Odd the phrase “what we are told to feel about motherhood” or so it seemed to me, when reading an article about books on early motherhood. I don’t remember ever being told what to feel about motherhood, or deciding to give it any proper thought myself. As a child, sometimes, I had imagined myself as a mother, as most girls do I suppose, not in any concrete way but rather as an emulation of my own mother. As a young woman, the idea became very distant; I was too busy learning, working, falling in love – just thinking about other things. Holding other people’s babies, I never toyed with the idea of them being my own.

Then came that moment on the doctor’s bed. “Look, there, you can see the two heartbeats,” she said. Those home pregnancy tests, though leg jittering and exhilarating, had not seemed very real. Laying prostrate, neck craning to see the unintelligible blur of the ultrasound image and mind sluggish in that oppressive, sanitised heat of doctors’ surgeries, I experienced my first maternal flash – a fearful image of a child with two hearts, “What does that mean?” I asked concerned. “That you’re having twins.” The relief was immense, “Oh goody,” I chirped, “All’s okay then.” What was it I felt? A sudden and instinctive sense of devotion and responsibility.

For those long months that followed, as my belly got bigger and heavier, drifting floor-wards with distinct limbs protruding towards the end, my maternal attitude remained quite static. I was protective: crisscrossing lanes in the local swimming pool to avoid the flailing arms and legs of neighbouring bodies. And I was devoted: eating carefully to provide enough of the good stuff, and conscientiously attending all prescribed medical appointments and still arranging a few more, despite my aversion to those dry, white waiting rooms. I was proud, too: smiling smugly when the gynaecologist told me our unborn daughter had long legs, and letting friends place their hands on me to feel those writhing tots inside.

By static, though, I mean that my idea did not (and could not) develop much beyond this waiting game of pregnancy – enough of a preoccupation in itself. My thoughts were mostly with my own body working hard to grow those children. How I would feel about them as individuals in the future, apart from a vague notion of loving them, and how I would feel about myself as a mother, were impossible to tell. The children’s presence was an abstract concept, made only slightly more tangible by the folded up pram and the two gleaming white cots in our spare room. Looking back, some of these practical preparations were momentary insights: I was sure I wanted us to have slings to carry the children in, breastfeeding was a must, and the thought of them sleeping in one bed at first was rather sweet. Still, this was no grand maternal theory at work, just certain aspects of life with little babies which seemed important.

Perhaps other expectant mothers read lots of baby books. I didn’t. Seizing the moment of precious quiet, I read the types of books I was always meaning to read but never quite finding the time – history, philosophy, gorgeous, weighty fiction. The one baby book – pastel fronted and brimming with photos of smiling infants – lay untouched until close to the end when I dutifully got on with reading it, only to forget everything it advised by the time the children arrived. When they finally did, the excitement of meeting them, tempered by that post-natal extreme fatigue, was enough to prevent any conscious deliberation about what I should be feeling about motherhood and how this compared to what, if anything, I had been previously told. A subconscious choice – instincts seemed easier and more realistic than the prolonged thought of soul-searching.

Now – the children nearly two – I have more time and that delirious tiredness has become a distant memory, marked only by the dark shadows under our eyes in those early photos. I suppose I do think more about motherhood and me, but rarely in terms of how I expected myself to be. There is no sense of comparison, nor of set standards here. Rather, I find myself continually surprised by the strength of my feelings, though fluid and specific to the situation, the power of instincts and the ease with which most maternal decisions come.

It is perhaps for these reasons, that I was caught off guard by the journalist’s phrase. It implied an existing consciousness and a set of absorbed cultural norms, uniform and dogmatic, which women are somehow drilled to believe prior to bearing children. It also presented “motherhood” as quite distinct, separate from anything else we might experience or set out to achieve. In doing so, it left no room for the individual, or for intuition. And therein lay a danger: that we are making too much out of all of this, creating something of a cult of motherhood – with huge expectations, frustration at any limitations and a desire for perfect infants. You see, we are told to feel all sorts of things at various stages in our life, but no one insists or expects you to faithfully believe them. What about what we are told to feel about love? You could say that “what feels right” is simply a product of everything we have previously been told to feel, but that seems a bit paranoid, simplistic and counter-intuitive to me.

Our neighbourhood is awash with children. Wide prams jostle on the pavements. Rival toyshops display their red windmills and ice-cream cone sand scoops competitively to attract the grabby fingers of the passing throngs. Local supermarkets stock the very latest baby food inventions, brightly packaged in orange, green, and pink, immediately edible and prominently placed. On each corner is a playground, filled with sand, slides and excited shrieks. On every other corner is a play-cafe, outside which, in bad weather, these prams with their serious suspension and rugged, muddied wheels line up like parked jeeps, the shrieks piercing hot stuffy air instead. They are lucky, our children, for this glorious world they inhabit. 

I suppose I should consider myself lucky too. Next door I can flick through rails and rails of beautiful children’s clothes. Downstairs and across the road, we can attend classes in early musical education, dance and movement, mother and child yoga, you name it, the list goes on. Nurseries, though somewhat short on places, are so plentiful you are bound to find one nearby, as we did. Should either child have the tiniest twinge of hunger as I pile milk, carrots and potatoes between the rugged, muddied wheels of our own enormous pram, a squeezy burst of organic pumpkin, pear and apple in a neat foil pouch will placate them until the shopping has been done. And what about all those mothers jostling on the pavement or protecting their coffees in cafes, just bursting to share their maternal anecdotes with me. “Stewed apple came right back out of his nose, you don’t say!”

To deny the pleasure and convenience this child-orientated environment brings would be untrue, and unfair to those whose livelihoods depend on creating it. We have a lovely time, mostly; never short of somewhere to go and always meeting our friends on the streets. So what’s the point of this description and the tinge of satire running throughout, you might ask.

You see, it came to me one grey afternoon in a cafe, too hot and hard at play, that there was something contradictory at work in this delightfully colourful place, however good its intentions. It was not so much the children – they were behaving in the expected way, dashing down slides, squabbling over toys and gorging themselves with soya hot chocolate and gluten-free banana cake – but the parents whose behaviour could perhaps be described as wanting. One father sat in the corner frowning at his laptop screen, a mother gabbled away to a client on her phone, whilst another flicked through a magazine. In their defence, they could have been simply enjoying the opportunity to park the children and get on with something else, which we all do, and need to do, from time to time. But why come here, I thought, to this place designed to celebrate the communion of adults and children, to read your emails?

I don’t suppose would mind so much if this plentitude of children’s play areas and apparently health-giving dried fruit bars was not accompanied with the parallel rise of child-friendly mobile phone applications and the near constant availability of children’s TV. With all of this, it seems there is something going on in these days of small and late families living in big, hostile cities, with busy parents who have constant access to the external world’s demands. We want our children to have fun and to be well fed. We also want to continue and succeed in our old highly pressured lives, whatever that conventional idea of success might be. Lacking the time to adequately fulfil both desires, we strike a compromise: a children’s world, pretty, diverse, distracting, pacifying, but most importantly a work of artifice.

This is not to say that children must always sit at the very centre of our entire attentions: most dissatisfying for adults and stifling for children – mine are not, and I don’t expect that of anyone else. But it is to say, my task as a parent is not simply to push my children into a separate, artificial world in which they are conveniently distracted, but rather to help them understand and take pleasure in the adult world, which they will have to fully inhabit one day. So now is the time for me to stop browsing the Mothercare website for adorable rainbow print t-shirts and to start pointing to the rainbows in the sky instead.

“Take the red one”, the nursery teacher said. My child obediently bent his little knees and picked up the red brick from the floor. My mouth fell open. “Now the blue one.” He let the red brick slip from his sticky fingers onto the carpet with a thud and reached for the blue. A smile of cheerful satisfaction spread over his rosy face. “And now where’s the yellow brick?” This time there was a second of hesitation, his hand gliding deceptively towards the green brick. Bah – I thought to myself, realigning my jaw, it is a question of luck. “No, the yellow one”, said the nursery teacher firmly. The hand still teasingly waited – oh the suspense – but then complied. His smile grew wider. I was amazed. Flabbergasted. He knows the colours, and I was unaware of it! What other remarkable, as yet unknown, capabilities does this child possess?

Of course I tried the trick myself that afternoon when we got home; it would take a stronger parent than I to resist. Forgetting, in my excitement, our usual afternoon routine of yoghurt, crackers and a bit of fruit, I pushed both children straight into the playroom, rummaged through an array of more obviously entertaining toys, and proceeded to arrange four coloured bricks neatly in front of him on the floor. For three minutes I successfully held his attention whilst he proudly placed a series of coloured bricks on the table at my behest – until out of the corner of his eye he spotted his wheelie ladybird and scampered off to whizz through the rooms on that. His less biddable sister had more quickly realised that this was perhaps a parrots’ game and had been tearing up old newspapers under the kitchen table for some time.

For all its brevity, I was hooked. This – in my eyes – exemplary achievement, which had been nurtured and then displayed by someone other than me, filled me with a new sense of pedagogic duty and ambition. And though I remembered the yoghurt, crackers, even the fruit, my mind was elsewhere, whirling with the possibilities of further child improvement. So there it was, the following afternoon, that I found myself sitting on the floor in a play cafe repeatedly naming and pointing at the shapes in a jigsaw puzzle hanging on the wall. “Circle.” “Where is the circle?” “Square.” “Where is the square?” On and on I went, until both children gave me what I deemed was an adequate response. But it did not last long: bored, they wriggled off my lap and wandered over to a miniature table, bedecked with crayons and paper. Enthusiastic scribbling ensued. Unperturbed by this lack of interest and abandoning my hot coffee, I came quickly after them and sat down in a miniature chair. Taking a crayon, I drew a big circle on both pieces of paper, and then a square and then a triangle. The pointing and naming began again. The children looked dismayed, and pushed my hands away from their drawings. Thus followed more enthusiastic scribbling, and no shape naming.

At this complete (and in retrospect, understandable) rejection, I returned to my coffee and spent a moment contemplating what I had done. The vision of an overly ambitious mother, standing draconically over her children until they could immaculately recite the times tables for a local competition flooded my mind and filled me with a sense of foreboding. What was I hoping to achieve? The only way I’d ever learned anything was when I could see some benefit in it for myself, and usually where some fun was involved. I was definitely taking all the fun out of it, and the benefits were minimal. They would learn from me too, but without the laboured repetition. So I have decided to limit my pedagogic efforts to enthusiastically pointing out vehicles (admittedly, sometimes with the mention of the colour at the same time) as we walk down the street and to reading funny children’s books which don’t appear to be ‘teaching’ much, beyond a love of stories and fantastical pictures, at all. Genius (well, some level of intelligence perhaps), if they have it, will grow of its own accord, and the thing is, I could never really see myself tending a greenhouse.