Aquanatal class

Not like last time.

I arrived early - very early - so that I had time to settle Linnea into the creche. She left me happily and went to play as soon as we arrived and I let her out of the buggy. I filled in the paperwork and showed them her snack box. Ordinarily they offer the children squash and a biscuit but I couldn't allow the biscuits as they didn't have the pack with the ingredients.

Then I went and changed and got into the pool and swam. All on my own. For ten minutes, maybe longer. Gradually bumpy women showed up, one at a time, and one started a conversation - Australian, so perhaps the laws of British reserve didn't apply this time. A few people were bemoaning the fact that Baby Showers aren't common here; it's a lack I've often been grateful for. We all talked about names and how many weeks along we were and so on. I'm in the middle, dates-wise, though since I'm likely to give birth at 37 weeks and the rest are primi paras I expect I'll deliver before some of them do.

I do want a photograph of a pool full of pregnant women astride sausage-shaped floats bobbing up and down. I'd also like to know why exercise makes Braxton Hicks contractions ramp up. And how to keep the baby asleep while I'm trying to build up my calf muscles.

So what's the issue?

I paraphrase: "If you'd rather not leave your 10-month-old baby for more than a day, you have deeper issues." I didn't paraphrase the "deeper issues" phrase, since I'm not clear what it means, but the context implies "problems".

But I've heard this before - that it's unhealthy to want to spend almost all of every waking day with your baby, that wanting regular time away in multi-hour chunks is more normal than not, that not wanting such time is evidence that the parent is weirdly dependent on the baby and fostering a dependent attitude in the child, suffocating and other things I can't remember the names for now. If it's a boy-baby Oedipus comes into things once the discussion gets sufficiently heated.

The bit I don't understand is why it's bad for parents, particularly mothers, to want to spend most of the time with their children, caring for them, not leaving them with a sitter or a carer or similar. How does it hurt the mother? How does it hurt the child? How much time away from the child, leaving someone else to care for it, is necessary for optimal psikerlogical development?

This makes about as much sense to me as the assumption that it's bad for children to be left with an alternative carer while the parents, to pick a random example, go out and earn food money, or study, or take papier mache lessons. Why?