My arrogance nearly killed my baby
Christina, a best selling novelist, led such a gilded life she thought she could do no wrong. Here she confesses . . .
YES I admit, I am competitive, shamefully so. There is nothing that I can’t turn into a competition and so, when it came to having children, I looked upon it as yet another exam that was to be passed with flying colours.
For me, life had been a series of tests to be overcome. It all started at school, a highly competitive all-girls’ school, where my best friend and I used our spare time to rank each pupil in the class in the five categories of looks, musical ability, charm, cleverness and sporting ability.
By chance, the two of us would always head the leader boards (which would come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever heard me sing).
Like many academically-minded girls, I sailed through life being good at stuff — passing exams, being polite to grown-ups, getting onto the netball team, getting into Oxford. The last exam I ever failed was a chemistry exam, aged 13, with a pitiful 24 per cent, but even that was as a result of a competition to see who could write the funniest, most inappropriate answers. I remember a now-famous novelist a couple of years above me sobbing publicly in the school corridors for a whole day when she failed her driving test, her first ever failure, and I recall thinking how this seemed to be a reasonable response to such ignominy.
Psychologists have claimed that women like me run into problems when they apply the same ‘ hurdle model’ to pregnancy, as they did to their high-achieving, single lives. This is when a person sees life as a series of short-lived challenges or issues to be overcome, before they can return to life as normal.
I worked in publishing and saw the world of work like this: preparation, event, rest and start again. Hurdles to be overcome and judged upon how high you clear them.
So when I married at 33, and we decided to try for a family, it seemed entirely reasonable to apply the same template that had seen me through the first three decades of my life.
I mean, it all starts with a pregnancy test, which I aced in the first month of trying. Oh how smug I was, thinking that my fertility was something I was in control of, when in reality I had just got lucky (a point which was proven to me by subsequent failures to conceive and a miscarriage).
The birth is all too easy to fit into the hurdle model and as a consequence becomes something that most pregnant women obsess over, in lieu of giving any thought to the reality of everything that comes after it.
We aim to have a ‘successful’ birth and then for life to revert to normality. This turns motherhood (an endless and frequently unrewarding job) into a neat pass-or-fail that focuses on the events of just one or two days.
I did what all clever girls do and I joined an expensive antenatal class (you see, class, it was the nearest thing to being back at school) and I researched. A lot.
I bought dozens of books, I read them and watched endless programmes with people giving birth, but always fast- forwarded over Caesareans since obviously I wasn’t going to have one of those.
MyBIggEST worry was whether there would be an unoccupied birthing pool at my local hospital because obviously I was going to have a water birth.
I found pregnancy easy, something again that I ascribed to some innate ability rather than random good luck. I had no morning sickness and I cycled until my due date, looking like an orange balanced on a knife.
I cringe to look back at how confident I was that I would go into labour on my due date and how, no, I wouldn’t be having an epidural, thanks. My due date came and went and so did another week, perhaps an early intimation that there were forces beyond my control.
At last, labour started and I went to hospital where the birthing suite was empty and I got my coveted pool, and things started to progress rapidly. What could possibly go wrong? Well, of course, lots. There was meconium in my waters — a sign the baby was in distress — and my unborn baby’s heart rate was up.
Soon I was bundled to the more high-tech delivery suites, where I was hooked up to a monitor and put on a drip to speed up labour.
When a ‘spinal block’ epidural was mentioned, I begged for it and even pretended not to be having a contraction when they were putting the needle in as I couldn’t wait another minute for its sweet relief.
After all attempts to push the baby out failed, the registrar said: ‘We think it’s better if we operate,’ and my reaction was: ‘yes, get it out through my nose if you have to, just get it out.’
My darling first-born was cut out of me under the bright lights of the operating theatre after full labour, wanton nakedness, unspeakable indignity, a late epidural and an emergency Caesarean.
THISwas everything I had not wanted, but I didn’t care when I looked at my perfect, albeit slightly- squashedlooking boy. I had failed at this birthing business, but he scored perfectly in his Apgar test, which gave him a score according to his health and responses, and I glowed with elation.
At this point, I’d like to be able to write that my competitive gene was removed along with the placenta. But I needed a far more terrible, potentially catastrophic event to take place for that.
We took William home and bathed in the adulation that first-time parents receive, surrounded by people eager to pay homage. With all the flowers and goody bags, it’s the nearest I’ll ever come to being an Oscar nominee, albeit one with a huge stomach and maternity bra. Even a Caesarean hadn’t stopped my manic need to achieve, as I bounced around the day after my major abdominal surgery, insisting on cooking lunch and making tea for all our guests to show how little motherhood was going to change me. A friend without children or a partner came to visit and I looked around our flowerfilled house and at my darling boy and thought: ‘ How she must envy me. Why, I almost envy myself.’
Looking back with my overly dramatic writer’s hat on, I feel that in that moment of hubris, I tempted fate and caused the terrible events of the following weeks.
At first, it seemed that we could do the job of being good parents. The community midwives seemed to think so, we put on such an impressive show that they left us alone after a couple of visits, writing in their notes I was ‘breastfeeding beautifully’.
But I wasn’t. William wasn’t getting any milk and I hadn’t realised. The books told me how important it was to breastfeed and even how to do it, but they couldn’t tell me how it would feel. It was as if you’d learned to eat by reading instructions about cutting up food with knives and forks and then chewing and swallowing, rather than by actually doing it. So it looked like he was feeding, but he wasn’t.
When the midwives came back five days on to examine William, they discovered he’d lost about 25 per cent of his body weight.
He was rushed into hospital with neonatal hypernatremia, a condition where a newborn is so dehydrated that the sodium levels in his blood become dangerously high. It can lead to kidney failure, amputation and, in rare cases, death.
The paediatrician who examined him paled on hearing the sodium level reading, and the consultant said he was the thinnest baby she’d seen outside Africa. I had given birth
to a healthy child and had almost killed him and possibly damaged him for ever. I wished the midwives had visited us sooner, but at the same time I knew that my complacency and arrogance had created this situation.
My husband, a solicitor in a London law firm, is as competitive and omni-competent as I am, and we had both dismissed the idea of taking him to hospital when we’d begun to worry that William seemed listless and wasn’t filling his nappies as we had been expecting, because we hadn’t wanted to be ‘ those sort of parents’ — paranoid and inept. We had to leave him behind for the first night while they slowly rehydrated him.
‘Try not to worry,’ they told us. ‘We’ve just got to hope he doesn’t have any seizures.’ I was fortunately allowed to stay in an anteroom in the special care ward for the rest of his eight-day stay.
My fellow mothers were very different from those in my antenatal classes. Here they were addled junkies with drug-addicted babies and scared-looking teenagers who didn’t speak English. The doctors were more my type, alpha girls who were competent and efficient. But I wasn’t one of them — not now.
Here, I wandered around in weekold stained pyjamas, focusing on nothing except, of course, nurturing an underweight baby and belatedly trying to keep him healthy
I was tortured by thoughts of ‘if only’ and ‘what if’. William had a brain scan and I remember clearly thinking: ‘I don’t care if there’s something wrong with him, I will look after him and we will get through it.’
This surprised me since I’d always assumed my perfectionism would extend to my offspring, and had wondered how those parents of children with impairments or special needs coped or even, shaming as this is to admit, loved their babies.
For the first time in my life, I simply existed. In the world I had previously inhabited, there were no rewards unless they were externally given — the A-grade, the promotion, the pay rise.
Here, there were no prizes for doing things quickly or for being able to quote from books; here acting in the sort of dreamy, bovine way that I abhorred, was the best way to behave. It was the only way.
The worst thing that had ever happened to me made me a far better mother.
I still would have been congratulating myself and taking credit for his utter gorgeousness, instead of realising that there is so much — almost everything — that is beyond our control. I wasn’t cured of my need to achieve overnight, not after all those years.
AndI still partook in the postnatal mothers’ group’s sleeping-through-the-night comparisons ( failed that one with William, who kept us awake all night for months, and also failed that test with my other two children, Celia and Lydia, born two and four years later), and became far too interested in whose child actually liked nigella’s liver and apricot puree.
Everyone tells you how being a mother changes you, but I had not realised that it would turn all my competency to incompetency. I had imagined that once my baby was born, I’d be me, just with added patience, love and kindness.
The price for not changing immediately turned out to be a high one, though fortunately, as the consultant wrote on our notes at William’s six-month review, the only long- term damage was to our confidence as parents.
I’m now ten years and a couple more children on from my horrific start with William. My competitiveness hasn’t completely abated, and now that they’ve gone to primary school there are whole new avenues in which it can emerge.
But my early failure has left me with the lesson learned that the best you can hope to ‘ achieve’ is that your child stays alive. The rest is all up to them, the innate something that all babies are born with, and which makes them each special and winners all.
Things i Wish i’d Known: Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood, edited by Victoria Young, is published by icon Books, priced £10. Order your copy at www.mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P is free for a limited time only.