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I recently went to a birthday party for an old family friend. I didn’t know many people there and only went out of a sense of obligation. Normally I don’t mind parties like this. I’ll happily have a couple of glasses of bubbles and make small talk and have a few laughs. Then again, I tend not to accessorise my party outfit with a screaming child.
My daughter Violet screamed from the moment we walked in the door until the moment I made our apology-filled exit. I tried every trick in the mothering book — Volumes 1, 2 and 3 — to calm her or distract her but she wasn’t having any of it.
Now, usually when this happens, other people jump in and try to help. They’ll offer to hold Violet, dangle their keys in front of her, pull face or make animal noises. In general, they’ll act like an idiot in order to quiet her.
Not on this occasion. No one was willing to make an idiot of themselves.
I’d understand this lack of response if we’d been at the launch of a Lady Gaga album surrounded by waifishly thin types kitted out in clothes made entirely from cheese. But we weren’t. It was a family do and there were idiots as far as the eye could see.
Even the older women, who you’d assume had been in the same position and, you’d think, knew a thing or two about entertaining children, offered only their silence and glares of judgment and scorn.
Everyone else seemed to just wish that the floor would open up and swallow Violet and me whole. The rejection and disapproval made me tense and anxious which I’m sure upset Violet even more and just made everything worse.
I left the party feeling like an inadequate mother and a poor guest. Why couldn’t I soothe my own child? Why do I seem to have given birth to the only child in the world who screams all day? If I could have curled up in my car seat and howled like Violet all the way home I would have.
And then I decided that I was expecting too much of myself and too much of Violet. Every parent knows that sometimes children have days like this. Be it from teething, over-stimulation, not enough stimulation, or whatever, sometimes babies just cry.
And sometimes mothers just need someone to act like an idiot for a bit to distract their child. So if you ever find yourself in a social situation with a screaming child and a mother only just managing to hold it together, then don’t look the other way. Instead, get in touch with your inner idiot and entertain both the mother and the child. Raising a child takes a village, and that includes the village idiot.
‘A baby will make your relationship worse; a child will never improve your marriage’ a mother friend told me recently. Her statement was quickly followed by vigorous nods of agreement by the other mothers at the table.
What happened to a baby bringing a couple closer together? I’ve watched The Bold and the Beautiful and seen those women have babies to save their marriages. Sure, they’ve all married, divorced, remarried and redivorced the entire cast umpteen times in between being abducted by aliens, so perhaps they’re not the best role models.
But is there no truth in idea that a bundle of joy equates to happily ever after?
Apparently not if the research is any guide. Some researchers believe that the birth of the first child is the first nail in the coffin of many marriages. By the time children reaches the age of three, there’s a 20 per cent chance their parents will be divorced.
And it’s not just the early days when you’re surviving on two hours of sleep a night and adjusting to the reality of having a small person clamped permanently on your boobs that your marriage gets rocky. Oh no, it goes on for much longer than that.
In their book When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples, Carolyn and Philip Cowan cite a study in which they tracked approximately one hundred couples for five years after the birth of their first child.
They found that 97 per cent of couples reported that there had been an increase in marital conflict since the birth of their child, and almost 25 per cent of couples reported that their marriage was in distress even eighteen months after the baby had arrived.
The statistics don’t lie. Most new mothers I have spoken to are angry and resentful. And most of this anger and resentment is directed at their partners. They are seething that their lives have changed so much more than their partners; that her lifestyle and identity has been completely obliterated and his life carries on pretty much as normal. A woman sacrifices her body, her mind, her sleep, her career, her autonomy, and her personal space, while a man might have to give up golf on the weekends.
In many cases, I’m sure this is an overstatement, and that men do carry more of the childcare burden. However, I have heard new fathers say things like, ‘I’m not giving up golf/football/surfing/ on the weekend because that’s my time.’ They seem completely oblivious to the fact that the mother of their child has not had a single moment of ‘Me Time’ since she went into labour.
The inequality that sneaks into a relationship when a child arrives is unavoidable. Mummy’s life will change more than daddy’s. But what makes this change unbearable is that firstly, women don’t expect it — they assumed that the basic equality in their pre-baby relationships would continue — and secondly, the inequality is so often unacknowledged by their partners. All of a sudden women are working harder than they have ever worked in their lives, but domestic work and childcare so often goes unseen and unvalued.
I wonder if more marriages would be able to weather the storm of children if mothers felt more supported and more appreciated by their partners.
‘Just relax, stop trying and just let it happen’.
I was at the hairdresser and straining to overhear the best relationship and fertility advice that a set of extensions can buy.
As best I could make out, the client wanted a baby but only seemed to date men who were in no position, or had no desire, to become fathers. The hairdresser was telling a story about a friend of hers who finally managed to find the man of her dreams and get knocked up after just relaxing and letting it happen.
The hairdresser’s eagerly listening client seemed soothed by the news that things would work themselves out if she handed over her desire for a partner and a baby to Lady Luck.
Who knows? Perhaps it will all work out for the client as it did for the hairdresser’s friend. I wish her all the luck in the world.
But I can’t help wondering at the advice to ‘just let it happen’. I spent way too many horrendous months of my life sitting in an IVF clinic waiting room filled with desperate and devastated women who had made the mistake of handing over the reins of their fertility to fate and chance. They had wasted their precious fertile years ‘just letting it happen’ and by the time they realized that ‘nothing was happening at all’ their last option was to pour their fortunes and their souls into invasive and often unsuccessful fertility treatment.
A 30-year-old woman who wants to get pregnant, stands a 22 per cent chance of being successful during any given month. By 35, it has dropped to 18 per cent. By 40, it’s five per cent and by 45, there’s only a lousy one per cent chance. With numbers like these we don’t have the luxury of just letting it happen.
When it comes to getting a good education and a job, nobody tells us to just relax and ‘let it happen’. In fact, it’s the opposite; we work out what we want and then we go after it. When it comes to managing our finances or reining in our credit card debt, we don’t sit back and let the universe take care of it. Why don’t we approach our relationships and our fertility to with the same determination and strategy as all the other aspects of our lives?
‘I’d like to send a hilarious YouTube clip to a friend but I’m worried she’ll think I’m a smug mother,’ says my friend Jennifer.
Under normal circumstances Jennifer’s friend would appreciate the humour and cuteness of a baby playing with a Labrador puppy. But these are not normal circumstances. Jennifer’s friend is trying to conceive.
I can sympathise. When I was trying to have a baby, and facing month after month of failure and bitter disappointment, it seemed like everywhere I turned people were thrusting their fertility in my face.
I’d turn on my computer or television to be greeted by pregnant bellies and toothless grins. Even the animal kingdom seemed to be in on the conspiracy to make me feel inadequate. While my rubbish bin gradually filled with negative pregnancy tests, the elephant at the zoo managed to get knocked up. No doubt it was one of those elephant species that’s on the endangered list owing to its mind-bogglingly complicated breeding cycle.
I remember being amazed and hurt by the insensitivity of the people around me. My infertility was no secret so why were people constantly showing me what I didn’t have, and might never be able to have?
As the months of ‘trying’ stretched on, when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. People stopped being insensitive, and started doing something worse — much worse. They started being sensitive.
As Oscar Wilde put it, ‘there is only one thing worse than being insensitive; and that is being sensitive’. Or, at least, Oscar Wilde would have put it if he’d had trouble procreating – which he didn’t.
Now officially re-categorised as an Object of Pity, my name dropped off the pregnancy and birth email announcements. The invitations to baby showers and children’s birthday parties dried up. My brother mysteriously forgot to add my email address to messages with photos and videos of my niece in Canada, even though everyone else in my family seemed to receive them just fine. I felt excluded, like a social pariah.
When Jennifer asked me whether or not she should send the video to her friend, I should have known the answer. I know what it feels like to be Jennifer’s friend. But when it comes to the social etiquette of interacting with people struggling to have a baby there is no right answer on this test. To tell or not to tell? When you are consumed by your infertility, both options seem rude and insensitive.
In the end I told her not to send the video. For what it’s worth, my advice in dealing with friends trying to conceive is: share baby information with your friend if it’s something she’s going to find out about anyway. You don’t want her to feel the pain of infertility and exclusion. Otherwise, spare her the reminder of what she doesn’t have.
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