Joy of being a most eccentric mother
She let her five children scribble on every surface and lost them at sea for an entire night. Childbirth expert SHEILA KITZINGER on the ...
SHEILA KITZINGER was the natural childbirth activist who taught generations of British women how to give birth. Here, in the second extract from her delightfully zany memoirs — completed just before her death in April at the age of 86 — she reveals her very unorthodox approach to mothering her own five children.
aT ONE point in my, life I had five children — all girls — under the age of seven. And a book to write about childbirth. I wondered how I was going to manage. Then, one day, I just climbed into the children’s playpen with my books and other reference materials and started working. It turned out that I’d found the perfect solution: from then on, the playpen became maternal territory.
Celia, the twins Tess and Nell, Polly and Jenny could all see exactly what I was doing. I was there if they wanted me and they were free to roam round the house. Importantly, I was in no way dominating or directing them. And far from being isolated in my study, with the children in the nursery, I was living in their world.
Motherhood is certainly never what you expect. Somehow, I thought I’d be in control of the bringing up of my children while, in fact, you find that they bring you up.
It’s one of the best f orms of education there i s. To me, the pleasures of motherhood come from being flexible enough to retain a spirit of adventure and being able to grow through the mother- child relationship into adult friendship.
For that to happen, it’s futile to try to train our children to be obedient or impose on them our own beliefs. They should not have to live their lives on someone else’s terms.
After all, none of our children inhabit the world in which we grew up. They must face new problems, but also have new opportunities.
So, the really important thing is to give them self-confidence, together with the courage to explore and challenge. Then they can become their own, free people.
Mothers often talk in terms of phases. They say: ‘When he can find his thumb to suck, he won’t cry so much.’ Or: ‘It’ll be easier when she can crawl/walk/no longer wakes at night.’
It is as if a woman thinks: ‘ Once we’re over this phase, I can be a good mother. I’ll be able to cope.’
Then, gradually it dawns on her that she’s face to face with an individual with an incredibly strong personality, and that motherhood is never going to be easy.
Some mothers never enjoy their toddlers for this reason. They get caught up in a constant battle of wills as an imperious little creature commands, resists and dares.
Some mothers see antisocial — even potentially criminal — tendencies in this arrogant, egotistical selfhood, and believe it’s the direct result of their own failure as mothers.
They don’t see that their children are behaving perfectly normally, and just need more freedom to discover themselves.
In my case, I sometimes felt guilty I hadn’t given them my undivided attention. My life was full of writing, lecturing and counselling on all aspects of childbirth, plus I cooked, painted and entertained at the drop of a hat.
When our five girls were small — they were born between 1956 and 1963 — I used to leave a hot meal in the Aga if I was busy or had to be out when they came in from school. I thought that was pretty good going.
BuT, at the age of six, my daughter Polly came into the kitchen one day and said: ‘Sheila, why can’t you be a proper mother?’ She meant one waiting at the school gates. I always took the approach that children should have a lot of space to experiment, play, interact and learn from each other.
I had five maxims for a happy life with five children: Mattresses are for bouncing. Water is for pouring. Sand is for scattering. Walls are for drawing. Paper is for cutting.
In our first house, in Freeland, Oxfordshire, all the surfaces in the girls’ rooms were washable. The floor was rubber and one whole wall was a gigantic blackboard.
And because children delight in scribbling everywhere, the other walls and the beds were covered with specially treated hardboard that could be cleaned with a damp cloth.
Then, in their playroom, there were black and white tiles on which they could play a variety of games.
The toy cupboard was crammed with boxes, paper, string, scissors and paste, crayons, paint and pencils — that’s all they wanted.
Over the years, I’ve found that providing children with anything but the essentials is a waste. Toys, for instance: they never played with any of them. But if I threw away a piece of paper or a length of string, they’d be frantically annoyed.
ThEN, in 1966, we moved to an ancient house in Standlake, also in Oxfordshire, with fields at the back. The girls used to stage battles on the track encircling the paddock. ‘We fought with laundry basket shields, saucepans and brooms. You just closed the door,’ says my daughter Jenny. ‘We grew up fearless.’
Native American warrior tribes valued these qualities in children. But i n our society, there’s an emphasis on obedience and conformity to rules. Isn’t it better for us to aim to rear warrior children?
My husband uwe also believed in encouraging independence in the children — often even more than I did and occasionally with dramatic consequences.
It was uwe who got the children interested in sailing. It was also uwe who told they didn’t need life-jackets all the time if they hampered their movements . . . which l ed to one frightening incident when they went missing at sea for an entire night.
In 1968, we’d bought a holiday home in the Languedoc in France. It was in a fishing village called Bages on a saltwater lake. The girls would explore all round the village or have adventures in the 12 ft, gaff-rigged dinghy that came with the house.
The boat quickly acquired a name, Trouble (as there was trouble every time they took it out), and never more so than in the summer of 1972 when the twins Tess and Nell — then in their early teens — and Jenny, aged nine, went out to sea with a friend called Miranda. By 8.30pm, they still hadn’t returned home.
here is what I wrote at the time: ‘No sign of a sail on the horizon and soon it will be dark! Still, they’re good swimmers. They’ll get cold, but beyond that I don’t suppose any harm will come to them.’
It was decided to go to bed and start the search again as soon as light dawned. Of course, once we lay
down, we really started worrying. Had they drowned? Were they all together or had they split up?
At first light, Uwe and Miranda’s mother launched a search party and discovered the boat with a note tied to the mast saying that Tess, as captain, had decided the journey home was too difficult against the north wind and that they were sleeping on an island, on beds of seaweed, in a deserted house.
The note said they intended to paddle across an isthmus and walk back around the lake. Sure enough, that’s what they did, arriving back shortly afterwards in a bedraggled, but otherwise happy group.
We scooped them up, listened to stories of their exploits with relief and admiration, and returned them to civilisation, showers and food.
My mother hated cooking. She didn’t want me ‘wasting time and energy’ on what she saw as a trivial activity imposed on women.
With my five daughters, I took the view that they should learn how to do domestic tasks when they were young, so they didn’t have to think about them later when they had important things to do.
I’m afraid the girls didn’t share my views about domestic tasks. As they grew older, they acted as if they were a squad of slave labour.
The heart of family life, of course, is sitting round a table, all eating and making conversation in a civilised fashion. This is where the foundations of society are laid — or so the theory goes.
It didn’t work like that for us. Meals were often the trigger for disagreements and sometimes outright rows that broke into physical attacks. Seven strong personalities — sitting close to each other — are a recipe for confrontation.
NoW that I think back, it’s just possible that t hose exercises in mutual confrontation were highly character forming. Though domestic guerrilla warfare and angry arguments at meal-times were hard to tolerate, and I often yelled at them, I enjoyed the conflicts of adolescence.
There were l ong discussions about society. The girls questioned things it was easy to take for granted, and challenged my assumptions. I found that I was learning a lot.
Uwe, who values i ntellectual rigour, used to challenge them. When the girls got up in the morning, he’d often ask: ‘Now, what are you going to achieve today?’
At the end of the day, he’d ask each of them: ‘ What have you achieved today?’
Then, if their responses weren’t satisfactory, he’d say: ‘Your mother had already written ten pages before breakfast.’ But the girls just laughed and it became a family joke.
‘Why did you have five children? Was it just so that you had material for your books?’ Celia shouted at me when she was 12.
Five years l ater, i n the early Seventies, Celia was in her first term at Bryanston School in Dorset. She managed only three months there before being expelled for suspected lesbianism.
In the Seventies, homosexuality was seen as pathological — a condition to be remedied by treatment. I took a different view.
As Celia said later: ‘Looking back, I really appreciate the fact that [Sheila] never wanted us to be the same as everyone else. It wasn’t difficult to tell her that I’d become a lesbian.’
In the Nineties, I disclosed that I had another two lesbian daughters. This perturbed some people. Was it a reaction to my work in childbirth? Wasn’t it a terrible shock for me? of course not.
I didn’t plan to be heterosexual. I just was. I expected to love a man, and did. If I’d known my three radical lesbian feminist daughters then, I’d probably never have made that decision.
only one daughter, Tess, has had children. When she first made me a grandmother, I faced a major life transition without any understanding of what it entailed.
I had a picture of what I didn’t want to be — know-it-all, bossy or sentimental. I didn’t want to have to fit a stereo stereotype; I wanted to go on being me. AndA I have.
When Tess had Sam, her first baby, she chose to give birth at home in a pool of water. Watching her, I was amazed at how the way pain melted away when her body was submerged and how easily she moved into all sorts of positions.
Her children quickly became an integral part of my life. As Tess lived in a bungalow at the end of our garden, a new baby was often plonked on my bed in the morning as she rushed to do a school run.
I was even more relaxed about being a grandmother than I was about motherhood. For instance, when I saw little Laura, at nearly a year old, picking up beads and carefully putting them i n her mouth, I didn’t get alarmed.
She wasn’t going to choke on them, because she knew she must not swallow beads. The important thing was not to startle her.
For many women, becoming a grandmother is a symbol of ageing, of being ‘past it’, just a spectator on the touchline, the invisible older woman.
Nonsense. Becoming a grandmother gives you a wonderful chance to rediscover yourself as a mother.