What They Aren’t Telling You About Motherhood

Motherhood is like being swaddled in a soft, warm blanket — or at least that’s what They want you to think. When Naomi Wolf discovered she was pregnant, she was shocked by the mountains of advice that mothers-to-be are given, heavy on comfort but light on the facts.

She set out to write a book that offered a true account of pregnancy, birth and parenting a new-born — which is how Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood was conceived.

The account found in her own journals and through interviews with other women paints a different picture than the one we have come to expect. It is less a gentle retreat from the world and more a heroic act which must be met with both great physical strength and spiritual will.

Dear readers, gird your loins, this book is not for the faint of heart.

It begins with pregnancy, or rather the discovery that despite her best efforts to the contrary, Naomi had conceived. She writes about how many women have had the same discovery, and like her, find unexpected delight in the news.

For fifteen years birth control had never failed me; and then, when my heart and body longed for a baby, when I was newly married, when it was finally safe — birth control failed me… I had the strong intuition that will and longing had somehow altered chemistry; that mother love, the mother wish, had created a different alchemy, more powerful than the alchemy of the lab or the product trial.

Being a woman of means she began with the best pregnancy care, the best doctors, but they let her down. They would not answer her questions about their intervention rates, but simply assured her that she would be fine. Her hard, pointed questions were met with condescension. They knew what was going on and she simply had to trust. So she began her own investigation into the matter.

Meanwhile her slender, girlish frame was blossoming into an unwieldy colossus. People began to ask her intensely personal questions without any embarrassment. Naomi Wolf, famed author and thinker, was reduced by those around her to a baby incubator.

Perhaps more unnerving was her change in perception. She became more feminine, more girlie and far more dependent. She wanted her mate by her side to protect her, to guide her through the newly dangerously world. Her brain may still have been that of an ardent feminist, but her body was slowly chipping away at her independence.

Readers, I was terrified. But it only got worse, up next was birth.

Her own was less than ideal. The hospital pulled a bait and switch, whisking her out of their birthing centre at the first available opportunity to drug her up and cut her open. Those pages do not read like a horror story, there is no delight in the gore or fear — they read like the pages of a woman writing about her own death.

The vulnerability of describing her own body, splayed open on a table, while she struggles to understand what is happening to her through a veil of drugs evoked more pity in me than anything I have ever read.

Wolf does not demonize medical interventions. She believes some are necessary sometimes and that they do save women’s lives. Her problem is that these are often done without the consent of the patient. Even when consent is asked for, they are pushed towards what is easiest, and most profitable, for the hospital. Women should be given the option to make informed choices.

But forewarned is forearmed. She describes each common medical intervention in great detail, with statistics gleaned from a variety of sources. Natural birth is also taken to task, with the Earth-Mother platitudes stripped away to reveal where the dangers could lie. Perhaps the most practical part of the book, this section could be separated and sold as a resource for pregnant women.

Then comes the baby.

Post-partum depression came as a shock to the generally hearty Wolf, but her research found it to be extremely common, almost to be expected considering the rapid hormonal changes.

What was more frightening were the changes to her life. She describes being a new mother as living in a ghetto, isolated from the rest of society. Modern life has stripped mothers of the emotional support traditionally provided and nothing is left in its place.

The baby also shifts the power balance in relationships. The woman is now subtly beholden to the man — requiring his financial and emotional support as in no other time. A fiercely independent person, this was my biggest concern around birth, and yet these frank accounts lessened my worry. My secret fears were mapped out, the landmines clearly marked.

That unveiling underscores the whole book. This terrifying, dangerous journey feels a little more manageable knowing what lies ahead.

You start on solid ground before you’re pregnant. You arrive, hopefully, at a more or less solid ground, with its knock-out, who-knew, what-was-my-life-before-I-met-you love for a child once the new family has stabilized. This book is about the precarious ground between them. I feel more strongly than ever that new mothers and new parents are served by knowing what the dangers are — and knowing how best to traverse them…

… a woman is not a mother just because she has had a baby, a mother is not born when a baby is born; a mother is forged, made.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. I know when I take a step into that great unknown, to begin my quest towards motherhood, this book will be my trusty dog-eared companion.