Another prime example of whingey navel-gazing by a "journalist"

[emkana]

honestly woman what is your problem?

24 poppers on a baby sleep suit seems an awful lot....especially in a small size?? Im thinking 2-3 on each leg and maybe 4 up the front.

Also she does sound like she was horrible to the husband...took over and wouldnt let him do owt without criticising so no wonder he wasnt v. nurturing.

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I'm really shocked that anyone could slag off this piece. I think it's brave, frank, a good read, and probably for some readers an eye-opener. If someone had posted on MN about this issue, I'd guess she'd get lots of support.

(I also wonder if she hasn't had PND tbh. The feeling that you're the only person who can do the caring properly, the anger/loneliness, the inability to let go enough to see the key issues, the inability to ask for help or arrange a babysitter, the lethargy...)

my husband has always been fantastic, he was much more of a natural parent than I was

'24 poppers,each one etched on my psyche'

lol

In retrospect I was totally nuts after dd1. I had no idea i was nuts at the time. I appeared to be coping v well to everyonw health professionals included so I never questioned my behaviour.

Myeye are all those symptons of PND then?

PS goes through list and shouts bingo!

Not now but after dd1 definitely.

shouting bingo is definitely a sign

I'm really surprised that people have such negative reactions to the article.

I'm not a journalist and I know a lot of people on MN have writing experience so are more experienced than I am, but I didn't think it was that badly written.

It all rang very true to me and yes pre DS I was fairly self obsessed but then aren't most people and yes my relationship with my DH did take a battering which I didn't expect at all, is this something I should have known about, in which case perhaps more chat about this in NCT classes would be handy.

Eek must go, DS dismantling computer room...

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PS, I had PND badly with my second baby, so badly that I couldn't mistake it. I then realised I'd had it at a lower level with no 1, no one had spotted it.
If you feel in retrospect you were nuts with dd1, then I'd say yes, it's a distinct possibility
Because of what happened to me, I just know there's loads more PND out there than is officially recognised.
Like I said, this piece feels very familiar. Yes, even the bit about the poppers. I remember how exhausting it was to change a lightbulb, fgs.

It was the idea of pairing socks as an act of love that cracked me up.

Everyone knows that you can tell a (first time) pregnant woman how hard the whole thing is going to be as many times as you like but they never ever listen.

And then the enormity of looking after this teeny tiny baby and the shock to your relationship/life/whatever hits you like a big red bus. It's been happening for, oh, a few hundred thousand years.....

My friend and I were really candid with each other after having ours. It was around the time the girl had set fire to her house with her baby inside. We felt sympathy for her. We also talked about how we felt it would be ok to harm our new babies because they felt like an extension of ourselves. It would be up to us to cut our arm of for eg. mad?, yes, but we wouldn't go to jail for it. Absolutely mental.

agree with hippmummy

A sleepsuit with 24 poppers? Actually this is the only bit of the article that didn't ring true.

maybe it just felt like 24 poppers
pmsl actually about the number. maybe poppered cuffs? so, two on each cuff, ten from neck to bottom, five on each ankle?

OMG have just realised I've forgotten about poppers on sleepsuits. They run inside the leg from ankle up to the crotch, and down the other side...
Sheesh, how quickly one forgets

And you had to really concentrate on the poppers around the legs because if you got one wrong the sleep suit would be all squint and you'd have to start again (all this time the baby is screaming blue murder). I was so glad to see the back of sleepsuits.

The piece seemed well enough written to me and her plight seems a common one worthy of sympathy. What is so infuriating is this whole trend of 'personal experience journalism' -- journalists writing as if they were chatting to other journalists who share their prosperous and fortunate lifestyles and consequently their not-too-tragic problems.
I had my first child nearly 12 years ago and I've been reading 'journalist becomes mum' stories ever since. If you have to write about a personal experience can you at least choose a new personal experience each time. Like ordering a vente in a Starbucks, for example.

24 attempts perhaps as it's dark cos you don't want to trick the baby into thinking it's daytime, your bleary-eyed and you've just stubbed your toe on the way in

Hmm she seems rather badly prepared and lacking in insight, but the article is quite reasonable I think

But don't most people with Oxford degrees swot up on their Naomi Wolf and Rachel Cusk before having a baby?!?!?!

The only thing that enraged me about this article was the husband.

Even if she's shutting him out of the baby stuff to start with, he can still pair his own socks, can't he?

And what's all that shouting at her for wanting a cup of tea about? Presumably he's cross because she worried him by yelling so loud, but if he didn't respond to the first yells she had to, didn't she?

Spot on JonRonseal, can we talk about how much we love Jon Ronson instead?

I LOVE Jon Ronson

I think most first time mothers are 'badly' prepared for the change in lifestyle - it certainly came as a suprise to me - and still does on a daily basis.

I thought she was alright to be honest