My grandma, a fearsome Torry matriarch, always said: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.
“Mummy internet forums” weren’t around when my grandma was raising her kids – instead there was an ever-gossiping network of female relatives – but you can bet, if they had existed, she’d have reached queen bee status.
These forums – designed primarily for mums to share support and information – are huge business. Mumsnet, possibly the best known, claim to have seven million visitors a month.
To navigate these sites, you need to learn a new complex language. TTC: trying to conceive. MIL: mother-in-law. DP: dear partner. Sometimes the DP is being a PITA: the translation unprintable, but I’ll let you use your imagination. Once you become fluent, there’s a sense that you are part of a secret society.
Certainly, that’s how it felt when I joined my first pregnancy forum. A baby will always be life-changing but our “lovely surprise” occurred after relocating to Prague. We were still living in a holiday apartment, spoke only a few words of Czech and didn’t even have health insurance that covered pregnancy.
Mum forums were my lifeline
After years of hoping and wishing, I was both overjoyed and overwhelmed. Then, three weeks after those two lines appeared on the test, Covid arrived and the country was put into full, strict lockdown.
It was a frightening and isolating time. Yes, I had friends and family I could call, but what I needed was the support of other women living through the entirely unique experience of a global pandemic pregnancy. And so, while I was anxiously baking a baby, I turned to mum forums.
Soon I was spending hours of my empty lockdown days with these strangers. The speed and depth of intimacy we shared – detailing physical ailments, marriage woes, family arguments, work disputes – was astounding and, in retrospect, bewildering.
The forums were my lifeline. Those women were some of the first people I shared a picture of my baby with – him curled on my chest, a tiny fleshy cashew nut, while I lay blissed out on oxytocin and impressive Czech painkillers.
The trust was suddenly gone
During my baby’s first months – in darkest Prague winter, with no cafes open or “baby and me” groups, when extreme weather kept us from even our daily lockdown walk – I spent even more time online. We shared our fears and triumphs and exhaustion. I messaged them in the wee hours during night feeds, while watching boxsets with the volume down and subtitles on.
What is helpful about being judged behind your back by other women?
Gradually, all the women I’d been through pregnancy with started to have their babies too and the whole thing began to feel… different. First, someone suggested to another mum that sleep training was “child abuse”. Then I watched another woman get hounded for not giving her baby constant eye contact while bottle feeding.
Finally, in what I considered my “nicest” group, mothers started sharing posts from other forums; theoretically out of “concern” for the mother and child but what, I wondered as I watched one, two, three posts go the same way, is helpful about being judged behind your back by other women? The trust was gone and, with a heavy heart, I left each and every one of my mum websites.
Caving under the pressure of societal expectations
My fearsome grandma had another apt saying: “Consider the source”. The source here wasn’t these mothers, exhausted and overwhelmed themselves. The source of this lapse in the sisterhood was the impossible standards of modern motherhood.
Women who felt they should be devoting every moment to their baby, living a social media-worthy existence of matching family Christmas PJs and looking like they did before they had grown a human in their uterus; who had lived through a pandemic and had a baby-bomb go off in their life. Simply, it was now not enough to feel they were doing their best, they had to believe others were doing worse. Besides this, they should do it all with joy! Motherhood was a gift.
Are you doing all this? Some wonderful tips and comfort on this thread: https://t.co/THGWMj7ugv pic.twitter.com/TkhUW6wAnz
— Mumsnet (@MumsnetTowers) December 6, 2021
And me? Honestly, motherhood has been the greatest gift. My son is a joyful miracle to me every day. But stepping away from parenting by mum forum committee is what made that possible. Instead of listening to strangers on the internet I understood our family, our son, was entirely unique and so our parenting would be, too.
Mum forums had been a lifeline but I realised it was time to cut the cord and navigate the choppy waters of motherhood myself. I learned to trust my instincts. I understood that we’d make it up as we went along and that I was the mum my son needed, simply because he was mine and I was his.
Kerry Hudson is an Aberdeen-born, award-winning writer of novels, memoirs and screenplays. She lives in Prague with her husband, toddler and an angry black cat