Round babies, square books

On the weekend I read an email from one of my closest girlfriends that made my heart sink. The message was short but filled me with dread. She is due to give birth in a few weeks and wanted to know my thoughts on Gina Ford's Contented Little Baby book and asked for other book suggestions. I sat down to write a reply and was unable to look away from the screen for the next hour. I wrote, deleted, rewrote and deleted. And this was to one of my dearest friends.

Baby books are dangerous terrain. I have a love hate relationship with them and my heart still beats a little faster every time I pick one up. I bought quite a few books during my pregnancy – my mantra was knowledge is power - and read them all at least once before my due date. I felt prepared in the only way I could. That is, not at all.

I read the Baby Whisperer and thought it was genius. She made it sound so simple. I appointed her my magic wand – my fairy godmother whose book would solve all my baby-rearing dilemmas before they had a chance to arise. On occasion I even wondered why any other baby book was printed. She covered it all.

At least that's what I thought until I had an actual baby and realised very quickly that no book covered it. I realised my fairy godmother was lacking in practical solutions. I learned that no matter which book I picked up, unless I'd written it myself – miraculously retrospectively - applying it to my bundle of baby presented the ultimate square peg round hole dilemma. It wouldn't fit. At least not the way I had hoped. For me that lesson was fraught.

Gina Ford's baby bible The Contented Little Baby was one of the first books I bought. At the time I had no knowledge of Gina Ford or the controversy that is conjured with the mention of her name. Blissfully ignorant I loved the picture on the front and thought 'a contented baby' sounded like a pretty good thing to have. Once I started reading I immediately noticed the tone, which is exactly like the routine itself – very very strict. I enjoyed reading it and figured there were some useful pointers but I wasn't interested in using such a strict routine.

That was why the Baby Whisperer appealed to me. She didn't prescribe a minute by minute schedule, instead a pattern of Eat Activity Sleep to repeat throughout the day roughly in three hour cycles. To me, that made sense. What I didn't grasp – and what wasn't mentioned - was that my baby might occasionally resist this routine. That she might wake before up her designated activity time or not sleep when the cycle rolled around again.

As I wrote and rewrote my thoughts on Gina Ford*, I found myself reliving the trauma of discovering that my real life baby didn't necessarily conform to the pattern dictated by numerous experts, no matter how adamant they were, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried really hard. I tried so hard that as a fledgling mother trying to find my feet it became an exercise in confidence erosion. And soul destruction.

I became most reliant on books when my baby who had previously slept long stretches at night, was suddenly no longer capable of more than two hours' at a time. As fate would have it, this disastrous little phase coincided with my husband being overseas for a few weeks, so it was pretty happy days.

My only conclusion, after madly thumbing every book I owned and racking my brain for solutions, was that I was doing something wrong. I'd reread sections and convince myself that I must have missed something and would vow to do it properly the next day. But the next day, things would invariably continue in the same fashion, and I'd be deflated once again that I'd not managed to get it right. By the time my husband returned from Russia I was in a state. I didn't know what was what. Any of the maternal instinct I had previously displayed was now absent. In my search for a solution to this aberration in my baby's behaviour, I had inadvertently sacrificed my intuition.

After twenty minutes listening to me explain precisely what we – myself and my baby – were doing wrong, my husband imposed a temporary ban on books. Without those officious instructions whizzing around my head, I was able to focus on my instincts. At least what I could find of them. A breastfeeding consultant helped me get feeding back on track and within a week mother and baby were doing much better. Sleep did us both wonders, but more importantly, I regained a little faith in my mothering abilities.

In Robin Barker's tomb Baby Love (which I sadly didn't get until my daughter was 8 months' old) she makes an observation that I wish I'd read months earlier. She said baby books can be destructive to new mothers because their routines are so prescriptive and tones so certain, that it's easy to think you're failing or doing badly when your baby doesn't do exactly as they say it will. That was certainly my experience.

Fortunately I read that before I'd burnt all my baby books. With a different mind-set – treating them as guides rather than definitive instruction manuals - I now find baby books amazingly useful**. And I now know that's why the baby section in any book shop is so heavily populated. There's no single magic formula. I suspect that's a lesson each parent learns in their own way, in their own time. I really hope my friend learns faster than I did.

* Lauren Quaintance the Managing Editor of magazines at Fairfax Media wrote more eloquently about her attempts to conform with Gina Ford here

**One book, in particular, Save our Sleep by Tizzie Hall really did do wonders for me when it came to the holy grail of my baby sleeping through the night.