Keeping It Under Wraps: Parenthood, Uncensored

By Keeping It Under Wraps

​​To procreate or not to procreate: that is the question.

The choice, in itself, is a big conversation in society, and often something that is highly judged. Even the relatio

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keeping It Under Wraps
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838491437

Book preview

Introduction

What does the word ‘parenthood’ bring to mind for you? 

We struggled to find the words to convey the wide range of issues, topics, stigma and emotion that encapsulate what seems like such a simple word. It was really important to us to find a good, all-encompassing definition to start from: it is a central part of who we are (whether we like it or not), and the basic obvious definitions just aren’t enough to cover the life-defining experiences tied to this word.

Pick up any parenting book, or how-to guide, in a bookshop and you’ll read reassuring stories about hope and joy and delight. Parenthood is marketed as a topic that only speaks to those who choose to try to raise children.

The reality for most stands in contrast: fear, pain, disappointment, giddy euphoria followed by troughs of despair, and the feeling of being utterly overwhelmed and unprepared. It’s hard to find the book for teenage mothers, for those too cautious about generational trauma to risk getting pregnant, for the person hoping a baby will save them or their relationship, for those that choose to terminate a pregnancy, for those afraid of their children or their parents, for adults who protect themselves by estranging themselves from their family, for those who end up having to put their own dreams on hold or losing a part of themselves because of their parenthood choices

For some of the contributing authors to Keeping It Under Wraps: Parenthood, Uncensored, parenthood was restricted to the act of parenting children they had actually given birth to, while others thought immediately of their own parents and how they were raised. Then there are the stories of not-parenting, choosing or not choosing to have children, of being parented or not-parented, of supposed alternative parenting: fostering or adopting, raising oneself, raising the ones who are supposed to be raising you.

We rarely speak openly and honestly with friends, colleagues, partners and our family about the realities of parenthood. It’s another topic too ‘taboo’ to tackle head-on. We risk being scrutinised, judged, or condemned for speaking up truthfully. Our choices are our own and deserve respect. By keeping our journeys under wraps, we continue with the same stereotypes: we all must want the picture-perfect, white picket fence, nuclear family life.

No more keeping it under wraps.

Childbirth is Beautiful. Any Questions?

Diagram Description automatically generated

Tracy Hope

M

aybe it’s some vestigial ancient need, this urge to share your birth story with any pregnant person you can. It’s a kind of hazing – an introduction to a club with very specific entry requirements. The club of birth-givers is open only to people with a uterus who have grown a small human and expelled it into the world. Once you’re a member of the club, you have certain obligations, and one of them is to tell other people your story, with or without prompting or approval.

Before I had my first child, I had been told the vaguest details of my own birth and the many days, no, weeks – no, months! – of painful labour in an almost-condemned birthing unit with straw lining the delivery room floor and rats scurrying in and out. I emerged victorious into the world, ready to be the most obnoxiously talkative, five-syllable-word spouting child my family would ever know.

When I got pregnant the first time, unexpectedly but as ready as I suppose anyone can be, I was sitting on a kitchen chair holding the positive pregnancy test (as much of my own pee wiped off as possible) when I first felt the ground shake. It started as a rumble, almost below my ability to hear, but crescendoed into the roar of running feet – a stampede of parents all striving, en masse, to tell me about their childbirth experience.

I heard stories that would make anyone’s toes curl. About episiotomies, for example, where the doctor cuts your perineum open even though they don’t have to because the only alternative – and everyone guarantees you this! – is that the skin around your vagina will just rip right open. About haemorrhoids and incontinence and painful sex and blood and shit and mucus plugs. About babies with enormous heads that simply cannot fit through the exit door.

All these stories, told with gory satisfaction and without omitting a single revolting detail, are shared with the best of intentions. It’s best, after all, to go into labour knowing all the possibilities. To not be surprised by anything that can happen in a birthing suite. And yet.

And. Yet.

Despite all the best intentions, there are always surprises. If a new parent is lucky, the surprise might be that the baby arrives a day or two early. Or that baby is born at home, instead of in the fancy birthing tub at the hospital that they booked in advance. Maybe the parent giving birth has sworn up and down, to a vast audience, that they will certainly not need any drugs because a natural labour is the best thing they can do for their baby but – surprise! Childbirth hurts like a motherfucker and there are some really, really good drugs for that. I’ve tried most of them and I can confirm that they are excellent.

And it turns out that, no matter how many well-intentioned, utterly disgusting birth stories you hear, somehow they still omit the most shameful and painful and filthy details. No one wants to share how they shit themselves while pushing, which is a very normal part of childbirth because you’re trying to push something out of a hole at the bottom of your abdomen, which is right next to another hole. And if they do tell you that you’ll almost certainly poop yourself, they might omit the extra detail that you could be on all fours at the time with your arse pointed straight at the midwife and your spouse, and that the midwife may have to wipe your backside while you bury your face in your arms in embarrassment.

I bet no one will let on that their waters broke copiously over the midwife’s shoes or share that you can actually puke in the middle of a caesarean section, while the surgeon and nurses are shouting, ‘Please don’t move!’ You lean your face against a convenient plastic cup the anaesthetist holds against your cheek, and you taste the pineapple you ate to bring on labour all over again.

You probably won’t hear about how you might not be allowed to leave the hospital post-caesarean until you have farted because the hospital needs confirmation that your gut is functioning properly. So you could just sit there, holding your new baby, waiting to fart, for two days.

They might tell you an amusing anecdote about how, when your second child is brought to you from the other end of the surgical table, and you’re told it’s a girl, you may be momentarily confused because you had boy in your head all along. But they probably won’t let on how terrified you can feel in that exhausted, drug-fogged moment because you have no idea what to do with a girl and think you will comprehensively screw everything up.

They have a long story about that first baby that just didn’t want to be born: how that kid was ten days overdue and showing no interest in coming out, so the midwife performed a completely embarrassing and not-weird procedure called ‘sweeping the membranes’. In this very normal procedure, your midwife or doctor will slide their gloved fingers inside your cervix and run them around the outside of the baby’s amniotic sac to stimulate labour. They will tell you it can be done at home lying on your own bed, but somehow that makes it more awkward and weird because it’s suddenly less surgical and more intimate. They will also tell you, while laughing, that it didn’t work anyway. It might not have been so amusing at the time.

The denouement of most birth stories is the arrival of the baby. By that point, the climax of the story is long past, whether it be the decision to surgically remove the baby, or the final pushing and heaving and grunting, or something in between. Because after that point, a soft veil falls, pushing the nastiest details into a hazy background, and what remains are the first gentle moments where parents and baby meet face to face.

To be fair, the haze is either drug- or euphoria-induced, and maybe you won’t remember any of the first moments a year later. And maybe those first moments are full of stress or fear or exhaustion or even disappointment, because what you get in the end is not what you imagined in the last few months. Maybe you imagined a boy and got a girl, or maybe you expected a different kind of childbirth (foolish – don’t have expectations). The baby you hold in your arms is not the baby you carried in your mind or your heart, because reality almost never aligns perfectly with your imagination. Not in childbirth, not in life. But what you hold now, after all the poop and farts and blood and mucus and pain and drugs and invasive procedures: that’s your new reality.

Childbirth is a beautiful thing because of its potential. The possibility that comes into the world with that final push, or that last slice into the uterus, is infinite. Every second after a baby comes into the world changes the potential of who they will become. Birth stories, shared to a willing or (more likely) unwilling audience, are a ticket to an exclusive club, one that neglects to acknowledge people who are parents without giving birth physically, but who still hold that beautiful potential in their hands. If you’re not in the club, you get to hear the G-rated birth story: the one where everything goes smoothly and nobody poops when they shouldn’t and the doctor is inexplicably both good-looking and funny. We don’t want to scare away any future members! And if you’re a cis man, you will never – let me say this again, never – hear more than the most basic birth story if you didn’t witness it yourself. You probably can’t handle it.

Every time someone I know announces a pregnancy, I have to fight the urge to share my birth stories with them. I used to believe I wanted to prepare them for the worst possibilities, but it’s not that. It’s never that. It’s this ancient need we have, as parents, as incubators, as the carriers of possibility, to be a part of some mystical society that, even as we share every detail, withholds the worst and darkest parts.

Single and Childfree – Don’t Feel Sorry for Me

Diagram Description automatically generated

Iris Leona Marie Cross

C

ommuters muttered obscenities. I fumed. I’d been waiting so long at the bus stop I had a crick in my neck from staring east in anticipation of the bus. In all the years I’d spent in Britain, Canada, and the US, I had never had to wait an hour for a bus. Here, it was over an hour. Why were buses passing us by displaying the sign ‘Not in Service’?

‘I need to pay a bill, but the company will be closed by the time I get downtown,’ said a lady standing next to me, expecting me to respond. I smiled, eyes still focused toward the much-anticipated bus.

‘You live around here?’ she asked.

‘Not too far away,’ I replied.

‘I’ve just finished my shift. I’m caring for an older gentleman. He’s bedridden,’ she said.

She gave me a synopsis of her life history, though I hadn’t asked for it. She was a caregiver, a mother, and a grandmother. A daughter had followed in her footsteps but had become a full-fledged geriatric nurse with a diploma to show for it.

‘It’s a wonderful career, you know,’ she emphasised.

I nodded.

‘I’m so proud of her,’ she continued.

‘You should be,’ I added as I shifted my gaze from the invisible bus to her.

‘So, are you married?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not.’ I could have predicted her next question, and she didn’t disappoint.

‘Do you have children?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I replied.

She extended her arm, gave my hand a tight squeeze (pre-pandemic days) to console, and said, with pity for me, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘No need to feel sorry for me. My choice,’ I replied with a smile, switching the topic to the disgraceful public transport system draining taxpayers’ pockets.

I had to deflect from a potentially irksome exchange in which she’d expected me to provide an in-depth explanation for what was, in her eyes, my pitiful state. I’d been there before and was keen to pre-empt any such conversation. Given her reaction, anyone would have believed I told this stranger I only had a few weeks to live.

As an unmarried, childfree woman of a certain age, I am often at the receiving end of annoying questions and tedious comments about my single no-children status. More times than I care to remember, I’ve been asked, in the order of increasing importance, the questions: Are you married? Do you have any children? These questions have dogged me wherever I’ve lived – in Trinidad and Tobago, where I was born and now live, as well as the US and Britain, where I spent some of my adult life. If I were to ask each inquiring person to contribute one dollar to hear my lengthy explanations, I’d have enough money to feed the entire band of hungry homeless people I meet on the streets every day.

It isn’t the questions so much as people’s pitying reactions that touch a nerve. I’m forever tempted to extol the virtues of my unmarried, childfree situation as compared with their married-with-children lives, in which husband and children form the bulk of their complaints. However, I seldom succumb to temptation, choosing instead to launder my words before letting them drip through my lips with a smile.

Why do people feel unmarried women with no children should be pitied? Why do they think this status could not possibly be a personal choice? To make matters worse, as an African-Caribbean woman, statistics show it’s more likely that I’ll be a single mother than a married one. We even joke about it, likening it to Four Weddings and a Funeral starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell.

‘With African-Caribbean men, it’s a case of Four Christenings and No Wedding,’ an African-Caribbean woman once said. ‘I mean, it’s not even four christenings with the same woman!’ I don’t even fit the African-Caribbean single mother stereotype; it raises eyebrows. I am seen as an anomaly.

Throughout my life, I never felt my purpose included carrying a fetus in my womb or adopting a child, although I adore these mini human beings and have four godchildren. When my niece was younger, we had so much fun playing Shopkeeper. I was the Trinidadian customer and she was the French proprietor. I spoke in Trinidadian Creole; she spoke with a put-on French accent. The Trinidadian customer seldom got the items she needed from the French shopkeeper because of the language barrier. The skit was hilarious. Children are indeed precious.

There, I’ve done it again – feeling as though I have to apologise by making it known I’m not anti-children just because I have no desire for children of my own. I’ve always said if I lived in a sprawling mansion, I’d invite a multitude of children over for