Breastfeeding books

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Dot writes: when breastfeeding, the kind of book you need is a book in little sections, as you’re going to have to stop at least every twenty minutes to deal with burps, possets, nappies or baby inexplicably getting restive and punching you in the breast. (Prawn specializes in a sort of half-breaststroke, done with the upper arm and leg, only I get to be the water.) I’ve just finished Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, which doesn’t fit this description and was jolly good actually. However, I’ve also been pursuing my current main interest by reading books about motherhood. There are quite a lot of anthologies and collections of short essays/observations on the market, mostly humorous.

The challenge for writers on this topic is to balance the familiar and the particular, to deliver that stab of recognition that is (presumably) what draws readers in in the first place while still being funny or insightful or both. For me the person who does this best is Anne Enright (Making Babies). I read her book in pregnancy and I keep mentally referring back to it. Now Prawn is so fat I keep thinking of her observations on her own baby in the fourth month:

The baby disappears into her own personality. She gets rounder. Her features begin to look strangely confined, like a too-small mask in the middle of her big, round face. It is now that babies look like Queen Victoria or Winston Churchill, or anyone fat, and British, and in charge.

She has a piece called ‘Milk’ in which she remarks on the strange things that set off the letdown reflex. The day my breasts tried to feed my mobile phone I thought of Anne Enright. So, recognition – but who else would write about that?

Making Babies is wry and witty but there’s a sadness about it too, a sense of the seriousness and the pains of motherhood. Much more straightforwardly funny is Fiona Looney’s Misadventures in Motherhood. There are some lines I really relish here, such as the moment when, as Looney and her husband make a doomed attempt to go out for dinner on their wedding anniversary, their little boy engagingly asks ‘ “can I sleep in your bed with my teddy…in my nude?”‘ Looney is another Dublin resident (Anne Enright I believe lives in Bray) and I enjoy the local colour. It’s one of the things that makes me realise I am finally feeling at home in Ireland.

Mothers are always wrong (though they can also find things that aren’t there, as my mum liked to point out when I was a child). There’s a strong strand in the comic literature of motherhood of owning up to and laughing off one’s failure to live up to The Rules. Fiona Looney does this to some extent. Stephanie Calman does it a lot more in Confessions of a Bad Mother. She’s performing a necessary service and I am storing up some of her experiences as sources for comfort for the future. I’m sure there will come a day, for example, when I put Prawn down on the sofa and he rolls off and I’m convinced he’s brained himself and it was my fault. However, I didn’t warm to her in quite the way I did to Fiona Looney or Anne Enright. Ironically given the verbal habits of the Irish, it was partly because Stephanie Calman swears too much. Also, she was so frightened of labour she had two elective caesareans. It’s good for me to see this issue from the other side, I suppose. One could make a case I was so frightened of caesareans I had an unattended birth. Anyhow, let’s say she’s not a soulmate.

I’ve recently acquired two anthologies on motherhood as well, Mums: A Celebration of Motherhood, ed. by Sarah Brown and Gil McNeil, sold in aid of PiggyBankKids (um?) and Mum’s the Word: The Truth About Motherhood, ed. by Sarah Webb and sold in aid of cystic fibrosis research at the National Children’s Hospital, Tallaght. They are both excellent but the Irish one seemed a little front-loaded. By the end of Mum’s the Word I’d resolved to go back and count just how many of the contributions contained the phrase ‘but it was all worth it’. Here recognition did start to blur into banality as I got rather too used to the irresistable downwards-upwards curl of the maternity memoir, down into labour-ward horrors, or humiliating incidents of one’s child puking, or fights with ghastly teenagers, and back up into pridejoysmiliness. The experiences are precious and deserve respect, but the writing felt a little lazy. However, when I looked again I realised there’s actually much more variety in this book than I’d remembered, and some very strong and moving pieces. I would pick out, in particular, Kate Holmquist’s account of the death of her mother and Ho Wei Sim on taking her Irish-born daughters to see their Chinese-born grandmother in Malaysia. I was also very interested in Katy McGuiness’s piece on her daughter Ellie, who has Down’s Syndrome, and Anne Marie Scanlon on having hyperemesis in pregnancy – an essay that should make British readers very grateful for the NHS. (Scanlon was exceptionally sick and receiving wholly inadequate treatment from the public hospitals in the US, but managed to drag herself onto a plane and fly to England). In fact I think this may be the only contribution that really does contain the words ‘it will all be worth it’, though in quotation marks.

The British anthology is for the most part a collection of fiction rather than memoir and makes the rather original move of including some male contributors. It has less to say about birth and early childhood than the other books I’ve mentioned here and more about some of the other things mothers might do, including live for over a century growing herbs and daughters in Glasgow (Isla Dewar), and manipulate a state-governor husband into commuting a death sentence (John O’Farell). If only the cover weren’t pink.

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Filed under Prawn on the outside, Pregnancy, Words and books

Tags: babies, books, Calman, Enright, Gil McNeal, Looney, motherhood, Sarah Brown, Sarah Webb