I’m a pretty active member of several online communities – mostly related to mothering, but other technical ones too. Many of my friends come from these (although those I class as friends I don’t only know online) and a lot of support for parenting and technical issues comes from these places.
One on of these sites we’ve recently been having a discussion about how its a shame that new mothers have to come to strangers on a website to ask for advice and reassurance about perfectly normal (if tiring) newborn behaviour. Its not the fact that they’re asking – we all happily give the needed advice and reassurance – its that they (we, really) have to wait until we have babies to experience them.
To quote my post:
“Before I had my son, I was good friends with 2 mothers. Most of my friends haven’t had kids, I don’t have that sort of relationship with my mother in law and haven’t spoken to my mother in 7 years. I’m one of these people that wants to know everything, so when I’d read loads of stuff on pregnancy and birth (and I agree pg women are really hung up on birth – its scary!) I started reading baby books. My tiny pool of motherly support was from two different extremes. My sister-in0law had had 2 fairly textbook babies (although I did hear about things like mastitis and colic from her, so was prepared for those as much as I could be) and my friend had a horrendous pregnancy, a difficult Caesarian (scar still infected nearly a year later) and various other medical problems that have made her life really difficult – so I didn’t feel she was representative.
The support from society – parents, extended family, friends, neighbours – that once would have helped to support us mothers through this is pretty much gone. The mothers that didn’t breast feed, and were “taught” to parent in a particular way don’t have the knowledge (I remember SIL’s mum telling me she got told off by MW for BF more often than 4 hourly and during the night) and so can’t offer support to their own children. In most cases our parents / relatives don’t have so many children that we helped bring the younger siblings/cousins/nieces/nephews up, so we’re completely unexperienced with babies!
And nothing has really appeared to replace this. We can’t trust our midwives and health visitors, so we’re stuck with mumsnet. It’s the only place we can express our (possibly irrational) fears and ask our silly questions, knowing we’ll get an honest answer. Its a real shame it’s all we’ve got, but thank god we do (and have people to answer then). I just wish we had a society where we didn’t get to child bearing age with no experience of kids, and where help from relatives was actually help rather than judging under the guise of helpfulness!
Oh I hope I remember this when I am a MIL!”
I guess that says it with regard to babies, but I think the same goes for so much more. We don’t live as a community any more – and I can’t see society ever becoming like that again – so we’ve lost so much shared knowledge and experience, its worse than a shame. I’m lucky to have had the help I have from David, and from Jenny and her family. Add to that my antenatal group who have been there every week for us to compare notes, and support groups like the baby bistro (which I am now able to help people at, even in an unofficial capacity until they get more funding for training)
Hopefully by getting my nieces involved with Rowan I’m ensuring that they won’t grow up like that – they’re going to be older than all their cousins, and hopefully heavily involved with them all, so maybe they’ll do better than me – and not be shocked by some of the hard parts of being a mum!
