Baby Care Magazine

Both you and your husband will want only happiness and fulfilment for your children but one of the first things you will discover about mothering is that it is different from fathering. You will discover this not long after the birth, in the middle of the night, when the baby cries.

Mothering, you will find, involves waking up and doing something about it. Fathering involves waking up and going back to sleep or waking up and saying, ‘Does it want something?’ The biological explanation for this is that women have breasts.

You can either refuse to buy it and give the father lots of kicks while yelling that it’s his turn to change the nappy and he’s a lazy git, or you can get up and see to the baby yourself. If you choose more times than not to get up because it’s easier, this will set the tone for your mothering and you will find yourself largely responsible for the child’s emotional welfare, education, physical health, music lessons and driving about.

Me as a mother
This is what has happened in our place. Your father is an excellent parent in that he cares passionately about you, will go to the ends of the earth to spare you pain and suffering and has always taken you on excellent outings to feed the ducks, but he has rarely remembered the names of your friends, known what subjects you are doing at school or spent more than a minute listening to stories from your troubled lives.

This isn’t a complaint. He takes care of the car, the lawn mowing, the washing, the VAT returns, the washing up and taking rubbish to the tip. The distribution of labour in our house has suited me fine. I have loved every minute of being a mother. But there are some aspects of family life which require special consideration so I’ll mention them and you can consider.

Pets
You buy pets so children will learn about mating, death, flea infestation and smells via the animal kingdom. Unless you are a huge pet lover yourself, forget it.

Children only want animals they can cuddle in moments of boredom or misery and they don’t ever accept responsibility for scraping Whiskas off the kitchen floor and emptying the kitty litter. Nor will they change the goldfish water or buy extra pond stuff with their pocket money.

Owing to the rise of the roving psychopath, they will not be able to walk the dog until they are over six feet tall and weighing more than eleven stone, by which time a dog is the last thing in the animal kingdom which will be of immediate interest

I say children. I mean you. Yet you have all taken pains to tell me how deprived you have been. Frankly I think two cats, ten rabbits and eight goldfish Is enough for anyone.

Childcare
If you pursue your careers once you have children, you will need childcare. There is no greater source of angst for the modern mother. It always seems to be the modern mother and not the modern father who has to fix it and the modern mother whose job must suffer if the arrangement falls down. This will be about breasts as well.

It is generally held that in an ideal world the role of childcarer should fall to the grandmother. Excuse me? The grandmother has already raised her own children and once round the block on that one is enough. She is there for emergencies if her own career allows it, babysitting and many happy holidays and visits.

Childcare means nannies, creches or childminders and the choice you have will depend on how much you earn. None of them ever looks entirely normal on first viewing. When seeking childcare look first for signs of potential violence and abnormalities of speech. You will not want your children speaking with strange accents or using the language incorrectly.

Check that there will be affection – love is overdoing it – security, reliability, stimulation, proper food, hygiene, consistency and proper attention. You can do this by hiding when potential minders are with your child and seeing how they are. Never be frightened of
changing an arrangement that gives you the creeps and never hang in there just because you don’t have time to find a better alternative.

There is no need to worry that the childcarer will replace you in your child’s affections unless of course you are absent so long that the child forgets what you look like. You need to make sure that the time you spend with your children is ‘quality time’, a modern term which means playing chess.

Your needs will change according to the age of the children. You think everything will improve once they are at school, but this only applies if you can do your job in school hours. Otherwise you need to make complicated provisions for after school hours and holidays. Working from home is one answer. It was the answer for me. Not only could I be there for you when you were home, I didn’t have to mix with people and this is a boon beyond compare.

Me and childcare

You will read a whole lot of palaver telling you that leaving your children to the care of anyone not involved in their conception will damage them irreparably and bring about social decay. Burn it. There are studies to prove anything, as I discovered when I wrote a guide for working mothers to reassure me when the first of you was a baby. The simple underlying truth seems to be that, provided you have good quality care appropriate to the needs of your child, the child looks happy and you are content, future delinquency will have nothing to do with you working.

I whipped you out of two situations which I hated and finally settled for help in the home because that’s where I was working- This was the luxury of all luxuries but even so, it wasn’t without its heart-attack moments. I had to sack the nanny who had entered in her diary, The baby was a little bitch today. Served me right for reading the diary. Served her right for leaving it lying around when she might have guessed I put the happiness of my baby before her privacy.

Catering
A good many husbands are now as keen on cooking as their wives and it is no reflection on their manhood that they spend longer than she does in the kitchen. The reason is simple. Cooking is the best and most creative of all the domestic chores and it’s better to be good at that than ironing. This is my view anyway.

Catering, however, is not without its hardships. A mother must take into account the tastes of all family members which can on occasion reduce the number of dishes acceptable to all to one. This is a pain in the neck. Be firm about food faddism. Withdraw all food if you must until most family members come round to your way of thinking.

Do not overbuy. It takes a great deal of ingenuity but provides enormous satisfaction to use up everything in the fridge by the end of the week. Throwing out is not a happy solution for leftovers but, if it won’t go into a cake or a soup and no one will touch it in a salad or on toast, let it go.

Extra curricular
The lot of extending the child so that it can reach its full potential usually falls to the mother who must arrange music, dancing, gym, tennis, riding, skating an self-defence lessons according to the funds available, the interest of the child, the availability of the classes and the degree of frustration felt by the mother who was never able to get classes in her own childhood.

You
You are all women of accomplishment because that’s what your father and I wanted to spend our money on. Owing to my fear of boredom, 1 took huge pleasure in giving you the wherewithal to entertain yourselves any time any place. It helped that you were talented. You can sing, you can play the piano, the violin, the cello, the penny whistle, the guitar and the recorder. As my father pointed out, I could play only the fool.

You can draw and paint. You can ride, play tennis and dance but you can’t do embroidery. In that I have failed you. I don’t know who has taken most pleasure from your many accomplishments. Probably me and if you have the money, the time and the energy I strongly urge you to do the same for your children. They will then be fully rounded which is the correct thing for the modern child to be and has nothing to do with bra size.

Chauffering
In the pursuit of these accomplishments, as well as their social lives, you will spend many, many hours in the car, trekking across England and connected territories, it is very tiring and there are many bad people on the road who see your face across a steering wheel, recognise you as a very tired mother who has spent too long in a church hall watching pttis, and who will decide to ram you. These people are men with retarded sexual development. You deal with them by winding down the window and yelling. ‘Got a penis problem? Sorry, children. That man was very silly.’ This relieves neck ache.

Listening
lust as your children stop needing you to drive them so many places, they require you to listen to them which takes up even more energy and concentration. Or they won’t want to speak to you which also requires a great deal of energy and concentration because you must get them to open up or watch them shrivel before your very eyes.

You want them to talk about their friends, their work, their hopes, their fears, their spots, their hair, their dreams and so on. Usually they will only speak to you when it suits them and this will be when you are on the phone, in the bath or about to go to sleep. Take vitamin B6 for brain power.

Sick children
A nanny comes into her own when the children are sick because the child can stay in her own bed and you can still go to work. But once the children are at school, you have usually finished with the nanny. When the children are sick you must take time off work to care for them even though you have meetings booked with heads of state. Maybe the father can take time off work more easily but in my experience this is unheard of and ‘easily’ doesn’t count.

The first thing you must do is test for genuine sickness. This can involve the thermometer – ‘If you don’t have a temperature you can go to school’; vomiting – ‘If you’re not sick again within the next hour I think you’ll be all right’; and rashes – ‘Look, it’s faded.’ But if the child is truly ill, forget it. Cancel everything, become a nurse and enjoy it, which you can provided the symptoms aren’t too worrying. You can watch lots of lovely TV together. In the event of worrying symptoms, forget work altogether. The child should always come first and the labour market needs to acknowledge and accommodate this.

How to be in two places at the same time
Time management has always been the secret of successful mothering and never more so when successful mothering must be combined with successful money-earning. We still don’t have a mobile phone but I can see how they would be invaluable for letting everyone know where you are and how long you will be. Without one, you need watertight arrangements for children being at a piano lesson and not at someone’s house for tea and for there being food for supper as opposed to ‘I know. McDonalds’ again.’

Sometimes if you have more than two children you will be required to be in three places at the same time. You can do this by making clever and timely appearances and plotting your route through back streets to avoid traffic jams. There have been times in my life when I have had three children at three different schools in three different parts of London and all of them have had something on. The important thing is to be there for the bit that counts or at least to give the impression you have been. ‘Shame Mary was so ugly -poor little Jesus’ is always a good observation.

Making the most of the time available is essential. Prepare yourself en route, arrive focused, note remarks, performances, pictures on the wall and where your child is standing.

Sometimes you will have to explain to one or other child that you just can’t be there but this is rarely acceptable – a present helps.

Bribes
Presents are good. There are times when what you have to do will be completely offensive to your child -like going out when they want you to stay in. Then you must bribe them because there is no reason why they can’t be made a little happier when you are going off to be happy.