who´s on my side

Several books on motherhood warned me about the entitlement people feel to give unrequested advice to a new mother. To that I should add how vulnerable I was to being subtly influenced by all the advice. I prepared for it and I was quite determined to stand my ground and do things my way. However, it did not always go like that.

A friend of mine, mother of older children, visited when I was still pregnant and mentioned matter of factly (I do not remember in which context) how clean everything has to be in the first three months after having a baby. I internalised this message without blinking. I was not even aware of it until much later. This is how I decided I needed a cleaning lady. This is how I was frantically cleaning ordering and scrubing for the first months after having the baby. The compulsion continued even beyond the first three months. Although I check myself while doing it more often, I am still today doing more than necesary to keep my baby clean. I wash him every day and change his cloths after he wears them once, even if they are clean. I have to confess that I am not using the same standards for myself and my cleanliness. Why this determination, he will not get sick from being a litlle dirty and he does not even like being changed so often. I think it started with my friend´s remark long time ago. It also has to do with WHAT WOULD OTHER PEOPLE THINK. Which has already poisoned my life on many other fronts, even before I became a mother. But as a mother I find myself especially vulnerable to that old silly scare.

Feeding the baby has been probably the chapter that elicited the most unwanted advices from my career as a mother. Doctors, nurses, books, friends, relatives, parents, partner, neighbours, strangers in the street. Even the CLEANING LADY. Which is funny, cause we could not speak any common language so our verbal communication was very limited. However, she managed somehow to give across the message that I should do something different about the feeding. I do not even remember what. I just remember my consternation that she was giving me advice about this. I thought she was on my side. One day she caught me cutting some old cloths with a pair of scissors into smaller pieces (to be used for, guess what, cleaning...) and she praised me with the two words she could speak in Dutch "good mama" or "mama good" I don´t remember. I felt proud!

Which does show how stressed i am about all the advice and the praising. If I get a comment that I should be doing something different I am very annoyed. As if that person was telling me I was a bad mother. As if they were not on my side.