Naked Motherhood - part one (the horror hours)

I started pre-natal yoga classes the other week and I picked up this book called Naked Motherhood by Wendy LeBlanc.

Oh how I wish that I had found it before I had Lily; before I even decided to get pregnant. Honestly, I could have been so much better prepared.

In the book Wendy LeBlanc explores all those 'hidden truths' about the experience of motherhood - from the fact that pregnancy can often unexpectedly knock you for six, to the fact that so many women are so unprepared for the reality of labour that they wind up traumatised, to the myth that your life will go back to normal within a few months of the birth, and so on...

In researching for this book, LeBlanc surveyed and interviewed a diverse group of women around Australia and so her conclusions are not based solely on a small circle of friends or her own experience. Instead she provides a wealth of examples, in addition to statistic information to back up her findings. And some of those findings are pretty telling:

• 43% of mothers surveyed expected to be exhausted during the first twelve months of their first baby's life
• 90% reported an impact on coping; 63% in the severe to extreme range

• 67% of women surveyed expected their sleep to be interrupted by their first babies
• 84% reported an impact on coping; 63% in the severe to extreme range
• almost no-one expected these interruptions to go on for more than three months
• all expected their babies would sleep for long periods of time throughout the day

Logically I knew that babies woke up often during the night and that my sleep might be interrupted while Lily was very young. I was nervous about this, because I have always been very attached to sleeping and felt that I 'needed' at least 8 hours every night in order to function. I figured that after the first few months we would work out how to settle her easily and that I would have the chance to sleep during the day, 'since babies sleep so much'. Ha.

Lily slept for a maximum of 40 minutes at a time during the day until she was about nine months old (and for most of those she was attached to me) when she finally started sleeping for about 1 hour & 20 minutes twice a day (for a short blissful period). Often it would take me over an hour to settle her beforehand. She slept for no more than 3 hours at a time at night for almost 3 years. For long periods she would wake up every 40 minutes for a feed. Sometimes she would have only just come off before the 40 minutes was up and so only 5 or 10 minutes would elapse between feeds. To say that I was exhausted almost feels like an understatement. Sometimes I felt as though my very sense of self had been shattered.

I was utterly unprepared for this.

Another thing that LeBlanc covers is the 'horror hours'. Again if I had even heard of these I had not listened. As she puts it:

Studies have shown that the average baby cries for three hours per day, the majority of which occurs between the hours of 6pm and 9pm. These are the 'horror hours'.
At this end of the day the mother is tired too. She may have been on duty for twelve hours already. Still there are hours stretching ahead filled with walking and consoling and feeding and cajoling before she can sit down and relax-or sink into a blissful sleep herself. By five in the afternoon a mother may feel she has given every inch of herself throughout the day and now has not a drop of giving left in her. Yet, somehow, she must go on giving of herself until either her partner arrives home to relieve her or her baby sleeps. [p.43]

Lily had reflux when she was born and this gave her terrible heartburn that got worse as the day went on. By the time it got to about 5:30pm she was exhausted and in pain and would start screaming. At first we had absolutely no idea what to do. We tried everything. We walked her, bounced on the swiss ball (something that often worked at other times), rubbed her tummy, gave her a warm bath, sang to her, rocked her, fed her, etc... and she just kept screaming.

I hate the sound of babies crying. It breaks my heart and I want to stop it by comforting them. But this feeling is nothing compared to how I felt about my own baby. I would have done anything to make her feel better. I felt like I was a complete failure as a human being (and, of course, as a mother) because I couldn't make her feel better. It felt as though the sound of her crying was ripping me apart. Again, I never expect to be challenged so completely.

(Eventually, we did discover that if I put her in the hug-a-bub (sling) just before the horror hours and sang her to sleep then we could walk around outside and keep her asleep for the duration of the horror hours. We started an evening ritual of wearing and walking Lily around the city and didn't go home until after 8:30pm when we knew that if she woke she was less likely to scream. AND she grew out of this stage at around 2 months.)

So, yes, those would have been useful things to prepare myself for (if I had been willing to listen), particularly because LeBlanc shares a wealth of sensible suggestions for dealing with all of these issues.

However, what I like the most about this book is the way that she uses it as an opportunity to tackle another huge facet of motherhood - the fact that it brings you face to face with the ugly side of TEH PATRIARCHY.

To be continued in Part Two (I had really better go to bed)...