A few weeks ago I picked up my diary, intending to look back over the entries since the birth of my son, Stan, just over a year ago. I hoped I might have documented a few of the mind-bending experiences that characterise new motherhood. I was genuinely surprised to find that my last entry had been in January 2010, the week before Stan's birth. Over the course of the most significant year of my life so far, I had written down precisely nothing.
Was this simply because I have been too tired and distracted to string a sentence together? Looking back, I think there has been a more fundamental difficulty too: writing a diary requires a first person, an "I". During the surreal, extended process of dividing into two separate people, it has not always felt clear to me quite who I am. One of the many bewildering things about becoming a mother is the loss – albeit temporary – of that firm sense of self.
Perhaps that is part of the reason why writers have been so reticent on the experience of falling in love with your first baby – at least in comparison with the age-old tradition of writing about romantic love. "Baby books" tend to be hectoring instruction manuals, in which babies feature not as lovable people but as problems to be solved. I am full of admiration for Eleanor Birne, who, in the face of sleep deprivation and identity crisis, has managed to write When Will I Sleep Through the Night, a lucid, humorous and, above all, completely unhectoring account of becoming a mother.
The book is an alphabeticised collection of observations on themes from "A is for after" to "zoo" (finding themes for every letter has involved some cheating – a story about a hip scan is filed under "x-ray"). Although she explains that the year has been too chaotic to give any linear sense of "progress", the sections are woven together so cleverly that I found it hard to put down.
Some of the topics are amusing and throwaway: "yoghurt" and "poppers". Others tackle the "big issues": labour, breastfeeding, going back to work. I particularly liked the section on grandparents: "Since N has been born I have been learning to be a mother, but it strikes me now that I have also been learning how to be a daughter again." Less pleasant, but also very familiar, were her interactions with the community midwives, who specialise in supplying alarming misinformation and barking out tick-box questions about postnatal depression.
From material that skirts dangerously close to baby-bore minutiae, Birne draws out the real story of self-discovery. (I am prepared to concede that I have a higher than average tolerance for baby-bore minutiae, but let's be clear, unless you are interested in babies you will prefer not to read this book, regardless of its merits.) Tying the disparate observations together is what Birne calls "the shock of new love"; the emotional earthquake that rearranges the tectonic plates of any new mother's world.
My one quibble would be with the way this book has been marketed. The title and cover blurb position it as a guide to the unknown for women who are expecting their first baby. As Birne herself acknowledges, that is a hopeless task. No matter how many times and how eloquently people tell you about parenthood, it is impossible to imagine what's ahead of you when you are pregnant. I would advise mothers-to-be to save it until they, too, reach the end of the first year and can smile in delighted recognition.
