The psychedelic world of motherhood

The psychedelic world of motherhood
By Jemima Lewis
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 09/03/2008

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/09/do0908.xml


If I lose my thread and begin to segue wildly in all directions, forgive me: I have "mumnesia". This is an official medical condition, unveiled last week by a team of American scientists.

It afflicts mothers in the first few months after giving birth, rendering them incapable of sensible thought. The combination of sleep-deprivation, hormonal fluctuations and the sudden rearranging of priorities means that they forget anything that isn't essential to the survival of their progeny. The mother who complains that her brain has turned to porridge is not being self-deprecating: she is stating a scientific fact.

As medical conditions go, mumnesia is not unpleasant. It reminds me of my student dabblings with drugs, but without the dread of arrest. There is the same bubbling up of intemperate emotion ("I'm so happy," I keep weeping into my husband's jacket, as he edges nervously towards the front door. "I'm JUST SO HAPPY"); the same capacity for staring at one thing for hours (then, a huge hairy caterpillar undulating across a Northumberland beach; now, a baby); and the same sensation of looking at the world through a distorted lens, so that the most familiar people and places take on a new aspect.


In part, this is the fall-out from labour - an experience so intense that it casts a hallucinogenic haze over everything that succeeds it. I do not mean intense in the approving sense, as used by enthusiasts for LSD or sado-masochism. I mean that it is barbaric, medieval - far, far worse than anyone will ever tell you. What the books describe as "discomfort" is in fact like being picked up by a giant pair of hands and wrung out until every vertebra in your spine has snapped. The pain will make you vomit until your head spins.

"Why didn't you warn me?" I keep asking my childbearing friends, to which they reply either "I didn't want to frighten you" or "You wouldn't have believed me." Not unreasonable, but I can't help feeling rather hurt, as one does on discovering that one's most intimate confidants have been keeping a shared secret. At the same time, I look at them with a new respect. If they endured that chamber of abominations and thought it barely worth a mention, what other heroics might they be capable of? Slowly, the sorority of mothers from which I never realised I was being excluded is opening up to me, like a sea anemone unfurling its tentacles.

There are whispered confessions of bliss, despair and frank ambivalence. "Sometimes I love her so much it hurts," reflected one friend, gazing down at her newborn daughter. "And sometimes it's just like I've been given a pet turtle."

I can feel myself slipping into a parallel universe: one where phrases such as Tumble Tots and Tiny Talk may actually mean something; where conversations that would once have seemed boring to the point of hilarity become an illicit pleasure; where a pale-faced stranger pushing a pram is no longer invisible, but draped in Boadicea's finery: a warrior-heroine in her own quiet way. Such is the psychedelia of motherhood - and this time, I'm told, the trip never ends.


Most people who have never given birth are well aware that it usually involves agonising pain.

So why is it apparently an astonishing surprise to so many of those (like this writer) that choose to?
Posted by Vicky on March 9, 2008 12:51 PM


I think this is a diagnosis in search of sufferers. The average new Mum suffers sleep deprivation, a leech like creature which appears to have 24/7 demands in her life, and various hormonal swings.

That has been going on since the beginning of time - a touch of irritability, the odd mistake cause by tiredness - but in the end all down to Mother Nature.

Why must the medical-scientists capture and name this free-ranging natural condition? Are they trying to take ownership of it from Mums?
Posted by simon coulter on March 9, 2008 10:35 AM


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I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

To liken moohood to a psychedelic experience is to insult psychonauts everywhere. It takes a lot more brains to get through an acid trip than it does to spoot out a spawn.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me

Sounds like if moos aren't shot with happy chemicals through their bodies, nor avoid warning future moos about the woozy baby-induced trip, the whole humanity would probably have ground to a halt!

You'd HAVE to be on acid to

1. even WANT kids

or

2. be able to deal with them.

The only reason breeders paint the flowery picture of pahrunthood they do is because they don't have the stones to admit they've royally fucked their life.

Breederhood is like a Monet: beautiful from far away but up close, it's a big 'ol mess.

Feh Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> To liken moohood to a psychedelic experience is to
> insult psychonauts everywhere. It takes a lot
> more brains to get through an acid trip than it
> does to spoot out a spawn.


Off topic: Feh, I am so loving the word "spoot" now!

KidFreeLuvnLife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You'd HAVE to be on acid to
>
> 1. even WANT kids
>
> or
>
> 2. be able to deal with them.
Trust me when I say there are no amount of drugs, legal or otherwise, in the world that will make a rational person want kids, or be able to deal with them.

> Breederhood is like a Monet: beautiful from far
> away but up close, it's a big 'ol mess.
Hehehehehhe....I like that one!

And yes...spoot is a wonderful word that's as beautiful to look at as it is to hear...in my estimation.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me