The only advice I would dare to give an expectant mother

This is a story about female friendship

There is something about the experience of becoming a mother that makes it impossible to resist sharing your pearls of wisdom. The lessons learned are so hard learned. There are so many of them, a truly infinite number of topics to expound upon. A single sentence of passed wisdom (you need to overlap the diaper tabs at the waist, when you fasten one; keep your nipple shield in your bra) can save someone a dozen loads of laundry or literal weeks of frustration. Yet babies (and their mothers) vary so wildly it is rare for the exact lessons you learned to apply to someone else. A tip or piece of kit is critical for one family, and irrelevant for another. Expecting parents often seek out advice—in the form of books, recommendations or “registry must-haves” YouTube videos—but trying to consume it all is perhaps the closest one can come to drinking from a firehose.

As tempting as it is to spill all your hard-earned mothering secrets upon your closest friends when they fall pregnant the wisest course of action, for the most part, is probably to resist—for mum to keep mum. Answer if asked and otherwise, just check in regularly once the baby comes (and categorically do NOT keeping asking if that baby has come in the week that your friend invariably goes overdue). This is the approach I am trying to stick to—with one exception. The advice I would implore all pregnant women to throw their efforts into with utter abandon, even if they are tired or nauseous or can’t be bothered: make “mom friends”.

This is not novel advice! Women have been forming “playgroups” or “bump groups” for decades. It is also something of an advice trojan horse: having real live mom friends is the best way to find out about everything and anything you need to know about babies. You can try out their pacifiers, their overpriced but very soft diapers and their magical baby shushing device. They will tell you to put a bouncy seat lined with a towel next to the bath, if you ever have to do one solo, so you can plop your slippery-as-a-fish baby in there once you are done cleaning him. You can text them for advice on how to clear up baby acne (the Mustela micellar cleansing water!) and to ask if their babies also suddenly started eating less around week 11.*

It is great to have a circle of wise older mothers—they can help you see the woods for the trees when it feels like the roughest parts of the newborn phase might never end. More specifically, though, I am advocating for you to make mom friends who are roughly the same gestational age as you are and to make them while you are still pregnant. There is much less time for idle chit-chat after a yoga class once the baby comes! You will not be able to remember anyone’s name, let alone any salient details about their life. While you are pregnant, go to a prenatal yoga class and see if anyone wants to irritate a local bartender by nursing a diet coke and a water with you for two hours. Join a “beyond the bump” group.**

The most gratifying people to meet will be those who roughly share your due “month”. Before I experienced it pregnancy seemed so binary (you are, or you are not). I could not understand just how different it is to be 12 weeks pregnant, 24 weeks pregnant and 36 weeks pregnant. At 12 weeks pregnancy has been a cherished secret—you are laid low with nausea, telling very few people and fearful about how healthy your future child is. By 24 weeks you have hit viability, and a new stressor emerges: you definitely have to give birth to a real live baby (!!). By 36 weeks you are less afraid of birth than you are of actually remaining pregnant for another four weeks. Even six weeks is a huge gap when you are both clutching your tiny newborns. It will feel as though a decade has passed during the first fortnight after the baby comes.

The importance of slight differences in age shrink by the time everyone is 4 or 6 months old or so. But the third and “fourth” trimesters are the times in which it is the most gratifying to be able to talk to people who are going through it too: who understand how unbearable it is to have their induction dates messed around with when they are a week overdue; the all-consuming intensity and pressure of trying to breastfeed a newborn; how hopeless it can feel trying to “get anything done” in the weeks after your baby is born.

Yet the “going through it together” is just the start. There is a strange real-time nostalgia that occurs in the early part of motherhood, an awareness that this is the time you will remember when your kid crashes the car into the neighbours’ flowerbeds, when they have children of their own or when you are old and grey. It can make the experience, at times, feel like you are both living it and watching it. The impulse to try and capture this time, to save it, is very strong.

In the modern world there are plenty of methods available for trying to do this: photos, videos, newsletters (!!). But you cannot really reminisce with a digital record. You reminisce with other people. The more people you surround yourself with during this magical, wonderful, terrible time the less you are the sole keeper of a thousand tiny, precious memories. Your partner is the keeper of many of these. Two lines showing up on the test, the hurried car ride to the hospital, the projectile diaper changes. Visiting sisters and grandparents keep some more. But there are some things—the strange things your body does, during and after pregnancy; the relief of realising that, for the most part, everyone supplements a little (or a lot) at some stage—that can only really be understood by other women who went through the same thing at the same time. Things that only your new mom friends can keep.

*How many pieces of advice did I sneak in under the trojan horse of giving a single piece of advice? I can count at least four. ;)

**Specifically, if you are based in D.C., try out the prenatal yoga class at Past Tense on Friday evenings. Emma (the instructor) is wonderful! I started going at around 20 weeks. I also met lots of lovely people in my “beyond the bump” class at the EDCJCC, which I took at around 30 weeks.