Explaining the mother-madness-syndrome

Plenty of times i have heard the promise made to self and friends, vitnessed women taking the oath not to talk about their babies in that obsessed way "feather-headed women" tend to, strangulating their listeners with inexhaustible details of the wonder child from how adorable and smart he is to his beautiful " golden colour stool". Behaviour which sooner or later removes a majority of friends away from the mother.

At the weekend i encountered just such a women ,and recall a promise i made last Autumn to kill her, at her own request ,should she ever step up to becoming one of those.

She had a hand full of pram, which like a factory leaver automatically pulled and pushed the perambulator to and fro rocking the baby within, whilst the other hand was busy in gesticulating and overemphasising her talk aobut the ways with babies.

I did not get out a gun and remind her of her death wish.

For the knee long red dress i had bought after Christmas's has now become an almost naughty miniskirt, a majority of its cloth too busy stretching over the increasingly large tummy to worry about lengths of decency. I waddled in style of fat duck with my very expensive boots bought on the other side of Christmas's, cracked at the soles from the recent endowment of weight, and i listened to her, not really able to stop the hyper enthusiastic river of baby idiolect, and even one might say enjoying it. This being a sure sign, that i too am getting the mad-mother syndrome.

The mad father syndrome also exists. It begins at the discovery of pregnancy, when half excited, half fretful, nurture installed paranoia's forcee the new fathers to calculate dates, menstrual cycles and romantic encounters, before settling that the child is theirs, and than proceed to be excited and more scared still, in attendance of medical checks which confirm the baby is well and normal. Establishing the child is both his and healthy the father enters a phase of life in which suddenly he sees prams everywhere, he is surrounded by prams all day, rendering him to study deeply their mechanisms and all the technical aspects, brakes, wheels, fold ability, safely, as well as car seats before concluding that only the most expensive gadget contraption is fit to carry his offspring.

The mad mother syndrome, is quite another thing all together. One can see pregnant women walking down the street alone, talking out aloud. To everyone they appear clinically mad, but in their own world the mother is conversing with baby, creating that pre-natal contact that will be so reassuring to child when its born. The mother too gets targeted by prams, all day, prams like dodgem cars start bumping into her all over the place, but she does not see baby carriers, she sees babies. She observes babies in sleep, listens to them cry, calculates what differentiates the beautiful from ugly ones. She is abashed at how big they are, finding it impossible to believe that half a meter of baby fits inside her tummy. When she sees baby clothes, toys, beds, she wants to have them all. From week to week the baby inside her grows to sizes it can not be ignored. The little thing jumps at strange noises, the banging of pots, or reacts with fear at hair-dryers, hoovers, anything electrical and noisy. It has periods of sleep and activity every few hours, waking the mother up squiggling about in the night, or he kicks when she sits in a way he does not approve, and most surprising of all are the places baby manages to wriggle his fingers and toes. I can feel wriggling of fingers beneath my ribs as i lie on my hip and am filled with fears of squashing him. Even the father can not ignore the baby as from time to time litte feet kick him trough the tummy if he lies or sits close. This baby presence being 24 hours, plus a big dose of mothering hormone is how the women catches the mother madness which does not stop once the baby is born.

Im not sure that this is a valid excuse for my mother to melodramatise in paranoia every time i am crossing the street tring to hold my hand at age of 29, but it is a reason why i seem not to be able to write about anything else these days. I do think aobut other subjects, and start writing, and than the baby kicks and all the priority evaporates out of alternative things to think about and i find my self talking aloud to him in the otherwise empty apartment, making even the dog lady upstairs look at me funny on the stair case.

I promise, to try not to over swamp my friends with the whole baby affair, but to my readers i can obviously not promise to write about anything else, as all the types of experiences that inspired me before in comparison are just not as exciting as the discoveries revealed by the baby kicking inside me each day. --