Imagine, if you will, my partner and I preparing to do the thing that is apparently required to make baby number two. Stay with me - this isn’t a porno.
I am sat on the edge of the bed having a somewhat one way conversation with his ball bag. Look, I told you to stay with me.
Well, hello boys (and girls?)
Before we go any further, I need to have a word with you, and by ‘you’ I the sperm with aspirations of becoming my second child. Obviously there are millions of you and only one of you is going to make the cut, so there’s no point getting complacent. The competition is fierce in there so whoever you are I need you to listen up.
Before you begin your journey towards my egg I would like to make a couple of things clear.
You will be loved, obviously. You will be OH SO wanted. We will be delighted to meet you. But, and it’s a rather big but - I am going to need the baby that you will become to arrive fairly self sufficient. I’m thinking sleeping through the night from birth, ideally without being held. No contact naps, no needing to feed every two hours and absolutely no waking up because you have realised that I, the only safe place you have ever known, have put you down. Ideally you could just come out with a fully developed circadian rhythm and an inherent love of your own personal space.
Breastfeeding is fine, but perhaps you could also learn to operate the fridge? It would help with the whole leaving you with strangers thing.
And if you could come out already toilet trained, walking confidently, holding a provisional driving licence and with a decent grasp of the English language, that would save us all an enormous amount of time.
Mandarin would be a bonus. I hear it’s the most spoken language in the world.
I appreciate that this may sound demanding for someone who currently exists exclusively as a microscopic collection of cells in your will-be-father’s bollocks but given that you lot are already responsible for deciding whether I'm getting a boy or a girl, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to ask for a few other specifications.
I have heard there are babies who are very easy and I think this is what we should be aiming for. You’re going to have to think about your mother here.
I do in fact have a life and lots of things to do.
With that said - good luck!
You may be wondering what has led me to write a mock conversation between myself and my partner’s testicles. Well, there is a reason. Unfortunately, it is not that I have lost my mind - although I appreciate that the evidence is mounting.
The reason is that I was talking to someone the other day about the prospect of baby number two (which is, admittedly, a much more conventional setting for discussing your reproductive future given the fact that nobody is having to pretend they can hear you through a scrotum) and when discussing my hypothetical next child they used the words “less needy”.
As in… My second child might be “less needy” than my first.
For anyone who’s been here a while, you can probably see why I’m now aggressively hitting my keyboard, but for those new here - hello - I should probably explain that I am one of those irritating people who thinks babies are supposed to need their mothers. I have spent the last three and a half years breastfeeding, cosleeping, napping together and being exceptionally available to a son who has had what I would consider an entirely reasonable expectation that his mother will, in fact, be there when he needs her.
Before I go on, a quick bit of background for anyone not in the know! My son has slept in my bed since he was four months old. I exclusively breastfed (and still feed now 3.5 years later) and have never once even attempted to sleep train. I have never spent a night away from him, all our naps were spent together and I was once called “extreme” for the crime of going upstairs to have a snooze with my then 3 month old rather than putting him in a cot and coming back down to sit with a guest. I have written about all of this extensively, so if you want the full case for why, there’s a back catalogue for you to go and get lost in.
Having said all of that, it probably won’t come as a surprise to know that I don’t consider any of this a parenting failure I need to address before having another baby. I know, wild! It certainly shouldn’t surprise the person who said this to me given they know the way I mother.
This is not the first time I have had the sense that people assume I will do things differently with a second child. It's as though people think that after doing it this way once and having seen just how GOD AWFUL it all is I will have surely come to my senses. I’ll have learned my lesson, realised the error of my ways and decided that this time, I’ll do it properly. Like the last three and a half years were a mistake I made because I didn’t know any better, and now that I do, I’ll surely want to correct it.
Nobody says this outright, obviously. Nobody’s ever actually said “I assume you’ll be doing things differently because you’ve clearly learned from the disaster that was your first child.” That would be insane and also extremely rude, and also very wrong because my first child is not a disaster but a fucking fabulous little guy who I would happily do all of it again for tomorrow.
But it’s sort of there - in the “less needy.” In the assumption that what I did wasn’t a choice but something that happened to me, because I got unlucky with a “needy” baby and given the choice, obviously I’d pick the other option.
The other option being what some have coined… Wait for it… The “low maintenance” baby.
I vividly remember coming across a trend last year that made me wonder if we’d forgotten what words meant. The “low maintenance baby” was being pushed by TikTok creator Aubrey Matthesius whose bio read, and I quote, “Low Maintenance Mom” and, somewhat ominously, “Teaching moms how to be chill again” - somebody get this woman a red hat.
Her whole thing was essentially about raising a baby who would fit into your life rather than your life revolving around the baby. How? Well, a variety of things, some I agree with - like not buying the wipe warmer - and others that I don’t - like sleep training. A few of her stances are:
Sleep training from day dot because “a low maintenance baby needs to be sleep trained”.
Not cosleeping because “babies are going to push the boundaries as long as you let them”.
Moving the baby out of your room as quickly as possible via - and I promise I'm not making this up - the closet.
And doing all of this in the name of “old school, old fashioned parenting” because “chill babies” are simply “the result of chill moms”.
Low maintenance babies by this definition aren't born, they're made - not by temperament but by low maintenance mums. See also:
Aside from the fact that the term “low maintenance” and “baby” feel inherently at odds to one another - in part due to the fact that babies are, you know, fucking babies, and are by definition the highest maintenance things you can find on planet earth aside from maybe a Fiddle-Leaf Fig, it also implies that for a baby to “need” you you must have done something wrong. Because if low maintenance babies are made rather than born, then presumably high maintenance babies are made too.
Which means that when we describe a baby as needy we’re no longer just describing a baby who happens to need a lot (because they are, urm, babies). We are, whether we mean to or not, suggesting that somebody has done something to make them that way - and that somebody is generally Mum.
The baby who wants to be held has been held too much. The baby who won’t sleep alone hasn’t been trained to sleep alone. The baby who only wants their mum has been allowed to become too attached to their mum. The baby who wants to feed a lot has been given too much access to the boob. The baby who doesn’t like being passed around has not been passed around enough.
The baby is not simply a baby with a particular temperament it is a project that mum has got a bit wrong.
And if a needy baby is a made thing, not a born thing, then “you might get one that’s less needy this time” isn’t actually a comment about the baby at all - it’s a comment about me. A subtle way of saying maybe you’ll do it differently next time, and if you do, you’ll get a different result. It’s a weird optimism about what is essentially me not doing what I did the first time.
I can see why this stuff feels seductive to people. It’s the same reason the 90s mum has become a sort of cultural icon again.
She's wearing an enormous t-shirt that definitely came free with something in 1997. She's drinking a hot cup of tea. The children have buggered off somewhere until teatime. One of them is probably building a den out of an old washing basket while another is drinking from the garden hose because the earth isn’t on fire and we don’t know what a hosepipe ban is yet. Nobody knows where the third child is and everyone seems totally cool with that.
Apparently our mothers spent the entirety of the 1990s like this. They weren’t curating childhoods or building sensory trays and they weren’t worrying that giving us a yoghurt with too much sugar would lead to a podcast episode titled “Why I cut off my mother” 25 years later.
It’s obviously a romanticised version of the decade - I’m fairly sure there will have been plenty of stressed mothers in 1997 too - but that’s almost beside the point. The fantasy isn’t really about the 90s. It’s about a mother who seems blissfully untouched by the constant pressure to optimise every waking minute of family life. And I get it!
Danielle Shugg’s viral essay about her own 90’s mum absolutely exploded because I think it tapped into exactly that. People weren’t sharing it because they wanted to buy a VCR. They were sharing it because the image of a mum who drank her tea hot, had a nap in the afternoon and didn’t appear to spend every second wondering whether she was accidentally ruining her children felt sexy as fuck.
Which is funny because the “low maintenance baby” idea is basically selling the exact same dream - the unbothered mum with the unbothered baby. She who has her own life - a mum who isn’t trapped in the confines of that dastardly blighter - motherhood. Or at least, the kind of motherhood that shrinks things for a while. We don’t want that kind of motherhood. That kind of motherhood is a real vibe killer. And no one wants to be the vibe killer, do they? Just follow these steps and you too can avoid the fate of the “high maintenance” baby and reclaim your power as the “low maintenance mum”.
It’s easy to see why people might look at the way I’ve chosen to mother and see it as the “high maintenance” option. But that feels a bit like calling breathing high maintenance. To be high maintenance means something requires a lot of attention, upkeep, faffing about, monitoring, and intervention. You have to keep on top of it. You have to actively do things that might not feel natural to you to keep it going.
Do you feel like that about breathing? Do you wake up in the morning and think, right, better get a few breaths in today. Can’t let that slip. Perhaps I’ll put an alarm on for 3 o’clock to remind myself.
Mothering in the way I have feels a bit like breathing to me.
I’m not saying it’s easy. There is no version of motherhood that’s easy. But it was what my son needed, and it was what felt right to me to give him. I’m not some sort of martyr who enjoys making everything as difficult as possible - far from it! I love low maintenance. I am not good with stress. I am anxiety in barrel leg jeans do you hear me?! For me the least high maintenance thing has always been to mould my life around what my child needs and not fight against that - to surrender.
Feeding on demand meant I never once had to think about ounces, or timings, or whether he’d had enough. There was no logging it or watching a clock or wondering if the last feed was too close to this one. The expensive shiny hands-free pump I was gifted gathered dust like the bottles I never had to sterilise.
Sleeping next to him meant I never had to train him to sleep any other way. There was no standing outside a door listening to him cry, no timed intervals, or controlled crying. There was no berating myself about whether tonight’s the night I can finally hold firm. The cot made a fabulous dumping ground and every nap we spent together was a nap I was forced to rest in. Fuck, I miss the naps.
I just had a baby who needed me so I gave him me and it was considerably less faff than trying to teach him not to.
I know the second time around will have to look different in some ways and I can hear people lining up to tell me so. There will be another child in the mix - one that also needs their mother in different ways. My attention will be split in ways it wasn’t the first time - which is partly why I’ve waited.
I wanted my first child to have a decent stretch of being the child who could have all of that from me without having to share his mother with a newborn. And I wanted to give myself the best possible chance of being able to respond to another baby the way I actually want to respond to them instead of their needs becoming a problem because there's another tiny person attached to my ankle.
We don’t know who our babies will be. And if my second turns out to be “less needy” then brilliant - I suppose I’ll take the “win”? But if they are exactly the sort of baby I had the first time around I can promise you I won’t be sat thinking that I need to make them less needy. Because I’ll have something I didn’t have the first time - perspective. I’ll remember the last time and I’ll know something I didn’t know then.
It ends. It. all. ends. And the baby who wanted to be attached to you all day becomes the 3 year old who is quite happy to wander off somewhere while saying “you stay. staay. staaaaaaaay.” as though he were talking to the dog.
If there is anything that will change the second time around for me it is this. The knowledge that what they say is true. That everything is temporary, fleeting, impossible to retain like grains of sand slipping through your fingers.
If anything will change, it will be the voices in my own head. Hush I will say. You know nothing and I know very well that this is where I’m meant to be.
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