« My husband dresses me | Home | The teachers' plot to make our children into failures »
A baby is not for Xmas
After giving birth my mother would cook the family dinner
There are few things in life that are entirely inescapable, apart from death and taxes, but one of them, at least for those who are nine months pregnant, is childbirth. That is one of the things that is so elemental and awe-inspiring about it; labour is an overwhelming and unstoppable force, like a typhoon or a tidal wave. Which is why, I suppose, there was such amazement last week about a young businesswoman who, though already in labour, carried on working through her early labour pains at her office in Glasgow for more than five hours after her waters broke.
Her baby was born four hours later in hospital. "High flier put contract before contractions", according to a headline in The Daily Telegraph, above a picture of the radiant new mother with her infant daughter. Miss Sue Clark, 34, was working on a pounds 4.5 billion takeover deal. She had worked for more than 10 hours a day for the previous 14 days, and will be back at work in January. She will have "some help" with the baby and expects her husband to "take a full role".
I imagine the point of this story - why it is news - is that this is seen as some sort of new extreme of motherhood: women are so driven to succeed that they are prepared to try to ignore the demands of nature. I think that is true, but not in the way that the story suggests. Whatever the myths about childbirth, it is actually easy to override the demands of labour, at least in the first stages. Giving birth for most women is not overwhelmingly difficult. Most women these days are encouraged to stay as active as possible, until well into labour, and most historically have done so. The first stage of labour is not always very painful, and in any case the pains are intermittent and it is only in the short, second stage that all other concerns must give way to the force of nature.
Equally, many women recover quickly, and go back to work in the fields almost at once. In the Seventies and Eighties lots of working women managed to disguise the demands of pregnancy and giving birth, in order to prove that pregnancy and childbirth wouldn't stop them doing their work. My mother, whose first three children were born at home, would always rest for a couple of hours after labour, then get up and cook dinner for everybody. And I wrote a column on the day my second child was due, and then went home and did a television interview when he was only 48 hours old, even after a difficult labour. That's all pretty commonplace, and nature doesn't usually object much.
What nature does object to, I think, is what happens in the following months and years. Gazing at the Telegraph's photograph of the ambitious mother and sleeping child, I was reminded of the slogan the animal welfare people usually put out at this time of year: a puppy isn't just for Christmas. Similarly a baby isn't just for its birth day. A baby is for ever, and for every day. I realise that new mothers don't understand that. I didn't understand it myself, and imagined I could do a two-month working trip to China, only weeks after my baby was born. I assumed that it would be easy to hand my baby over to someone else and easy to find a suitable someone else; it isn't. Nor did it occur to me that while some babies sleep peacefully through the night, others scream with colic and wake up four or five times in the night. It didn't occur to me that I might have a baby with chronic illness or disability, who would need much more of my time than other children: children with special needs almost always force their mothers out of full-time careers. Nor did I realise that babies grow up to need more and more, not less and less, of their mothers' time.
None of this seems to have occurred to Miss Clark either, judging from the way she talks. However, she may turn out to be another Nicola Horlick, and manage to do everything at once, including her demanding job. The question is whether it matters for a mother to work more than 10 hours a day for more than 14 days. What is the point of having children in that case? Isn't that what defies the demands of nature in this story? My feelings and my experience convince me that women and children need each other.
However, there is a quite a lot of evidence the other way. Many women, rich and poor, have entirely neglected their children throughout history, handing them over to others, either because they had to or (more significantly) because they wanted to. Wretched 19th-century factory hands tied their infants to bedsteads when they went off the mills. Jane Austen's mother handed her babies over to peasants in the village. During the Second World War women were expected to dump their children in creches and work in munitions factories. Seven-year-olds are still sent off to boarding school. I don't know of any evidence that those generations of unmothered children were far more dysfunctional than any other. Our bourgeois idyll of the carefully nurtured child is very recent and very short-lived. It could be argued that those of us who feel so strongly that children need their mothers at home, if only part-time, are merely expressing a preference.
However, the answer to this question is very simple and very final: ask the children. They are almost unanimous.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, December 13, 1998
