Oh baby, Meghan’s got a lot to learn

THERE was something about the wonderful pictures of the Duchess of Sussex as a newborn in the arms of her mother Doria in the Mail this week that reminded me a little of the arrival of my own daughter, almost 16 years ago.

The same cross little expression on the baby and the same look in her new mother’s eyes, a mixture of shock, exhaustion and awe.

But most of all, in the background, the calm and knowing presence of Granny.

No one knows better how your first birth is likely to turn out than your own mother, who’s been there, done that and can offer honest, practical advice. And just as her mother was such a reassuring presence, I’m sure Doria, now it’s Meghan’s turn, has been a fount of wisdom for her daughter.

As we know, Meghan — due any day now — is planning a midwifeled home labour, away from the ‘men in suits’. She also reportedly favours a water birth, and is using yoga, meditation and homeopathy to prepare for the arrival.

Apparently, she wants it to be ‘as natural as possible: no drugs, no caesareans and so on’.

I would expect nothing less from this most modern of young royals who has always been a staunch advocate of a healthy, holistic lifestyle. If anyone has a chance of achieving the kind of magical, mystical birth that every woman dreams of, it’s her. But I do hope Doria is advising Meghan to keep her feet on the ground over this apparent desire for perfection.

I have nothing against home births, water births — or for that matter any kind of birth.

It’s just that having babies is not an exact science. Labour can, it is true, be a beautiful experience. But it can also be savage and elemental. And you never really know how it’s going to pan out.

To be prepared, a woman really needs to be open to all eventualities. Yet a whole industry seems to have sprung up to feed mothersto-be the notion we are wholly in control of the process (we are not: that’s Mother Nature prerogative, and she is a capricious old cow) and that there is a right and wrong way of having a baby.

In recent years, this has come to mean that having a child without medical intervention or

pain relief is in some way morally superior. Natural good; medically assisted bad.

It’s an attitude summed up by a friend of mine who, having undergone an elective caesarean with her second child following serious complications with her first, was asked by her health visitor whether she ever ‘felt cheated’ she didn’t ‘have a proper labour’. The answer, of course, was no. Or at least she hadn’t up until then.

There is nothing wrong with having an ideal vision of how you would like your baby to be born. Just as long as you keep in mind that things may turn out to be very different.

OTHERWISE you could end up like another friend who had her heart completely set on a water birth at home.

She and her husband had it all worked out: the pool, the TENS machine, the fairy lights, the beach balls, the Peruvian pan pipe music — everything.

I spoke to her just as she was going into labour. Then waited for the jubilant phone call. And waited. And waited. Nothing.

Two days later, a shaken new father called me. It had been a car crash, hours of agony ending in a mad dash to the hospital and an emergency caesarean.

My poor friend was traumatised — all the worse because she had expected it to be such a wonderful, ‘empowering’ experience.

I’m sure that Meghan will be fine. Not least because if things don’t go according to plan, those dreaded ‘men in suits’ will be on standby with their pesky science to make sure no harm comes to either her or the baby.

But I would just urge her not to get too fixated on the idea of the ‘perfect birth’.