Yet, if drugs don’t work, what does? Since babies cry for many reasons, there is obviously no single remedy. Some babies need more stimulation and by the time they are about six weeks old start crying because they are bored stiff. It is only when they start doing things for themselves and exploring the world around them that crying becomes less. Mothers often said that these babies became happier when life was made more exciting – when they were surrounded by other children, for example, could listen to music and had lots of handling.
But babies can be overstimulated, too, especially those who are premature. These babies only stopped crying when they began to feel more secure. This does not necessarily mean that they needed peace and quiet. What was needed was to recreate something of the conditions a baby experienced inside the mother’s body – playing a cassette tape of the sound of the heart and circulation – and cradling the baby close to her body like a kangaroo in the pouch.
Some babies needed a lot of holding and touching. Many women suggested to me that this might have been because they had a difficult birth and as a result had frightening dreams, so that they needed to be soothed again and again. Jumpy babies – who startle and cry in their sleep, often waking themselves up – can find a definitive routine comforting, which may mean parents need to keep to timetables. Some mothers became so tense themselves when the baby was constantly crying that they needed to be alone for a while. Only then could they unwind and the baby settle down: ‘What helped me most’ one woman said, ‘was to leave the baby in a safe place and go for a walk around our farm and talk to the animals where I am unable to hear or see the baby.’
Some breastfed babies were not getting a good mouthful when they were at the breast. As a result they seemed to be feeding, but were in fact only getting the fore-milk, and none of the richer hind-milk. Their tummies were never comfortably full and they whined and fussed. When a baby is well latched on to the nipple a good deal of the areola, the brown circle around the nipple, is drawn into the mouth as well as the nipple itself. You can always see when a baby is latched on because sucking produces some movement in the upper cheeks and the ears wiggle!
A baby might cry irritably if a mother was under stress herself – because of family difficulties or problems in her relationship with her partner, for example. Sometimes it was only when these things were sorted out or when she developed a strategy for coping with stress that the baby calmed down.
However much helpful advice she was given, I concluded that the mother was the expert on her baby. Nobody else could know her baby as well as she did. Though drugs sometimes gave a breather so that she had a chance to calm down herself and think straight again, they were not really the answer. A baby’s cry always means something and it is those who love the baby most who can learn to interpret what she is trying to tell you. The cry is part of a pre-verbal language which, like all languages, has to be studied before you understand its meaning. It can be the most difficult language of all to learn!
A book grew out of this research: The Crying Baby, which was published by Viking in 1989, and with additional material in a new edition, Understanding Your Crying Baby published by Carroll & Brown in 2005.
Being Born
Much of my work has centred on finding vivid words in which to communicate and share women’s experiences. In Being Born39 I tried to extend the use of language and imagery to share with a small child the amazing process of pregnancy and birth. In the 80s this hadn’t been achieved.
I decided that I wanted to write a book for children, and record the unfolding of a journey that each of us has taken, but of which we have only momentary glimpses, or which we cannot remember at all. It is not the story of what happens when a baby brother or sister is born, but about what a child might see, hear, feel and do deep inside the mother’s body, and about the baby’s experience of birth.
This is different from an approach that explains a mother’s pregnancy in terms of the biology and mechanics, and the names of organs so that labels can be put in correctly. Distinct, too, from the teaching of ‘human reproduction’ in a detached, dispassionate way as a matter of hormones, anatomy, cellular development and viability, which is often how TV programmes for schools are done.
Children are often treated as completely ignorant of intense experiences they live through. These include sexual feelings, loss and grief when someone close to them dies, and outrage at social injustice. Yet experiences in childhood can be very powerful, even when children do not have the language to express this other than in difficult behaviour or withdrawal, and we should learn how to give them loving understanding and share with them accurate information. They do not live in a world of their own. They live in our world.
Language for most things that take place in women’s bodies – menstruating, being pregnant, giving birth, even making love – is heavily medical. We just don’t have words to say what we feel and know for ourselves.
I wanted to write for three and four year olds and talk to them just as I talked to my own children about pregnancy and birth, drawing on their experiences of their own bodies and their feelings to understand what was happening inside the mother’s body, and how it might be for the developing baby. Only in this way could I do justice to amazing photographs taken inside the uterus and draw on the child’s wonder at the miracle that was unfolding. So it was all written to the child as ‘you’.
Lennart Nilson’s photographs were an inspiration for me to write that book. They were perfectly tuned to describing fetal development in a language children could understand, in immediate and warmly descriptive terms that help them imagine how it might be inside their mother’s bodies.
Some children’s books about birth were comic. Fine! Others were sternly educational. Not so good. There is no need to talk down to small children or make pregnancy and birth jokey. I believe that we should aim to be honest and use vivid descriptive language, linked with visual images with which they can identify. What must it feel like to be curled up in your mother’s body? To feel contractions clasping you in labour? To be pressed down through bone and muscles and out into the world? To be held in your mother’s arms and see her for the first time?
I wanted my book to use language which creatively and vividly, attracted young children to the book with terminology and simile that was right for their age, and read like a good story book: ‘You didn’t look much like a baby yet – more like a sprouting bean … and then, like a tiny sea-horse, you grew little ridges down your back that would form your backbone.’ ‘When you had been growing for about five months your mother felt you move. At first your kicks were faint, like butterflies inside her, or little fish swimming, or soap-bubbles that float and pop.’ ‘Your mother could feel you go bump-bump-bump. If she didn’t guess what had happened she would have been surprised and wondered what you were doing.’ ‘Your fingers reached out and felt water. Your fingers touched wet, shiny skin. Your face felt the touch and your fingers felt it too. Then they slipped away again, into the water. Your fingers were the first things you played with. They moved like the fronds of a sea anemone in a rock pool. Then one day your fingers found your mouth and brushed your lips. You liked the feeling and you began to suck your hand.’ ‘It was warm in the uterus, like being in a warm bath in a darkened room. Fresh, warm water kept flowing in to keep you comfortable. Your skin had a white creamy coating that kept it from wrinkling in the water.’ ‘When you had been six months inside your mother’s body you could hear her voice. Often when she spoke you moved, almost as if you could talk to her with your whole body. She spoke and you listened. Then you moved. She spoke again and you stayed still. Then, when she had finished speaking, you would move again. Loud bangs made you jump. Sometimes you went to sleep for a long time. Then, when your mother went to bed and was about to go to sleep, you woke up and bounced around.’ ‘When you felt the thick, springy uterus pressing against your foot you pressed your foot down and then lifted it. You took your first step. The stepping movements you made he
lped you turn upside down in the uterus, ready to be born. They helped you press your way out of the uterus when it was time for you to be born. You had been growing for eight months and now you were beginning to get plump. The fat would keep you warm after you were born. Your fingernails were like tiny shells.’
Being Born was published in 1986 and earned a Times Educational Supplement Award. I think I succeeded in what I was trying to do. A Swedish journalist told how she read the book with a group of four to six year olds and was immediately asked to read it again. She had five children gathered around the book. ‘Their individual comments inspired by my readings aloud and their looking at the pictures gave rise to one comment after the other, alternating between delighted screams and laughter whenever they recognised the similarities between the pictures and their own world.’
For the record, the purpose of this book was definitely not anti-abortion. I support every woman’s right to make this decision for herself. This is her body, her baby – her life.
Home Birth
For many women who wanted birth at home in the 80s the whole pregnancy was turned into a struggle involving negotiation with doctors and midwives about their right to give birth in the place of their choice. It still is. Every week two or three women contact me who are battling with the medical system. Most are suffering extreme stress from the uncertainty, and dread that their blood pressure may go up (which it may as a consequence of this stress). In relationships with caregivers they say they are made to feel like someone concerned only with her own emotional satisfaction, and who doesn’t care whether her baby lives or dies.
One thing it was important for a woman who wanted a home birth to realise was that GPs themselves were also under strong pressure from hospital obstetricians and from their colleagues to ‘play safe’ and turn down requests for home births.
Some of them were very frightened of the whole idea. It was not only that they had had no experience of it. Many had never seen a completely natural birth without any intervention during their training. They distrusted their own skills and did not really understand the skills of the midwife. They felt that if they could not intervene in a way similar to that of a hospital obstetrician, and did not have immediate access to high tech procedures – continuous electronic fetal monitoring, for example – they would be giving less than adequate care and might be guilty of negligence.
This is why it was important to share with GPs all the knowledge that was building up about the safety of planned home birth, and to work to increase their self-confidence in doing home births. One aspect of this was helping to link together home birth GPs so that they did not feel isolated and could exchange information and skills with each other.
It struck me that a way of reducing some of the obstacles for women, and at the same time helping those GPs who were willing do home births, was to contact the Family Practitioner Committee asking that it approach all GPs on the obstetric list to find out which were prepared to do home births.
In 1986 I wrote to the Oxfordshire FPC saying this. I said I realised that no GP could be expected to approve of home birth for all women, and that he or she would have to come to a decision with each woman. It agreed to draw up a list.
This worked well. GPs who were happy to help with home births had come out of the closet.
Germaine Greer’s ‘Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility’ Is Published
Whenever any woman whose name is linked with feminism produces a new book announcing a development of her ideas, it is greeted as evidence that the women’s movement is crumbling. Articles are published selecting, with glee, phrases which cast doubt on, or seem to be an open denunciation of, what is taken by many to be a received feminist gospel.
Recantations and heresy are bread and wine to anyone trying to review a new book and the reviewer often comments that this is ‘mature’ feminism or feminism ‘grown up’. This woman is, after all, just as men have always known women were – finding deep contentment in babies, hearth and home, and longing for the protective arms of a strong man.
Feminism has no leaders in the conventional sense. It has spokeswomen but no elected leaders, not even by popular acclaim. That structure of power and submission, authority and passivity, is an integral part of organisations dominated by men. On different issues women speak out, and what comes over as ovarian (no, not ‘seminal’) philosophy at one time tends to be subsumed by fresh thinking. There is no creed to which women are required to give assent.
Some find it difficult to cope with this. There are those who long for a firm statement on belief and who reject each one of their sisters who will not vow allegiance to what they consider to be the truth. Yet flexibility is an important part of our strength. The imposition of any creed, however noble it looks, propels us from one schism to another – schisms which are the product of fear: that insidious poison in the relationships between women and their capacity for effective action.
‘Ideological correctness’ is the Marxist term, but this kind of conformity is of course much older than Marxism. It fired the crucifixion of Jesus and the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the burning of witches in Salem, and it is inflaming rival concepts of Islam today.
I was brought up as a Unitarian, the daughter and granddaughter of a female line which believed passionately in free thought, the searching spirit and the death of creeds. This was no limp ‘live-and-let-live’ philosophy to avoid fuss and unpleasantness. These women would have said, with Voltaire, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ They were anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, against social injustice and inequality and exploitation. It is a heritage of strong and courageous women who refused to claim that they must always be in the right or understand each aspect of the truth.
With these strongly held convictions, I opened Germaine Greer’s book, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, and discovered that she was extolling babies, the family and the oldest kind of contraception in the world – withdrawal.
She presented a very romanticised view of women’s lives, but then she always was a romantic! She used to think that fun and spontaneity were tremendously important. When she wrote The Female Eunuch 14 years earlier, she advised women to refuse to do things when other people expected or required them to and do them only when they themselves wanted. If you don’t like cooking or housework, she said, don’t do it! Do away with timetables and routines! She didn’t say what a hungry three-year-old was supposed to do when there was no food and mother had gone off to be spontaneous and express herself. And she seemed unaware of the physiological pull a breastfeeding mother feels when her baby cries. She ignored all the gut feelings of being a mother and the emotional umbilical cord through which flows pain and longing that is a good deal more powerful than detached intellectual awareness.
At that time she was toying with the idea of having a baby in a rural Italian setting. She thought that a farmhouse in Calabria might be the answer. She would go there with some women friends to give birth to their children: ‘Their fathers and other people would also visit the house as often as they could, to rest and enjoy the children and even work a bit. Perhaps some of us would live there for quite long periods, as long as we wanted to. The house and garden would be worked by a local family who lived in the house … The child need not even know that I was his womb-mother and I could have relationships with the other children as well. If my child expressed a wish to try London or New York or go to formal school somewhere, that could also be tried without committal.’
There were two elements in that particular recipe which I found disturbing: one was the last two words – there was no committal to another human being; the other was that all this could never be done unless you hired or cajoled other people who would take responsibility – the peasant family on whom everything else depended. She must, I think, have realised this herself.
The attraction to feudal solidarity has now become a paean of praise to th
e extended family, which she calls ‘The Family’ to distinguish it from its pale shadow, the nuclear unit of a couple with their 2.5 children. Life with mothers and father-in-law, uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews and cousins-once-removed may be, she admits, difficult. But ‘The Family’ has always offered women territory which was indisputably their own, and however disenfranchised they have been in the outside world, in the domestic sphere they have exercised political power. In breaking up ‘The Family’, women have been robbed of their own territory. ‘The Family’, she says, ‘offers the paradigm for female collectivity; it shows us women co-operating to dignify their lives, to lighten each other’s labour and growing in real life and sisterhood – a word we use constantly – without any idea of what it is.’ She may be right, but she writes all the time as a ‘visitor’ commenting on how other women live. We never hear what these women themselves have to say about their lives.
She also claims that the extended family provides a much better environment for children. ‘In our society there is profound hostility to children and those of us who decide against childbirth do not do so because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like them.’
Anyone who has had a baby soon comes to realise this. Babies are rarely welcome at adult social gatherings and in Britain, unlike Italy and France, some restaurant owners detest them. The Good Food Guide often suggests that parents should leave ‘under-14s and dogs at home’. (I once wrote to the editor, suggesting that there ought to be a special list of restaurants which put themselves out to welcome children.)
A Passion for Birth Page 25