BEST BOOKS ON... NEW MOTHERS
MY HUSBAND was compiling our ‘birthing playlist’ (yes, we were those idiots) when our firstborn began his journey into the world.
In the rush to get to the hospital, we forgot all forms of pain relief (his job), but we did have a backgammon set for all the waiting around. (Did I mention we were idiots?).
Afterwards, it took me weeks to process, through sleep-deprived befuddlement and pain, all that had gone awry. We were given a room, but no midwife — they were chronically short-staffed.
A monitor I was rigged up to malfunctioned, so the labour was more advanced than anyone realised. At one point, an auxiliary wheeled in some gas and air without explaining how to use it. Eventually, a midwife arrived, furiously cried: ‘This woman could have given birth hours ago’, and set to work.
Post-birth, in surgery, a male nurse joked: ‘It says in your notes you’re a journalist. What sort? Not medical negligence, I hope.’
Still, what luck to give birth in the developed world in the 21st century. Rebecca Abrams’s Touching Distance is a riveting historical drama set in Aberdeen, my own birthplace. In 1790, Alexander Gordon returns there, determined to introduce modern practices.
When childbed fever starts killing off the city’s new mothers, he turns detective, determined to confront ignorance with enlightened ideas.
Harriet Lane’s thriller, Her, offers a sharply observed study of modern, middle-class maternity leave. Emma used to work in TV. Now a full-time mother to a toddler and baby, she feels like a diminished drudge.
When elegant Nina befriends her, she’s reanimated: ‘To be seen, again, for who I really am. Not to be a person always in the context of other people’. But baby-brained Emma is forgotting something crucial.
Few mothers love more bravely or generously than Ma in Emma Donoghue’s Room who, despite having conceived her son Jack in the most harrowing circumstances, always has his best interests at heart.
Whether you are a mother or not, don’t begrudge anyone a cuppa in bed this Sunday.