Twenty one months and fifteen days

Most of the time I walk around congratulating myself on how advanced Alice's vocabulary and communication skills are for her age. But occasionally it will occur to me that just because I can understand her, it doesn't mean she is making sense.

Example: would an outsider necessarily glean anything from the words 'yoya poon'? No. Whereas the mummy-translator renders the above into 'yoghurt spoon' and further into the full intended meaning which is something like 'I would very much like to eat a yoghurt with my spoon now. Make it so.'

Five weeks and two days

Ok, I need to amend what I wrote five days ago, I think. I just started reading What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen, which in its very first chapter addresses the issue of there being nothing to say about looking after babies:

a mother who has little to relate usually assumes that this is because there really is very little worth telling ... Our language can be very clear and precise about anything practical. A person who has 'tidied up' has both the word and a tidy area to show for it. It is much harder to find a word that describes the giving-up-things mode of attention a mother is giving to her baby.

At first I thought it was just coincidence that made me reach for that particular book (which I borrowed from the library before Alice was even born). But I wonder whether subconsciously I was uncomfortable about the 'motherhood is boring' trope that I'd flippantly evoked in the last post, and wanted something to counter my own words. Because deep down I know that what I do for Alice is NOT trivial and menial. It's just that it's hard to externalise the things that now feel important, because the language of the public world doesn't fit the achievements of the domestic one.

In other words, there might not be a conspiracy of silence as such, but a silence is imposed anyway through not having the right words.

Incompetence

A short hospital stay last week (all fine now) gave me cause to think about pregnancy/birth language again. Some of the terms in general use really do make you wonder about the people who invented them - they seem to reveal a totally negative and distinctly judgemental attitude towards maternity.

For example, I apparently have an 'irritable uterus'. This is an ok term I guess, although to a laywoman it does conjure up the image of my womb being cross with me, which is hardly comforting. But it reminded me of reading about 'incompetent uterus' or 'incompetent cervix' which basically means that the cervix is weaker than normal and starts dilating too early. Could there possibly be a more loaded word than 'incompetent' to describe this? Is it only me who would feel personally accused by such a diagnosis (even knowing on a rational level that I am not consciously responsible for the behaviour of my internal organs)?

Of course, it gets worse. If your labour doesn't move swiftly enough for those overseeing it (for example, stress can occasionally stop labour altogether), it is called 'failure to progress' and steps will be taken to get you going again. Fair enough, but why bring the concept of 'failure' into it? Failure sounds human and avoidable, even if it isn't, and is surely the last word we'd want associated with what is already the greatest test of physical endurance most of us will ever have to go through.

Oh and there are more failures on the horizon - once you actually have your baby he or she might be assessed as 'failing to thrive', a weirdly vague diagnosis (referring to slower than expected growth and weight gain) which in its lack of medical specificity just sounds like a scary accusation aimed at the parent.

What hope have I got of getting through the next 10 weeks in a conducively calm frame of mind when half the relevant terminology seems designed to scare me?

Weeks: 29+6

Amphibious midwifery

I was inspired by the Guardian's free wallchart today to look up midwife toads (actually a type of frog). It turns out they are so called because the male carries the fertilised eggs on his back and subsequently wraps them around his legs to protect them from predators until they hatch into tadpoles. Er, maybe it's just me but that doesn't sound THAT similar to the duties of your average human midwife...

Speaking of which, having just read Misconceptions, Naomi Wolf's book about the medicalised, interventionist and downright inhumane model of antenatal care and birth in the USA, I am even more grateful for our cheery, practical midwives and their non-judgemental care so far. And especially for our specialist nurse from the regional cleft lip/palate team, who visited us at home and provided all the information and reassurance we could possibly want, including encouraging me to go ahead with the planned home birth if I want to. So now we just need to convince the obstetrician (although to be honest he is a lovely man too and I'm sure he won't be aggressive with his 'hospital care is best' agenda if we are really keen on home birth.)

Weeks: 25+1

Couvade

I am fascinated that sympathetic pregnancy exists, and that it has such a poetic sounding name. I will not be very impressed if my husband does take to his bed during or after the birth though.

From Wikipedia:

The term Couvade is derived from the early French word (Couver "to hatch") and custom where the father, during or immediately after the birth of a child, takes to bed, complains of having labour pains, and is accorded the treatment usually shown women during pregnancy or after childbirth.

It is thought that couvade is a way to minimize sexual differences in the pregnancy and birthing experience. The couvade may also be a way to establish the father's role in the child's life and to give balance to the gender roles. An earlier theory suggests that the couvade was evidence of male envy. Couvade is more common where sex roles are flexible and female power and status high.

Western medicine has tended to see the couvade as a medical syndrome or pathology. Defined medically, couvade is another term for Sympathetic pregnancy.



Weeks: 19+2

Some thoughts on words

The language of pregnancy is slightly odd when you think about it. I don't mean the technical terms and the endless mystical abbreviations, but the everyday words. Take 'conceive' for example. 'Conceiving' a child makes it sound like you just thought something up. That which you create when you conceive something - a concept - is practically the opposite of a child, surely. A concept has no physical manifestation; a child is the most amazing physical thing that human beings can create. Why is creating LIFE described with a word that can be equally well applied to dreaming up a project, a scheme, an artwork, a joke, an argument, a sonnet, a dress design? Not that these things aren't valuable, but it's a category error somehow. I did write a poem about this a while ago in fact, but at the time a child WAS only an idea to me. Little did I know...

Or 'expecting'. Why do we 'expect' a baby like we expect a letter, or a phone call? I suppose the word contains the sense of something that SHOULD happen at some future date, but might not. Which is an accurate, although rather pessimistic, way of describing pregnancy I suppose. Maybe 'I'm having a baby' sounds too definite for some people, too much like tempting fate. Or too much like the present tense.

Weeks: 15