On Motherhood

[ailbhe]

Caveat: I have a slight temperature and a not-slight headache and a medium-slight sore throat. So this may not make any sense. You have been warned.

Today's Miss Manners

calls for people to stop telling mothers - potential, expectant, new or established - disaster stories. There's a lot to be said for that. I myself have, in the very recent past, posted a number of comments in various places along the lines of "Congratulations! As to your original question - I don't know. As soon as you contemplate becoming pregnant, everything you do is wrong, somewhere, so do your best. You can worry about what you eat now, what you feed them later, what you teach them to feed their children after that - as long as you're worried sick you're doing it wrong, you're probably doing fine."

I like being a mother. It's complicated at times like this - Rob is finding it hard to do all the daytime babycare as well as his usual evening stuff, and he's getting visibly more tired by the hour. But I like it. I like breastfeeding and cuddling and playing and feeding and eating and walking and clapping hands. And every day, through my own fault because I persist in reading news, I discover that I am doing something to ruin my child's life forever.

Ho hum. It somehow fails to make me feel like a failure, or want to do anything different. I think most of what we do is fine. So does Linnea.

(Today she rejected a banana in favour of breastmilk. I feel so honoured!)