The baby whisperers

BY MEGAN NICOL REED

IN A tired little house on the corner of a quiet suburban street and a major through road on Auckland's North Shore there are nipples galore.

"What you see here/ What you say here/ What you hear here/ Stays here," reads a sign Blu-Tacked to a wall in a room with two beds with matching peach candlewick bedspreads and sagging middles. Dazed women sit around, phonebooks propping up their feet, tri-pillows on their laps. Everything – the furniture, the wallpaper, the carpet, the curtains, the women – is muted, washed out.

The noise is extraordinary. Five babies crying. Five babies screaming. Five babies mewing. A cacophony. And then an extraordinary calm when all those mouths find all those nipples.

"Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream," plays the lullaby in the nursery where the babies are put to sleep in a row of tiny cribs and antiquated perambulators. "Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream," it seeps through the baby monitor and into the lounge.

Kelly Clow is a navy engineer, responsible for the maintenance on all the ships at base. Michelle Hermen's sister was murdered 12 weeks ago. Sunnie Xin immigrated to New Zealand from China. Rachel Turner's baby boy was eight weeks premature. Caroline Dobby is from Ireland and fell in love with a Kiwi bloke.

Some of these women are feeling desperate. Some say they are doing OK. Some are beyond caring.

Everyone is here for one thing. Help. Help with their new baby. Feeding it, settling it, mothering.

The gruelling relentlessness of those first months with a new baby is unparalleled. Nothing can prepare you for it. And when you are in the thick of it, when you are existing on a handful of hours of broken sleep, it's easy to lose sight of the sheer love, the very joyfulness of a new baby.

Plunket knows this. This tired little house is a Plunket Family Centre. There are 20 around the country. None are flash. But for the mothers who spend a much-needed day at these centres, there is nowhere else they'd rather be. It is a haven. Somewhere you never want to leave.

It is the staff that make it so. Plunket nurse Megan Johnson, community Karitane nurse Agnes Overdevest, hostess Wendy Perriam. They mother the mothers.

 

"Put your feet up," they urge. "Do you need a shoulder rub?" "Go and have a sleep."

Caroline, 32, mother to five-week-old Sophia, her own mother back in Ireland, many seas from her first grandchild, says she could happily live here. "You know your life's going to change but you don't know just how much. My husband gets home and the house is a tip, like I've not even got to anything. There are some cultures, in the Middle East and some Asian countries, the families all gather around for the first six weeks and the mother does nothing but feed and recuperates after the birth and that's it. We're expected to be superwomen, running around and doing it all. You look back at a bad day at work and you think, actually, that was nothing."

Some women spend the day at these centres because they just need a break. Someone to share the load of their newborn, to give them permission to have a nap. Most of the women here today have been referred by their local Plunket nurse for help with establishing breastfeeding. "It should be the most natural thing in the world, shouldn't it?" says Caroline, "I can't believe how hard it is."

None of these women are young or inexperienced. At 28, Sunnie is the youngest. Michelle, 39, already has two teenage children and a toddler. But new babies can be as unsettling as they can be unsettled.

Kelly: "That tribe thing is so true. Once we would have delivered our next-door neighbour's baby by now and watched our sister raise hers. I hadn't had much contact with babies to be honest."

Caroline: "Neither had I."

Kelly: "That's what we're replicating here, isn't it, the whole sort of community thing."

Suffering from pre-eclampsia, Caroline had an emergency caesarean. Her blood pressure has remained high which hasn't helped with her milk supply and Sophia hasn't been gaining enough weight. For weeks now, Caroline has been expressing after every feed to increase production and top Sophia up to give her the energy to suck. It's exhausting.

Plunket nurse Megan puts on a video about lactation. "Now remember," cautions Megan, "This baby, they wouldn't have chosen to use it if it wasn't a perfect feeder. You'll know what I mean when you see the video. It's really clear and really obvious. Whereas when you're trying to do it, it doesn't look like this."

"Slipping, slopping, slurping or clicking indicates that baby is not attached in the best possible way," instructs the video. "Breastfeeding should feel 100% comfortable and pleasurable."

Kelly, 35, knows all about sore nipples. Her nine-week-old son Benjamin was born prematurely. His corrected age is only three weeks. She started using nipple shields in hospital because they can be easier for a wee mouth to grasp. Now she's sick of carting them around and the hassle of sterilising. But without a good latch he has damaged her nipples. Her Plunket nurse has been encouraging her to come here for help with weaning Benjamin off the shields. "I'm really impressed. I didn't know really what to expect [of a Plunket Family Centre]. And it's just amazing. So supportive. It's like what don't they know about. I'm trying to suck up as much information. I thought I knew quite a bit after 10 weeks, but you know, it's just amazing listening to them talk about settling and that's not what I'm here for but I definitely can use it.

"One of the nurses in hospital said that she got to breaking point and came in and she thought there was something wrong and they said, look he's tired, give him to us, you go and lie down. I think the key for her was to really tank him up in the evening and fill him up so that he slept a bit longer. And she was a nurse. She said, oh it's just gold. It was nice to know that it was there if it got...

"It seems to me it's such a – I mean I'm a Plunket baby – it's such a good New Zealand organisation. It's something worth supporting and making sure the government does."

ABOVE THE window, net curtains moving quietly in the wind, another sign, this one embroidered, in a frame. "God could not be everywhere... therefore he made mothers."

On the table – bowls of tinned fish and asparagus, beetroot and grated cheese, a basket of sliced grain bread, a tub of margarine. Muffins, warm and sweet, straight from the oven. Old fashioned, wholesome fare. Hostess Wendy presses food on the women. Crackers with marmite and cheese, home-baked chocolate slice, hot drinks. "You should have something to eat. You need to keep your strength up."

The women express surprise at being catered for. "Mums are busy. We take as much of a load off them as we can," says Megan.

Megan doesn't look like a Plunket nurse. Or, for that matter, a mother of three. Thirty-seven, tanned, fit, skinny jeans, sharp haircut: she's downright sexy. She laughs. "I'm in the thick of it. I'm in the mum game." Like all Plunket nurses, she is a registered nurse with an extra grounding in Well Child nursing. She is also studying to be a lactation consultant.

Her energy is remarkable. "Good boy. On you go, darling. Good boy. Good boy. OK, let's pop him on. We'll get him a feed and we'll get him a top-up." She flits from mother to mother, baby to baby. Swaddling ("The bigger they get, the bigger your wrap needs to be."), shushing, talking tummy time ("Do his tummy time when you change his nappy, flick him over then. It's frequency, not duration that we focus on with these little guys. As he gets more efficient and shrinks down that feed time, it will naturally grow into more play time."), compressing breasts to encourage flow. Always full of praise. She discusses poo as though it were the most fascinating topic in the world – and of course, to these women, at this point in their lives, it is. She examines 11-week-old (corrected age three weeks) William Turner's dirty nappy: "The volume's good. The volume's good, but hmmm... It's the fatty content we're missing."

She is a dealmaker. "OK," she says to Rachel, William's mum. "I really need you to express. Can we make a pact that you do three definites and four if at all possible? The more you do, the more successful this whole thing's going to be, so it's in your hands. OK? So obviously optimum is after every feed, but I realise the stress you're under at the moment, so can we make a pact on three and if you get more, you get more. All right?"

It is busy, so busy. The phone rings constantly. A young mother calls in; from the waist down her eight-month-old is in a pink cast. "She's so heavy," she says. She starts to weep. Agnes sits with her and hands her tissues.

Michelle is at a loose end. Five-week-old Lilly, a lazy feeder who hasn't been putting on sufficient weight, is still asleep. "She'd sleep forever, I think. I feel lost without my baby." She talks quietly about giving birth to her daughter so close to losing her sister, her triplet, whose estranged husband has been charged with her murder. "She had four kids too. They've lost their mummy and their daddy." She has been depressed, she says, with a small and anxious laugh. "Should we wake her? She doesn't usually sleep this long." "Here lots of things are unusual," says Megan.

OVER THE course of the day, several of the babies are weighed before and after feeds to check how much milk they've taken in. Megan is at pains to point out that under normal circumstances this sort of repeated weighing is not recommended.

"It's totally a guesstimate and it's not something we ordinarily race around and do a lot of. What we'd rather do is look at how much the baby is suckling on the breast, how long they're suckling for and wet and dry nappies and those types of things, but we've got a few different types of things going on today. It's not typical. Weight is still the very best indicator of gain, but it's more accurate to do a naked weigh and measure over a week.

"It's not helpful if it's not used properly. Because, at the end of the day, if a mum doesn't go out of here knowing how to look for good sucking, knowing what a good latch is, knowing how long to feed their baby, if they don't go home knowing that, what good is doing a weigh here? Because they're going to go home and stress and worry, you know what I mean. So in actual fact, it still has to be about the basics."

On the lounge floor Agnes is giving Sunnie a lesson in how to massage seven-week-old Ryan's wee face. Sunnie has a very fast flow and Ryan fusses at the breast a lot, getting increasingly miserable. "Can I do a massage on your face? Can I? Can I? Ah, let's try that. You've got such a lot of issues going on, haven't you? Let's try this. Nothing to lose. Ah, is that nicer this time? Shall we do some more? What do you reckon? Would that be nice? Let's try it. Good boy. Can we do it again?"

Under Agnes's gentle touch Ryan dissolves. Agnes advises Sunnie that it's a good way to relax a baby before a feed, but she should always ask his permission first.

Over on the couch, William is causing consternation, in a fountain he brings up his entire feed. Rachel, 33, has also come to the centre because of unsatisfactory weight gain. But while he's always been a spilly baby, two weeks ago he had an operation for renal issues and the spilling has become worse.

Megan: "We've established today he is getting milk."

Rachel: "So it's going in..."

Megan: "It's going in. But what's coming out..."

William is distressed. His mother, dripping with vomit, is remarkably calm. "I'm just past it. I'm so past it." The consensus is he needs to be seen this afternoon by a doctor. Megan writes a referral.

It's 3.30 on a Friday and the last woman and her baby have just left. Most plan to make a return visit. Wendy pops on a final load of washing while Megan and Agnes sit down with a cup of tea. "There's no limit to how often they can come," says Megan. "Of course, the hope is they won't need us eventually. It's about feeding their babies and sleeping their babies and it's stressful and we know that."

Ultimately they are teachers of mothercraft, equipping mothers with the skills and the confidence to do this by themselves.

There is a knock at the door. A teenage mum, her sister, a toddler and a baby are outside. Don't they close at 3pm? Megan shrugs, "We do. Can you not tell, we go with the flow here." She ushers them inside. There is always another mother in need.

- © Fairfax NZ News