I didn't even manage to get to the end of the first episode of this new drama by Kay
Mellor. It was so
stereotyped it did my head in. Six pregnancies trying to cover as much of a
textbook variety of situations and symptoms as possible. A teenager in denial.
An acrimonious divorce. A lesbian couple. A toyboy. A blogger. Financial
despair. Indigestion. Baby brain. Waddling. Twins. Nausea. Swollen ankles.
Overwhelming fear.
It being set in Leeds meant that the “it’s
grim up north” card then had to come into play, punctuated with really bad Yorkshire accents and unemployment. Having visited Leeds only
yesterday, I can report that the city appears to be booming, with its ever
expanding law firms, shopping precincts, concert venues, restaurant scene and
riverside apartment developments. Yet this drama seemed to think that its
citizens are still living in back-to-back slums and eating coal with their
chips. To get into the role, two of the actresses (Tara Fitzgerald and Jill Halfpenny) seem
to have spent the last few years chain-smoking. Not that they were smoking in while
pregnant on screen (health campaign advice must be stuck to!) – just that their
voices had become unrecognisably rasping and lowered in pitch since I last saw
them in anything.
I didn’t stay long enough to watch the couples’
“parentcraft” class. One lady was already in labour and about to deliver twins
and I just didn’t have the patience to endure the huffing any longer, and
wanted to quit before the “Get t’bloody anaesthetist in to gi’ us a bloody
epidural” lines hit. (Though apparently the contractions were only Braxton Hicks anyway.) I did have time to notice that the thick one from Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies was going to be one of the leaders taking the
class, which meant no one was going to be able to take it seriously anyway.
It’s hard to write anything about NCT antenatal classes that
hasn’t already been said by Dara O’Briain (tear or cut, anyone?) or Kirstie Allsopp. Like most people,
I went along to NCT classes just to make friends. Which thankfully I did. My
daughter still plays regularly with some of the children in our class who we first met as
“bumps”. As meeting people was my motivation to attend, I generally ignored the
crap the class leader told us about childbirth, and kept asking arsey questions
instead. I was already being threatened with an assisted delivery as I
have a small hole in my heart which the obstetric consultant decided to stress
unduly about, even though the hospital cardiologist thought it was a matter of no
concern. Plus I had spent the previous three years doing speech perception
experiments with babies at the university and had met so many mothers still
traumatised by their horrible birth experiences nine months after the event that I had been left with no
illusions. There was no doubt in my mind that the whole procedure was likely to be
absolutely dire rather than magical.
So I was really angry when our NCT teacher said, “I am not going
to tell you about Caesarians because I don’t want to scare you.” Yet she had
just shown us statistics which revealed that nearly 25% of births in York end
in a C-section. Which meant that at least two of us were gearing up for one.
What is scarier, being told calmly and rationally about surgical procedures in
an ante-natal class, or being told during labour that your baby is in distress
and needs to be cut out of you immediately, with you having no idea about how they are going to go about it? As far as I am
concerned, it’s just wrong for NCT ante-natal class teachers to let people
believe that it will all go swimmingly, that if you inhale aromatherapy oils
and let your husband massage the small of your back in your birth pool at home,
the baby will slip out without any bother. And that you should never even need to go to hospital. Such a naive view (which our teacher herself contradicted by telling us that only 5% of births in York are at home) leads
to new mothers possibly feeling an overwhelming sense of failure if all goes horribly
wrong. And anyway, my husband has always been crap at giving massages.
And all this before we start on the nonsense they told us
about breastfeeding being the easiest and most natural thing in the world. Or the insanity
of making us practise changing nappies by wiping Marmite off a doll’s bottom.
This was our only preparation for the mad, bad, dark and exhausting newborn days
ahead: it wasn't enough.
