Making Babies Read online

  We turn to Sterne to find glee, envy, all those ravening eighteenth-century emotions, transmuted by language into delight. Shandy quotes Ambrose Paraeus on the stunting effect of the nursing breast on a child’s nose, particularly those ‘organs of nutrition’ that have ‘firmness and elastic repulsion’. These were ‘the undoing of the child, inasmuch as his nose was so snubb’d, so rebuff’d, so rebated, and so refrigerated thereby, as never to arrive ad mensuram suam legitimam’. What was needed was a soft, flaccid breast so that, ‘by sinking into it . . . as into so much butter, the nose was comforted, nourish’d, plump’d up, refresh’d, refocillated, and set a growing for ever’.

  This was still when ‘breast’ was a common, easy word. Men placed their hands on their breasts, had pistols pointed at them, and were in general so set to a-swelling and a-glowing as to put the girls to shame. There is a distinction between ‘breast’ and ‘breasts’, of course, but it is still charming to think that this seat of honesty and sentiment is the singular of a plural that provoked desire. As if, in modern terms, we got horny watching someone’s eyes fill with tears. As, indeed, sometimes, we do.

  No. The milk surprises me, above all, because it hurts as it is let down, and this foolish pain hits me at quite the wrong times. The reflex is designed to work at the sight, sound, or thought of your baby – which is spooky enough – but the brain doesn’t seem to know what a baby is, exactly, and so tries to make you feed anything helpless, or wonderful, or small. So I have let down milk for Russian submariners and German tourists dying on Concorde. Loneliness and technology get me every time, get my milk every time. Desire, also, stabs me not in the heart but on either side of the heart – but I had expected this. What I had not expected was that there should be some things that do not move me, that move my milk. Or that, sometimes, I only realise that I am moved when I feel the pain. I find myself lapsed into a memory I cannot catch, I find myself trying to figure out what it is in the room that is sad or lovely – was it that combination of words, or the look on his face? – what it is that has such a call on my unconscious attention, or my pituitary, or my alveolar cells.

  There is a part of me, I have realised, that wants to nurse the stranger on the bus. Or perhaps it wants to nurse the bus itself, or the tree I see through the window of the bus, or the child I once was, paying my fare on the way home from school. This occasional incontinence is terrifying. It makes me want to shout – I am not sure what. Either, Take it! or, Stop! If the world would stop needing then my body would come back to me. My body would come home.

  I could ask (in a disingenuous fashion) if this is what it is like to be bothered by erections. Is this what it is like to be bothered by tears? Whatever – I think we can safely say that when we are moved, it is some liquid that starts moving: blood, or milk, or salt water. I did not have a very tearful pregnancy, mostly because we don’t have a television. Pregnant women cry at ads for toilet tissue: some say it is the hormones, but I think we have undertaken such a great work of imagining, we are prone to wobble on the high wire. Of course, the telly has always been a provoker of second-hand tears as well as second-hand desire. Stories, no matter how fake, produce a real biological response in us, and we are used to this. But the questions my nursing body raises are more testing to me. Do we need stories in order to produce emotion, or is an emotion already a story? What is the connection, in other words, between narrative and my alveolar cells?

  I suspect, as I search the room for the hunger by the fireplace, or the hunger in her cry, that I have found a place before stories start. Or the precise place where stories start. How else can I explain the shift from language that has happened in my brain? This is why mothers do not write, because motherhood happens in the body, as much as the mind. I thought childbirth was a sort of journey that you could send dispatches home from, but of course it is not – it is home. Everywhere else now, is ‘abroad’.

  A child came out of me. I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing.

  Damn.

  Nine Months

  Day One: Ah

  Development (the baby)

  I WAKE UP to the sound of my baby saying, ‘Ah.’ It is the morning after she was born. ‘Ah.’ She says it clear and true. This is her voice. It sounds slightly surprised at itself. It certainly surprises me. ‘Ah.’ There she goes again.

  Perhaps it is a reflex, the way this baby will stride across the sheet when you set her feet on the bed. She already knows how to talk, but it will be some months before she stops teasing me, and does it again.

  We are born knowing everything.

  Regression (me)

  I wake up to the sound of my baby saying, ‘Ah.’ It is the morning after she was born. ‘Ah.’ She says it clear and true. This is her voice. It sounds slightly surprised at itself. It certainly surprises me. ‘Ah.’ There she goes again.

  She should be crying, but she is talking instead; experimenting with this sound that comes out of her mouth. The womb is so silent. And of course. Of course! It is obvious! I have given birth to a perfect child.

  I look into the cot and watch for a while. Then I decide that I must have another baby immediately.

  You see, I never believed, until just this moment, that I could do this, that it could be done. Now I know that it is true – something as simple as sex can make something as complicated as a baby, a real one, and I think, What a great trick! and I wonder, How soon? How soon can we do the impossible again?

  It is now the end of June. With a bit of luck we can start again in the middle of August. We could have another one by . . . next May. Allow three months for trying and failing – latest, I’ll be in labour again by August of next year. Which means that I’ll have to write that novel in five months, proofs at Christmas, to rush for publication late spring, and then, pop, another baby! Perfect. It all fits. I have to ring Martin and tell him this. I pick up the mobile phone he has left for me by the bedside and I dial a three. I cancel and try a six. I cancel again. I can’t remember our phone number.

  Usually, it takes me three years to write a book, but that’s no problem: I can make babies, for heaven’s sake, novels are a doddle. Look, it is all there in my head. I can flick through the pages and know the shape of it: I can relish the tone.

  The novel is in my head but the phone number is not in my head. I look around the room and have a think. It’s in my file – of course it is. There: just under my name. I follow the numbers with my finger and dial.

  I used to be good at numbers. My brain must have been reconfigured during the night, somehow. I had heard that motherhood makes you stupid, maybe this is what they meant. Never mind, I can always use a phone book. I can do anything. I can conceive a child in the middle of November, say the 12th or 13th – Is that mid-week? It would probably be more relaxed if I ovulated at a weekend. I must ask Martin to get down the calendar.

  He answers the phone.

  The First Month: Dream-time

  Development (the baby)

  We dream, in our first weeks, more than at any other time in our lives. More than all the rest of our dreams over the whole span of our days. Constant dreaming. I wonder if she knows that she is awake. She opens her eyes and the world is there, she closes them and it is still there – or something very like it: the long shift of light and darkness that is week one, week two, week three. The landscape of her mother’s breast. The earthquake of her mother’s rising out of bed. The noise of it all.

  Two faces. Two people grinning, singing, cooing, calling to her. They gaze into her eyes – but deep into her eyes and they do not look away. They smile – a massive break in the O of the face. Hello. Yes. Hello. Something blanks out in her head and she turns away.

  Overload. Shut-down.

  Regression (me)

  I never feel her skin. She is always dressed – another vest, another babygro, always snowy white, then yello
wing at the neck from crusted milk. I change her all the time, but bit by bit. I change the nappy and then the vest. Nothing will persuade me to give her a bath. She has no fat yet, under this skin of hers. So much of what we think of as skin, the pleasure of it, the way it runs under our fingers, is actually fat. Merciful, sweet fat.

  I was looking forward to the softness of her, and I thought her skin would look so new. But it looks as though it belongs to someone who has been in the bath too long. It is too thin. Seven layers of cells, that is what I remember from school – our surface is seven cells thick. But I think she has only three or four. I think she has only one. It is not so much a skin, as a glaze.

  At the weekend, in my parents’ house, my mother quite tactfully clears the room. Just in time. I weep like someone who has been in a car crash. I weep like someone who has woken up from a dream, to find that is all true, after all.

  ‘Have a good cry,’ says my mother, for the first time in twenty-five years. She too, at last, on home ground.

  The Second Month

  Development (the baby)

  The books (the books!) say that her hands will uncurl this month, but they have always been open. Open and large and long. On the day she was born, her father looked at them and said, in a deeply regretful way, ‘You know we’re going to have to get a piano, now.’

  She lies on her back on the white bed, wearing a white babygro, and she twists her hands slowly in front of her face; utterly graceful. She does it when there is music playing, looking very ancient, and centred, and Chinese.

  She still sleeps, most of the time.

  The baby wakes with a yelp of hunger, and she goes for the breast like a salty old dog. ‘Aaarh,’ goes her mouth, as she roots to one side. ‘Aaarh.’ She turns away from it to fill a nappy – which is serious work, of permanently uncertain outcome, or so it seems to her; always surprising, and bravely undertaken.

  ‘Oh, good girl!’

  We squeak toys on her tummy and smile, before she blanks out, or closes her eyes to sleep again. And then one day, she does not blank out. She smiles.

  Regression (me)

  I am still not walking so well and the blood is an absolute nuisance. I look up the Internet to try and find someone who knows when this is supposed to stop, but it’s all about joy and despair, it’s all feeding and postnatal depression and not a single thing about leakage, seepage, anaemia. Never mind.

  In the first weeks, some book tells me, I am supposed to take three baths a day. Hah! I run a bath and the water goes cold before I have a chance to get into it. I sit in a bath and then lurch like a big wet cow out of the bath, carefully, carefully over the tiles, to run to the baby. What does the baby want? We are all agreed that this is a very contented baby, but it seems, all the same, that ten minutes away from this contented baby is one minute too many. Here, darling, here’s your big, wet Ma.

  Actually I don’t mind the bath so much, a quick dip is fine, I don’t really need clean hair. I can’t go out anyway, because my feet are still too big for all my shoes, except for one pair of floppy, disgusting sneakers. I don’t mind that either. If I made a list of the things I cannot do, it would start and finish with going to the toilet. I never thought of going to the toilet as a fundamental human right, but I do now. It should be in some UN Charter, the opportunity and the privacy, the biological ability to go to the toilet. No one mentions this on the Internet. They talk about sex instead. Sex. Crikey.

  At the recommended time, we try a bit of sex. It’s a wasteland down there. Women are awful liars. I do not think of all the women who gave birth in pain any more, I think of all the women who conceived in pain; the Irish families with eleven months between one child and the next. Did they feel the way I do, now – and then get pregnant again? No wonder they didn’t tell us anything – those lowered voices in the kitchen when I was a child. Welcome to the big secret – it hurts.

  But I really cannot believe that it hurts like this for everyone. Maybe I am too old. Maybe it is the fact that I have very loose joints. I think it isn’t the tissue that hurts so much as the bones.

  I don’t know. I have never heard anyone discussing how long the pain is supposed to last. So I draw upon however many ghastly generations of suffering have preceded me and when I go back for my check-up, I smile hugely and say that everything is fine, wonderful, marvellous. I don’t want to piss on the parade, and besides, it is true: I am extravagantly happy – messy, creaky, bewildered, exhausted, and in pain, but happy, hopeful, and immensely refreshed by it all.

  Meanwhile, Martin is still on paternity leave and I can sleep. I have a talent for it. I doze, I nap, I snooze. I have no problem doing this. For the first time in months, I have an easy dream life – it seems my unconscious has relaxed. If the baby cries, on the other hand, I shoot up in the bed like an electrocuted corpse. Never mind the empty husk of your discarded body – pregnancy doesn’t stop once they are out. I am still attached to this baby, I still feed myself in order to feed her. The only difference is the distance between us, now – all that space and air to get through. Air that she can suck in, and then exhale.

  The baby cries. She cries on Saturday and also on Sunday. She does not take a break on Sunday night. And on Monday morning she cries again. We become acquainted with the long reaches of the night.

  There are two, exactly opposite, ways to describe all this, and so I start to train myself in. The baby is a happy baby, I say, and lo! it is true. If I said the opposite, then this would become true instead. The baby is cranky, we will never sleep again – I would spiral downwards and the baby (the family! the house!) would be dragged down with me. So the baby is a happy baby because we have no other option, and the more we say it, the more true it becomes.

  Besides. Look.

  Such a beautiful, beautiful baby.

  Once, maybe twice a day, I get an image of terrible violence against the baby. Like a flicker in the corner of my eye, it lasts for a quarter of a second, maybe less. Sometimes it is me who inflicts this violence, sometimes it is someone else. Martin says it is all right – it is just her astonishing vulnerability that works strange things in my head. But I know it is also because I am trapped, not just by her endless needs, but also by the endless, mindless love I have for her. It is important to stay on the right side of a love like this. For once, I am glad I am an older mother. I don’t panic. I put a limit on the images that flash across my mind’s eye. I am allowed two per day, maybe three. If I get more than that, then it’s off to the doctor for the happy pills. Shoes or no shoes.

  The Third Month

  Development (the baby)

  The baby cries for three days, on and off, and then she does something new, or she does a number of new things, all at once. She starts to grab and she also discovers her mouth, running her tongue around her lips. Or she finds her toes and starts to babble, both at the same time. The crying stops.

  I wonder what was happening, for those three days? Waking up and crying, or turning and crying – seeing, reaching, scrabbling and suddenly setting up a wail. Brain fever. Hints and premonitions. Her mind is pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. There is something she must do, and she does not know what it is. Something is within reach, and she does not know what it might be. She has never done any of this before, and yet she knows that she has to do it. The shift and pressure of it must be huge. And then, all of a sudden, she breaks through. Not only ‘habwabwa’ but also toes! Not only this, but the other thing!

  So that’s what it was. What a relief.

  Babies always know they have achieved something. They are naturally proud of themselves. She has a new expression every day now. Her worried look is more worried, her smile is slow, and complex, and huge.

  Regression (me)

  Somewhere in this month I realise that the baby will live, that when I wake up she will still be breathing.

  From one day to the next, she changes from a tiny, mewling creature into the proper baby she is. All those old-fashioned words now ap
ply: bonny, dandle, gurgle, dimple, posset. I give in to my stubbornly large feet, and buy new shoes.

  I walk the streets of Dublin with the baby in a sling and everyone smiles at me and at my child. ‘Isn’t he lovely?’ they say, assuming, for some reason, it is a boy. A man leans towards me on the bus. ‘It’s very hot,’ he says. ‘I have some water, ma’am, if you’d like to sponge the baby down.’

  At home, Martin puts on her babygro, limb by tiny limb. ‘Where did Napoleon put his armies?’ he says. ‘In his sleevies!’

  I watch them and think how impossible it all is. I cannot see how this baby will grow into a person, any old person – a person like you, or me, or your boss, or that middle-aged woman in the street. I cannot see where it all goes.

  The Fourth Month

  Development (the baby)

  The baby is becoming herself. Every day she is more present to us. A personality rises to the surface of her face, like a slowly developing Polaroid. She frowns for the first time, and it looks quite comical – the deliberate, frowny nature of her frown.

  Or maybe she is disappearing. There was something so essential about her when she was just a tiny scrap: something astonishing and tenacious and altogether herself.

  The baby disappears into her own personality. She gets rounder. Her features begin to look strangely confined, like a too-small mask in the middle of her big, round face.

  It is now that babies look like Queen Victoria or Winston Churchill, or anyone fat, and British, and in charge. She is most imperious when her father picks her up. She sits in his arms and looks over at me as if to say, So who are you?

  Regression (me)

  The baby sits in her father’s arms and looks over at me, like I am a stranger, walked in off the street. Oh, that blank stare. It makes me laugh, and go over to her, and take her back from him.