The president of the Midwives’ Association, Rita Borg Xuereb, is studying Maltese couples who have had their first baby, in her research for a doctoral thesis. She has told a seminar gathering that a good number of these new parents have emotional difficulties and ‘challenges’ – the euphemism for problems. She says that they are offered little support (by whom, the state?), and she wants to emphasise how important it is that they should be supported and prepared for what lies ahead.
“Most couples assume this responsibility with joy and enthusiasm, but many others find it difficult to adjust. Some try to hide behind a smile because society does not expect a woman to be distressed,” she said.
Ms Borg Xuereb reminds us that the quality of a marital relationship plunges by between 40 per cent and 70 per cent after the birth of a baby. How do they measure these things, I always wonder? Perhaps they ask new parents to tick the boxes. How many times a day have you wanted your husband to be as far away as possible? Ten times? Five times? Twice? How many times this week have you looked at your wife, shuddered, and rushed off to the office with a sigh of relief? Five times? Five times? Five times?
The trouble is that no one tells new parents that these are entirely normal feelings. The new parents themselves are loath to admit what they’re going through, because they are ashamed or embarrassed. And those who have been through the same thing and survived it unscathed, also for reasons of shame, embarrassment or pride will not say: “So you smashed the entire dinner service when he came home? So what? Don’t beat yourself up about it. By the time our kids were at primary school, all we had in the kitchen cupboard was a collection of odd plates.”
So when new mothers experience that overwhelming rage, and new fathers that bewildering need to escape, they think it’s a sign that they should never have married that particular person. The husband takes it as a signal to run off with a Russian looking for a meal ticket, or the clerk at the office, and the wife begins to fantasise about the young man behind the cheese counter, who is always so kind to her.
Yes, new mothers do feel rage: huge, vast and uncontrollable rage. Their life has been taken over. They are powerless. The demands are endless. There is little sleep, pleasure or distraction. Their husband either seeks reassurance by making unreasonable demands for sex, or wants no sex at all and makes them feel like an unattractive milk machine. The rage wells up and turns them into beings that are unrecognisable even to themselves.
New fathers complain when this rage is directed at them, but they shouldn’t. They have become the target because the obvious and real target – the baby – is protected by the mother’s primal instinct not to harm it. When the mother wants to yell at the baby, she yells at the baby’s father instead. When she is struggling hard against the urge to pick up the screaming child and fling it across the room (don’t be shocked, it happens), instead she flings the pot of soup she has been cooking at her husband, who is watching television and looking annoyed at her ‘disorganisation’. While he is privately thinking that his mother would have coped beautifully, turning out a Cordon Bleu meal with a baby sitting in white frills all powdered like a Cow & Gate advert, his wife reads his mind and throws the soup with perfect aim.
Look what sometimes happens when there is no father to deflect the mother’s rage away from the baby – or when the mother prizes her relationship with the baby’s father over and above that with her baby, and targets the baby instead. That’s when children get victimised and battered.
It’s a well known fact that after the birth of the first baby, many parents end up like mortal enemies, hissing at each other from either side of the baby barricade. She resents him for having a job to rush off to every morning, while she is left to commune with a squalling bundle, spending her days mired in faeces, urine, milk and pureed food, with nothing more interesting to do all day than take a walk with a pram.
He wonders why the woman he married has turned into a harridan who seems to spend most of her waking hours (and there are many of them) in a nightie or a dirty track suit, with unwashed hair in one of those plastic comb-clips, obsessing about the colour of the baby’s excrement or the fact that he isn’t attaching well to the breast. You get some so-called new men who take an interest in these things (“Oh really, darling? It looked like French mustard when it’s usually like lentil soup? We’d better call the paediatrician.”), but Mr Average recoils in horror, and starts working late, which only makes matters worse on the home front. He returns to a stern silence and an atmosphere that would freeze the claws off a polar bear. There will be no marital relations that night, or for any foreseeable night within the next, oh, 50 years.
Paul Micallef, a psychologist and staff trainer at St Luke’s and Mount Carmel hospitals, told the same seminar: “When I talk to parents who are expecting their first child, I feel like such a spoilsport. They are full of joyous expectation and they hardly think of what can go wrong.” Well, I’m glad that somebody is reminding them that things will not be all roses and tinkling cot-mobiles. I’m a spoilsport, too. I tell women who are pregnant for the first time to get as much fun as they can now, because they are going to have drab days for a long, long time – days when even doing the grocery shopping alone becomes exciting.
The extent of the communication problem is summed up in those cards we send when people have babies. They’re all flowers and joy. But looking after a new baby couldn’t be less like joy and flowers. A more accurate representation would be a card smeared in puke and poo, which screams when you open it. The correct words to expectant mothers are supposed to be jolly and congratulatory. Then the baby is born, everything goes haywire, and the mother wonders what’s wrong with her, why she can’t cope, why it’s not the glorious Madonna experience she has been led to expect.
The political correctness of what to say about babies has taken over. The result is that parents who are suffering the entirely natural distress caused by a screaming infant spouting at both ends and spending half the night and most of the day awake think that there is something wrong with them for feeling out of control, exhausted and full of resentment.
The other day I found myself with an entire lunch-party frowning at me in disapproval when the man seated next to me announced that he had just become the father of twins. The words shot out of my mouth before I could stop them: “Oh God, you poor things. That must be terrible.” I hastened to explain that it wasn’t the fact of the twins themselves that I thought was so awful, but the inevitable disruption of having to cope with them. Visions of relentless crying and screaming (babies and mother), ceaseless feeding, mounds of dirty nappies, sleepless nights, fraught days, and that desperate juggling trick of trying to put one to sleep before the other wakes up, so that you will have at least 10 minutes to dash to the shower, swam before my eyes, making me shudder even at a distance of two decades.
You spend half an hour rocking one to sleep with mounting impatience and growing hysteria, and the minute he drops off, the eyes of the other one spring open and your heart plummets through the floor. “I don’t really know about all that,” the new fathers of twins said. “My wife takes care of them. I work quite long hours.” Oh dear. That’s a big one waiting to happen.
I remembered a fellow mature student who was with me at university. His wife had just had a baby. “How are you getting on?” we asked him. He explained that it hadn’t affected him much. He had decamped to the spare room and was carrying on with his life while she got on with the business of the baby. When I and some other women with children expressed our disapproval, his reaction was: “She wanted the baby. I told her that I would only agree to it as long as it did not interfere with my life. She accepted that. She wanted it; now she can look after it.”
I thought at the time that his attitude was an aberration, but I have since discovered that there are quite a few men who think like this, and women who go along with it so that they can have their baby and a husband.
What they don’t realise until it’s too late is that having a baby in this situation is worse than having one alone, because not only do you have to cope with the demands of the infant, but you also have to contend with a recalcitrant husband who makes you brimful of resentment. Struggling to cook a meal and quieten a whining baby at the same time is one thing when you are alone at home. It is another thing all together when there is a man in the next room who refuses to pick up and calm the baby while you cook, because that was the bargain and you had better stick to it. And then we wonder why marriages break down.
Actually, I don’t wonder at all. The marriages of people who still have children at home – either young children or teenagers – don’t break down when the statistics tell us they do: when the couple files for separation.
They break down soon after the babies are born, but a sense of responsibility keeps the parents struggling along together, until the obvious cannot be ignored any longer. Her resentment becomes uncontainable. His desire to flee the nest and live the life of a bachelor becomes uncontrollable.
They wake up one morning and realise that they really, really don’t like each other. She looks at him across the living-room and thinks: “If you do not come back home tonight, what I will feel is relief.” He looks at her and thinks: “What I would really like is never to have to see that woman again.” Marriage breakdown never comes out of the blue; it comes after years of simmering anger, and the seeds of destruction are usually sown in the immediate post-baby aftermath. When that period is badly managed, the marriage doesn’t stand a chance in hell.
Ms Borg Xuereb is right to point out that people who are expecting their first child should be warned of what it is really going to be like, instead of being told fairy-stories. Sadly, the lies begin with being told that you can breathe your way to a pain-free delivery, and carry on with far-fetched romances of peaceful and jolly maternity, in which the baby feeds and sleeps like clockwork, the clothes are laundered by 7am, and supper is on the table at 8pm precisely.
Even those who have had babies themselves prefer not to tell expecting women the truth, out of some misguided belief that it is unfair to tell them these things because it might put them off. Yet when women speak honestly among themselves, most of them will say that the worst moment of the day was when the door clicked (or more often, slammed) shut behind their husband as he left for work, and it was just them and the baby, with a day stretching endlessly and monotonously ahead, filled with nappies, bottles, crying, needing, needing, more crying, more needing and, God, how envious they felt that he could just close the door and leave while they were trapped.
Really, no wonder marriages break down. These are the secrets that are withheld from women who are expecting their first child. The result is that they feel that they and their feelings are freakish, pushing them into depression. Or, just as bad, they feel that their feelings have significance, rather than being commonplace, and see them as a sign that their marriage and husband are just not worth keeping.