So you’re electing for a c-section?

Yippee: we’re all going to be allowed to have c-sections whenever we want them. We will of course be queueing up. But if you’ve not been lucky enough to have one before and are planning to take advantage of the new guidelines, here’s what you need to know.

Before:

1. Don’t bin your maternity nighties in anticipation, as you will be living in them for the next six weeks.

2. Shave in advance. Unless you want a nurse to take you by surprise with a blunt razor.

3. It will not happen when they say it will. I was confidently told that it would be at least an hour, so my husband went to the loo. Thirty seconds later, they came to collect me, leaving him locked in the loo.

4. The anaesthetic might not work. If so, don’t let the junior doctor tip you sideways to try to spread it around a bit. Ask them to call a consultant instead. Preferably before they start operating.

During:

1. The drugs will make you feel a bit less than well. You may have spent nine months planning your first skin-to-skin encounter with your baby; when the moment comes, you will be concentrating on not being sick.

2. They put a nice screen up so you can’t see what’s going on inside you. However, the lights above you have little mirrors around them. It is not advisable to look up.

After:

1. Whatever size knickers you normally wear, the elastic will somehow always coincide neatly with your scar. Make sure you are armed with a supply of Granny-pants, preferably disposable. I am a size 10 normally, but size 16-18s worked well for me.

2. They will not let you out of hospital until you have done a poo. Learn from my experience and do not – repeat NOT – take a triple dose of Lactulose in an attempt to speed up the process.

3. Enjoy your catheter. You can drink as much water as you like without having to get up for a wee. This is fun.

4. Unlike the cannula. Possibly the most painful medical torture implement ever invented, and a necessary evil of c-sections. Look on the bright side, though: they take your mind off the scar pain.

5. Take your painkillers. You might think it doesn’t hurt that much, and that you don’t need them any more. Yes it does, and yes you do.

 

Yes, it’s all good fun in elective section land. (Especially compared to the vaginal birth from hell: been there, done that, got the t-shirt). And however bad it might feel, just remember that you’ll somehow forget the bad bits enough to do it all again in another couple of years’ time.

That’s motherhood for you.

Un-yummy Mummy

So you think you’re quite cool? So did I – until I had children. But now I have to face facts: I am officially a Sad Old Fogey. An un-yummy Mummy.

I was once quite keen on fashion, honestly. And then I had two children and woke up in the Per Una skirt department. How on earth did that happen?

Fact is: your image takes a severe blow once chidren come along (or, in my case, in the nine months  before it). Here’s how I underwent my own personal anti-metamorphosis.

Fashion Disaster 1: The voluminous nightie.

When pregnant. I went lumbering into Next, having heard that they had decent maternity clothes. I emerged weeping. There was I, 5 foot and 7 stone, toting around a bump that wouldn’t fit into size 16 maternity leather-look lurve trousers.

What would fit me? Nothing – except my tent-like nightie. I ended up going to work in it. I think I got away with it because it was navy.

Fashion Disaster 2: Sensible shoes.

Why does nobody warn you that you can’t push a buggy round a muddy park in heels, and that you will start to covet Granny shoes? Though pregnancy is evidently nature’s way of dropping not-very-subtle hints of fashion disasters to come. My feet swelled up so much that I could only wear flip-flops. In December.

Fashion Disaster 3: The Bag. 

Big doesn’t have to mean revolting. Again, someone should have told me. Even once your children are at school, you will still find yourself being a mobile receptacle for conkers, tissues, hand gel, discarded wrappers, stuffed toys and sticks. Then you will be glad it’s all contained within nice cheery Cath Kidston strawberry fabric. When I look at my nasty mouldy-green nylon contraption, I certainly would be.

Fashion Disaster 4: The car. 

I was always going to have a lovely little convertible. So why am I driving round in a rusty old tank (sorry, estate car)? Ah yes, because we could fit the Phil and Teds in it – even when the pesky catch broke and we couldn’t dismantle it. And then there was also the small matter of fitting the children in too. And the five suitcases that accompany a baby on a day trip to Ikea.

Fashion Disaster 5: The Reflective Strip.

It seems like only five minutes since my mum was berating me for cutting the naff reflective strips off my anorak. Now I find myself wearing one of those luminous cycling sashes after 3pm (and, to their horror, making the children wear them too) – because without them, we will obviously all be crushed by the random car that will mount the pavement because the driver DIDN’T SEE US.

Yes, I have to face it. I am officially an un-yummy Mummy, and an embarrassment to my children. But there is at least one consolation: the only thing worse for a child than an uncool Mummy in an M&S fleece bed-jacket (such are the perils of working from home) is a Mummy who’s trying to be cool. Fleecy bed jackets rock.

Mamma Mia!

“I have reached that age”, muses the narrator of Anita Brookner’s Incidents in the Rue Langier, “when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person she least plans to resemble: her mother”.

Well, missus, I know just how you feel. There I was, having a quiet rummage in my photo box in the vain hope of finding a picture of myself that didn’t belong on Crimewatch – and I suddenly saw my mum’s eyes staring up at me.

Apart from our mutual interest in growing cabbages, I had never seen any resemblance before. I am blonde, blue-eyed, round-faced; my mother is dark and chiselled. So I was somewhat taken aback to see her looking at me through my own face. But if the physical resemblance is a spooky new development, then I can’t help wondering what other disturbing patterns might follow. Am I also programmed to watch Cash in the Attic and keep chickens?

Of course not. I am independent woman, not a clone. Aren’t I?

Um, no actually. Not only do I now have my mother’s eyes: I have taken on her personality as well. There I was, harmlessly ironing a pile of sheets and bath towels, when my husband asked me what on earth I was doing. Now, ironing sheets and bath towels (which, now I come to think of it, is probably pathological) seems to be perfectly reasonable. Why? Because Mum does it.

I should have known it was bad news when I inexplicably found myself watching the Christmas Antiques Roadshow (I blamed pregnancy hormones at the time). And, of course, having children has only made the problem worse. All those old maternal cliches that I was never, ever going to utter seem to find their way into my dealings with the children. I’m not made of money. Nor does money grow on trees. The starving children of Africa would be GRATEFUL for that lovely lentil casserole. Stop showing me up! And – my all-time most hated phrase – “life is grim, life is earnest” (to be said to children when they’re particularly miserable and thus particularly reluctant to hear it). Tee hee.

Yes, you may try to fight it, but your Inner Parent will out. Just think of all the mini-me offspring of celebs, doomed to become their mothers. And while the Royal Family have managed to eject Her Ferginess from their ranks, she’s still there – only in delightful duplicate, in the form of her daughters.

As for me: well, when I think of the mad relatives I could have turned into, then I should probably think myself lucky. Whether my daughter will agree when her turn comes, only time will tell.

Maid in Britain – and staying that way

It’s official: Britain is the worst place to live in Europe. Long working hours, low pay, high prices and cold weather all conspire to make us more miserable than any other nation. According to a uSwitch survey, 46 per cent of those surveyed had thought of emigrating.

Well, all I can say is: if you think it’s bad here, you have never lived in Germany.

I will add at this point that some of my best friends are German. In fact, several of my relatives are German, as are my washing machine, fridge and dishwasher.

But designing a good dishwasher is no excuse for being a culinary desert. Can you buy Cadbury’s chocolate in Germany? Nein. Nor can you buy essential items like baked beans (no, gebackene Bohnen are NOT the same, whatever the Germans tell you), Cheddar cheese, Yorkshire Tea, sliced Warburtons bread or, in my experience, fresh milk. Believe me, a cup of ‘black tea’ with UHT milk just doesn’t make for a high quality of life.

Nor does a German Sunday. German Sundays are like going in a time-warp back to my 70s childhood, when the height of excitement was Dad washing the car or mowing the lawn. Only in Germany, they’re both deemed so exciting that they’re illegal.

If the elderly Hausfrauen are to be believed, they are not the only things that ought to be illegal. Wearing a skirt in winter (obviously you should be wearing trousers, and equally obviously it is the business of Frau Klugscheisser to tell you so when you’re minding your own business at a bus stop), failing to put a hat on your baby, crossing the road with the red man: all provoke “Na, so was!” (said with a curled lip and a shake of the head). Which roughly translates into Victor Meldrew saying: “I don’t believe it!”

“Na, so was” is rather what I thought about all the shops being shut on Sundays – until I realised that they are not desperately enticing when they are open. Unless you’re obsessed with your health. The town where I lived was notable for its assorted chemists shops, complemented by the wonderfully named Reformhaus (aka health food shop). Though to look on the bright side, if there’s nothing but muesli bars to spend your money on, you might well feel quite wealthy.

Which reminds me: if it’s wealth you want, you could do worse than wait for a friend at a German station. Because waiting at a station means that you are a prostitute. Oh yes. Stand there for more than thirty seconds, and you’ll find some dodgy type with lace-up leather-lurve-trousers and scary facial hair sidling up to you and asking how much you charge.

However, being propositioned paled into insignificance compared to my experience on a train (as opposed to waiting for one). Standing opposite me was a man. He was staring at me and waving a sausage. Why’s he doing that? I wondered. Only after several minutes did I realise that it was no random frankfurter (yes, I was a very inexperienced nineteen-year-old). I did what all good British people do, and pretended not to notice. But it didn’t half make me nostalgic for a good old British banger.

To look on the brighter side, Germany is endlessly fascinating to children. First of all, there are the loos with little shelves so they can inspect their own poo. As I have moved out of the phase of being intimate with my children’s poos, I was not keen to hear the details. Then there are the sex shops. “Mummy, is that a World War Two shop?” my seven-year-old asked as we found ourselves in the vicinity of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. “Um, something like that,” I replied vaguely (it was the rubber masks in the window that fooled her).

Best – or worst – of all was the selection of books by the tills in a Berlin bookshop. We have ‘entertaining’ light reads about how to fart in the office and get away with it – but the Germans do everything bigger and better. “Why are those ladies weeing on one another?” my daughter asked as she flicked through what looked like a harmless little novelty item. For once, I was lost for words. As were my children when they heard that German schools finish at lunchtime.

Toilets with shelves? Books about wee? Half days for ever? All of a sudden, they were among the 46 per cent who were planning to emigrate.

And that is surely the killer argument. However bad Britain is, however lousy the weather, however hard we work: our children don’t finish school at lunchtime. Let’s be grateful for small British mercies.

49 minutes? I don’t know how they do it…

Ah, the panics of parenting. One minute, you fear you’re condemning your precious baby to a life of hoody-wearing crime by bottle-feeding him; the next, you’re feeling smug because you didn’t let him watch TV until he was 27.

Of course, middle class parents feel the panic worse than anyone. If it’s not the merits of reusable nappies versus the tumble-drying cost to the environment, it’s agonies over whether organic raisins rot infant teeth more quickly than Haribo. You can hear the hand-wringing even over the sound of the Baby Einstein DVD.

And now middle class parents have something else to worry about: middle class neglect. Yes, as a result of spending the vast amount of their time at work (or playing tennis and chatting to other yummies about nail extensions at David Lloyd), the middle classes are spending a paltry 49 minutes per day with their screen-bound offspring.

As a result of this neglect, said offspring have never learnt to use cutlery or even speak properly. Such is the extent of the problem that Clarissa Farr, the high mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School, is offering parenting lessons to people who are obviously well qualified enough to afford the annual fees of £18,000 per child.

Now, I am definitely a middle class parent. I have the Boden catalogue and National Trust membership card to prove it. But my overwhelming feeling when hearing about these 49 short minutes that parents spend with their children isn’t guilty recognition. It’s more like envy. Only 49 minutes? How on earth do they wangle that one?

By 6.49am, I have already spent 49 minutes with my children. By the time they go to bed, my older one at gone 9pm, I will have spent fifteen hours a day with them in the holidays and at weekends, and about seven hours a day with them on precious school days. And to think I considered home educating when they were small and sweet.

During these acres of hours, I will have told them off several gazillion times. I will have nagged them about table manners, sharing, taking turns to speak, not kicking one another (their favourite activity), piano practice, spellings, turning the TV off, and returning the cushions that they have thrown at one another. If I haven’t nagged them sufficiently about their manners and general behaviour, my husband will have done it instead. As he also works from home, there is double non-neglect in our household, particularly at meal times. Well, nobody can say that our children haven’t been lectured in stereo about sitting up straight and not throwing their cutlery at one another.

We will also have been for a walk, played games and argued in Tesco about whose turn it is to pick out the broccoli stalks for the guinea pigs. I will have provided endless paper, Sellotape, cardboard boxes, pairs of scissors and paint brushes, and will have (re)threaded countless needles. I will meanwhile have managed to iron about two and a half items and will have drunk half a cup of tea.

Given all this attention, I can cheerfully say that my children and I would all happily sacrifice our craft box for a bit of new-fangled middle class neglect. My daughter has been clamouring to go to a holiday club ever since she was old enough to know that such things existed (“I could play tennis and football and have a packed lunch, Mummy” – obviously a packed lunch at Multisport Mayhem tastes much better than my foil-wrapped Marmite sandwiches in the park); my son’s idea of heaven would be for me to leave the house so he could stay in and play computer games without another dreary maternal lecture on their brain-rotting potential.

I might benefit too. Working in an office, rather than writing at a kitchen table covered in bits of the Beano and Happy Meals toys, might allow me to emerge from the Sellotaped fog of the past ten years. I could then delight the children at the weekends with expensive presents instead of giving them yet another empty cereal box and telling them that I’m not made of money and, while I’m at it, that money doesn’t grow on trees.

I could then enjoy their company at the weekend and let them watch trashy TV, eat junky finger food, and bicker non-stop with one another in the sure knowledge that Peskia the Polish au pair could deal with it all on Monday. They could enjoy having parents who were a novelty, rather than a permanent and irritating fixture. Even a coffee at David Lloyd (if money did decide to grown on trees after all, and I could afford the monthly subscription) sounds like the equivalent of a month-long luxury cruise. When did I last spend 49 minutes doing something that didn’t involve the children?

To look on the bright side, maybe there’s a career opportunity in this. With so much middle-class attention to offer, maybe my husband and I could share it around a bit. So if any neglectful middle-class parent wants to swap a David Lloyd pass for a husband with a keen interest on table manners, they know where to come.

Will I be arrested?

Our local Sainsbury’s corner shop has been shut for the past nine days for a ‘fundamental makeover’ (well, that makes two of us who could do with one). So you can imagine my joy when it re-opened this morning, thus saving me from the horrors of the Co-op.

Well, the floor is shiny, they have new plastic baskets for fruit ‘n’ veg, and they have a gluten-free section. All of which are very exciting. But what really caught my eye was something quite different.

It was a notice in the cereal aisle.

IF YOU CANT FIND WHAT YOUR LOOKING FOR, PLEASE ASK.

Oh no, I thought. But being a nice, polite middle-class shopping type, I really couldn’t deface a Sainsbury’s notice. Could I?

Unfortunately there was a pen in my pocket.

The notice is now grammatical. But if you see grainy CCTV footage on Crimewatch of a mad-looking woman brandishing a fountain pen … then it must have been my double.

Five crimes against children that I was never going to commit…

Ah, principles. It’s so easy to have them. And even easier to ditch them once children come along. Here are the top five things I was never, ever going to do when my children were born.

1. Use environment-busting disposable nappies. I have the bill for the reusuable ones to prove it. What nobody told me was that they make your baby look like a pear, and that he will be the only newborn needing clothes for age 3-4 to accommodate the nappy bulk. They do make very good – if somewhat pricey – dusters, though.

2. Go to Macdonalds. We all know that the route to hell is paved with chicken nuggets and thick shakes. Hence my dear little organically-grown infants were never going to darken its doors. Until, stuck on a long motorway journey with two tired and hungry children, it suddenly seemed like the best invention since the epidural. It still does, at times.

3. Use a dummy. They stop your child from learning to talk (and, like all middle class parents, I was keen for mine to be talking in full sentences at six weeks. Until, that is, they learnt to talk and never stopped again). They also give them sticky-outy teeth and are generally used only by people who put Coke in baby bottles. But, confronted by a newborn who was determined to suck fruitlessly at me for at least 25 hours a day, I found salvation in a multi-pack.

4. Use reins. Having a toddler on reins is like having a dog on a lead, said Mrs Smugaroo (i.e. me). What about his independence and freedom?

Then I found myself living on a main road with a bolter. I was such a keen user of reins that I did at one point wonder whether my son would be going off to university wearing them. Yet another principle down the pan.

5. Use the TV as a babysitter. Actually, I did quite well with this one until I was defeated by Peppa Pig. One watch and I was hooked. Which meant that I had to let the children watch too. And then it’s just a short leap from Milkshake to Brainiac. Sob.

Ever the optimist, though, there are still many things that I am definitely, absolutely, decidedly never going to let my children do. Under any circumstances. Ever.

1. Open a Facebook account.

2. Have any kind of screen in their bedrooms.

3. Shop at Jack Wills (because they might emerge anorexic and with flicky hair extensions).

4. Get in a car with anyone who hasn’t been driving for over, ooh, 40 years.

5. Wear crop tops. Boys included.

I am already polishing my maternal halo in anticipation …

In a pickle

‘Cheese and pickle sandwich eaters are most intelligent’. Allegedly.

People who are fond of cheese and pickle sandwiches are more likely to be intelligent, according to a survey. Believe it or not, researchers – headed by a doctor, no less – have interviewed 2,000 people in order to identify eight ‘key sandwich personalities’.

As I was eating my sandwich while reading about this, I was very keen to find out what my sandwich personality might be.

Sadly, soya and linseed bread filled with spinach and chickpeas wasn’t on the list, so I will never know whether I am officially an impulsive high-flyer or a sensitive homebody (actually, that combination probably means I’m a lentil-weaving hippy).

However, I do have definitive proof that the research must be deeply flawed. My husband’s favourite sandwich is cheese and pickle.

Revealed: My Guilty Secret

A dreadful thing happened yesterday. My guilty secret was almost discovered.

My husband was idly opening a letter – having failed to notice that it was addressed to me. Why on earth had I left it lying on the kitchen table?

Eek! I said, hastily whipping it out of his fingers. I think that’s mine!

Husband looked puzzled. All the more so as he had already seen the tell-tale headed notepaper: Halifax Building Society.

“Why are the Halifax writing to you?” he wondered. I shrugged oh-so-carelessly. “Oh, they’re probably just trying to sell me a credit card,” I mumbled, stuffing the evidence into my mountain of vital papers. Husband gave me a suspicious look, then ambled off.

Horrors! I thought. For my husband had been about to discover that I have a stash of secret savings. So far as he is aware, all our money has been joint money for almost 20 years now. For both of us, shared money has always been symbolic: shared money means shared lives. We are in this together.

But that hasn’t stopped me from keeping a little nest egg. And the only thing that makes me feel slightly less guilty about it is that I’m not the only one. According to a poll by insurance firm Prudential, fifteen per cent of couples over 40 have a secret savings pot worth £1,037 on average. Women are more likely than men to be secret money-hoarders, with 18 per cent admitting to hiding savings averaging £1,002.

Hannah Close, a barrister friend of mine, is another member of the secret savers’ club. She has a proportion of her monthly earnings paid into a separate bank account so that she can buy things that her husband considers frivolous. “He is the type who actually checks bank statements. If he sees I’ve spent £200 on a pair of shoes, he’ll grump about it. It’s easier just to buy things behind his back. If he actually notices I’m wearing new shoes, he’s so clueless that he’ll believe that they only cost £19.99.”

This logic makes good sense to me. I would dearly love a ludicrously expensive waterproof coat and a cello. Not that I can play the cello.

More worryingly, though, 23 per cent of secret savers are keeping their own stash of cash in case they split up from their partner (which must mean that women are either less optimistic or more realistic than men when it comes to relationships). Another friend, Sian, has adopted precisely this approach. “My parents split up, and my mother was left virtually penniless. I have no intention of leaving my partner, but I think it’s sensible to plan for all possible scenarios.”

Oh dear. Is that what I’m secretly planning?

In that case, my husband will be relieved to know that my secret stash amounts to … £67.29. Which might just about pay for a day trip to Huddersfield and back.

Hands off my Roles!

A small headline caught my eye recently. “Fathers must do chores too,” it announced. Mmm, yes, I like the idea of my husband in Marigolds, I thought.

Then I read on. According to recent research, half of all relationships suffer following the birth of a baby. Nothing new there, then. But there was more. If fathers carry on being traditional breadwinners and leave all the domestic duties to new mothers, divorce beckons. The solution? For parents to share caring and earning roles.

Hang on a moment. Share caring and earning roles? If anything is the recipe for divorce, it surely has to be shared roles.

When I became pregnant with our first child, I had a very good, well paid job which was, astonishingly, flexible enough to accommodate a baby. My husband was working part-time from home, so we had Fisher’s ideal set-up: both able to work and also both able to look after the baby and vacuum the stairs.

Fast forward. That baby is now nine, and his sister is seven. I wash, iron, make packed lunches, remember birthdays, supervise homework and piano, make supper, and don’t vacuum the stair carpet (after all that homework, there’s no time for stairs). I gave up my job seven years ago because the confusion of shared roles was more than we could all bear. My husband has turned himself into a full-time property developer, though I think he’d have turned himself into a full-time bin-man in order to escape from the chaos and detritus of the children.

And we love it that way.

For us, shared roles meant that all consistency went out of the window. Being consistent with yourself is hard enough (what exactly was the sanction for hanging Barbies out of an upstairs window?); being consistent with someone else is well-nigh impossible. Even if you agree on the big things (no to murdering one another, yes to family meals), every day with children throws up several trillion tiny-but-really-quite-significant dilemmas. Do matching socks really matter? (Husband says yes, I say no). Can a little girl climb trees in a Disney princess dress? (I say yes, husband says no). Can your son really walk to school in his underpants if he doesn’t get his uniform on now? (Oh, actually that’s the one thing we did agree on – to our son’s horror).

Shared roles also lead to two possible domestic outcomes. Either nothing gets done at all (because nobody knows whose job it is), or – worse – two people do the same jobs, meaning that one floor is spotless and the others untouched. And few things are more likely to lead to divorce than a husband putting his wife’s only decent jumper in a boil wash – except a wife tidying up the heap of scrap paper that was obviously a year’s worth of invoices filed on the floor.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all women should be corralled into the domestic sphere. It could equally be the woman who leaves for work at 6.30am while the stay-at-home father washes up, makes the beds and sorts out sibling squabbles over the blue felt-tip. If both parents work full-time, it could be the nanny who plays this role. What matters isn’t that roles be divided according to gender: it’s for them never to overlap at all.

That way we and the children all know exactly where we are. In our family, it’s very straightforward. Spiders in the bath? Daddy’s job. Vomit, dead animals, drains, and bins? Daddy’s job. Party invitations, snacks, homework, family presents? Mummy’s job. Stair cleaning? Um, nobody’s job.

Having clearly defined roles has turned out to be as important for our relationship as me shovelling the children off to bed early so we can drink Baileys and watch Match of the Day. Now that’s the one shared role that really does work.