How Not to Be a Perfect Mother. Libby Purves

She had missed a line. These encounters do little to soothe the nervous primagravida.

      When your big moment comes, you are led into a cubicle, asked to take off your lower garments, and lie on a padded plank until The Consultant comes round. Even sitting up to read your book or ease your heartburn may be treated as insubordination and Wasting Doctor’s Time (what doctor? where?).

      After a couple of hours of this persecution, a nervous woman will become hopelessly docile, too timid to ask questions even if they are burning in her heart; and the more spirited, bolshie type becomes so rude that she, too, forgets to ask the questions that make her cry secretly in the night.

      None of this is any good. Plenty of people have campaigned to improve British antenatal cattle clinics, and they are making slow but sure progress. Rudeness, insensitivity and inattention are regularly exposed by the dutiful media. Occasionally one hospital lays itself open to ridicule or disgust, and all the others pull up their socks an inch or two. I did most especially enjoy the tale of the woman who miscarried and insisted she was still pregnant. She demanded an ultrasound scan, but was refused one. Eventually, she was admitted against her will to a mental hospital for being obsessively demented about this phantom baby. When she escaped and got her scan, it turned out she was still pregnant. She had only miscarried one of twins. The baby was born safely, and the hospital, according to reports, ‘apologized’. Apologized! It should have been put in the stocks!

      Plenty of midwives campaign to improve the system; depending on where you live, you might be luckier than someone else. Meanwhile, there are a few ways of improving your lot:

      • If you live in an area where you are expected to go to the hospital for every visit, ask for ‘shared care’, so that half your appointments are mere visits to your own GP. If you don’t like your GP, or he looks gloomy at the thought of obstetrics and new babies (some doctors positively prefer cosy chats about arthritis and golf), then for heaven’s sake change your GP. Quick. A doctor who doesn’t like pregnant women is not going to be overjoyed when you turn up with a new baby covered in mysterious spots, either, or when you dither for weeks over the whooping-cough jab. Change doctors! Now!

      • At the hospital, make sure you always book the first appointment of the morning, and get there 20 minutes before it. Then nobody can say, ‘Doctor’s running a bit late this morning.’

      • Take something to read. The hospital supply of mysteriously stained two-year-old copies of OK! magazine can seriously damage your morale.

      • Alternatively, knit. Everyone knits in antenatal clinics, sometimes managing a whole sweater while waiting for God to sweep in in his white coat. Or you can score points over bossy solid nurses in clumping shoes by arriving in an elegant flowing dress and doing petit-point embroidery. On no account wear a personal stereo or you will miss the magic moment when they mumble your name, and have to wait another hour.

      • When you do see the consultant, mention how long you waited, if you did. He might like to know, and he has a lot of power in the class-ridden hospital society. Tell him no wonder your blood pressure is up.

      • Write down your questions before you go in. Somehow, lying half-naked on a high table being prodded by a strange man in a hurry and a brisk, bored midwife, one tends to forget things. But stay friendly; let the midwife see that you respect his or her experience and opinions as much as the doctor’s, if not more.

      • If the midwife leaves you alone to take your clothes off, and leaves your notes on the table, for heaven’s sake read them. Of course it is not snooping.

      • If you are really worried, don’t hide it. With my second child I was irrationally convinced, near the end that something was wrong; but went through almost the whole of my 32-week appointment with a stiff upper lip. One casual kind word from my consultant, just as he was leaving after the regulation 45-second prod, brought on a flood of tears. It saved the day. Back he came, ordered the nurses to fetch a loudspeaker so that I could hear Rose’s heartbeat, gave me a kick-chart to fill in, and sent me home to the first peaceful night’s sleep for weeks. The dreadfully businesslike and abrupt manner of medical people sometimes creates a sense that they are hiding some awful secret from you. In fact, they are just brooding about their next pay rise and whether gorgeous Dr Gupta in Intensive Care really meant it about the Nurses’ Home dance on Friday.

      • Read all the books about pregnancy and birth that you can bear to. Go to classes run by the National Childbirth Trust if you can. If you can use terms like placenta, membranes, engagement, cervix and so on, the staff might talk to you almost as an equal. It is roughly the same principle you use for outfacing a contemptuous young garage mechanic who keeps going on about tappet-adjustments.

      • If they won’t talk to you, fight. It is often the youngest doctors who behave most like pigs. Remember all the time whose baby it is. Here is a piece of dialogue from my own past:

      JUNIOR DOCTOR (bustling in): Mrs, erm, er, Heiney. Er. (addressing midwife). Is this one complaining of any problems?

      ME: A bit of a problem with heartburn and bad leg cramps.

      MIDWIFE: She has heartburn and leg cramps, doctor.

      JD (still to midwife): Oh. Yes (scribbles prescription).

      Give her that (tries to depart).

      ME: Hang on, doctor, sorry, what is this prescription for?

      JD (as if suddenly noticing me): You just take it to a chemist and he will give you some medicine (tries to depart again).

      ME: I will bloody well not take it to a chemist. I will take it to my GP and ask him for a civil answer. Why should I take anything when you won’t even spare me thirty seconds to say whether it’s supposed to be for the heartburn or the legs?

       (Doctor departs, but his ears are becoming satisfyingly red.)

      MIDWIFE: Oh, I am sorry about him. But what can we do?

      Such little playlets are being played out every day around the antenatal clinics of the nation. Just make sure your part is a speaking one. And don’t worry about making enemies; at least the fragmentation of care in Britain means that you may never see the same doctor or nurse twice, let alone be delivered by anyone whose name you even know. So you can stand up for yourself without much risk of meeting your adversary the next time in advanced labour. If you do, you could always brazen it out and say, ‘Oh, how lovely that it’s you, someone I know.’

      Of course, it would be better not to have any fights at all. I am just saying that if you do, it probably isn’t your fault, and I hope you win.

      • Finally – a useful hint for staying happy during hospital appointments. Don’t watch ER, Casualty or Holby City. In recent years it would seem that the production team of the latter programme has invested in a rather expensive bit of kit which simulates a womb, for filming Caesarean operations. As a result, every other plotline involves an emergency Caesarean, often involving death, mayhem, or the discovery that the baby is an IVF error or product of adultery, because it is entirely the wrong colour. Do yourself a favour, watch Friends instead.

      As to the usual physical discomforts of pregnancy, there are a few things to be done, but most of them too often repeated to be worth enumerating again. At one stage in my childbearing career I decided that if one more kind person told me to eat a slice of bread before getting up (for the sickness), stand properly (for the backache) and take Milk of Magnesia for the heartburn, I would knock them down and sit on them. One acquaintance of mine swears blind that raspberry-leaf tea cures sickness, backache, heartburn and cramps in the legs, and that gipsy women who drink it never have difficult labours. The fact that it tastes like shredded lorry-tyres is neither here nor there.

      There are a few things, however,