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‘It’s like everything now has to come with a set of instructions and a procedure to follow, but when it comes to children we try to follow the procedure and it doesn’t work because children are individuals, mothers are individuals and their circumstances are different,’ she said.
‘I think women are actually disempowered by the information much of the time.’
She said although people still paid lip service to the term ‘mother’s instinct’, a number of factors had combined to undermine women’s ability to tune in to it and to trust it.
‘It’s time, it’s money, it’s the way our society is structured and it’s that feeling that we have to have facts to confirm anything is real now, rather than relying on our feelings,’ she said.
Yet there was now a lot of scientific evidence emerging about the importance of early bonding and nurturing to future psychological health and development.
‘It’s in those first few years that a child forms an idea of what a love relationship is, what a positive relationship is and how to communicate and bond,’ she said.
 McPherson said instead of trying to follow the textbook advice, mothers who were in tune with their children could find their own best way and balance that with expert advice when it was appropriate.
‘This is about giving mothers permission to reject guilt and make their own choices and not feel burdened by the expectation of others,’ she said. ‘Even our mothers and our sisters and friends can unintentionally create expectations, as can our own experience as a child and, once your are aware of that, it’s extremely liberating.’
McPherson‘s wisdom has not sprung from perfect experiences, in fact the opposite. She had a nightmare induction into motherhood, with a difficult pregnancy, severe tearing at birth and resulting ongoing infections and anaemia.
It took a year for doctors to look beyond their first diagnosis of postnatal depression to discover the medical reasons for her recurrent illness.
When it was finally diagnosed she was left angry that precious bonding time with her new baby had been stolen from her. But, incredibly, the relationship did not suffer and she emerged from that difficult period to find ‘we were truly bonded’.
That wasn‘t the end of the medical difficulties.
But through them all, the former nurse discovered the power of her mothering instinct that, once she was in tune with it, was to prove an infallible guide on many occasions.
She said when she started writing she never intended to produce a book.
She was simply trying to make sense of what was happening through writing, a practice she had developed as a child to help process experiences. But by the time she finished, she had become passionate about sharing what she had learned with others.
‘The way it happened is that there were a whole lot of things that were bothering me about the way we mother and one day I wrote them down and there were 44; just one or two word topics,’ she said. ‘Then every time Angelique settled for half an hour I was drawn to the computer and I would pick a certain topic and it would just come out.
‘At the time I was really tired. I had a six-month-old baby who was quite sick and we were in and out of hospital, so it was almost a subconscious process when I was writing but then I would read it back to my husband at night and it would seem so obvious, so simple.’
McPherson‘s book includes practical advice on how mothers can rediscover and hone their instinct and intuition.
‘You pick up books on child rearing and they will say: feed at this time, feed at that time and this is the growth you can expect in this amount of time, but there is nothing actually telling us how to form really positive bonds with our children,’ she said.
Intuitive Mothering is published by New Holland RRP $24.95.
The Manly Daily, 30 March 2006
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