Middle-class Motherhood

I had my first session of the growing baby course at the Plunket centre today. It seems that parenthood these days requires a lot of courses - ante natal, baby and you (first six week course) and now this. This course is run by Plunket rather than the local Parents' centre so it has the rather dubious distinction of having no charge. I thought the fact it was free and run by Plunket meant that it would have somewhat more of a melting pot attendance. The previous courses had been peopled entirely by white, educated, well-off 30 somethings (on the whole, there were a couple of late twenties and early 40s) who seemed to have fairly recently moved to Kapiti to breed*. The complete lack of diversity in age, class and culture I feel is somewhat sad, and hopefully not representative of the current 'mini baby boom'. I fear what classrooms will be like in 13 years time if only the yuppies breed. Imagine 30 young faces peering out of their designer outfits as they sup on organic cappucinos with their iPod booting out whiney cafe pop songs whilst bitterly debating the failings of their summer holidays in timeshares on the Gold Coast. I arrived a little early and as I sat in the Plunket room watching the other mothers arrive, it dawned on me. This course was going to be the same too. In fact I already knew about half of the mums there from previous courses and yoga pregnancy classes! As I and the fifteen other mums sat around and, as we were instructed, introduced ourselves by stating name, baby's name and what job we had in our 'former lives'**, it seemed that this was not going to be a diverse group in any socio-economic terms. A PR consultant, an editor, another teacher, an accountant, someone who ran a dental recruitment agency, a salon owner etc. Looking around the room was equally disturbing. In front of every woman's seat was a neat little car capsule with a Lamaze stuffed toy danging down from the handle. Designer nappy bags stuffed fill with pump bottles of water, and everything that could possibly be needed for any baby situation from a change of clothes to hypoallergenic wipes and powders. Wide-eyed babies from 7 weeks to 6 months sat on their mothers' laps in their trendy baby warm outfits (that everyone was secretly happy about because the hot summer had not allowed for the wearing of fuzzy rompers and jumpers). The mums wore their non-maternity jeans, quietly smug to have got their post-baby bodies (or should that be 'not former-life bodies') into normal clothes again and sat around telling each other that they were looking good***. The weird thing was that the course didn't really seem to provide much in the way of useful information. It just seemed like the facilitator was getting people to discuss what they already knew about parenting. I had hoped that some expert knowledge would be passed out but sadly not. Then the facilitator recommended some Baby book and everyone's ears pricked up. I realised the sad truth. These women, like me, had desperately been searching for 'the secret'. It is like as soon as you get pregnant part of your brain sets out on a epic quest to find the Holy Grail of being the perfect mother. You try to assimilate as many books, advice, magazines, and parenting programmes as possible to arm yourself with all the information necessary to conquer motherhood. All our lives we've been led to believe that you can excel at anything if you just study enough, or practise enough or try hard enough. Our education system and our professional lives are based around the notion that knowledge and practise will lead to us being able to master any new skill. We are convinced that there is nothing we can't go on a course to learn how to do, or read a book to gain knowledge on, or even google to find the answer to a question. Then you have a baby and there is a whole industry on writing baby books and parenting advice, there are so many toys, equipment and gadgets to buy to help with every imaginable baby issue. You apply the same strategy that you have for everything else in life. You read every book, buy the toys that claim to stimulate and aid your baby's development, you even listen to the advice handed out by your parents, friends, midwife, plunket nurse and even the little old ladies that come up and gurgle over your baby in the supermarket. But, there are two laws that dictate everything to do with babies: 1. Everything you ever do will both be the WRONG thing to do according to some books, advice and little old ladies and simultaneously be the RIGHT thing to do according to other books, advice and, occasionally, little old ladies. 2. Any technique you use to deal with wind, crying, breast feeding, sleeping etc will probably work brillantly on some days and fail miserably on others. There is also a third that sometimes applies that whenever you tell someone that your baby has a good sleep routine, or sleeps though the night, they will immediately stop this behaviour. So I guess this is why there are all these courses attended by women who have already probably read dozens of books on babies and, at the end of the day, have perfectly successfully looked after their babies for months already. It is because no matter how many things you buy, or how hard you try or what advice you follow, there are some moments on some days when no matter what you do you feel like you're failing to be the parent you want to be. That can be very difficult to cope with if you are a person who has always been success in their career. It's not that being a full-time mother isn't rewarding or fun, most of the time it is both joyous and it does feel like you have achieved something extremely worthwhile every day. But when, for whatever reason, your baby is crying and it has been a difficult day, you do find yourself wishing you had read just one more book or gone on one more course that might have contained a suggestion of what you could now do that would magically calm your baby down and restore your confidence and enjoyment of motherhood. So even though part of me shudders when I see 15 SUVs crammed into the small Plunket car park, I'll continue attending this seven week course. Apparently we even get a certificate at the end of it, and maybe they might even finally reveal the much-sought secret of being the perfect parent. * I am coming to believe that Kapiti is mostly populated by former urbanites who move to start a family or retire, in some rare cases both. ** This is an apparently hilarious joke whereby you refer to your life before you had a baby as your 'former life' and, if you really want to have the room in hysterics, your 'past life experience'. *** Immediately after giving birth 'looking good' means that you don't look like you have just crawled out of a 5 km steam tunnel to escape a zombie attack only to be mistaken for a zombie at the other end and been beaten to within an inch of your life with a baseball bat****. After that 'looking good' means that you seem to have lost weight. **** I not sure why my brain likens the 'beautiful miracle' of giving birth to surviving a zombie apocalypse but it does. I suppose I imagine that if I had to face a mass of zombies it would take a similar level of endurance to survive, and that, hopefully, one's instincts and hormones would take over in the same way as they do during labour, and you'd find out that you are tougher and kick more ass than you would have thought. Although realistically, I'd rather give birth again than face a zombie attack. Other people I care about would suffer in the zombie attack for one thing and the whole world around you would change into a dark, squalid, derelict place filled with horror and despair. Hmm, actually spending several days after the birth in Wellington Hospital wasn't entirely unlike a post-apocalypse experience.