Invalidation from Other Mothers

Mothers groups and online forums provide a wonderful means of communicating with other mothers during the often bewildering first weeks and months of new motherhood. As each mother's experience is unique, the opportunity to share with other women is a golden chance to find solidarity with other mothers who are also figuring things out as they go.

Unfortunately, mothers groups and online parenting forums can also be completely invalidating. Online forums have proven particularly damaging when they provide little more than a façade of comfort (which occurs if closer real-life connections are not made). In the past year, an Australian mother suffering severe post natal depression reached out across multiple parenting forums for support and found none. She broke down and killed her children. This is an extreme example but serves as a terrifying reminder of the potentially damaging effects of invalidation.

One primary cause of invalidation is that many mothers feel judged by others and themselves and worry that their feelings may not be normal so they present a very one-angled view of their experience. When mothers share only fragmented pieces of their experience, it merely acts to reinforce the sense that the feelings they have kept to themselves are abnormal.

If a woman does share the deeper parts of her experience, the response from other mothers is vitally important. Invalidating responses range from seemingly benign to outright cruel.

Hollow sympathy, i.e., "I hope it gets better for you soon," diminishes the mother's experience by openly suggesting that (a) her experience is not shared, and (b) her experience is fleeting and is, therefore, insignificant. This is one of the most common responses from other mothers, and due to its seemingly genuinely sympathetic nature can also be one of the most damaging and invalidating responses. Such responses tend to pile up on a mother until she feels her reality has been reduced to complete irrelevance by the women around her.

Similarly, many mothers who have had multiple children forget the difficulties and confusion they faced the first time around. Subsequent children are viewed through the rose-coloured lenses of experience. There are quite a number of ways an experienced mother invalidates the concerns of a first-time mother. "We've all been there before, don't worry", "They grow up so fast, enjoy these early weeks while you can", "if you feel like that you should talk to someone" are all dangerously harmful responses which lack solidarity and diminish a mother's reality.

Outright cruel responses, such as "you're a bad mum", are thankfully less common but they do occur and are obviously damaging on a woman's psyche.

So what should be done?

As members of mothers groups and online forums it's vitally important to treat every woman's experience as real. Validating responses acknowledge the mother's feelings and opinions as true, honest and acceptable.

For example: One of the mothers from my mothers group commented that she feels judged when she is bottle-feeding her baby in public. I acknowledged her reality by agreeing that some woman will judge her, but I also comforted her by letting her know that not all women will judge her and that I didn't judge her. Finally, I validated her choice to bottle feed by reminding her that her choice makes her life easier and happier and is therefore the best choice for her baby. One of the other mothers in the group then added that she has experienced the same feelings of judgement while bottle feeding in public as well.

It would have been icy cold comfort if I had simply said "oh honey, I hope it gets better for you,” and there is little chance the other mother would have opened up and shared her experience. Hopefully you can see how that would have actually had a negative impact on the mother. Please keep this in mind if you have an opportunity to validate the reality of a first-time mum. Your response will make the world of the difference. I should know, I am a first-time mum.

Getting Baby to Sleep

I'm not glad that I paid $200 for antenatal classes that turned out to be entirely useless. They didn't prepare me for the reality of what I experienced in giving birth, nor did they prepare me for the reality of what comes next.

We were told babies follow a routine of feed-play-sleep (or simply feed-sleep for newborns). However, Jude did not care for supposed routines. From week 4 to week 8 he flat out refused to sleep during the day, thus making it impossible for me to do anything (like eat lunch or get dressed) during the day.

It was incredibly frustrating. Yes, some babies do follow by-the-book routines but some babies don't and it's unfair to disarm expectant mothers by pretending otherwise. I was completely oblivious to how severely my life would be turned upside down and dumped on its head by having a baby that didn't nap during the day, and by day I mean from 8am until 11 o'clock at night.

Almost all babies start off life waking every 3 or 4 hours (some every 2 hours) through the night. For me this meant that Jude feeds at 10pm, then 2am, then 5am, then 8am and I try to sleep in between. Some babies grow out of this pattern and start skipping one of those night-time feeds. According to one of my baby bibles (which I rushed out to buy as soon as I realised the antenatal classes had been a flat-out waste of money), babies can't really sustain themselves overnight until they're about 5kgs because their stomach is too small prior to that.

Jude was born smaller than average and at nearly 10 weeks of age he still hasn't reached 5kgs. Many babies will reach 5kgs as early as 6 weeks of age. This means that while all those mums with babies the same age as Jude are complaining they can only sleep from 8pm until 7am (what?), I am still getting up twice in the middle of the night to feed Jude and I leap with joy on the rare occasion that I get 5 hours in a row of beautiful, blissful, uninterrupted sleep.

Note: Not all babies start skipping night feeds once they reach the golden weight of 5kgs. Some babies still wake for feeds at 1 year of age or even older.

Happily, Jude has started sleeping more during the day allowing me time to catch up on much needed tasks like cleaning my bathroom (which was a bit skanky after 8 weeks of mold cultivation). I'm not sure if we've done anything to encourage the sleeping or Jude's doing it on his own, but we have tried very hard by putting him to bed when we think he's tired. There are supposed to be clear signs that a baby is tired, but Jude's signs are subtle and we function on guess work.

I've learned through trial and error that Jude likes it when I sit by his bassinet and read him a story. He's not interested in the pictures and I'm sure he has no idea what I'm saying, but a reading voice is different from a conversation voice, there's a certain rhythm to the written word that helps calm Jude and lull him towards sleep. My aim is simply to quieten him to a state of peace so he can put himself to sleep when I leave the room.

Jeremy's technique is to sing him a medley of songs with the same tune, like the ABC and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

It's been a long, confusing and exhausting journey to help Jude sleep. The scary part is, what works today might suddenly stop working tomorrow. With babies you just never know. As my GP said, as soon as you think there's a routine developing something happens and everything changes.