Having a baby is a little bit harder than remembering to take out the rubbish…..

The conversations I’ve had with each of them have made me giggle but fortunately, they’ve been mostly via email so my friends are none the wiser.

It’s a very fine line to walk with pregnant friends or brand new mums. You don’t want to be a know-it-all and you don’t want to scare them. But it can be highly amusing to be reminded of what it was like going into your first birth and baby experience, with all that naivety and false expectations and, well, cluelessness.

One of my friends is pregnant with twins and when I asked how she was feeling, a couple of months from birth-day, I got the following reply:

“I can’t sleep and I’m so emotional! This morning I burst into tears because we forgot to leave the garbage bins out last night! I can’t wait for these babies to be born so life can get back to normal.”

I took a deep breath before hitting ‘send’ on my response – which I worded carefully so as not to alarm her.

“Darling? Um, well, you’re about to have twins. Twins. Two babies. Two tiny babies. With all due respect, life is not going to ‘get back to normal’ any time soon. In fact, life will never be the same again. In a GOOD way!  But you will look back nostalgically, with love and affection, at this relatively peaceful time when the biggest drama in your day was a couple of forgotten garbage bins.

A whole new definition of ‘normal’ awaits you. It’s not necessarily bad – it’s very much magic and wonderful and amazing – but it’s also hard. And very, very, very different to anything you could imagine, physically, mentally and emotionally. Enjoy the calm before the storm and laugh at the garbage bins, my friend, laugh.”

My other friend is in a frenzy of preparation. She’s only a few months along but she’s highly organised and determined to control every last aspect of this whole baby business.

Every couple of days, she sends me questions. Foolishly, she assumes that since I’ve done it before, I will remember the answers. I don’t.
“What is the best brand of muslin?” Ummmmm, a soft one?
“Which dummy is the best and should I use one at all?” Um, well, whatever they don’t spit out and it’s up to you…

She’s already interviewed three obstetricians in a bid to find one she likes and still isn’t satisfied. She’s pre-ordered birth announcement cards because she knows she’s having a girl and she’s already named her. The woman is a machine.

I don’t dare try to snap her out of her military-style preparations with advice like “you can’t control your birth and you certainly can’t control the needs, temperament or will of a newborn….”

I read a lot of books before I had my first baby but because I had no friends of relatives who had babies at that time, there was no one I could ask for word-of-mouth advice.

With mixed results, I muddled through. Not unhappily but definitely without a clue. It wasn’t that much different the second time. I felt almost as clueless because I’d forgotten everything (it always astonishes me when women who had their children decades ago are able to dish out specific, detailed advice to new mothers based on their own experiences with their own babies. How do they remember? I can’t remember what I did with a baby two years ago, let alone 40 years ago….).

So, as experienced mums, what are our obligations when it comes to enlightening other women who are taking the big leap into the great unknown world of motherhood for the first time?

I’m not a fan of the doom-and-gloom approach; those women who take an almost gleeful delight in wiping the excited smile of a pregnant woman’s face with scary stories of pain, exhaustion and hell. That’s just cruel.

And just because you had a particular experience, it doesn’t mean everyone else will share that same experience or react to it in the same way.

I remember a well-meaning woman (at least I assume she was well-meaning), telling me the following when I was pregnant the first time:

“Go and see lots of movies, sleep all day, read newspapers slowly, get through as many books as you can, have sex regularly, take long baths, get a manicure, eat a meal without interruption and go to the toilet with the door closed. Do all that as much as possible between now and the birth because it will be a long time – maybe years – before you do any of it again.”

Come to think of it, she wasn’t far wrong…

How truthful should you really be with other women who are pregnant for the first time? Did other mums fill your head with advice before you had your first baby?