Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

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Press and radio coverage of this site from around the UK

News

Order of Parental Honour

Russia is to honour prolific mothers with a presidential award for their baby-making efforts, according to this story in The Telegraph. The move is an attempt to reverse an alarming decline in Russia's population. The Russian government is spreading the message that it is the patriotic duty of all women to bear at least three children. "Pregnancy is now the height of fashion among wealthy women," says the article.

'Height of fashion', indeed. At seven months pregnant, half-crippled with pelvic pain, gripped by every anxiety under the sun and sleeping with a boudoir's worth of cushions to prop up my aching limbs I do not feel remotely fashionable. My hair is a mess: I haven't dared touch up my greying roots for fear of harming the baby.

I hardly go out any more in the evenings - being sleepy by 9pm. My personal space has expanded to a two-metre exclusion zone around me. Talking to strangers scares me. My mind constantly revolves around how to protect the baby from every difficulty she might face in life. I'm terrified that the birth will be a disaster. The indigestion is getting worse. I would love to have three children, but if I can get through this pregnancy with a healthy baby at the end, and without permanently alienating all those whom I love, I'll count myself lucky.

In any case, The Telegraph quotes some so-called 'experts' on Russia saying the real cause of population decline isn't women shirking reproductive duty but .... rampant alcoholism. Oh dear. The average life expectancy for a Russian male is just 58. Poor bastards. They drink themselves into an early grave. But apparently it's easier in Russia to persuade women to have more children than it is to get the men to stop drinking.

Posted 26 May 2008 10:52 | Number of comments: 7 | Comments

Childbirth News Pregnancy

Cue the Counterblast

Piece in the Telegraph today saying we are evolving to have more children later in life. To help us stay fertile longer we will be less troubled by diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart problems and obesity that occur in middle age and beyond.

Professor John Hawks, the anthropologist who led the team of scientists behind the research, told the paper that genes allowing us to stay fertile for longer, as we delay having children, seem more important than living longer in itself.

"The trend has been towards later reproduction," Hawks told the Telegraph. "Many people wait to have kids until they are in their late 30s to 40s. But very few people lived in their 40s more than 50,000 years ago. That's a big biological change. So genes that impede fertility at later ages must be experiencing stronger and stronger selection pressure."

Hawks continued: "The bottom line: people are unlikely to live much longer in the future - at least, due to genetic changes - but they are likely to be better at having kids older."

Music to my ears.

Posted 11 December 2007 11:54 | Number of comments: 3 | Comments

Health News Older mother

Go on, blame it on us older mums

Depressing to read that mature mothers are allegedly responsible for putting pressure on maternity units. I've heard some lame excuses for the lack of NHS funding and its creaking infrastructure, but really, isn't blaming new mothers who happen to be a few years older than average scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel? The story claims the increasing number of women giving birth in later life is putting pressure on maternity units that do not have enough specialists to deal with complications associated with older mothers. Curiously, the article omits to mention that the overall birth rate has been climbing in recent years, which might have something to do with the pressure on maternity units. Nor does it dwell on the amount of funding going into maternity care. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists estimates that to provide safe care for all women in labour, the number of consultants needs to rise from 1,600 to 2,500 immediately, and more will be needed if the trend for women to give birth later continues. We older mums are costing the NHS because we are more likely to need a Caesarean or run into serious difficulties during delivery and so require consultants to be available. How inconsiderate of us.

Posted 13 November 2007 22:20 | Number of comments: 19 | Comments

Childbirth News Older mother

Obsessed

The night after Kate and Gerry McCann were named as suspects in the disappearance of their own child, I dreamt my duvet had turned into a rippling black cloud that was engulfing me in a sea of darkness. I woke up dripping with sweat to hear Beanie next door screaming, and clambered out of bed, pushing away the darkness.

No news story has ever affected me like this before, except maybe the Soham murders. I've become obsessed with this latest twist in the case of a little girl who went missing in mysterious circumstances in Portugal five months ago. Obsessed to the point where I can hardly talk of anything else. To the point where when I wake up it's the first thing I think about.

Since the story broke in May, it's felt like a part of me, of who I am as a parent. I've based so much of my behaviour since the little girl went missing on the assumption she was abducted from their ground-floor Portuguese holiday apartment.

I've hassled Beanie's nursery to tighten security, refused to leave her with anyone except close family and a handful of trusted friends and planned our holiday around being with her all the time. Beanie, like Madeleine, is pretty and blonde; just a couple of years younger than the missing girl. But so many of us parents, if not all of us, identified with the McCanns, with the unspeakable calamity that seemed to have befallen them.

The Madeleine story appeared to embody every parent's worst fears. The stuff of myth and monsters. Now it seems the real truth might be darker still. I hope not. But I get a bad feeling it might be.

Posted 09 September 2007 11:40 | Number of comments: 28 | Comments

Childcare News Safety

Time and tide

Erica at Littlemummy and British Parent Bloggers has pointed me towards a story revealing the pressure on mums is so great that we have just ten minutes of 'me-time' every day to ourselves, leading researchers to label our generation as 'motor mums'.

Writing as one who can barely bring herself to drive a car, I'm not sure this is the right label for me. I'm also unsure what counts as 'me-time', which in itself could be sad and telling. Loading and unloading the dishwasher? Cleaning the floors? Vacuuming? The Sisyphean task of laundry management, for which I'm beginning to wonder if I need one of those project management qualifications? Blogging?

I did go to lots of Edinburgh Book Festival events, some of them even on my own. That's got to count. But that was okay because I suffered torments of guilt for my frivolous abandon.

According to the people who came up with this research (a washing powder company) mums have so little time to themselves because they spend most of the day keeping their children happy.

I don't mind not having much 'me-time', (though as I write Beanie is screaming for my attention, annoyed to have lost me in the blogosphere, so I'll have to be quick). Perhaps I'm not being strictly honest with myself - there is tension between her needs, or at least her wants, and mine.

But I had to wait until I was 38 to have Beanie. So I had a super-abundance of 'me-time' before she arrived, some of it great, some okay, and some, well, frankly, lonely; spent wondering if or when Mr Right would materialise, if I'd be able to have a baby. Yes, I know: Bridget Jones, eat your heart out.

Maybe being older has meant a bigger adjustment to devoting most of my waking hours (and quite a few of the sleeping ones, too, on occasion) to another person.

But after waiting so long for her, now Beanie's here, I intend to make the most of it.

Posted 05 September 2007 11:46 | Number of comments: 19 | Comments

Childcare Daughters Guilt News Older mother

Monkey business

We all know that breast is best, but really, you can take a good idea too far, as I think you'll agree this picture proves. This Indian lady, a government worker, has treated Buru, her pet monkey, as her third child, since her woodcutter husband found him half-starved as a baby under a nearby tree after a storm. "Yes, I breastfeed him. He is my son," Namita Das told BBC News. "I did not have a son. God has given me one." According to the BBC, Buru generally stays at home, but can sometimes be seen climbing on neighbours' rooves, stealing bananas. Blimey! And I thought I got some funny looks for breastfeeding Beanie until she was a year old.

Posted 03 September 2007 16:36 | Number of comments: 16 | Comments

Breastfeeding Missing sanity News

L Plates Mum

Reading last week the story of a rise in unjust adoptions, I was taken back to my fears as an L Plates mum when Beanie first arrived and I hadn't a clue how to get from one minute to the next so sat in my flat shaking, wondering what to do next. Terrified the Baby Police (my friendly health visitor) would rumble me, I asked a friend who's a paediatrician if I'd get into trouble for general ineptitude in the matter of caring for a newborn. "No," she told me. "Not unless you're doing drugs or hitting her." Big sigh of relief, since I was guilty of neither crime, though I continued to fear the weekly health clinic weigh-ins when I had to de-robe Beanie and pop her in a set of kitchen scales. It felt like the neo-natal equivalent of annual performance appraisals.

Other News

In the Night Garden

Thanks to Littlemummy, who has a posting on how much her daughter Erin loves this programme, Beanie has discovered In the Night Garden on CBeebies. She's so excited by it, she insists on standing up and swaying furiously while it's on, waving at Iggle Piggle, Uppsy Daisy and their friends in what I take to be ecstasy, though her waves cause me a small pang of heartache, when I think how the characters will never wave back at her and see how unsuspecting she is of this. Her dad and I are pretty taken with In the Night Garden too. Va-vay in particular enjoys repeating the names of the different characters to himself. Sitting eating his veggie dinner a couple of nights ago he said, apropos of nothing in particular: "Tombliboos." Short pause. "Tombliboos." Va-vay, who has a degree in linguistics, is trying to pass his love of In the Night Garden off to me as an interest in the development of infant speech patterns. An interest that has led to him starting to get home earlier from work, in time for the 6.20pm start time. My cup, it runneth over.

Posted 26 August 2007 11:26 | Number of comments: 10 | Comments

Activities Childcare Daughters Dilemmas Domestic chaos Home Husband News

Breastfeeding blues

Next week sees the start of World Breastfeeding Week, now in its sixteenth year. This year's theme is the importance of breastfeeding in the first hour of a baby's life.

Educating women in the benefits of breastfeeding is only one part of the equation.

We need more health workers who can teach first-timers how to breastfeed, because I don't think it's an innate skill, despite what some people say.

"Every newborn, when placed on the mother's abdomen soon after birth, has the ability to find her mother's breast all on her own and to decide when to take the first breastfeed," say the organisers.

Sadly, it wasn't like that for me, nor for many of my friends, though most of us mastered breastfeeding in the end. The Bean was too busy trying out her lung capacity to do the "breast crawl".

I was ready to throw in the towel at various points in the early weeks and give Beanie a bottle. Only support from Va-vay kept me going. And stopping the 'nose-to-nipple' latch-on they taught me in hospital that made me dizzy with pain.

After that, everything slowly got easier. Until we got to the point where breastfeeding was actually enjoyable. But by that time I felt under almost as much pressure to stop as I did to start in the first place.

World Breastfeeding Week runs from August 1-7.