I understand the pain of becoming a parent when you’ve lost yours
In a new film, Prince William reveals conflicting emotions at the birth of his first child.
Judith Woods felt the same
Every so often in life a moment catches you off guard like a gust of wind and buffets you sideways, taking you to an unexpected place.
For Prince William, that gently forceful blow came after the birth of his first child, George, almost seven years ago, when he was suddenly transported back to another time and felt anew the aching loss of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.
He was just 15 when she died in a Paris underpass in 1997, under the most appalling of circumstances, pursued by the paparazzi. In the years that followed, William and his little brother, Harry, then 12, learnt to live with the sadness, as the bereaved do. But then, many years later, came the joy, fear and elation of fatherhood – a momentous event that suddenly threw his mother’s absence into the most painfully sharp relief.
“Your emotions come back, in leaps and bounds, because it’s a very different phase of life and there’s no one there to kind of help you,” he explains for the first time tonight in the BBC One documentary Football, Prince William and Our Mental Health.
“I definitely found it very, at times, overwhelming.”
Should I be surprised that these words gave me that selfsame jolt? They did because I completely understand the dreadful dark shadow that can abruptly fall on to the most shining days. My mother died of cancer when I was 24. I never knew my father; he was snatched from her, from me and my four sisters by a heart attack, as he read three of us a story in bed.
It was just over a week before my third birthday. I remember nothing.
I have no memory of even saying the word “daddy” until my elder child was born, 18 years ago.
But it was the grief over my mother that overwhelmed me the instant my daughter was born. So many milestones had passed without her that I thought I had processed, and was entirely inured to, the sadness.
Yet I found myself in pieces just at the point where I ought to have been strong. The circle of life had brought me to motherhood. It was my role to nurture, protect – above all, to look forward. But, if I’m honest, there were times I felt needier than the baby.
Psychologists agree that adjusting to motherhood without a mother as a touchstone can make for a complex and poignant period of adjustment.
At a fundamental level, becoming a mother – a role that previously belonged to her and her alone – brings up a vast number of issues. From the fairly obvious “What was I like as a baby?” to the more searching “How did this absolute and irrevocable change of identity feel for you?”
I have an uncomfortable suspicion I would be a far better parent – less laissez faire, more consistent – if she were here. I also have it on the best authority that, like every other woman, I would have been outraged at how much more lavishly affectionate and indulgent she would have been towards my daughters than she ever was towards me. But that’s the joy and the privilege of being a grandmother.
Without her there from the start, things were grim. But death is not the only cause of inconsolable sorrow. I had a pregnant friend who had fallen out with her mother so catastrophically many years before that she knew there would be no chance of rapprochement over the Moses basket. Still, she hoped.
Inarguably, her grief was far more crushing than mine; especially when her sister confirmed that their mother was aware of the arrival of her first grandchild and still didn’t, or couldn’t, reach out. Her mother-in-law did her best, but despite all the goodwill in the world, there was no way she could ever fill that role.
My children, now 18 and 11, are far more concerned with the living than the dead, and have not yet reached the stage of wanting anything more than a broad brushstroke description of Granny Woods; no-nonsense, fiercely clever with an amused glint in her eye.
She kept her own counsel and was ambitious for her adult daughters – but an endlessly patient pushover with little children and chubby babies.
My own husband’s mother died when he was 14, so neither of us could draw on a wellspring of maternal wisdom. I’m chastened to admit his feelings about the gap left by his late mother went virtually unnoticed. Possibly because I stole all the oxygen; having witnessed my traumatic labour, he felt (rightly) in no position to chip in his tuppence-worth as I extravagantly keened and lamented.
My bad. But in my defence, first-time motherhood without your own mother literally and metaphorically holding your hand is bloody terrifying. If you’re not seized by fear and paralysed indecision then you’re probably not doing it right. I would suggest that nobody has any place giving a tiny newborn to a woman who has just endured the train wreck of childbirth. But that’s what happens, folks.
Instead, unbidden, one of my older sisters took time off work and came to London to stay with me and my husband. I still get weepy at this unforgettable act of kindness. Herself the mother of two adult daughters, she was there for me as our own mother had been there for her.
Neither bossy nor know-all (although entirely justified in being both), my sister made for a still, calming presence to whom I willingly, slavishly deferred.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she might wonder.
“Absolutely!” I would respond even though I don’t drink tea. I hate tea. My thinking – insofar as I was thinking – being that she surely knew what was best. If she thought I needed a cup of tea, then I must do.
I kept instinctively handing her the baby. She would pause a beat before softly returning her to my arms, saying: “She’s yours.” I remember indignantly thinking: “You complete cow, why are you doing that? I can’t be trusted. How dare you pass this fragile scrap of life to me? This isn’t a game. You take her back, right this minute.”
But I never said it aloud. Even in my sleep-deprived haze of exhaustion and milk stains, I knew my sister was right. I was now the grown-up, however reluctantly. Aged 36.
Diana would be immensely proud of her eldest’s unflinching emotional honesty. By her own account, she was always led “by the heart not the head”; she also observed: “A mother’s arms are more comforting than anyone else’s.”
Is it any wonder that fatherhood made Prince William ache for that supportive embrace?
It’s a well-worn cliché that babies don’t come with a manual. But if you’re very lucky, they come with a grandmother. Or two. And that is all you need.
Football, Prince William and Our Mental Health is on BBC One tonight at 8.05pm
‘Your emotions come back in leaps and bounds – there’s no one there to help you’