It’s Not A Competition, You Know!

Surely pregnancy is an excuse, if any were needed, to go a little easier on ourselves. To chill out and relax and to stop asking too much of ourselves. Not so for a small proportion of women who insist on seeing pregnancy as another field of endeavour in which to ‘go for gold’ and who tend to regard all other pregnant women as ‘competitors’. For these competitive types, pregnancy is one more race to be run; not so much a time to sit back and smell the roses, rather a time to crank things up a notch or two. Far from becoming more laid back as their due date approaches, their competitive streak truly comes into its own in the delivery ward.

Scared of morphing into one of these momzillas? Here are a few signs that you might want to take things a little easier:

• Your birth plan runs to 24 double-sided A4 pages, closely typed, and involves a set of power point slides and a projector. That dolphin will be perfectly happy in the birthing pool!
• You decide to use your stopwatch, not for timing your contractions, but to see what sort of times you can achieve on the hospital corridor during early labour. You send your partner home to fetch your new trainers: those women shuffling along in slippers aren’t even trying!
• You bring your yoga instructor with you to help get your breathing just right.
• You have already put your baby’s name on the admission lists of all the best schools (you made a few phone calls the day you did the pregnancy test) and you conduct a quick poll of the other expectant mums to find out where everybody else will be sending theirs. You don’t wish to intrude, so you confine yourself to a short questionnaire.
• You insist that the mid-wife only shouts ‘push’ in Mandarin. It is never too early to introduce your baby to the benefits of a second language.
• You force yourself to mutter ‘thanks’ to your aunt who brought the seven-pack of sleepsuits from that hideous High Street store. Your baby will only be wearing Dior, Chanel and Gucci, thank you very much.
• If you already have other children, your account of your previous experience of giving birth will be more horrific than that of any other woman in the maternity hospital and will include a thirty-hour labour and a third degree tear, all of which you endured without as much as a whiff of gas and air. You have no idea why that first-time mother, who only came over to borrow a magazine, has started to cry.

And on a serious note, if you do happen to find yourself slipping into competitive mode, just remember this: when that big day finally arrives, they won’t be handing you any medals in the delivery ward – just your very beautiful baby! Isn’t that ‘gold’ enough?

Words by Danielle McLaughlin