Giving birth to your mother-in-law, and other surprises of parenting that aren’t immediately obvious when you’re pregnant

I went to a baby shower of one of my close friends this weekend, along with many others of that circle who are currently in the throes of early motherhood – a disproportionate number, mothers of girls. Amid the well-chosen, pale pink accessories and confectionary milk bottle favours, the carefully appointed private dining room was awash with oestrogen, good will and – in the slightly haunted eyes of many of the new parents, a masked shot of pain at the ordeal and personal fallout yet to come for the mother-to-be.

Ten years on from my own first birth, I arrived at the do hungover, after a night on the tiles “mum raving” (it’s what we do in East London), with a 4 a.m. homecoming marking my graduation from the parent of a young child to relatively freed up parent of a soon-be-secondary schooler. Concealing my hangover with dry shampoo, Jo Malone Red Roses and plenty of slap, I powered through brunch on hair-of-the-dog and baked eggs,  revealing my ill-kept secret as if it something to be ashamed of in a room full of women who would dearly love to get five straight hours of sleep a night, but who seemed relieved that there might also be a light at the end of the tunnel for them too.

As the only mother -of -two  in the room  (with the exception of the matriarch of the mother-to-be), it was hard to swallow down the unheeded pearls of wisdom that can only fall on the deaf or possibly resentful ears of new or soon-to-be parents. Yes, Gina Ford did work a treat on my second child, but only after I suffered nigh on three years of sleep torture with my first. Parenting is such a steep learning curve, and one which we must climb under our own steam, having navigated our own hurdles. The fact that I can still, occasionally, party till dawn perhaps offers a little ray of light to those who regularly start the day well before it.

It was, however, the first time I had the opportunity to speak to many of that group about my own children, not a little kids or babies but as near-grown fully formed personalities, rather than simply an extension of myself and my own parenting skills. When children are small, they are so much an appendage of their mother it’s hard to for us to look at them objectively, being, as we are so often, in thrall to their every whim, strength and apparent weakness it can be hard to unpick the fluff and the fear from the facts. 

Many of the women there are aware my son was diagnosed with autism some years ago and only now, perhaps, having had children of their own, they are better able to comprehend or empathise with the sorrow that must accompany this – and yet I have moved on so far from this point for it to be almost irrelevant. The sympathy I now felt, as new parents, in their glances felt almost as redundant as I now feel as a mother of my ten-year-old. Whatever the challenges I once faced, my son has turned out to be as brilliant a person as I could have wished when I was pregnant: witty and charismatic, clever and confident. I can now take pleasure in the fact I can borrow his perspex gold wolf on a chain he bought for himself with his Christmas money from a stall in Hackney’s Netil Market and wear it to a mum rave in London Fields. It is, with the benefit of ten years’ perspective, the relationship I would have always wanted from my son – we share a personal aesthetic, even if I may sometimes struggle to connect with some of his geekier personal interests, and that is probably, with hindsight, just fine.

Talking about my daughter proved more of a minefield, particularly in a room where many of the women were negotiating the early years of their relationship with their own. Ava, a second child was, by comparison with my son, an easy baby and a delight as a toddler. I knew what I was doing and whether through luck or judgement, nature or nurture, Ava was a baby and young child who was and continues to be self-sufficient, to the point where she needs me for very little. But as time has gone on, this self-sufficiency has troubled me – perhaps I took advantage of it – it made going back to work easier, handing her over to childminders easier, putting her down for naps, and regaining a bit of myself. In short, she made it easy for me to do what I needed or sometimes wanted to do, and perhaps in some ways I feel I have been a little bit selfish. The fact that I’m worried about it, though, means, aged seven, I’m trying to make up for lost time. But there are other things at play that might define my relationship with her. She is, with seven years gone since I could legitimately say she was entirely mine – it’s strange how growing something in your body makes you feel so proprietary over a baby as a mother – actually not very much like me at all. It’s only when babies arrive and you have a chance to get to know them, that you realise that so much of them belongs to someone else.

I read somewhere that girls have a disproportionate amount of their father’s genes – this article explains how the paternal grandmother is the most closely related grandparent to the resulting granddaughter– it’s a little different for boys, because of where they get their respective Y chromosomes – this article explains why my son is probably more like me in temperament, personality, and crucially, in intellect than my daughter, who personality wise, takes much more after Tom.

To mothers of girls, this basically means one thing – in many ways, you give birth to your mother-in-law. And perhaps this explains the trouble we often have with our daughters- depending on how you view your relationship with your mother-in-law. I like my mother- in-law very much, but in lots of ways, we are chalk and cheese, for all we might look a little alike – blue eyes and blonde hair. So, while many people say my daughter takes after me, she doesn’t – she looks just like her grandmother – which probably says something interestingly Freudian about my husband Tom.

And in many ways, Ava seems more like her than she is me. Like her paternal grandmother, she prefers to wear plain, simple clothes –  grey top and jeans to my preference for vivid colours and patterns. She has none of my flamboyance or overt femininity, resolutely hanging out with the boys at school, and shunning complicated friendships with girls. She prefers science and maths to arts and English – in which I graduated in from uni. She likes to be read stories but rarely engages with them in the way I devoured books at her age. She prefers animal documentaries to Disney films, to which I owe my mother-in-law a deep, unending gratitude; but would also rather do a puzzle, which my dyspraxia and hand-to-eye coordination issues always made a struggle. In short, although I love them both dearly, in many ways my daughter is as much of an enigma to me as my mother-in-law, who doesn’t pop round, preferring quite often, to see the kids on her own.

Yet it was an accusation levelled at me by my own mother when I was pregnant with her grandaughter: that I was more like my homemaker paternal grandmother than I was like techie, left-handed she, as Ma painstakingly taught me to knit to while away the boredom of my second pregnancy, preferring the more up-to-date challenge of doing the branding for the lifestyle company I set up when Jonah was a baby.  It seems ironic, that while so many women secretly long to give birth to daughters because they can better project their own identity onto their future child, it is their sons who end of much more like them, as I have found to my surprise – and often, delight. Ava probably won’t make my mistakes, but I’m not sure I be much good at helping her with her own.

It is perhaps a little blow to our conflicted female egos, though, when one’s pregnant identity splits off and becomes someone else – someone slightly unexpected, for all we love them anyway. The paternal grandmother is  akin, to some kind of phoenix, having lost her son to his wife or partner, as tradition – and real life to a greater or lesser extent – often has it, resurrects herself cuckoo-like in the marital nest through her son’s wife’s female brood. So, if our partner’s mother’s genes dominate our daughters, as women, we should learn to value our mother-in-law, and certainly seek to understand them, because through our daughters, we very likely give birth to them, or at least the closest approximation.

Chatting, then, at the event, to the mother of my friend who was expecting a baby girl, what was striking was how little they resembled each other compared to the way she resembles my friends’ two brothers, who I’ve met on occasion previously. But what she (or her daughter) thought of her son-in-law’s mother  (who was, perhaps understandably not in attendance), I daren’t ask, no matter how many sheets to the wind I may have been by the bay showers’s end.