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The first time I was pregnant I thought it was going to be the most exciting and wonderful experience in my life. By the time my fourth child came along I thought "Here we go again!"

The difference was the knowledge I gained the first three times around. There were so many things I dreamed of and expected the first time that I now knew were untrue, and so many things that I had not expected the first time that I now knew about.

The best thing about experience was that I could now ignore 95% of what well meaning strangers were telling me! I can clearly remember buying book after book the first time and studying them at length. The choices and decisions seemed endless, home or hospital, epidural or not,feeding, sleeping, under water, it went on and on . Every person I met had an opinion on, well everything. Of course I'd breast feed, not use a dummy, express milk when I returned to work and only dress my child and self in organically produced hempen sacks.My mother and mother in law knew all this was so much baloney and that they of course knew better. That they also were giving me wildly conflicting advice did not matter. They both knew that they were right. I was confused, but also I would say with hindsight, very painful in my opinions of the right way to do everything. Number one then is that people have been raising children for millenia in varied cultures and the children have survived, so there is more than one way to do anything and none of them may be wrong.

The second important piece of knowledge I gained was that basically the mother only has limited control over what happens. Nature decides if and when labor is going to occur, except in our society where she might not. In other words you may wish for natural this and natural that but if something goes wrong you wish very quickly for maximum medical intervention..now. I know this as I had only one natural birth, followed by an extremely emergency section. ( I know that seems an odd phrase but my first section started basically before I even reached theater but my next emergency section took an hour to set up).

This leads me to my third great secret. Every woman with a horror story or even just a story feels the need to share. When this is with other mothers it is a discussion forum with wry humor and ribald jokes such as " by that time I didn't care if we were in the middle of the car park,I just wanted drugs "...followed by " I was in the car park and yes I wanted drugs". Unfortunately when this is

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