Warning! Maternity!

It is still night. Baby lying against my skin. Skin to skin, her body in a shawl. Bringing to bring we move in layers through the house. Baby joins me when I put on socks, wash my hands, go to the bathroom, cook coffee, cook breast pump, drink coffee and a black chocolate. I know a blast of power and read poems. Read maternityand try to make it quiet because it is night for others in the house. But I laugh out loud, and read aloud to baby, and think, when he hiccups, that he laughs. The poems are so playfully light – so fun, almost child-friendly with their rhymes here and there, or a pun – but still existential, and utterly dark.

If a host is down of giving life, of nurturing life; when passing on the family is difficult, why should one think about life and the world and the meaning of everything? You can think that it would be possible to nyte the, and that the frameworks around childbirth and maternity leave have room for improvement.

The training you get / Food, clean diapers, cuddle, sleep It's all / So, off you go! // Oh true, did we forget to tell you that you work in shared shifts and eternal guard? The trade union for maternity women / never signed the cooperation agreement

Desse Linen wrote Kristin Storrusten (b. 1986) while her baby was out. The big rust tells the newspapers that maternity-the poems are self-biographical and written in birth depression. I write this with my 17 day old baby against the skin. Never before had such a hot kitchen. For here is a piece of warmth and love; I write this with my hope lying on my skin. I set, as Cathrine Grøndahl wrote in 2008, my hope for the world. I put life to the world, but now I want to hope for life. The hope of infant idyll and the expectation that this alone will be happiness – that is what makes it all difficult. Feel not to succeed. Not that I, like "everyone else," enjoy these days. I have heard that breastfeeding should be the most intimate one can experience, and that the old intimacy, that between mother and father, should now have a new dimension, with a third person on the team: that mother and father meet in boundless happiness and love and admiration on the couch with their joint project between them in the arms.

Baby is with me when I put on socks, wash my hands, go to the bathroom, boil coffee, boil breast pump, drink coffee and a black chocolate.

But Mom and Dad are very tired and fragile. For baby, milk needs all the time, and breastfeeding is best known, as Storrusten writes, as chain, as barbed wire, through the chest. The authoritarian German nursing aide at the health station says: "Don't complain! Enjoy this time, which is the happiest time! The quiet time, before they learn to crab! "

For that he should have, the borough. He bets on the new citizens, and raises money. The follow-up is so extensive when a child is going to have, that I rush my stress, almost run sick of the hours of midwife and health sister and home start and everything at will. At the same time, people stand in line for an hour at a specialist doctor for half a year, and for a whole year in line for help in psychiatry. He should have, the Norwegian state, that with psychiatry he is rather poor at. But that was not always the case, at one time he was good at it: the days when psychiatry was still state, and not as now, left to the districts. In those days, he had his own hospital, like Gaustad, with a farm and a horticulture, when the patients were allowed to stay in peace and quiet as long as they needed it. Then they could ride horses and measure with oil measurement and work in the greenhouse where they grow their own food. But then peace and tranquility and asylum ended, and chaos and riot broke out in the city. Psychotic patients themselves were moved out into society – to the municipalities, the districts, to the municipal bus days. So now, when psychosis comes in, the sick person walks alone and laughs, out in the community, between the "normal" people, and scares them or makes them sad according to how much understanding they have for their suffering.

But no rule without exception. Should a host be affected by birth depression, the state and the municipality and the borough will soon resign. 10 to 15 percent of all newly-born mothers end up in such a state, and it affects both the baby and the institution that can relieve the state of the welfare project, namely the family. Finally, at fixed, at health stations and maternity wards, one has to take care of the danger of birth depression. One creates a booklet that one sends home with the mothers, and one educates health mothers and midwives and the health station on the topic.

So it should have them, the state, the municipality, the district: They follow up the pregnant, the giving birth and the newborn. They follow the fetus and call the pregnant woman, when she is 38 years or older, to an early ultrasound to check if the fetus is such a fetus that the state wishes to be born and enter the community after a quarter. I do not understand that I am over 38 and pregnant, frivillig goes to fetal diagnostics, as it is said – I understand it rather than anything I do supports go to. Without realizing what is happening, I can have an ultrasound and blood test that can confirm with great certainty that no, my fetus does not have Downs. Then I don't have to decide whether to remove it or not, based on Downs.

But, says the counselor at the Rikshospitalet to me: The finest blood tests that can reveal many other syndromes and hereditary diseases and yet tell you what color your child gets on their eye. It's better to go to Stockholm or Copenhagen, says the adviser, and explain how it can be done: You googler "harmony test" and book an hour at a private clinic, then they can take a long weekend dive, you know, say hi and wink to me and my husband, who sits there and thinks that the state wants a special type of child, maybe even a special eye color? That the state throws money into finding and removing chromosome aberrations. That the state uses, as pediatric professor Ola Didrik Saugestad puts it, more money to remove the fetus than to allow them, when they are born, to have a good life. Asking a fellow in political science Aksel Braanen Sterri does not have a full life with Down's or other syndrome. The author Thorvald Steen, on the other hand, is vividly judged that one may have one særs rich life with a serious hereditary disease. Because, as Olaug Nilssen said, she won the Brage Prize Heavy talk of time, the novel that is about nurturing an autistic son: One is no more than his diagnosis.

I do not understand that I am over 38 and pregnant, frivillig goes to fetal diagnostics as said before – I rather understand it as I do supports.

Birth, upbringing, host parents or not? Why doesn't anyone talk more about this, even before making a baby? Because then one is there and one has to decide whether to prepare the child or not, whether one wants to know about hereditary diseases or not. And then: If I have an epidural during childbirth, I will breastfeed my baby, I will fullbreastfeeding it? Did I think what I wanted? No. I knew nothing. How could I know what it all meant – epidural, full paralysis, whole or half leave? Googling something about "baby" or "maternity time" – like when I googled "birth" and "pregnancy" while getting pregnant – I come to Mammonett, the women's guide, the baby world, where one mostly finds a blend of horror and horror, Happiness and horror in comments like openbert are written in hormone rush. I click on "sleeplessness" and "night awakening" and get all kinds of sightings and ponderous conspiracies.

Where can I find facts – pure empirical evidence – if not from those who ask me if I should ask for an epidural, full-term or on leave? And I understand why they exist – Kvinneguiden, Mammanett, with their desperate comment fields: There are so many things to understand and so little concrete information to get. Getting pregnant, giving birth, being a midwife or husband is both so advanced, frightening and painful on the one hand, and so wonderful on the other, that it should have been a full-time job for at least a year, the premise: with school and course, and preferably with Storrusten say maternitycollection of poems as a compulsory curriculum. One type of literature that lowers expectations, prevents feelings of loneliness and of failure, and prevents one from the chaos that ensues: going to the bathroom with baby in carrier, to do everything with baby skin to skin, to just take baby away from tell when baby herself has gone to the bathroom and needs a new diaper.

For baby will be close until mother says, all the time. Baby loves the smell of mother say and the sound of the heart of mother say, and in this lies the great happiness, and the meaning of life and to breathe new life into the world: Imagine being so important to someone. Imagine someone gives me, meg, the utmost confidence. It is wonderful – even when baby cries and bugs in the wrong city and I can't sleep.

Postpartum Depression I don't know who it is, but maybe it's melancholy? Maybe it's sad about what I lost as I was our mother. That something was over, that something else was starting. Change is not man's strongest side. We like best when everything is as it always has been – with routines and pre-meds. Baby too. Her chaos is transient. She needs more time to find her habits, needs to have digestion in her gong. Then she might get surplus to another – like realizing that night is the best time for sleep.