Nellie

The baby was 13 days overdue and I remember feeling really disappointed that I had gone - you think the baby might be a few days' overdue but you're still going to be able to have this great birth that you had in your mind. But anyway, I ended up getting it induced and I felt before the induction I felt really like a bit of a failure that my body hadn't done it. But at the same time my sister-in-law rang me - my sister-in-law who'd had these two perfect births and who was pregnant as well and due, you know, around the same time as me with her third. So, you know, was probably going to have another perfect birth, rang me and she said "Don't worry. No matter what happens tomorrow, at the end of the day you will have this beautiful baby in your arms". And even though she had the perfect birth, her saying that made me feel a whole lot better about the birth. It was pretty yucky. Like, just ended up having the Syntocinon and injection and stuff so I just felt out of control during the whole birth.

I went through the hospital and I had midwife-based care. I didn't understand with the first one that midwife-based care meant you still have an obstetrician-led delivery. So everything with my son in the antenatal care was really great, really supportive until the point when I started to go post-dates and they were really pushing - I started to get very actively pushed towards caesarean. They were saying, "You're just going to have to have a caesarean, you're just going to have to have a caesarean". And I'm quite stubborn. So I really wanted to - I didn't consent to having a caesarean before I went into labour which I feel is what they were trying to push me at. And I was at a public hospital so I was surprised by that.

I had the induction so I had this nurse who was so happy to put that needle in my hand and then push the button really high for the induction and she spent the whole time there. And she just kept pushing it harder and harder so there's no gap between the contractions and it was really awful. And then the shift changed about four hours before [my son] was born. And then the midwife came in and said, "There's no need for this, we'll just turn it down; everything's progressing okay. It's alright".

So I just have this memory of this officious nurse who was just so happy to push the button. And it just made me feel - 'I hate you, I hate everything about this'. But then I had this lovely midwife later. So even though it was an instrumental birth, I had to have the ventouse and episiotomy in the end which I think is all related to that cascade of interventions. By the time he came it was fine and she was really lovely in terms of letting him stay on my tummy for a while, doing all that attachment-centred approach to meeting the baby and things so that was really good.

There was a point [oldest son's] sleep got really bad at four months and I booked in for sleep school. But in the interim then my friend's child who was 2½ died and her funeral was the day before I went to sleep school. And so I went to the funeral and the next day I was at sleep school and they don't do controlled crying but you leave your baby to cry for a long period of time. Because he never cried much except when I was trying to do sleep training. I found that really distressing. They say, "Oh you just leave him for 10 minutes and then you go back in". And I just couldn't - I know other people can do it but I found it personally incredibly difficult.

And I couldn't do it. So in the end after about an hour-and-a-half of my poor little baby screaming his head off, just wanting to be fed to sleep, I picked him up and I fed him and he fell straight asleep. And the routine that we had - we had a sort of routine by that point. And a structure to the day. The sleep school totally disrupted it. It didn't actually get us any further and when I was sitting there after I'd failed to get him to sleep in sleep school strategy - so when I'd failed to do these sort of normative things I just did the thing that felt right for me.

So I guess I've been thinking a lot about this need to find an authentic way of parenting which is a way of parenting that resonates with your personality and your values. And for some people that is using crying techniques and for other people it's not. And for me, it just wasn't. [Just] because the Maternal Child Health nurse tells us and all the people in my mums' group are following Save our Sleep which is what the big thing was at that time.

So I finally picked him up and I fed him and he fell asleep in about two seconds. And I just was sitting there in this sort of institution room with the baby asleep on my lap and it was quiet. And I just was reflecting and thinking, 'There are so many worse things in life than a baby that doesn't sleep very well'. And it wasn't that he was difficult to get to sleep. He just woke a lot and would want a little - a comfort feed or a proper feed and then would just go straight back to sleep.

And at that point I just totally made peace with the fact that I've got a wakeful baby but he's healthy and he's alive. And I'd just seen this like a year of agony that my friend had been through with - constantly with hopes and then ultimately losing the baby and completely devastated. And I just decided that this is not so bad, this is what's happening.

And I think that was really at the point when I think all that maternal identity stuff came together for me. I think it was at that point when I just sat there and I thought, 'Well, obviously my parenting involves different things to what the Maternal Child Health nurse is telling'. And I found that at that point the whole parenting experience got a lot easier.

So anyway now when I talk to people who are having babies, I just say I really think that the biggest challenge of the early parenting is not related to the baby. That's physically demanding but I think the emotional stuff is all around identity. And then I noticed with my second baby, I think I'd dealt with all that identity stuff. And so nothing was such a problem.

But I think work being a huge determinant of it. Just that each time - after I had [oldest son's name] I had people wanting stuff from me. With [youngest son's name] I was getting emails demanding me to do work when he was like five or six weeks old. So what would happen next time? No. Technically on leave but still expectations about performance and production and stuff. So I think that decision about when the family is finished is also a tricky one. And the idea of being 'behind' is just stupid. I think it's something that I constantly struggle with. So I got this grant and I had some career coaching as part of it. And one of the really great things from that was about being okay about valuing my values and around family and trying to develop strategies to resist those pressures.

I find the guilt for me is that I'm technically part-time but I get emails all day every day and phone calls and text messages whether it's a work day or not a work day. So I guess that pressure - I'm constantly - I feel like I'm not working enough and then when I get messages when I'm home with my children, I find that colleagues or students don't respect my non-work days. They expect me to respect it for them, especially the male colleagues who I collaborate with and stuff. But they don't respect that for me. And I find that really difficult. You know, if they're not at work, they're not at work. Whereas if I'm not at work it's seen as something that's somehow negotiable.

I think there's an expectation about always of being available. I think smartphones don't help at all. And I think in academia [...] it's all about the career and that it's - and also this idea that it's not actually about the money whereas seriously, part of the reason why you work is for financial security. You might get - it might be personally rewarding but a lot of it's about the money. And if I'm not paid - given the importance of that economic imperative behind work, then I think that that makes them contacting me on those non-working days even more shitty. It still doesn't take away the guilt though. That I'm not doing the job properly even though I am doing my job properly. I was working until three o'clock this morning. And then that I'm not - because I'm answering emails or text messages, I'm not doing my parenting job properly. And it's like it can only be a lose/lose situation. Nobody's going to win except for the organisation that you work for and I think that's shit.

Before that I'd been fairly ambivalent about the whole idea of having children. But all of a sudden I just had this urge and so my partner and I talked about it a lot and he was quite anxious about the whole idea of having a baby because in 2000 he'd had a child with a previous partner and it was an unplanned pregnancy in that he wasn't aware that no contraception was being used.

And that whole pregnancy had been very fraught in terms of the relationship and it basically culminated in their baby being born with a chromosomal abnormality and he lived three days and died. And my partner ended up feeling really fucked up. Sorry, but yeah he ended up really having lots of alcohol and drug issues as a result of just trying to self-medicate for the trauma. So it really had a profound negative impact on him.

So then when I wanted to have a baby, he liked that idea but it was really tempered by this previous experience of the baby dying of Trisomy 18. And it had been a really awful experience because he was delivered and they had no idea that anything was wrong with the baby. Yeah, just really, really awful.

So that was sort of the background to the decision to have our first baby. And then, at about the 12-week scan with my eldest everything was fine and it came back like 1:52,000 that the baby would have Trisomy 18 which is a particular type of abnormality that his first son had. So that alleviated a lot of my partner's stress. But then as we got closer to having our son, so from the time when I was about seven months pregnant, he started to get a bit stressed at work and one of the guys he was working with was a bit of a party animal and a bit of a dickhead.

So my partner started hanging out with him and he'd be drinking all night and then going out partying all night and not answer his phone. And I think it was just him trying to deal with his - in hindsight, five years' later, him trying to deal with his anxiety. But at the time it was profoundly distressing and I was thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm at the point where this baby is going to be born. Like it's not a point where I can say, oh, the relationship's terrible and I could have a termination'. I know that sounds terrible but it was also at a point where I felt that his behaviour wasn't enough - I was too pregnant to make a decision, a sound decision about leaving or anything. So, anyway, he kept doing this and to the point, like, two weeks before my due date, he did the same thing. So he was doing it like every two weeks; staying out until nine o'clock in the morning getting totally off his head. But then when it came to the time of the birth, he was a real trooper and he got it together for the few weeks around the birth and that was really great.

And I really think that part of what was going on for him was just they had lots of backpackers working with them who were living this sort of itinerant back packer lifestyle and he's having this massive life change about to have a baby and all of this stuff. Anyway, he got it together for the birth and he was quite excited by the time the due date came around.