Messy tidy lives. How to help . Or not
But that's OK. Messy, tidy, whatever. You are doing OK.
As
says. Everything is messy.
Especially when it comes to babies. Babies introduce a new level of messiness. All our plans become maps. As we dodge down the side roads to get to where we think we should be going.
How to offer help when you have not been asked for help.
It is a toughie right? We want to help yet we still must be respectful.
I have been involved in the raising of babies for three generations now—first my mother’s babies, then my own (five of them), and now my ninth grandchild.
I love how organised a person needs to be when there’s a baby in the house. Order is a necessary balance to the messiness of pregnancy, childbirth, and baby.But it almost never works out that way. It can take me days to write to you now!
Babies have always figured large in my landscape. In big families, older sisters have always helped raise the littlest ones. My mother used to say my little brother never cried because I spent entire summers carting him around on my hip. When I was putting her babies to bed, she would instruct me from her own bed - she was an invalid for much of her life, after TB as a teenager - to wrap the baby up like fish and chips, sleep them on their side tucked in tight so they couldn’t roll over, and turn up the radio (the BBC). That was the 1960s version of today’s white noise machines.
Mum had a beautiful cane crib with a deep mattress lined in white cotton brocade. It creaked when the baby moved. One end had two wheels, and if she was having a bad night, I would wheel the crib about for her. That bassinette creak would wake me from the next room. Even when I was little.
My mother loved babies but wasn’t encouraged to breastfeed. Because of the TB, they said her milk would be no good—too thin. So my brother and I were raised on cow’s milk: Carnation evaporated milk, canned milk, and then fresh milk delivered every morning by the milkman. The baby bottles were glass and sterilised in a big pot.
But after her first two children, Mum told the doctors to bugger off and breastfed her babies anyway. She was not convinced that her babies were better off with cows milk. My younger siblings thrived. After weaning, they drank cow’s milk in their bottles and started on solids—mainly baby rice—at around eight weeks so they would sleep longer, which they did. They were laid on alternating sides to flatten their ears and fed strictly every four hours. If they cried between feeds, they were given a small bottle of water.
I had a baby on my hip from the age of ten. I almost never have a dream without a baby on my hip, clinging on for dear life. Still.
When I had my own babies in the late 70s and early 80s, we were told to sleep them on their stomachs, in case they choked on their own vomit. My mother was horrified, but I was determined to do everything differently from her—including not dying young. I always placed a sheepskin under the sheet for warmth and softness (my daughter is appalled). Sheepskins and babies were a natural pairing then. I had a wooden rocking bassinet that I would tap as I walked past, the babies slept in the kitchen in the day time and baby slept in the room with us at night until about six weeks. I’m a very light sleeper, so the bassinet was pushed into the nursery for the first half of the night. After the last breastfeed, baby would sleep beside me.
That was the era of demand feeding, co-sleeping, baby slings. We fought to breastfeed in public and to continue breastfeeding as long as we wanted. Women were just beginning to take control of their bodies in those days. We transitioned straight from breast to sippy cup—no bottles, except for water or Ribena (God help us) between feeds. I know we talk about our mothers and grandmothers and their influence but much of it was to encourage us to keep quiet. Every generation upends the knowledge of the one before. I hope each generation of women gets louder.
I never used pacifiers. We called them dummies. Now they say pacifiers help babies sleep. I said they used to say smoking was good for pregnant women, too. My daughter scoffs at my smart-arse quips. She is not quiet. Good.
In the early 2000s, when I was a nanny in England, we laid babies on their tummies and sides, tucked in tightly with woollen blankets, in cold rooms - those big old country houses made it easy for baby to sleep cold. Baby rice at three months. Rice water for crying babies. We spoon-fed soft food as soon as a baby could sit unaided in a high chair.
Now—here in Australia, in 2025—we lay babies on their backs. No blankets. Firm mattress. Dressed in swaddle clothing like little cotton sleeping bags with sleeves, and wrapped tight. A heated room. I find this hard. My instinct is to lay them in a stretch-and-grow (now called a onesie), tuck them in with sheets and a woollen satin-trimmed blanket. But now all decisions are data-driven. Fewer babies die of SIDS when laid on their backs.
Now they eat soft food when they can reach and stuff it into their mouths—around six months. This still terrifies me.
No little drink of boiled, cooled water. Water is out.
I’m writing with the baby monitor on my notebook, watching a wriggly sleeping baby. He’s a noisy sleeper - I don’t know how my daughter gets any sleep with him in the bassinet a foot from her head. He squeaks, moans, speaks in his sleep. In this house, we pick him up at the second cry. We don’t want him panicked. Not for us the four hour feeds and crying baby behind two doors as my mother advised. Jerky knees mean wind, though this baby is well-fed and well-burped this morning. He sleeps soundly even as he moves about.
My daughter is a police detective. She and her team investigate every death -including babies lost to SIDS. Imagine being the mother - having the police come to your home while you're drowning in grief and guilt. But this is their job. The common markers are stomach sleeping, loose blankets rising up over babies mouth, and co-sleeping. Once you know these things, you cannot un-know them. So she and her colleagues are very careful.
To me, the first two months of a baby’s life are about survival. Just keeping them alive and growing. It’s a battle. A battle with little sleep, little time. A woman needs support to make it through without significant emotional cost. No woman should be forced to have a baby. No woman should be forced through labour and all its interventions, the horror of an emergency c-section, through sleepless weeks and aching unhappiness, unless she chooses it. She must choose it. Childbirth is life-threatening for both woman and baby. The recovery is a thing. The baby blues are a real thing. Newborns will suck the very bones from you. Life becomes a blur. It must be a choice or the resentment is real. Luckily my daughter lives in a country where she has a supported choice.
If you want to help a new mother in your neighbourhood, bring food. Complete meals. (Breast feeding Mums need an extra 500 calories). (I have to add that I saved all the high protein hay and extra feed for my milking cows - stop comparing me to a cow, I hear my daughter say). If you are lucky enough to be invited in and many young mums are naturally in a bubble so you may not be. Leave baby alone. I know you all want to hold the baby but don’t. Instead: make her a cup of tea. Empty the dishwasher. Clean the stove-top. Change the sheets. Mow her lawn. (I still haven’t got to mine—maybe today.) Stuff like that.
And - after touching base with my old friend Mel yesterday - Mums are tired and borderline overwhelmed for years! So women and men my age can make a huge difference.
If teenagers minding babies is as old as time, then so too is the quiet, steadfast care of the grandfatherly generation.
Today is a doctor day, so we won’t get to all the chores. Days out need to be carefully planned with a newborn baby. He’s two weeks old now. My daughter cannot drive for another month. And she is hating feeling dependent on her Mum. But we have a system. Designed when she first discovered she was pregnant. When we put a long agreed plan into action.
So on we go. With the comfort and trust of a teensy baby in our arms.
How not to offer help
I was chatting to
about when it is not ok time to offer help. The answer is a bit messy too!But sometimes, you just have to offer. Like offering your seat on the train. Or offering to carry a heavy bag for a struggling person.
So anyway - this story was about 25 years ago - my brother Timothy was on a bus in London. It was late winter. Early evening. Low light. That soft London light. Green almost. The air like moss. The bus windows steamed up. My brother coming home from a few beers with mates. My little brother is a very kind person. Clever and brave and kind. I guess he was in his early twenties in this story. Very NZ. Shorts in winter, wooly jersey, a little rough round the chin. Wild curly hair like the rest of us - needing a good cut.
As he was getting off the bus at a stop close to his flat, he noticed an ancient-looking lady in a dark coat and over-boots, a plastic hood covering her lightly purple hairdo; getting off ahead of him. She had gathered her multitude of shopping bags, her handbag slipping down her arm, one hand on the banister, carefully, carefully descending the bus steps into the rain, one step at a time, her umbrella over her other arm. Overburdened. Her coat buttoned up tight, trying to cinch the belt with laden arms, she landed, called something to the bus driver and turned down the street.
Timothy got off behind her, dropping his head in the rain and called out, “Can I help?” Her bags looked heavy and they were walking the same way. But perhaps she hadn’t heard him. She tottered ahead through the wet London rain, (London rain is wetter than any other rain - gently sodden), she was weighed down with groceries, her coat secured, struggling to get her umbrella up as the traffic splashed past and the bus pulled away behind them. Lights gleamed in the puddles. Dusk hovering. The woman, whom Timothy swears was well over a hundred, stumbled on the pavement into a puddle, still trying to manage her bags.
He called out again, “Can I help you?” and rushed toward her, ran up behind her, reaching for her hand on the bags. He was sure he could help. Carry the weight for her. But as soon as he reached out, she stiffened, hunched even further, and suddenly picked up speed. He mumbled something more about helping, his hand close to her bags now. She reared up and shot away from him. She dropped a couple of her bags in her hurry, lifted her feet and trotted even faster to get away, hurling a little unintelligible East London abuse over her shoulder as she disappeared down a side lane.
Timothy was left standing there, calling out, “You dropped your bags!” Of course, by now, it was clear he’d scared this poor woman half to death. He felt dreadful. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave her shopping lying there in the street, or take it home, what to do, so he gathered up the spilled groceries, refilling the string bags, and hurried after her, hoping to return her food to her.
He told me he was calling out as he ran: “Mrs? Excuse me? Please? Hello? You dropped your shopping bags!” He skidded around the corner to catch up and screeched to a halt because there she was standing on a stoop just a few houses down - with two more old ladies beside her, in their long black coats and plastic scarves. All three of them glaring at him. Folded arms. Eyes narrowed. Glowering, even. The old brick buildings themselves seemed to lower their eyebrows and glower at him too. The rain took a step down in intensity. Clearing a space for him. The quiet seemed to be everywhere as the young hoodlum and three crones locked eyes.
Very, very slowly, Timothy set the bags on the driest patch of footpath he could find. He attempted a small, uncertain wave, thought better of it, turned, and ran for his life back to the busy street.
So - yeah - offering help is not always the best! Thank you
for reminding me of this story!Love you heaps! Love that you are hear to comment. The Lounge of Comments is open!
My rhubarb crowns and strawberry runners have arrived so I am hoping to get some gardening done today. It seems odd to plant strawberries in the winter but - I am in Victoria, Australia so I guess it is ok!
Celi
I had my baby in England, and then in Paris, with Dr Spock my only advisor. I put him down on his front as somewhere I was told it helps with burping. My husband's grandmother came and stayed in the English village where we were for the summer. She watched over us for 2 weeks without interfering. When my son was asleep in his basket in the living room I remember Granny saying in a reassuring voice, 'you don't need to lower your voices; babies sleep through anything', and from that day I was relieved not to be tiptoeing around, and he slept soundly as predicted.
When I had my first baby in London, we had just bought a house in Scotland where my husband was being transferred to the head office of the company. I had a few weeks with my parents with mother doing most of the baby minding including making the milk for feeding her and then suddenly I was in Scotland knowing nobody and having no support. I quickly made friends with a couple of neighbours whose babies were the same age and together we learned. But hey my daughter is now 65 and she survived even though her mother was muddling her way through. By the time baby number two came I was a qualified mother and handled two children with ease.