On X this Tweet from a doctor who has lots of letters after her name said this:
“No one goes into motherhood expecting rainbows and butterflies all the time. We know it will be beautiful and hard.
What many women aren’t prepared for is the absence of a village and how even something as basic as scheduling a doctor’s appointment for themselves suddenly requires mental gymnastics, logistics, and backup plans.
There’s no class that prepares you for that part and women’s health is suffering because of it.”
I have heard it all now. It seems you need to be Isaac Newton these days to pick up a phone or open an app and book a doctor’s appointment for your newborn’s MMR jab. What absolutely nonsense is this?
If you told me that this post was from some fake account from some nefarious anti-western regime that aimed to reduce the fertility rate in the West, I’d believe you. That is if the fertility rate could get any lower which I am not sure it can.
There is just so much scaremongering now when it comes to having a child. Now I am not here to criticise new mothers. I was a new mother and I was clueless. How they let me leave the hospital with a newborn which I and my husband were entirely responsible for keeping alive, is looking back, a miracle. We didn’t have any family around us which can be a problem as I have written about before. But don’t kid yourself that the ‘village’ can be problem free. At least on your own you are spared from the mad advice about putting sugar in bottles and letting the baby cry it out etc etc.
Sure I spent hours of the day on my own. I once spent about 10 hours in a playground. It was sunny, I had bought a copy of the Times and the baby fell asleep and the two others were enjoying the adventure playground (in Brockwell park for the record) so why would I leave. In fact I once called an ambulance but it turned out the baby was teething. That’s how clueless I was. The sheer responsibility can be overwhelming, emotionally. The GP in fact had to tell us at one point that no we did not have to come in unless the baby had a temperature. So I’m not saying I was mother of the year.
But I will say this. You do not need a PhD in aerodynamics or English literature to be a good mother to a baby. It is absolutely first world nonsense to say that scheduling a doctor’s appointment ‘requires mental gymnastics.’ What the heck are you talking about Dr Nisha Patel, MD MS, Dipl of ABOM, CCMS? Calculus requires mental gymnastics, understanding Schubert requires mental gymnastics, heck the Times crossword requires mental gymnastics, organising medical appointments do not.
It’s a wonder any of us with parents without PhDs in chemistry made it to adulthood with this kind of thinking. You do not need to be a genius to be a good mother. You need patience, empathy, lots of energy and decent organisational skills. And above all you need to put your phone down.
I bet the women (and they are usually women) who complain the loudest about ‘the mental load’ and the stress and the need for mental gymnastics to book a doctor’s appointment are the very same people who spend inordinate amounts of time on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. I just know these are the very same people who check their phones first thing in the morning to see what celebrity has died, how many people have been killed in some awful war and what stupid thing the stupid politicians have proposed lately.
You know, you’d be a lot less stressed if you didn’t do this first thing in the morning.
Everyone gets stressed over life admin. And I can recommend the excellent Tranquillity by Tuesday by Laura Vanderkam if you do feel overwhelmed. But what I object to is this ridiculous usually American notion that basic adult activities requires ‘mental gymnastics.’ This is exactly the kind of thing Ben Sasse describes in his book I spoke about previously, the total inability of the Rising Generation to cope with adult responsibilities.
If you find life admin hard, then batch all the life admin things you have to do and do them at a certain point in the day. Write down a list. And off you go – phone in hand. Do not multitask.
Once you sort out the doctor’s appointment, book the eye test, sort the household insurance, do whatever needs to be done with the house alarm you will be Einstein, according to this doctor lady. You’ll be in line for the Nobel Prize for Physics. By the way, one of last year’s winners was Michel Devoret. This Yale professor of applied physics won the prize with two others for “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” How good he is at booking doctor appointments is unknown.
This kind of negativity around parenting is unhelpful. There seems to be some kind of weird sense in the west right now that life should be struggle free. Even though all the main struggles have been eliminated, the risk of dying in childbirth greatly reduced, or walking along a path and having sewage dumped on your head, or the fact you can get in some kind of tin can and fly to London in less than an hour and then be on the other side of that great city via a very fast train under the ground in less than hour many people believe we have never had it so bad. Now booking your child’s polio vaccine requires ‘mental gymnastics.’ No, cop yourself on and just be grateful a vaccine for polio exists and if you live in the UK you can get it for your child absolutely free of charge.
Look I am not saying there is nothing to complain about. Readers of this Substack understand I complain about plenty. But on a micro scale if you live in the West, you’ve won the lotto.
There is such a thing as keeping perspective. Our grandmothers with just a primary education managed to raise a lot more children than the papered poodles like me. And they did with a lot less support from their husbands and the state. And they did it with far less bellyaching.