Making Babies Read online

  Time was, people who suffered childhood sexual abuse were accused of ‘making it all up’. As many as 35 per cent of abductees were also abused, yet they are ‘making up’ something else entirely. As therapist John Mack (Ph.D.) points out, regression therapy moves through dissociative strategies and false memories to approach the real facts of a patient’s past. The difference with his patients is that some of them have a false memory of sexual abuse, which in fact covers the real story of alien abduction. It is only of limited use asking whether this man should be in jail.

  Whatever the facts, there is a considerable amount at stake here: the word ‘hysteric’ is as charged and as complicated as the women it tries to identify. Besides, what about all those, to quote one abductee, ‘Baby things. Baby here. Baby there. Baby everything. Everything is babies. Oh, God, I mean like babies, OK?’

  The first foetus to star in a movie was the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a star child, the first of a new hybrid race. I wonder if the actor was ever born.

  The first female protagonist of a Hollywood science fiction film was Sigourney Weaver in Alien – a film so saturated with reproductive anxiety it still makes you check for something stirring in your guts. (Is that a tapeworm, or was it just wind?)

  Look at a copy of the National Geographic, a magazine that will always exist in 1973, and there it is – between a photo essay on the birth of a distant galaxy and an article about breast decoration among the Nuba, floats the foetus, ‘the world within’. It drifts free, like an astronaut on his umbilical cable; glowing, weightless; with pads for fingers, and plum-like, radioactive eyes. The foetus sees nothing, knows everything. It does not eat, or speak – the mouth is a bare line – but it seems to smile. It lives in water. It is a different life form. The foetus has no capacity for wonder. There is something blank and mean-spirited about it, perhaps. It lurks. It is all potential. We do not know if it means us well.

  As Julia Kristeva says, quoting Mallarmé, ‘“What is there to say concerning childbirth?” I find that question much more pungent than Freud’s well-known “What does a woman want?” Indeed, what does it mean to give birth to a child? Psychoanalysts do not talk much about it.’

  What is it like being pregnant? ‘It is like having an alien inside you,’ a woman said to me, many years ago. ‘No really, it is.’ She had three.

  We do not choose, sometimes, to be occupied by this other creature, and this is one reason why women find pregnancy unsettling. It is assumed that our bodies will ‘know’, even if we don’t, what pregnancy is like and what it is for; that we are, on some cellular level, wise, or even keen on the reproductive game. But I do not know how such cellular knowledge might happen, or where it might inhere.

  A woman probably does know what she wants when she says, ‘I want a baby,’ because a baby is, first and foremost, an act of the imagination (unless it is an act of fourteen tequilas after the office do). But there are many cases of women who do not know that they are pregnant until they go into labour. There are cases of woman who ‘know’ that they are pregnant, but who are not. In discussions about reproductive choice, it seems to me that we do not know what we are talking about, or that different people are talking about different things, and the experience of pregnancy, because it is so difficult to describe, is skipped or ignored.

  In Ireland the imagination is still held in high regard. ‘Making things up’ is a normal and often social activity. This has its drawbacks, of course. There are always the priests, some of them abusive – and the babies. In Ireland we have babies all the time. Easy-peasy. We have them just like that.

  ‘I think you should forget about aliens,’ says Gerry, my friend. ‘All that nonsense. Have a baby instead.’

  And I say, ‘Watch the skies.’

  The Glass Wall

  I SPENT MOST of my thirties facing a glass wall. On the other side of this wall were women with babies – ‘mothers’, you might call them. On my side were women who simply were. It didn’t seem possible that I would ever move through the glass – I couldn’t even imagine what it was like in there. All I could see were scattered reflections of myself; while on the other side real women moved with great slowness, like distantly sighted whales.

  I always assumed I would have children, but only dimly – I never thought about when. I was reared in the seventies, by a woman who had been reared in the thirties, and we were both agreed that getting pregnant was the worst thing that could happen to a girl. My mother thought it would ruin my marriage prospects and I thought it would ruin my career prospects (same thing, really, by the different lights of our times). And when do you stop being a girl? By ‘career’ I meant something more than salary. I could not get pregnant, I thought, until I had ‘gotten somewhere’, until I ‘knew who I was’, until I was, in some way, more thoroughly myself.

  These things are important: they do happen, but they often happen late, and you can hardly tell people to stop dithering. I look at women in their thirties with their noses pressed up against the glass, and all I can tell them (wave!) is that life in here on the other side is just the same – only much better, and more difficult.

  I see them wondering, Does he love me and do I love him? and Will I have to give up smoking? and What about my job? and I don’t want to be that fat woman in the supermarket, and What if it is autistic and Don’t they cry all the time? and I want to say, ‘It’s fine.’ More than that, when I first had a child, I was so delighted, I wanted to say, ‘Do whatever it takes.’ Children seemed to be such an absolute good, independent of the relationship that made them, that I wanted to say, ‘Buy one if you have to,’ or, ‘Hurry.’

  I was wrong, of course. Besides, most women are more interested in sexual love than they are in the maternal variety, they want a man more than they want children, or at least they want it first. Still, it is good to keep in mind the fact that, in a world where sexual partners can come and go, children remain. They are our enduring love.

  Dream-Time

  ONE FRIDAY IN October I started falling in love with everyone, and I stayed in love for two weeks, with everyone. This was awkward. It was a moony, teenage sort of love. I waited for the phone to ring. I was shy, almost anguished. I missed appointments, even with the people I loved, which was everyone, and so stayed at home and saw no one, my mind full of impossible thoughts.

  I did manage to go to a school reunion (where I loved them all) and to the opening night of a play (where I made some wonderful new friends), but mostly I mooched, and wrote letters to celebrate the fact that I had just finished a book and that life was, perhaps unbearably, good.

  Towards the end of this peculiar fortnight, I had a dream full of the usual suspects: people from my past who spoke to me in an unsettling, unresolved way. I have this dream, with variations, all the time, but this night it was interrupted by a woman I barely knew twenty years ago who floated in through a window, dressed in pink. She smiled an angelic smile, as if to say, ‘None of this matters any more,’ and then she patted her stomach, very gently. I started awake with the thought that I was pregnant; then I turned over to go back to sleep, saying to myself that the moment had come: it was time to stop the shilly-shally, the hit-and-miss, we had to get this conception thing going, properly, finally, and have the baby that was waiting for us, after all these years.

  Soon after, I went to Berlin for a reading, half-dreading who I might be obliged to fall in love with there – but sometime in the middle of the weekend, I hit a wall. I couldn’t say why this was. I didn’t tell my hosts that I knew German and disliked the half-understood conversations they held in front of me, before turning to talk English with a smile. I walked the streets, planning a story about a woman who falls in love all the time, and another story that was full of mistranslation and sly insinuation, in which a woman meets a foreign couple and cannot quite tell what is going on.

  My hostess said that she loved the passage in my book about a dream in which the ceiling is full of dangling penises. I have never written su
ch a passage, nor anything like it, but she insisted: she was even quite insulted, as though I were accusing her of having my own pornographic thoughts. What could I say? I said I would check. But I noticed, in myself, a terrible physical weight, as if I could not carry my life around any more, I could not even lift it off the chair. I thought that perhaps I should stop writing books: something, at any rate, had to change. I walked from Schönhauser Allee to Unter den Linden, looking at the afternoon moon over Berlin, thinking that when it was full my period would come and then maybe everything would right itself again.

  On the way back, I stopped over in London and got very drunk. The hangover seemed to last a week. I felt terrible. I dosed myself with miso soup and seaweed. I was insane for miso soup and seaweed. I still thought my life must change. I went on the Internet and typed in ‘ovulation’ on the search engine, then turned to my husband, Martin, saying, ‘I think this beer is off. Is there something wrong with this beer?’

  We bought the pregnancy test from a girl with romantic thoughts behind the cash register in Boots. Martin says I was delighted when it proved positive, but I was not delighted, I was shocked and delighted maybe, but I was mostly deeply shocked.

  If Kafka had been a woman, then Gregor Samsa would not have turned into an insect, he would not have had to. Gregor would be Gretel and she would wake up one morning pregnant. She would try to roll over and discover she was stuck on her back. She would wave her little hands uselessly in the air.

  It seems to me that I spent the next six weeks on the sofa listening to repeats of radio dramas, but my computer files record the fact that I worked, and that I also surfed the Net. I was looking for information on what happens when you get drunk in the very early stages of pregnancy, but the women on the Internet all wanted to lock expectant mothers up for drinking Diet Coke. In the chat rooms and on the noticeboards all the pregnant women talked about their pets: the cat who just knew, the dog who got upset. There was also a lot of stuff about miscarriages.

  Martin took me up the mountains to keep me fit and I nearly puked into the bog. I got stuck on one tussock and could not jump to the next. The life inside me was too delicate, and impossible and small. No jumping, no running, no sex, no driving, no drink, no laughs, no household cleaning, no possibility, however vague or unwanted, of amorous adventures, no trips to India, no cheerful leaps from one tussock to the next in the god-damn bog. I made the jump anyway and went over on my ankle. Darkness started to fall.

  The next weekend he brought me to Prague, as a surprise. There are two things in my life that I have never turned down, one is a drink and the other is an aeroplane ticket. Already, friends were starting to look askance when I stuck to water; now I sat in the departures lounge and did not want to board the plane. This intense reluctance, this exhaustion, was pregnancy. It was nine in the morning. People were running to the gates, buying newspapers, checking their boarding passes and drinking prophylactic shots of whiskey. I looked at the world around me and listened to my own blood. There was a deep note humming through me, so low that no one else could hear. It was in every part of me, swelling in my face and hands, and it felt like joy.

  The weeks when you are generally, as opposed to locally, pregnant are a mess. I put on weight in odd places. I went to the kitchen in the middle of the night to see what nameless but really specific thing I was starving for. I sat down on the floor in front of the open fridge and cried. The aisles of the supermarket were filled with other possibly pregnant women – paralysed in front of the breakfast cereals, stroking packets of organic lentils, picking up, and setting down again, a six-pack of Petits Filous. Starvation is no joke, especially when you have been eating all day. I had, in my life, managed to have every neurosis except the one about food, and now my body was having it for me.

  At ten weeks I went to the obstetrician, as if she could somehow fix what was wrong with me. We talked about postnatal depression (could I be having it already?). We talked about amniocentesis, but not much. She did not seem to realise that the child I had inside me would have to be deformed. She led me up a terrazzo staircase that smelt of school, and brought me into a dark room. ‘Right,’ she said, flicking on the light. ‘Let’s have a look.’ I was expecting stirrups, but instead I got an ultrasound. The baby was like a little bean sprout. It flicked and jumped, as though annoyed to be disturbed. She lingered, with her sonic pen, as though this sight amazed her every time. It was all too much to bear. I said, ‘It looks a bit disgusting,’ and she said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ as though she knew I was just shamming.

  All of a sudden I was going to have a baby. The fact of my pregnancy was as real and constant to me as a concrete block in the middle of the room, but I still did not know what it meant. A baby. A baby! I had to realise this many times: first with a premonition, then with a shock. I had to realise it slowly, and I had to realise the joy. After the ultrasound, it came to me all in a clatter and I walked home, roaring it out in my head. That night we went out to tell my parents. My mother said very little but, every time I looked at her, she looked five years younger, and then five years younger again. She was fundamentally, metabolically pleased. She was pleased all the way through, as I was pregnant all the way through.

  I spent the next six months remembering and forgetting again, catching up with what my body already knew. The world senses this gap. It seemed like everyone was trying to persuade me into this baby, as though they had made a great investment in me, and didn’t trust me to take care of it. Out of badness, I did my best to drink (and failed) and took an occasional cigarette. This made one woman, a practical stranger, burst into tears. I wondered what her mother was like.

  A pregnant woman is public property. I began to feel like a bus with ‘Mammy’ on the front – and the whole world was clambering on. Four women in a restaurant cheered when I ordered dessert. A friend went into a prolonged rage with me, for no reason at all. Everyone’s unconscious was very close to their mouth. Whatever my pregnant body triggered was not social, or political, it was animal and ancient and quite helpless. It was also most unfair. Another friend showed me a pair of baby’s shoes and said, ‘Look, look!’ He said that in prison, they show little shoes to child molesters to make them realise how small and vulnerable their victims were. He did not seem to notice that he had put pregnant women and child molesters in the same category, as if we both needed to be told what we were.

  Perhaps he was right. A pregnant woman does not know what she is. She has been overtaken. She feels sick but she is not sick, she lives underwater, where there are no words. The world goes funny on her; it is accusing when she is delighted, and applauds when she feels like shit.

  People without children went, without exception, a little mad. People who had children succumbed to a cherishing nostalgia. I began to enter into the romance of their lives, and see them as they must have been, newly married perhaps, and in love; dreaming of the future that they were living now. Pregnancy is a non-place, a suspension, a holiday from our fallible and compromised selves. There is no other time in a woman’s life when she is so supported and praised and helped and loved. Though perhaps it is not ‘she’ who gets all the attention, but ‘they’; this peculiar, mutant, double self – motherandchild.

  I looked in the mirror. I had a body out of Rouault, big thick slabs of flesh, painted on stained glass. I was an amazement to myself, a work of engineering, my front cantilevered out from the solid buttress of my backside. Every night now, there was a ritual of wonder as we measured the bump. From week to week I felt my body shift into different cycles, like some slow-motion, flesh-based washing machine. ‘Oh. Something else is happening now.’ In the middle of January I surfaced, quite suddenly. I realised that the strenuous work was done, the baby was somehow ‘made’, all it had to do now was grow.

  I have no idea why the first stages of pregnancy, when the child is so tiny, should be the most exhausting. I suppose you are growing your own cells before you start on theirs. Your blood volume goes up by 30 pe
r cent, so your bone marrow is working, your very bone marrow is tired. It is as if you planted a seed and then had to build a field to grow it in. When that was over, everything, for me, was pure delight. If someone sold the hormones you get in the second trimester of pregnancy, I would become a junkie. I cycled everywhere, walked at a clip, fell asleep between one heartbeat and the next. I started dreaming again, vivid, intense, learning dreams. I was breast-feeding a blue-eyed girl and it was easy. I was in labour and it was easy – the child that slithered out was small and as hot as a childhood dream of wetting the bed; she was the precise temperature of flesh. Some of the dreams were funny, many were completely filthy. I had 30 per cent more blood in my body and, as far as I could tell, it was all going to the one place. Another thing the books don’t tell you.

  The child was still hiding. The days ticked inexorably past. I did not feel like an animal, I felt like a clock, one made of blood and bone, that you could neither hurry nor delay. At four and a half months, right on cue, it started to chime. Butterflies. A kick.

  The child leapt in my womb. Actually, the child leaps in the womb all day long, but it takes time for the womb to realise it. You wait for the first kick but, like the first smile, the early versions are all ‘just wind’. The first definite kick (which coincided with the discovery of the first, definite pile, a shock severe enough to send a surge of adrenalin through any child) was wonderful. My body had been blind, and I barely comprehending; I had begun to long for a sign, a little something in return. The first kick is the child talking back to you, a kind of softening up. I began to have ideas about this baby, even conversations with it, some of which, to my great embarrassment, took place out loud.