, and holding a naked baby against my breasts. My brother-in-law, Hilary Rubinstein, who was married to Uwe’s younger sister Helge, worked at Gollancz. Victor called him to his office and said, apparently with shocked disbelief, ‘I have photographs of your sister-in-law’s private parts on my desk.’
I am grateful to them for their courage. They decided to go ahead and publish. It was clear sailing from then on. The editor suggested a few minor adjustments. Otherwise the book was published in 1962 exactly as I wrote it in that post-birth milky, glowing ‘babymoon’.
The Observer serialised three chapters, the first extract taking up the whole front page of the supplement. With four children under five, I had no spare time. Any career as a social anthropologist was certainly on hold. But I was a writer! The Experience of Childbirth was subsequently sold to Penguin and went through 23 impressions with them. It has been published in many languages, and sold well over a million copies. It is still in print, now with Orion. The whole experience was astonishing. The only thing that compares with having your first baby is having your first book.
Jenny’s Birth
Jenny’s birth at home in March 1963 was really do-it-yourself. My waters started leaking, and I had backache for five hours or so during the night. I thought labour was probably about to start, slept fitfully, and was suddenly awakened by hefty contractions. We just had time to get ready before they came thick and fast. It was daybreak, and the birds were singing outside the open window.
I had four children under five in 1961
I did not want to call the midwife too soon, as my own midwife was on holiday and I did not know her replacement. We decided to wait until we were absolutely sure that the second stage was about to start. By then it was too late. I felt my body opening like a rose. Uwe was filming and saying, ‘Smile, darling.’ I did, and opened more. I put my hands down and stroked Jenny’s head in my vagina. She gave birth to herself, emerging like a swimmer doing the crawl, and then crept over my thigh and up my body, knowing perfectly well what to do and the way to my breasts. It was the perfect birth!
The labour had been 40 minutes of action. The other four children came in wearing new flower-sprigged night-dresses especially bought for the occasion. They helped me wash and dress Jenny. And then we remembered to call the midwife.
Birth has been empowering for me. I do not believe that childbirth is the only way that women can find fulfilment, but for me it has been a peak experience, one that has liberated the energy to strive for better birthing conditions for all women.
For many other women, what began as an experience that we wanted to ensure was intimate, part of the ebb and flow of life – the birth of a child from love into love – opened the way into a deeper political awareness. For in childbirth, as in other aspects of women’s lives, the personal is the political. When we acknowledge this, we create the conditions that make it possible to liberate women from the degradation, senseless mutilation, and violence imposed on them by medical systems everywhere. We start to reclaim our bodies in joy, drawing strength from our shared experiences as women.
Jenny’s first day
Me As A Mother
Now I had five little girls under seven! With intermittent help from an au pair, it wasn’t the easiest way of mothering. But I carried on combining teaching with lecturing.
Motherhood is never what you expect. It is an incredible adventure. You discover a lot about yourself. I don’t think it can be for any woman exactly what she thinks it is going to be. I thought I would be in control somehow in bringing up my children, whereas, in fact, you find that they bring you up. Motherhood is a magical mystery tour and you soar to the heights of elation and swoop into depths of despair. It is one of the best forms of education there is if you are prepared to learn from it, and you learn along with your children.
I made up my mind to have my babies close to me to be able to respond lovingly when they needed me. This was when they were hungry, of course, when they needed a nappy changed, were too hot or too cold, but also when they couldn’t reach, or manipulate, something that attracted them, manag
e to do something they wanted, or were bored and sought stimulation.
Mattresses are for bouncing. Water is for pouring. Sand is for scattering. Walls are for drawing. Paper is for cutting. Those were my five maxims for happy living with five children.
Sleep training methods that were given scientific justification by the Behaviourists in the 1920s have made a come-back and become popular today. They can be highly successful at producing a compliant child. For many parents there is no doubt that they work. In a 1928 edition of Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book of general household advice, the author, a man, wrote that if a mother responded to crying by immediately feeding her baby it would demand milk ‘at improper times and without necessity.’ Cuddling and carrying a baby around exposed it to infection. The right place for a baby was in its cot. He explained that a baby used crying to exert power over parents and also needed to cry to strengthen its lungs. A nurse or mother who tried to stop it crying was harming it. Crying was almost the only form of exercise a baby got. It caused blood to circulate, helped digestion, and promoted growth.
Today, once again, methods of ‘controlled crying’ and rigid time-tables are ways in which mothers are taught that they must exercise discipline if they are to gain the upper hand and avoid being manipulated by their babies. This approach is popular with parents who want a quick fix for sleeping problems, do not understand the separation distress experienced by babies, and who fail to consider that if we do not respond to babies we risk them learning to give up and becoming emotionally detached. They may grow into people who are despairing and depressed, find it difficult to form social relationships, and sometimes are in a more or less permanent state of resentment and hostility.
I enjoyed breastfeeding. With the twins it was easy, too. I did not introduce tastes of solids till they were six months old, fed Tess for over nine months, and Nell, the smaller one, for a year. She was usually ready for a feed about half an hour before Tess, so I had time to concentrate on each one separately. Polly, number four, usually woke for a breastfeed at about 5.30 a.m. She suckled energetically, and then lay happily on my bed while I worked on the first edition of The Experience of Childbirth. I was excited by birth and words came pouring out on a wave of energy.
This has remained my general pattern for the day: get down to putting ideas together and do some solid writing before the pressures of the rest of the day are upon me. I know that there is a fashion to train babies not to wake until 7 a.m. on the grounds that the mother’s life will be chaotic otherwise and she will get exhausted, but it didn’t work like that with me. Polly’s early waking gave me an opportunity for my own time, as well as time to share with her. That is how I started writing books.
I believe that children should have a lot of space to experiment, play, interact and learn from each other. As a result I have never wanted to feel ‘in charge’. When I was writing a book and they were small the playpen became maternal territory, and I sat inside it with my papers and reference materials so that they could roam the house. They could see exactly what I was doing and I was there if they wanted me, but I was in no way dominating or directing them, and far from being isolated in my study, with the kids in the nursery, we lived in the same world.
Mothers often talk in terms of phases. We say, ‘When he can find his thumb to suck he won’t cry so much’; ‘It’ll be easier when she can crawl … or walk …’ or ‘no longer wakes at night’. It is as if a woman thinks, ‘Once we are over this I can be a good mother. I shall be able to cope.’ She is really saying something about herself, of course, about the goals for which she strives, and how she is going to meet those standards in the future. Gradually it dawns on her that she is face to face with an individual with a personality of incredible strength, and that motherhood is never going to be easy.
Some mothers never enjoy their toddlers for this reason. They get caught up in a constant battle of wills as an imperious little creature commands, resists and dares. They see antisocial – even potentially criminal – tendencies in this arrogant, egotistical selfhood, and believe it is the result of their own failure as mothers.
In the Toby House surfaces in the children’s rooms – furniture, walls and floors were washable. The floors were of rubber composition and in their playroom it was of black and white tiles on which they could play a variety of games, traditional and personally invented ones. One whole wall in the playroom was a gigantic blackboard – and because children delight in scribbling everywhere, walls and beds were covered with specially treated hardboard which could be cleaned with a damp cloth. Over the years I have found providing children with anything but the essentials is a waste. Toys, for instance – they never played with any of them, but if I threw out a piece of paper or a length of string and they knew about it, they would be frantically annoyed. The toy cupboard was crammed with boxes, paper, string, scissors and paste, crayons, paint and pencils – that’s all they wanted.
One important thing I have learned in mothering five daughters, now grown up, is that this self-confidence, this assertiveness to be able to say ‘No!’, is basic to an individual’s ability to take responsibility, resist glib explanations and meaningless rules, and challenge prejudice and injustice. What I have enjoyed is witnessing and sharing in the excitement of children’s growth to independence and the development of strong, courageous personalities.
After we had moved to the Manor House in 1966 with fields at the back, the girls used to run round the track encircling the paddock fighting. ‘We fought with laundry basket shields, saucepans and brooms. You just closed the door.’ Jenny says, ‘We grew up fearless’.
Native American warrior tribes always valued these qualities in their children. But in our society there is a legacy of heavy emphasis on obedience and conformity to rules. When we come up against the chilling facts of child abuse, violence within the family, and the exploitation of women, we may stop and consider whether we should instead aim to rear warrior children.
Yet we can’t hand on beliefs to children. All we can do is lend them ours for a while. They must then forge their own. They have magic ways of making light of our cherished convictions and creating their own space in a world geared to adults. There were Sundays, for example, when we all trooped to Oxford Quaker meetings – five blonde little girls, washed and brushed and on their best behaviour. Among the rows of silent Friends, each seeking inner light, there is something deeply satisfying that even a two-year-old can feel: no sounds but birdsong outside and the hum of traffic in the distance. I felt sure that the children were aware of the spirituality of the meetings – until I learned about the game they had invented, which kept them in rapt concentration. One child thought of a food and mimed eating it, and the others tried to guess what it was. When one of them caught on, she mimed eating the same food – until they were all doing it, and then the one who first found the solution switched to another food. In the quiet of Quaker Meeting my daughters made their way through imaginary bowls of steaming soup and corn-on-the-cob with butter running down to their elbows. They licked ice-cream cornets and peeled oranges, apples and bananas. Then one day, hearing suppressed giggles and noticing an amused elder on the bench facing us, I turned and saw the full drama as they wound long strands of spaghetti around invisible forks, let them uncoil into their gaping mouths, and then wiped tomato sauce from their chins. Thinking about it afterwards, I realised it was evidence of their resourcefulness, creativity, co-operation and skill in communicating ideas, even though the results were embarrassing! But it did mean that I had to stop taking them to adult meetings.
As the girls grew older, I found that I was learning a lot from them. Though domestic guerilla warfare and angry arguments at mealtimes were hard to tolerate, and I often yelled at them, I enjoyed the conflicts and confrontations of adolescence. There were long discussions about how society should be changed. They questioned things it was easy to take for granted, challenged my assumptions, always with a keen ethical sense and the courage to take a
difficult path if they thought it was the right one to follow.
The theory is that togetherness and sitting around a table eating in a civilised way and making conversation form the heart of family life. This is when parents and children gather to enjoy each other. It is when the foundations of society are laid. Politicians, experts in nutrition, psychology, education, social science, religion and ethics, and pundits representing just about every branch of human knowledge, tell us that we should draw around the dining table in harmony. Otherwise we have a sub-standard family. Mum provides the right food, beautifully fresh, properly cooked, bursting with vitamins and minerals, and then the family will flourish and each child will develop emotionally, intellectually and socially.
I can only say that it didn’t work like that for us. I tried. One thing we always did was to hold hands in a Quaker silence at the beginning of each meal. The children called it ‘sniffing the food’. Meals were often the trigger for disagreements, violent arguments and sometimes outright rows that broke into physical attacks. Seven strong personalities close to and sitting facing each other are a recipe for confrontation and conflict. Now I think back to it, it is just possible that those exercises in mutual confrontation were highly character forming.
The pleasures of motherhood come from being flexible enough to retain a spirit of adventure, and being able to grow through the mother-child relationship into adult friendship. For that to happen, it is futile to try and train our children into obedience or impose on them our own beliefs. They should not have to live their lives on someone else’s terms. None of our children live in the world in which we grew up. They must face new problems, new dangers, but also have new opportunities. The really important thing is to give them self-confidence together with the courage to explore, challenge, and strive for the good as they see it. Then they can become their own free people.
A Passion for Birth Page 11