It's three weeks later. I'm more tired than I knew it was possible to be. The baby has been wrestled into a lunchtime nap, and I'm lying on my bed wondering if I have the energy to go to the National Childbirth Trust reunion. If I do, I'll have to tell my birth story - again.
Not that anything terrible happened. Actually, in the strange, masochistic world of natural childbirth, I may have scored maximum points. I had a water birth, complete with low lighting, sympathetic midwives and supportive husband. In fact, I have the material to be positively triumphalist - I happen to know that of all the women in my group, I was the only one who did not have medical intervention.
Ironically, I was also the only woman who did not go active birth classes (I've never liked gym). I must admit to feeling a bit gleeful about the last detail - but not about the rest. I'm glad I had a water birth, but don't think it indicates any special virtue on my part - I think it is more likely to be the result of genetics and substantial hips. Nor am I surprised that the other women had intervention.
The NCT is a middle class institution, and full of women coming to motherhood after having had established careers. Not only did most of my classmates probably look nice in jeans, but they were mostly over 30, and therefore likely to need help. I know that some of the women there this afternoon will try to apologise for "failing" to have an "active" birth, and that seems absurd. I wish I had a T-shirt that said: "I think modern obstetrics are great."
In fact, now my mind is so full of naps, nappies, crying and feeds, I wonder why we put so much emphasis on the birth in the first place. I understand why the natural birth movement had to happen - the over-medicalised, paternalistic births of the 50s and 60s were repressive and even cruel - but radical reactions are always full of over-statement. When Sheila Kitzinger claimed in 1962 that natural child birth using her "psychosexual" method "has a significance for both man and woman which reaches far beyond the act of birth itself, and through the family has its effect upon society as a whole", did she really expect it to become the orthodoxy?
Because orthodox it certainly is. My classmates will be apologising because they have to some extent accepted Kitzinger's idea that natural childbirth will somehow put everything else, especially breast-feeding, right. "Immediately after the birth, the baby will be passed to you for bonding," says my hospital leaflet. "Once you've achieved successful suckling in the celebratory atmosphere that surrounds birth, you will feel confident about future feeding" asserts Miriam Stoppard, a main-stream authority if ever there was one.
My water birth gave me a strong feeling of having given birth to my son and I value the experience. But it wasn't magic. It did not protect me from heavy bleeding and some very painful suturing.( The local anaesthetic didn't take. "She can't keep her feet still, can she?", the doctor kindly observed.) And it didn't preserve me from having to spend a night on the the maternity wards.
I'd been up for 36 hours when I was wheeled in there, 12 of them in labour. I was not going to be allowed to shut my eyes for the next 24. The lights were on continuously, and the temperature was tropical. There was no drinking water or anything to eat - in my time there I was offered one round of toast and one mini Bakewell tart. The ward was shared with three other women and their babies. There was a single midwife answering calls from this and two similar wards.
The baby next to me had had a painful ventouse delivery and screamed for most of the night. Under the curtain, I watched its mother's feet, clad in padded purple slippers in the shape of monsters, pad to and fro, and heard her start to weep. When my own baby cried, I had to crank the bed up to breast-feed. It made terrible squeaks, and the other babies started crying. At one point, I fell over my catheter bag. My baby wailed. I wailed too.
Of course, a large part of the reason that conditions are so distressing is because of year after year of NHS cuts. I believe the average food budget is £1.40 per patient per day. Midwifes are paid truly paltry sums to do a incredibly demanding job, so naturally there aren't very many of them. But ideology played a part too. Maternity ward nurseries have been abolished not just for economic reasons, but to allow more "bonding" for mother and baby .
"We believe that the best person to take care of your baby is you, and we will not take him/her away for any reason," said the leaflet by my bedside, which also instructed me to wheel the baby to the lavatory with me, in case he was snatched. Half-conscious, in a lot of pain, I didn't feel like the best person - but there was no option, because visiting hours ensured that the people who did want to help - my husband, above all - were kept away. I did not "bond" with my baby during those hours in hospital - I felt alienated, guilty, inadequate and horribly lonely.
Nor did my water birth set me up for breast-feeding. My baby failed to latch on joyously after birth, because, prosaically enough, he had swal lowed a lot of mucus in the birth canal. Not that I knew that. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I was failing to feed him because of some of the "psychosexual" reasons Kitzinger suggests - "infantile sexuality" is particularly imponderable - when I was saved by a nursing auxiliary who matter-of-factly turned him over and and patted the mucus out of him.
The same nursing auxiliary did something else wonderful too. Like a glorious left-over from an old-fashioned maternity ward, she took the baby away for an hour so I could bath. The relief was immeasurable. Perhaps that makes me an unnatural mother - but I don't think so. Other great apes get over the difficulty of slowly maturing young by only having one baby every five to eight years. Human beings get round the difficulty by sharing parenting - except in modern maternity wards.
Out here in the world, I am just beginning to relax and allow other people - my husband, most of all - to help care for the baby. My hospital stay didn't just make me ill from sleep deprivation, it made me feel that I was the only person who should be taking care of my child, and that all other help, like ringing for the midwife, was a failure on my part and a favour on the helper's.
A good "birth story" certainly didn't save me from any of that. In fact, I think the emphasis on birth and the mother's individual experience isn't just sentimentalised - I think it stops us seeing babies for what they are - a collective enterprise. An old fashioned maternity ward with its nurseries, sleeping hours and matrons, ushered new mothers into a protected, ordered, if oppressive, community of women. The modern ward initiates them into a chaotic twilight where they alone are responsible for their child. If I do go to the NCT meeting, I want to talk about that, not the "quality" of my birth.
Infant by Kate Clanchy
In your frowning, fugitive days, small love,
your coracled, ecstatic nights,
possessed or at peace, hands clenched
on an unseen rope or raised in blessing
like the Pope, as your white etched feet
tread sooty roofs of canal tunnels
or lie released, stretched north in sleep
You seem to me an early saint, a Celt,
eyes fixed on a celestial light, patiently
setting the sextant straight
to follow your godsent map, now
braced against a baffling gale, now
becalmed, fingers barely sculling
through warm muddy tides
Soon, you will make your way out
of this estuary country, leave
the low farms and fog banks, tack through
the brackish channels and long
reed-clogged rivulets, reach
the last turn, the salt air and river mouth,
the wide grey sea of your life.
