Homer compares the pains of a severe, perhaps mortal wound suffered in battle to the pains suffered by women in labor. I recall in my childhood hearing women at Tupperware parties comparing how bad their labor was in a competitive way -- how long, how painful, how late at night it started. At the time, these comparisons horrified me. In retrospect, I see a similarity to men who played ball talking about their glory days, martial artists talking about tournaments and less legal interactions and a wide variety of other "top this" tales.
In many ways, these social interactions, like gossip in general, are ways of expanding our sense of what is possible, of introducing the newbie to the glories to be had in a difficult endeavor, of communicating and enforcing community ethics and codes of conduct. At their best, they are inspirational. They define us as heroes, worthy of respect. At their worst, they are an additional way of punishing those who have not measured up, of heaping additional blame upon the quite possibly innocent victims of circumstance or other peoples' fuckups.
I believe that two simple approaches to these kinds of interactions can help reduce the damage. The first is to listen carefully and be slow to judge. Empathize with the person telling the tale and find the good in it. The second is to show compassion. Those who have tried to do the difficult and dangerous, and whose outcomes were not the best, do not deserve a pile on from their friends and acquaintance. They deserve support and encouragement. Words of advice, if given, are more effective if chosen carefully, with a view to helping in the future, rather than condemning for the past.
Moving beyond generalities, several aspects of pregnancy, childbirth and newborn care seem to really bring out the competitive streak in people. I noted above the competition for how-bad-was-it was alive and well when I was a church-going child. As an adult, in a very different social strata, the competition focusses on other issues: pain management, interventions, actions of partner, quality of care received, health of baby, establishment of breastfeeding, newborn sleep patterns, products chosen for the new baby.
The competition here, as in most of what follows, has two axes: severity of pain, and heroism in response. On the non-interventionist side, the biggest heroes are those who have terrible pain, but also refuse things like epidurals. Their moment of heroism is the temptation to accept and its successful refusal. Also heroic are those who choose to accept pain management and are failed by it (spinal headache, patchy epidural, etc.). Those who claim not to have experienced or not to recall their pain are regarded with some suspicion. Those whose pain management choices lead to a cascade of additional interventions may be absolved, or blamed.
Were the interventions needed (in which case greater heroism is associated with surviving more dire possibilities successfully averted) or not (in which case, all too often, the mother is blamed for the "unnecessary" surgical or assisted delivery)? As with those who claim no (unbearable) pain, those whose birth experience lacks any particular drama are regarded with some suspicion. If you escaped the battle unscathed, perhaps you were a coward who stayed away from the real fighting.
Was the partner present throughout? Was the partner helpful? Was the partner a bumbling idiot? Absence at a crucial moment can contribute to the mother's heroic stature, as can a particularly juicy bit of bumbling idiocy that the mother justifiably responded to emphatically. A helpful partner present throughout, unfailingly helpful can also confer additional status. The mother's interpretation of the partner's actions is often accepted unquestioningly, but attempts to combine the two axes (a partner who is helpful, but a bumbling idiot, and present, but arrived late and left at crucial moments) can fail in ways that reduce the social status of both mother and partner.
The actions of the partner while parenting is an ongoing version of same, but external opinions become more important, as those close to the new family have opportunities to see them in action.
To some degree, this is credentialism: how big/well-respected/prestigious is the practice. To another degree, this is about interventions. More-is-better can be the name of the game. Care not offered and/or patient refusals accepted can be perceived in a very negative light, particularly in prenatal care. For example, refusing age-based screens (amnio, gestational diabetes) and not-medically-indicated testing (ultrasonography) has apparently moved me into a rebel-zone. My care providers are regarded with some suspicion, and a lot of people seem to be waiting to see how it all turns out before passing judgment. To be fair, a lot of others are very supportive, and highly entertained by the process.
Heroism can be attained at either extreme. A screaming, peeing, robust baby is obviously a great thing. But a baby who requires days in the NICU can also contribute to heroism.
A disjointed area, because so recently bottlefeeding was considered superior in every way. Heroism can be attained by successfully establishing breastfeeding, particularly in the face of numerous obstacles: an early return to work, a c-section, an older child still nursing, inverted nipples, etc. Trying seems increasingly mandatory. Women with close relationships with their mothers are ofen stuck in a horrific no-man's-land where breastfeeding is demanded by peers, but whose mothers are unsupportive at best and more likely are actively sabotaging efforts to breastfeed. These women deserve more sympathy and support and they aren't getting it. Breast-loving partners can make matters better or worse, and all too often their influence is completely ignored, or, when negative, blamed on the mother. This is a tragedy for everyone, and it needs to change soon.
Some parts of the world abandoned breastfeeding only very recently. In the US and some parts of Europe, the story is murkier. While many women were breastfeeding at the turn of the 20th century, many women were not. Clothing styles, class mores and etiquette and a highly stratified society (which made wet nurses widely available and cheap for the affluent) probably created a class of non-breastfeeding women over two hundred years ago in the US. I'm still looking for a good overview of the transition. Among the other undesirable effects of these women abandoning breastfeeding, or adopting a scheduled feeding style was the rapid return to fertility that took such a horrific toll on women through the 19th century. While we are reversing this change, it will take many years, and perhaps several generations, to return to a more biologically normal pattern. Currently, many celebrities still feel free to denounce breastfeeding in public; it is absolutely crucial this change both to remove the stigma of breastfeeding and to make it feasible to breastfeed in a biologically appropriate fashion.
Back in the days of twilight sleep (read: scopalamine and morphine for laboring mothers) and bottle feeding (formula is time-consuming to digest, leading to longer intervals between feedings), babies entered the world drugged to the gills, their kidneys taking a week or longer to clear their system out. Once fed, they were out cold for four or more hours. Mothers had a reasonable expectation their new babies would sleep through the night some time during the first week or so. Mothers had a lot to recover from themselves (routine episiotomies, recovery from the same drug cocktail, forceps deliveries and a lot of damage to cervix, uterus and so forth) and, not unreasonably, perceived those babies as ideal babies. They bragged about them, often to those children, who grew up thinking they did at least one thing right, and passing a similar expectation on to a new generation.
Boy was this a disservice. Attempts to integrate consolidated sleep into a no-narcotics-for-the-kiddie world have resulted in documented failure to thrive. The new dogma is wake-'em-every-three-hours if they don't waken and nurse on their own. Yet the old expectation persists. A new competition regarding who is the most-sleep-deprived has begun.
Changes I hope to see in the future include a change in what we expect of newborns and babies in general. We expect to be able to leave babies lying around in cribs and rooms of their own and to do so quietly. In addition to drugging the wee ones and feeding them cows milk (both of which make them sleep deeper), for many years medical dogma insisted on putting babies to sleep on their stomachs (to avoid choking on vomit), which tended to encourage deeper, longer sleep. The back-to-sleep campaign started in the US in the early 90s has fortunately reversed this bit of insanity. Harvey Karp has a multi-stage strategy for encouraging deeper sleep. But newborns in particular who sleep deeply are at increased risk of SIDS. It'll be many years before a more biologically appropriate parenting style (holding and carrying babies, feeding them frequently, putting them to sleep on their backs in bed with their nursing mother so when the baby wakes up to nurse it's short, sweet and barely awake) returns.
I haven't heard much about this one from my own circle of acquaintance, but reading and interacting with those outside my social circle suggest this particular issue is alive and well at least in some social strata. In addition to the current ridiculous advice from the medical community, in the past there were some truly deranged ideas that one should only gain the weight of the baby during the course of the pregnancy. Rumor (and New Yorker Magazine covers) suggest attempts to stay tiny while reproducing are alive and well in some places. Indulging myself here I will note that I gained 60 pounds in this (singleton) pregnancy, which I find hard on the knees and ungainly; it's not like I was particularly skinny to begin with, either. My friends have been unremittingly supportive of me, and have shared their own (and other people they know) stories of size and weight changes in an effort to reconcile me to my discomfort physical and otherwise.
I don't know what is up with our culture on this one, but there's a lot of weirdness associated with becoming sexually active with one's partner/spouse as soon as possible after the birth. The flip side of this competition is the secretive exchange of information on total lack of libido while breastfeeding/recovering from pregnancy/etc. The most damaging aspects of sex-after-childbirth revolve around some people wanting to have C-sections (to maintain a non-reproductive vagina) or having episiotomies stitched (or restitched later) tightly to make sex more "fun" (I can only imagine for who). I also find entertaining the wide swathe of women who will tell you in great detail their efforts with kegeling. Sometimes I tell them they can buy sex toys to make this even more fun.
Breastfeeding is frequently sold to new moms as a way to take off the extra weight they have after the birth. A lot of books also offer up exercise as a mood stabilizer during the post-partum period. Nearly every new mom has a closet (or boxes) full of pre-pregnancy clothes she'd like to wear again, and a scale that will tell her in some detail how she differs now from before. It's easy to displace all the other wackitude of adjusting to a new life after reproduction onto details of size and shape. And when the rest of it is hard to control, exercise and food can bear the brunt of frustrated attempts to impose control. Given the viciousness that can be associated with weight, shape, diet and exercise without reproduction, it's hardly surprising this area can be competitive. That said, women are often remarkably compassionate with each other, more so than they might be inclined to be at other times, and highly complementary of all efforts made, and small successes along the way. It's a pleasure to see and hear this camaraderie in action and a joy to experience (even already) in person.
Copyright 2005 by Rebecca Allen
Created July 7, 2005 Updated March 8, 2006