Don’t rush new mums
THE sight of the Duchess of Cambridge coming out of the Lindo Wing with full make-up and a newborn baby was enough to make most women sick. How does she do it? Well she has a team of helpers on hand and it’s not as if she had to get the bus home.
And – with all due respect to her stoicism – can someone explain to me why is it necessary to rise from childbirth quite so quickly? What is anyone trying to prove?
Back in the yuppie days (remember them?) I knew a very tiresome couple. I worked with Mr Yuppie and he proudly told me that on the day Mrs Yuppie had given birth she had not only finished off some terribly important piece of work in her private hospital
bed, but that very evening she had gone to the theatre, leaving the Norland Nanny sitting outside the auditorium with the baby so she could breastfeed in the interval. I mean, how utterly show-off-ishly silly can you get?
There are such peculiar conventions around childbirth. In the past we know that high-born women had to go into confinement long before the birth, enduring weeks of enforced inactivity. It must have been dreadful.
But now childbirth is treated as though it’s no more than a punishing session in a gym from which you must emerge with perfect hair and carry on as normal. That’s not quite right either. No wonder postnatal depression has become so prevalent.
When I had my first baby 34 years ago at University College Hospital (UCH) in London, it was usual to stay in for a full week, whereas now many new mothers go home on the same day.
LOOKING back, that week in the NHS maternity ward had a dreamy, endless quality. The midwives ran a sort of school for hopeless new mums. They were wonderfully patient. Finding my newborn covered in poo I went in horror to the midwife. She ran a warm tap and held him under it until he was sluiced clean. “Doesn’t he mind?” I whispered. “He loves it,” she said, handing him back all wrapped up in a fluffy clean towel. She was right.
We had salt baths (to heal stitches) and ate milky porridge in the mornings ladled from big metal cauldrons. There was a gang of gravel-voiced pregnant 14-yearolds from rough old King’s Cross being kept in for their own good who ran round with fag packets in their dressing-gown pockets.
Each day there would be a new arrival. Women who’d had caesareans came in like battle victims in a heap under blankets. We’d watch them slowly recover and welcome them to our funny little club.
On your last night in UCH the rule was that the midwives babysat for you and you were sent out with your husband (everyone had husbands then) on a dinner date. It was meant to ease you back into reality. Imagine such a thing now. But it was a kindly, gentle regime. The past is a foreign country.