A friend has a new baby. This no longer happens to me often. I started early so my sons are young adults and most of my friends’ kids are at least well into primary school. The torturous debates about controlled crying and co-sleeping, bottle and breast, spoon-feeding and baby-led weaning, seem almost quaint, though at the same time the vicious judgment of mothers’ decisions and compromises never quite fades.
My friend is suffering, as new mothers do, even more than 20 years ago, from too much advice. The baby’s needs are obvious and the same across time and the world: love, milk, warmth, nappies. But how to meet those needs consistently, hour after hour, is far from obvious. When the baby cries, try milk. It won’t make things worse, except that sometimes everything seems to make things worse. The goal is to avoid the baby being too tired to feed and/or too hungry to sleep, but the baby doesn’t seem to know that, and once you’ve ruled out hunger, cold, heat and a nappy change and the crying continues, the field is pretty wide. Eventually, I found, even if the initial problem wasn’t hunger or tiredness, one of them will kick in sooner or later and if you keep trying the same solutions in rotation there’ll come a moment when you’re right.
I watch my friend trying to soothe her baby. I know she thinks she’s failing. I suspect she thinks I think she’s failing. I don’t; I think that the baby is being a baby and my friend is being a mother. I offer to hold the baby, though I know – and my friend doesn’t, yet – that a stranger’s arms, however baby-experienced, hold little comfort and even though his mother isn’t solving the immediate problem, she is now and for years will be the answer to him, because she is his mother.
It is a reasonable working assumption that if the obvious solutions worked, the problems would have been solved some time ago
By the time my friends were having children, I had vowed never to offer unsolicited advice, not to anyone and especially not to new parents. There is no shortage of advice. Even 20 years ago, before smartphones, there was no shortage, and even then advice was contradictory. The important point was that whatever a mother did was wrong. Every possible course of action would harm the child, and the consequences would be all the mother’s fault. My nice GP said, “Yes, sorry, you give birth to the guilt and blame with the baby. Crap, isn’t it?”
For seven years, I slept four or five hours a night, rarely for longer than an hour at a time
Sarah Moss: A reader tried to needle me by scoffing at knitting - I was intrigued
Sarah Moss: I cycle to central Dublin several times a week. I’m a hypocrite not allowing my teenager to do the same
I’d rather be in Connemara than anywhere tropical, wearing wellies and a woolly hat
My children did not sleep. For seven years, between the insomniac kids and the flexible but full-time job, I slept four or five hours a night, rarely for longer than an hour at a time. I’m okay on not much sleep – I had been an insomniac child and teenager myself – but I was tired. I drove with the windows open and taught my classes standing up. I went about muttering “To be tired is not necessarily to be unhappy”, and found it more or less true. I enjoyed my children and my work very much. But I was unhappy when friends whose children slept all night asked me why we didn’t just put them to bed and close the door, a course of action that had occurred to us. Other friends asked why we didn’t just bring them into our bed, which had also crossed our minds (our babies were delighted to have company and an audience for their all-nighters).
I found myself reflecting on the uselessness of advice while trying to support another friend. He’s been having a hard time for a long time, and lives so far away that apart from sending the occasional gift, all I can do is listen. And sometimes, when I’ve listened, I find myself saying to my husband, “I don’t know why he doesn’t just – if I were him I’d just –”, and I tell myself to shut up. It is a reasonable working assumption that if the obvious solutions worked, the problems would have been solved some time ago. The fact that the problems are obviously not solved tells us that the obvious solutions are not correct, and therefore I should go on listening. My opinion is not useful, not relevant, and in fact not requested.
No unsolicited advice. If people want to know what I would do, they’ll ask.
(That said, if an infant hasn’t pooed in a couple of days, go for a onesie with feet.)
