“How old was your baby when he started sleeping through?” asked a friend recently. She is in the trenches with her newborn, who will only sleep on her – an affliction that has the potential to push parents to the brink of madness, and for which they have yet to find a cure. I recalled that it was eight weeks, if you count sleeping through as five hours or more, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her. I only remember, I think, because I was well rested enough to make decent memories.
People, readers included, took great joy in telling me that it wouldn’t last, and they were right: it didn’t. Though because of it, I can scarcely remember the winter at all. The baby was constantly unwell and we had entered the sort of co-sleeping situation that saw neither of us get much rest. For his part, he was waking for milk every hour; and for my part, I couldn’t get a sentence from Your Baby Week By Week out of my head. The line was something like: “Imagine how bad you’d feel if your baby died because you co-slept with them.” I can’t remember it word for word now, but at the time it beat its way through the membrane of my troubled slumber to form a haunting refrain that meant any rest I was getting was of even poorer quality and thus, conversely, meant I was probably more likely to have an accident during my waking hours. (I should add here that I have great respect for the book’s author Prof Caroline Fertleman and her co-writer Simone Cave, and say that I met the former when she was briefly my son’s consultant and was genuinely starstruck. Some people turn to putty when they meet pop stars; for others, it’s paediatricians.)
Memory is a strange thing. People, often mothers themselves, use the phrase “baby brain” to describe that maddening inability to know where your car is parked or what that word is, or what the thing was that you went upstairs for. There is evidence that birth and the postpartum experience can affect our memories (but as the book Mother Brain points out, there is very little research into baby brain in new fathers). In rats, memory appears to improve around the time of weaning and actually it seems that motherhood is beneficial for their brains in the long term. In women, we know that the hippocampus shrinks during pregnancy and the postpartum period. We also know that sleep deprivation affects our ability to encode memories in the hippocampus, which is perhaps why this past winter is recalled only in a series of flickering impressions: the sound of the machine delivering oxygen to my son, crying in a charity shop after we were discharged (but no recollection of the song that made me cry), the sight of his face when he touched snow for the first time, the theme tune to Strictly Come Dancing, which my mother watched while he sat beside her in the bouncer. Most of it is just darkness.
Similarly with the postpartum period: I remember how my mother tenderly brushed the knots from my hair, which had become so matted from writhing during labour that it wasn’t until she was able to get to me, three weeks after the baby was born, that it could be untangled. Not because my husband couldn’t do it, but because it hadn’t occurred to me to ask him. There are some things that only mothers do. And I remember thinking, perhaps with that writerly impulse: this is something. I will remember this. I can remember the blood, the sound of my little baby’s “moth breath”, as Sylvia Plath has it, and his hormone-drunk father saying, exuberantly, one day after coming home from the hospital: “Let’s have another one!”
My mother says no one remembers birth or the days that come after it, because if they did they wouldn’t have more children. It serves an evolutionary purpose, she believes. And I can see what she is getting at, when I think about the pain of my labour, a pain so bad I said I would jump out of the window. I haven’t forgotten exactly, but its edges have been blunted.
Perhaps this is why older people, when they give parenting advice, can sound so glib, so blase. They might remember some of the details, but they are dulled. The immediacy of the experience has faded with time. It’s one of the reasons why I admire my dad, because when I ask him what he did about such and such a problem, or at what age and stage I hit such and such milestone, he simply confesses that he can’t remember. Rather than be didactic about it despite his vague recollections, he is honest about the gaps in his memory. Those prone to unsolicited parenting advice despite long having retired from active duty would do well to follow his example.
Writing this column has been one of the best things that I’ve ever done, and the only thing for which I’ve ever been regularly recognised by strangers. This isn’t a boast: I’m no celebrity. It is in all the places you would expect: the playground, the breastfeeding group. But the thing people always say to me is: “You write it exactly how it is.” It is only after months of doing this that I have understood how little of early parenthood is written in real time, for understandable reasons. But to reconstruct it in retrospect is to always lose something in the recounting. I read my early column about breastfeeding now and I can barely recall the pain and torment I felt. Which is why it’s important that I wrote it. To remember. And so that those parents less able or inclined to record everything in writing from three weeks postpartum (because they are not insane!) remember too.
What’s working
The TV show In the Night Garden. “Why is Makka Pakka half the size of Upsy Daisy, not to mention the enormous Igglepiggle?” asks my husband, who is less awed by it than the baby. “Scale is a real issue in this programme. Look at the tiny Tombliboos.” “No,” I said, “it’s the Pontipines that are really tiny. The Tombliboos are bigger than Makka Pakka but smaller than Igglepiggle.” Normal conversation will resume when my son reaches 18.
What’s not
Hand, foot and mouth sounds like a truly medieval disease. I’m praying that I managed to escape it, having had it as a child. Another parent told me darkly that their toenails fell off.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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