Mother’s Manual: Read Fine Print

You probably can’t really be prepared for the changes a baby brings.

You’ve heard, of course, about deprivations of sleep and freedom. But are you ready to deal with the grandmothers?

It’s said that having a baby will bring a woman closer to her own mother. But for some women, it’s the start of a new, subtle but ugly power struggle, says Nina Barrett, author of “I Wish Someone Had Told Me” (Fireside, $9.95).

“I think one of the issues that never gets talked about in the books or magazine articles is how much competitive feeling comes up between mothers and their mothers and mothers-in-law,” Barrett says.

“It’s funny how acknowledged that Oedipal issue is for men--men grow up and compete with their fathers, try to vanquish their fathers, and one sort of accepts that there’s this passing of the torch there. With women, there’s no comparable myth. But I would say there’s probably an equal kind of tension, and a comparable process that takes place when you have a baby.”

Barrett, who lives in suburban Chicago, interviewed women about their experiences in becoming a mother. Among the topics were nursing, finding child care, labor, the postpartum period and how babies changed marriages.

When it came to the grandmother question, she says, “they could go on and on and on about that”--although the topic made them self-conscious.

“Most of them would talk about it with a sort of a sense of humor, like they understood that the whole thing was a little ridiculous,” Barrett says. “I think that the modern woman feels like she has it all under control--she knows that fighting with her mother-in-law is this situation-comedy thing that she doesn’t believe she’ll ever find herself doing, but here she is doing it. . . .

“As they were describing it to me, they could tell that the issues sounded very petty, and it sounded ridiculous for them to be excited over them. But it really did matter. It really does matter who gets to decide when the baby starts solid foods. It’s really a hot, emotional issue to a new mother.”

Infant feeding, Barrett found, is a dangerous topic. “There are all kinds of tensions that come out over major differences in the way our mothers raised us, and the way women are now told to raise their babies,” she says, and the issue of breast-feeding is ideal for fighting it out.

“It doesn’t sound like such a big deal whether you breast-feed or bottle-feed, but that was the No. 1 topic people said their mothers or mothers-in-law were constantly trying to undermine them about, or criticize them about,” Barrett says.

Grandmothers’ advice, she observes, “seems to spark brush fires everywhere.” It’s emotionally loaded, and it comes at a particularly tough time. “You’re particularly vulnerable to criticism, because you don’t really know what you’re doing. You don’t have the self-confidence to say, ‘Look, bug off. This is the way I’ve decided to do it, so leave me alone.”’