Agreeing with Hadley Feeman in a rant about motherhood.

Hadley Freeman has been having a little rant about support for mothers in the early days of looking after their babies. This has, inevitably, included stuff about the NCT.

When I was pregnant we went along to classes run by the NCT, which acronym then stood for the Natural Childbirth Trust, but which now seems to stand for the National Childbirth Trust. This puts a slightly different emphasis on things.

Recently the president of the NCT resigned because she was disappointed that the organisation now supports women who use formula. This has led to further discussion of the rights and wrongs of breastfeeding or bottle-feeding your baby. SOmetimes seen as a test of how successful you are as a woman and mother!

Now I always knew I intended to breastfeed as I was pretty sure I was too lazy to go through all the rigmarole of sterilising bottles and mixing the formula and making sure it was at the right temperature. I had seen my mother breastfeed two of my siblings and I sort of assumed that that was what one did.

And I was lucky that I was able to do so without too much difficulty. It made running around doing things with a baby so much easier. There is enough paraphernalia to carry around when you take a baby places without having to worry about bottles and formula and a million and one related items.

I was aware that there were purists who declared that babies should only be breastfed, that they should be fed totally on demand and that if they wanted to carry on doing so until they were old enough to play outside in the sandpit and paddling pool then you should so that as well.

I was also aware that there were purists who said that you should have no medical intervention, no drugs, no pain relief; childbirth was a natural process and you were not a proper woman if you gave in and demanded gas and air or stronger stuff.

As with so many things, I was prepared to listen to all this, reflect on it and then make up my own mind. And I was fortunate that my NCT teachers and breastfeeding councelors took the same sensible approach. The bottom line was that there is no such thing as a perfect birth and you should not beat yourself up if you couldn’t manage without pain relief, or if you gave in and accepted that your baby was two weeks late and maybe the birth needed to be induced. The object was to get a healthy baby at the end of it all.

Similarly, while they encouraged breastfeeding they advised NOT getting hung up on it. If it didn’t work for you and your baby then it was a shame but that did not make you a bad mother and a failure as a woman. There were, and presumably from what I hear our offspirngs’ friends talking about, a lot of folk around who believe that the only way to give birth is in a birthing pool, at home, surrounded by loving friends and relations.

Personally I always thought the birthing pool stuff was a bit extreme and I really did not see the point of getting all wet. But I did favour the idea of a home-birth for offspring number two. It had the advantage of my being around when the already existent toddler woke up next morning. And besides, I had managed number one without too much trauma, albeit two weeks late, so we gave it a go.

There were several of us in our district booked for home births at around the same time. The scariest midwife on the patch was delighted. She loved a home birth. (I say scary but she was really just rather bossy and she had been mega-helpful in the early days of my breastfeeding offspring number one.) However, for various reasons of timing she did not get to deliver a single one of our babies. She was so disappointed.

In my case, we discovered she was off duty and a replacement midwife from outside our area was sent along. She was wonderful, unflappable, and helped me through a casebook birth - pain controlled by breathing, sitting up to welcome a beautiful baby girl into the world. And then she equally calmly dealt with the crisis that followed as the placenta would not deliver and an ambulance had to be sent for to whisk me, and the tiny girl, off to the hospital.

Hurrah for medical intervention!

Crisis over, she turned up at the hospital at six the next morning to help me breastfeed that tiny girl. Above and beyond the call of duty.

I never saw her again but I saw quite a lot of the local midwives and health visitors popping in to check up that all was well. I can’t help wondering if some of that sensible help and down to earth advice is what has got lost with all the various cuts to services.

And if the National Childbirth Trust helps all the mothers who go through their services, not just the ones who can do perfect birth and perfect breastfeeding, then that is no bad thing.