Adding to the clan ...

Our beautiful daughter Olivia was born at precisely 8 am on Wednesday the 18th of January 2006. She arrived at the culmination of a bizarre labour, in which my clumsily induced* wife went from a standing start to a crouched, roaring finale in a little over 20 minutes, following a previous stint of 18 hours remarkable only for their pronounced tedium**.

The experience is often touted as being "magical". That is in fact probably one of the most regularly aired cliches one hears, certainly whilst a member of that none-too-exclusive "expectant parents" club. And there can be no doubt that the moment, at which you first clap eyes on the little being that is the end product of it all, is a very special one indeed. It clearly does something to your brain, because to the neutral observer Olivia would doubtless have just looked like a big, angry raisin - but to me she looked beautiful. Your mind obviously does funny things at that precise moment. I distinctly remember a very small voice at the back of my head piping up with an exultant "Yay! It IS a baby!" as though some part of my deep subconscious was half expecting a seal pup or a gardening welly. I also fell for that sitcom classic of being asked to announce the sex to the expectant partner, briefly glimpsing the umbilical cord and exclaiming "it's a boy!".

*"it appears still not to be working - let's ... umm .... let's turn up the dosage shall we? Yes, again."

** Su Doku ... it's actually crap. Seriously.

On childbirth ...

People's perceptions of and on childbirth are one thing that have gained an increasing amount of interest for me in the past fortnight. Since the birth of Olivia it has proven to be a daily part of life to be confronted with other people's views on the subject.

Of course, the perception of childbirth is influenced by everyone's individual experiences of it. It has been interesting to note the range opinions that emanate from family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and perfect strangers that one finds oneself conversing with these days.


Much of it is useful - predominantly anecdotal of course, a reworking of other people's personal experiences of their own babies, but this does provide a useful library of insights with which to experiment every time we have another nappy change, or feed , or curiously inflected squawk. And it is always offered in the best, most well-meaning manner of course. The only problems we encountered were in the hospital, during Ticki's recuperation - the profusion of advice on offer from the range of midwives whose shifts coincided with Ticki's stay was ultimately counterproductive, because it just led to conflicting information, much of which ran counter to our own instincts. This was particularly a problem with breastfeeding, which we didn't really get the hang of until we had got back home and had the chance to have a go at it without mother and child being manhandled like a bag of plums at an East End market.

For all the carefully proffered advice from everyone though, I have to admit that more than once in the past week I have found myself wanting to interrupt someone as they delivered their carefully caveated piece of information from their own bank of experiences, seize them by the lapels and bellow "Yes - THANK YOU! I know every baby is different and we'll work it out eventually and I'm truly happy for you that this was never really a problem with your little one, but what do I do about THIS, right NOW!?!?".

But of course, you don't ... too tired to, for a start.

Best laid plans ...

One of the most vexing aspects of the experience of actually going through childbirth, rather than just sitting there waiting for it to happen, is the extent to which your plans for the experience turn out to be entirely useless. It seems just a little while ago that we were all sitting at our NCT class fondly compiling our "Birth Plan", in which we outlined what we did or did not want to do in our pursuit of the perfect, natural, orderly and comfortably endurable birthing experience. Birthing balls, the pool, no drugs of course, just gas and air thanks. No students present - oh and of course we would like to cut the cord ourselves. And yes, we'll be bringing our own music.

Looking at it now, I can't decide whether it was charmingly naive or just plain stupid. Needless to say, such cute contrivances don't last a second once the action starts. I remember blubbering something about our birth plan clearly stating that we didn't want any diamorphine at around the time when it all started going properly off the scale for Tick. The midwife who had seen us through the previous few hours looked at me with practised Scouse weariness and said "Yes love, but she's knackered, she's in a lot of pain and she's probably got another four hours to go".

They're good at perspective, midwives ...

By the time the next midwife took over and asked me whether we actually did mind her bringing a student in to help her (contrary to our now thoroughly ludicrous birth plan) we were prepared to see Ken Dodd and Stan Boardman set up in the corner as long as it made the screaming stop.

It has to be said - a lot of the preparation that one goes through is nonsense. We semi-consciously exposed ourselves to a lot of "ideal world" conceptualisation of the birthing experience, principally through the National Childcare Trust's ante-natal classes that we subscribed to. These were packed with informative, helpful insights into preparing for the birth and life thereafter, all delivered in an engaging and fun manner by our likeable NCT host ... but most of it has turned out to be hopelessly idealistic - ideologically pious, almost. Breastfeeding, hospital births, birth plans, managing midwives - all of it dissolves into dust the moment you first come into contact with a contraction, a world-weary midwife and a screaming wife.