PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH: PREPARING FOR PREGNANCY
Most of us go into parenthood unprepared. Culturally we are led to think that it is a blissful state in which we will have endless joys, with a text-book baby that sleeps and eats regularly and smiles and gurgles the rest of the time. Preparation for parenthood should start before a woman gets pregnant. Most parents minimise the hardships of child rearing when talking to the young about babies. Then when a young girl has her baby she is perhaps fearful, disappointed, amazed, anxious, depressed, lonely and a host of other things because she imagines she must be at fault, since everyone else seems to be coping so well, and that she is a failure.
So during preparation for pregnancy young parents-to-be should be told that babies are tyrannical; do not care for your feelings; tire you out; leave you with little or no time to think, let alone do anything else; wake you at night; get ill; seem ungrateful; act irrationally; and can be generally fairly annoying. A first baby can put tremendous strains on even a good marriage, but a shaky marriage can crumble completely. This is the reason why it is best to leave having a first baby until the relationship is really sound and has proved its strength and capacity to cope with the bad times as well as the good.
Ideally every couple should attend a pre-conception clinic, where they would not only be given all kinds of medical advice but would also have an hour or two with insight-trained counsellors who would look at their personalities and psychosexual development, to help them to decide whether they were really ready for children.
Some people say they wish they had never had children and knew all along, deep down, that they did not want them, but felt they ought to have them. Unfortunately, having children is not like having the flu — you cannot have ‘a touch of it’! Of course being pregnant and having babies can be a wonderful, fulfilling and enjoyable experience but we have not played on this aspect because there are plenty of books and magazines that stress these aspects of pregnancy and childbirth.
The ‘ideal’ mother is at ease with her body, has a strong view of her body image and is not ‘uptight’ about her figure. She has an active, happy sex life, enjoys orgasms and enjoys her breasts being played with by her husband. She has intercourse rather than copulates, is at ease with her genitals and lets her husband see them and play with them.
Psychologically the woman who is best prepared for motherhood has a good relationship with her mother and accepts both her negative and positive feelings about her. Most women have some negative thoughts about their mothers, even though these feelings are held in their unconscious for much of the time. It is an interesting fact that many women tell their own mothers last of everybody that they are pregnant. This may date back to the childhood repression of their sexuality when they were told off for touching themselves and showing an interest in boys. Such a woman joyfully tells everyone else that she is pregnant but her mother she informs with some guilt because it so obviously confirms that she is sexually active.
Lots of women, as pregnancy advances, begin to fear that the baby will be abnormal, that it will be born dead, or that they will die while giving birth. Others worry about the pain of birth. Pregnancy is also a worrying time for women who have, or imagine they have, family diseases or abnormal traits. The time to get these worries sorted out is before getting pregnant. If, for example, you are concerned about spina bifida in your family, ask your doctor to refer you to a genetic counselling service. The vast majority of non-physical family traits are environmentally caused.
All of these fears are perfectly usual, yet according to one survey of women who had various anxieties during pregnancy, fewer than half ever discussed them with anyone, even their husbands, perhaps for fear of appearing silly or even unmaternal. Only later, once they were confident enough in themselves as mothers, could they bring themselves to admit that they had the fears.
A less common but not totally dispelled fear is that of producing a baby of the ‘wrong’ sex. Although most women say that the first time round they do not much mind whether they have a boy or a girl as long as it is normal, the picture changes for later children, when parents have stronger opinions as to the sex they would like. Surveys have found that the average woman wants two children, i. 3 of whom should be boys! Although social pressures are changing, the picture tends to suggest an in-built desire to have a boy first, and a girl second. The historical family and cultural reasons for having boys are now all but gone (families no longer need many hands to work in the family business, to farm, to produce food or to fight) yet there is still a slight preference for boys. In some parts of the USA, amniocentesis is being used to discover the sex of the foetus, with abortion if it is the ‘wrong’ one.
Some parents ‘choose’ the sex they want their child to be on the basis of their obsession with themselves or based on their fantasies of life as it ‘should’ be. A man may feel (unconsciously) that he will love a boy better than a girl because a boy is more like him. Other fathers (and mothers) fantasise that they will do all kinds of male (or female) things with a same-sex child and that this will make up for things they themselves never did as children.
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