If anyone would make a great mum, it’s Sharlene Poole. Known as New Zealand’s Baby Whisperer, the maternity nurse has been flown around the world to help wealthy families with their newborns. Sharlene’s shared the wisdom she’s gleaned over the years with regular appearances on TV and is providing even more invaluable advice in her new book, Baby Whispering.
The trouble is, Sharlene has been so busy helping others get to grips with raising newborns, she hasn’t got around to having a baby herself. Now, she’s made the decision to get on with becoming a mum, even though she doesn’t have a partner. “It is a complete surprise to me that things have ended up this way,” admits Sharlene.
“I thought I’d be married and have four babies in my twenties, but things haven’t worked out like that. Now I’m 35 and I don’t want to leave it much longer. “I know this is not the traditional way of doing things and if I was younger I would be holding out for Mr Right, but I can’t imagine missing the boat and not knowing what it is like to have my own baby.”
Sharlene, who will be looking into donor options over the next year or so, says her busy life makes it tricky to find time for relationships. “I’ve been doing a lot of hours and working really hard, but that’s because I love it so much.”
Sharlene has adored babies for as long as she can remember. As a small child she loved being around her infant cousins and changed her first nappy when she was five. After leaving school, she went to a private college in Christchurch where she got a thorough background on caring for babies and children, before she went on to run a nursery school for four years.
She headed to the UK in her mid-twenties and landed a job as a maternity nurse, looking after a newborn baby boy. “I just fell in love with George and I knew that was what I wanted to do,” says Sharlene. She has worked for families in Britain, as well as expats overseas, living with them until the baby was a couple of months old. She would even eat with them and sleep with the baby in her room. When the baby woke in the night, she would take it to the mum to be fed.
She flew to places such as Singapore, India, South Africa and Japan for work and says it was often an eye opening experience – especially when some of her clients had never had anything to do with small babies. “I had one mum who asked me if it was okay to kiss the baby on the lips and one dad, when I encouraged him to have a bath with his baby, who put his togs on to get in the water.”
When she returned home seven years ago, Sharlene was worried about getting work – partly because of the assistance already on offer from Plunket nurses, but also because many Kiwi women are determined to do things on their own. But she has found a demand for her skills – particularly with babies having trouble settling or feeding – although she tends to spend hours at a time with families, rather than moving in with them for weeks on end.
When some clients asked if they could videotape her seeing to their baby, she made a DVD and her clients’ suggestion that she share her wisdom in a book eventually convinced her to write one. Sharlene can’t wait to put all her experience to good use with her own baby and is intrigued to find out what kind of parent she is going to be.
“I know I am well qualified, but who knows what it will be like with your own child? “Babies do change your life and I know how hard it is raising a baby on your own. But I’ve also seen the joy that children bring and I don’t want to miss out on that.”
