Yoga:

Last night I went to my second yoga session - why did I not do this sooner???  I don’t feel tired when I’m doing it; my body feels pleasantly exercised; I feel calm; and I’m actually realising that I haven’t once, really, tried to connect with this baby - I have now though!  It’s wonderful

Despair:

Ok, I naively thought that some of the mums doing yoga too would be a bit hippy and more like me but no, of course not!  Yoga is now such a fashionable thing to do, that half the mums there are clearly nothing like me at all.  The yoga teacher showed us a baby carrier that was being sold by a charity at a very, very low price (ok, I tried to ignore the fact it was a flipping Baby Bjorn rather than a lovely, versatile, helpful ring sling or such like) - what did the other mums say?  “Oh no!  Do you really think I need one?  I’ve just bought a great big buggy!  Not another thing I apparently ‘need’!!!”.  I had to stop myself shouting out loud: “It’s one of the *only* things you need!!!”.  Of course I forget, in my cocooned world where most of my friends baby-wear, breastfeed, bedshare, that the majority of mums just don’t - in fact it doesn’t even enter their heads to do so!  It certainly didn’t enter mine to carry Flopsy when she was a young baby, so why should it enter theirs?  I just feel sad that everyone else hasn’t learnt what I’ve learnt.  I forget that I’ve been on a mothering journey that they have yet to start.  One of them asked me whether I thought they really needed a baby carrier.  I told them yes, but not one of those ones.  I said “you can’t do the washing up and push your baby in a buggy to stop them crying at the same time, but you can carry them while you do it”.  But then maybe they were planning to let their baby cry it out :-(  I just shut up and reminded myself of the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation thing - they would only remember a minute amount of anything I told them then, and it certainly wouldn’t be enough time to alter the way they planned to mother their babies.  It’s got to be a ‘drip, drip, drip’ effect.  I know I sound patronising, but I know that I got a huge amount from hearing little bits here and there and wish I’d heard a lot of them earlier on - I hope that these mums get to hear little bits more from me over the next couple of weeks, enough to at least get them *thinking* so that their babies get to have a more pleasant beginning to their lives.  It’s obvious that the yoga teacher and I are the first people to make them think about even buying a baby carrier, let alone using one!  I just can’t help feeling despair when I talk to parents like this - it’s something I’m going to have to get used to when I’m leading the antenatal breastfeeding sessions and I know it’s something I’m going to really struggle with.  I just wish I could wrap up all the knowledge and awareness I’ve accumulated since Flopsy was born and hand it to them in one go so they don’t have to make a journey at all, if that’s the way they want to go.  I’m not talking about changing people’s minds to make them do things the way I think is right - I’m talking about making people aware of other genuine options from which they can choose which is the right one for them.  At the moment, most parents-to-be are only aware of the mainstream choices fed to them by glossy magazines and ill-informed Health Care Professionals.  At the moment, the alternatives are just wierd things that wierd people do, not genuine options that make sense - the mainstream doesn’t allow for people to put their prejudices aside and actually listen to why ‘wierd’ people do ‘wierd’ things.  If they did they’d be able to make a truly informed choice and I’d respect that whatever they chose - I just feel despair that cultural conditioning denies so many people the chance to get the information they need to do it.

Ok, enough debriefing now…off to write yet another essay now!