Eleanor Black - Confessions of a Coffee Group Dropout

Eleanor Black is an award-winning journalist and first-time mother who drinks far too much coffee, though not at coffee group meetings. She has a Master of Creative Writing degree from the University of Auckland and several unfinished novels languishing in her cupboard, but this is her first book. She lives in Auckland with her husband Tim, son Micah and terrier Scout.

ELEANOR BLACK

Confessions
of a
Coffee Group
Dropout

First published in 2011

Copyright Eleanor Black 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Australia
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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
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ISBN 978 1 87750 506 5

Set in 10/16 pt Palatino by Post Pre-press Group, Australia
Text design by Christabella Designs

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Tim and Micah, who make mothering fun.
And for all new mothers everywhere...

Contents

And good luck!

You have probably just had a baby, or you are pregnant and about to embark on the grand adventure. Congratulations! For the most part, you are going to have a lot of fun. Children are hilarious, even very small ones. They are endlessly entertaining and interested in life, which makes them interesting. Most people wont tell you that.

Other mothers, when you break the good news, are more likely to start in with their war storiesthe 32-hour labour; the scary and rare hospital complication; the lost struggle, no matter how little Kapiti ice cream passes across their lips and how many abdominal crunches they do, to lose the stomach pooch that hangs over the top of their jeans; the 14-month-old who whipped off her nappy and smeared poo all over her bedroom wall and had to be blasted with cold water, nucleardetox style, before shed stop.

Just what you want to hear about when you are still coming to terms with the fact that you have recently acquired porn-star boobs.

Tell them youre about to welcome a boy into your home, and the response will often be, Ha, good luck! It can be overwhelming, and incredibly dispiriting. Everyone likes an excuse to recount horror stories and demonstrate their expertise, so instead of telling them to shut the frick up and let you enjoy your moment, you might want to consider ignoring them. Or not. Whatever feels right for you. After all, pregnancy means you have to give up soft cheeses, raw fish, chilled sauvignon blanc and sleeping on your backyou shouldnt have to give up swearing as well.

You wont get a lot of reassurance from other quarters. The image of mothering most often presented in magazines and on television and by the other new mothers you meet is pretty and pink and totally under control. You have a problem, you identify an agreed solution, carry out said action, and you move on to the next freeze-frame moment of parental bliss. Simple. When you question this arrangement, and possibly even mention that at your house everyone cries of an evening, you are met with blank looks and polite laughter. You are led to believe that you are entirely alone in feeling this way, and even a little bit weird.

Sometimes it can feel that the entire world has got together, had a meeting and agreed to lie to you. Does that mother in the skinny jeans and swishy haircut really bake biscuits and clean the loo when her baby is sleeping? She doesnt slump on the sofa and watch the loser parade on Jeremy Kyle to boost her self-esteem, or fall into the dreamless, drooling sleep of the damned? Has the woman sitting next to you at your coffee circle really made educational flash cards for her three-month-old? That she actually uses? Im going to take a stab at this and say, no, she too is watching trash television in her downtime and she should be ashamed of herself for suggesting otherwise.

Mothers can be very hard on each other, by criticising their compatriots efforts in toilet-training or establishing a bedtime routine or, more subtly, by giving the impression that they find this mothering gig easy, and cant understand why you dont, too. It is an insidious form of one-upmanship and it is, in my opinion, really damaging. No-one can maintain that level of effort and attention while surviving on broken sleep and overly sweetened mugs of coffee. No-one. One day you are going to stumble, perhaps after a night of waking every two hours with a teething baby, when you have just enough energy to move the centre of mothering operations from the bed to the sofa. You will decide to forgo the bath, to let the baby wear the same singlet for another day, to forget about trying to entertain him with books and musical toys and to let him watch television instead. You willgaspnot give him any tummy time. You will not tell any of the other mothers about this lapse. And you will feel like a steaming heap of cow manure.

Youll feel bad because you have been convinced in ways both subtle and blunt that it is your job to not only mother your child to the best of your ability, but to mother perfectly. That means making no mistakes, taking no short-cuts, accepting nothing but the utmost performance from yourself as defined not by you and your family but by your larger community by that I mean everyone from your midwife, to the parenting expert du jour, to an impossibly poised celebrity mother in the pages of your go-to gossip mag, to some mummy blogger in cyberspace who may as well live on Pluto for all that she can help you.

A hundred years ago this particular mothering problem didnt exist. Mothers werent fed a constant diet of stories in the media concerning evil mothers, overworked mothers, supermothers and sexy mothers. They werent scared stiff by doom-and-gloom reports about foetal-development problems, cuckolded into buying fancy sterilising equipment for bottles, reprimanded for using disposable nappies, or convinced that if they didnt start educating their babies in the womb they would end up failing kindergarten. Thats not to say the mothers of yesteryear didnt have their challenges, and I wouldnt for a moment want to be bringing up a child in the early twentieth century. However, I dont think they used up much psychic energy worrying about whether they were mothering correctlynot like we do today.

It must be said that this is, for the most part, a middle-class problem, and in many ways we are lucky to have the luxury of it. There are thousands of babies in New Zealand who never get tummy time, never get read to, dont enjoy a healthy diet, nor do their mothers have the skills or wherewithal to improve their lives, and that is a national tragedy. My son was a star at his local Plunket, in a disadvantaged part of Auckland, because he hit his milestones on time and was such a happy, well-nourished guy. He was unlike many of his peers, and I felt grateful each time we visited that I had the support necessary to give him a good start.