Making Babies Page 7

  In the meantime, grass is green and springy and amazingly multiple and just itself. It might even be edible. Everything goes into her mouth. This is the taste of yellow. This is the taste of blue. Since she started moving about she has also experienced the taste of turf, of yesterday’s toast, and probably of mouse droppings, because it was weeks before I realised we were not alone in the house. Paper remains her ultimate goal, and she looks over her shoulder now to check if I am around. That wallpaper looks nice.

  I really do wish I could remember my own wallpaper, instead of just the tear I made in it. The baby sleeps in my cot now – the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel, and a fairly ingenious sliding mechanism for the side to be let down. I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside; the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. The baby sucked, her eyelashes batting slowly over a drunken, surrendered gaze, and as my attention wandered I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone.

  My mother, or someone, pulled the cot away from the wall and, in time, the wallpaper I do not remember was replaced with wallpaper that I do remember (flowers of blue, block-printed on white). Babies love pattern so much I have begun to regret my own attempts at tastefulness. Not a single curlicued carpet for her to crawl over, not a single flower on the wall. Even her toys are in primary colours and her mobile is from the Tate, cut-out shapes, like a Mondrian floating free.

  Once I stop trying, I seem to remember my mother giving out to me about the ripped-up wall. She would have been upset about the wallpaper. Perhaps this is why I remember it. It was my first real experience of ‘NO!’

  My own child thinks No! is a game. I say it once and she pauses. I say it twice and she looks at me. I say it three times and she laughs. The punch-line!

  Tasteful as it is, she loves the mobile. It has a big red circle that spins slowly to blue, and a little square that goes from black to white. There are various rectangles that don’t particularly obsess her but, taken all in all, it is the thing she likes most in the world.

  We moved when she was nearly eight months old, and it was another two weeks before I got round to stringing up the mobile for her again. When it was done, she shuddered with delight. It happened to her all in spasm. She realised, not only that the mobile was there, but also that it had once been gone. She remembered it. In order to do this she needed to see three things: the mobile in the old flat, the new room without the mobile, the new room with the mobile. Memory is not a single thing.

  Martin says that his first memory, which is of one brother breaking a blue plastic jug over another brother’s head, is false. His mother tells him that they never did have a slender, pale blue plastic jug. He thinks he dreamt about the jug, and that the dream also contained the idea that this was his first memory, as he dreamt a subsequent ‘first memory’ of people waving to him from a plane while he stood in the garden below. He was convinced for years that this was real. This makes me think that we are very young when we search for our first memory – that single moment when we entered the stream of time.

  My own mother, who is curator and container of many things, among them the memory of my pot stand, worries that she is getting forgetful. The distant past is closer all the time, she says. If this is true, then the memory of her own mother is getting stronger now; sitting in a house by the sea, surrounded by children who are variously delighted, or worried, or concentrating on other things.

  When you think about it, the pots can’t have stayed there for long. I would have pulled them down. There would have been noise, though my memory of them is notably, and utterly, silent. Perhaps what I remember is the calm before a chaos of sound and recrimination. That delicious, slow moment, when a baby goes very, very quiet, knowing it is about to be found out.

  The other morning, the baby (silently) reached the seedlings I have under the window, and she filled her mouth with a handful of hardy annuals and potting compost. I tried to prise her mouth open to get the stuff out. She clamped it shut. She bit me (by accident). She started to cry. When she cried, her mouth opened. She was undone by her own distress and this seemed so unfair to me that I left her to it. I hadn’t the heart. Besides, it said on the pack that the compost was sterilised.

  But she will not let my finger into her mouth, now, even to check for a tooth (she is very proud of her teeth), and when she clamps it shut and turns away she is saying, ‘Me,’ loud and clear. ‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know.

  Until one day there will come a moment, delightful or banal, ordinary or strange, that she will remember for the rest of her life.

  Advice

  IT IS THE middle of the morning – an ordinary morning of undressing, dressing, sterilising, mixing, spooning, wiping, squawking, smiling, banging, reaching for the bread knife, falling down, climbing up, in the middle of which – a crisis! which is dealt with in the military style: change nappy, remove shitty vest, wash hands, find clean vest, pull baby away from stairs, comfort baby when she cries for stairs, dress baby, lift shitty vest, soak shitty vest, wash hands, and finally we are out the door and into the car seat, off to the supermarket, me singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and remembering I have left the back door wide open. I am driving carefully. The sun is shining. I think, What will I tell her when she grows up? Actually I think, What if I die? What if I die, now, soon, or even later on? I am in the throes of car accidents and chemotherapy, between the first twinkle twinkle and the second twinkle twinkle. By the fourth repetition, she is trying to dress herself for school and wandering out of the house alone. Her father has disappeared from this fantasy. She is facing the wide world, and there is nothing I can do to help her. I cannot reach her, I cannot speak. I should write her a letter, but what could it say?

  Park, take the baby out of car seat, try to find keys, put the baby back in car seat, find keys, take the baby out of car seat, lock car, and so on, all the way through the coin for the trolley (leave baby down on the ground? Is that dog shit? Who would have thought there could be so much shit in the world?), I am banishing foolish thoughts. They are just the big metaphysics, swooping over our small, lovely life. I must try to live in the middle, think in a middling way, and so, as we sail along the aisles, as I keep hold of her arm while ducking down, over and over again, to pick up the half-chewed, as yet unpaid-for banana that she enjoys throwing out of the trolley, I concentrate on a simpler task. Advice. What advice can you give a child to arm and protect them in the world? I am not thinking of Don’t talk to strangers, but of the things that only I would say. This is the perk that every mother demands, somewhere along the line – to exercise her own, particular personality. Usually, let’s admit it, with disastrous results.

  Smile at the checkout, apologise for the banana, sing, ‘Do You Love an Apple,’ to keep her still in the paused trolley, search busily through my empty head, only one nugget comes to mind. Beware of modest people. They are the worst megalomaniacs of all.

  For the rest of the day (scrub out the shitty vest? No, throw out the shitty vest. Don’t tell anyone), this is the only wisdom I can find, the only sentence, Beware of modest people . . . of course it is true: Einstein, Mother Teresa, some women I know, many many nuns, a couple of poets – all so lovely, all so monstrous. You have to have a very big ego to wrestle it down to something so small. I know, I’ve tried. Beware the tender smile, my daughter, the love that saddens, the crinkly eyes . . .

  But it isn’t exactly useful, as advice goes. Not as useful as Don’t touch the oven, it is hot! which is what I spend my day saying, now. Hot! Hot! I w
ould also say, Dirty! Dirty! but I can’t be bothered. I concentrate on Careful! or Gently! or plain NO! And so it will be, for years yet. The first thousand days of her life, the whole remarkable world around her, and all that I have to say could be reduced to one phrase, Proceed . . . with caution. And for the thousand days after that? Don’t talk to strangers, of course, which is the same thing again, in a way.

  There must be more. I just can’t think of anything. I open my mouth and . . . my own mother comes falling out of it. But of course.

  She takes advice very seriously, my mother. She still doles it out on a regular basis. She is not afraid to repeat herself. She is often right – when, for example, she says to me, You should flatter people a little. You should at least try.

  I never listened to a word of it; except maybe for, If Joyce was worried about what his Mammy might say, he would never have written Ulysses (a piece of advice which she has paid for, many times since), or the excellent, Never use a big word where a small word will do. What about, Cheer up, we’ll soon be dead? Did she really say that? Of course she would deny it, now – though I still find it giddily bleak and quite useful. Cheer up, we’ll soon be dead, just one of her variations on the mother’s mantra of, All this will pass. Having the wrong pencil-case, being forced to share a desk with Brenda Dunne, losing the boy you love, In fifty years’ time you might even laugh about it (but what happens, Ma, when you run out of time?)

  Never laugh at someone’s religion, that’s a good one. Actually, what she said was, ‘If someone worships a stone in the road and you laugh at them, they will pick it up and hit you with it.’ Fair enough.

  I didn’t start arguing with her until it came to men. Never humiliate a man in public – intriguing, this one. What were you to do in private? And then again, some men are very easily humiliated. They are humiliated when you are clever, and it is hard work being stupid. They are humiliated if you flirt, or if you don’t flirt. You could spend your life tending to some man’s pride, but, There is no excuse for marrying a bastard, she said, or something like it, as if falling for the wrong man was just a lazy way to go about your life, when there were so many good men in the world. In those days, a Good Man was someone who allowed the household the use of his pay-packet, who wasn’t a drunk, and who didn’t hit you. Actually, this is probably still a good baseline. Maybe this is something I could pass on to my daughter. I could translate it as:

  Never sleep with someone who has more problems than you – 50 per cent of people fail to follow this advice, and it is vital to be in the other half. What else?

  Never trust someone beyond their strength, because – oh, my darling girl, and the million things that could hurt her; not strangers, but friends, because these are the ones who break your heart – she must arm herself against the weak more than the strong . . .

  ‘Oh, get a grip, Mother.’

  All advice is useless. Don’t wear patterns next to your face. Never plant camellias facing east. Have sex before you go out for the night, not after you come home. The things that make you fat are booze and biscuits – nothing else. What about, Earn money – my mother used to tell me to do this all the time. All right. Earn money – you must overcome the natural distaste you might feel for cash. If you dislike the system, then find a crack in it, and live there. And the simplest way to earn money is to go out and earn it. That is what is called the (middle-class) Tao of money.

  I didn’t listen to that either.

  And look at this baby, just look at her – with her steady baby’s gaze; her serious baby’s eyes that have some joke in them all the same, as she putters towards the plastic shopping bags.

  ‘No!’ I shout, and when she cries I say, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right.’

  Proceed with caution.

  Actually, most of the time I don’t know what ‘No’ is for. Mind the door, mind the books don’t fall, mind your fingers, hot!, careful of the cup, don’t touch the dirt. After one particularly long day, I decided against it. It was making me depressed. So I left her to her own devices for a while, and we all cheered up.

  The Sioux, Martin tells me, let their babies learn everything for themselves: fall into the river, fall into the fire, anything. But children are quite careful, really.

  And what does she say to me?

  ‘Burr!’ says the baby, pointing at the sky.

  Look at the bird, Mama. This is my baby’s advice to me. Look at the bird!

  Being Two

  ‘I’M TWO,’ SHE says, standing on the bathroom scales. And indeed there it is on the dial, the nice, round-topped, swoop and swan of ‘2’. She is fond of being two. She is nearly three. Her new little brother is only zero with a few silly bits added on. He is not even a proper number yet.

  ‘So how’s it all going?’

  I want to tell people about her, but I want to tell them everything about her, because there is nothing else. The proper maternal mode is gabble. The proper maternal instrument is the phone. We are all a Jewish joke.

  ‘She can read! She read her name on her birthday card!’

  ‘And what about the number?’

  ‘No problem. Twenty-one.’

  And I want to tell them nothing about her. She is a child, she must not be described. She must be kept fluid and open; not labelled or marked. I could say that she is playful, open, stubborn, bossy, winsome, serious, giddy, boisterous, clinging, gorgeous – but these are words that describe every single two-year-old on the planet, they are not the essence of herself, the thing that will always be there. Describing a child is a matter of prediction or nostalgia. There is no present moment. You are always trying to grasp something that changes even as you look at it. Besides, all children are the same, somehow. And still I know she is different from the general run of toddlers. How do I know? I just do. And if you think I am biased, this is what other people have said about her:

  ‘There’s no doubt about it, she is a fabulous child.’

  Donal Enright, Grandfather.

  ‘I have to say I never met a more interesting, or nicer, two-year-old.’

  Theo Dombrowski, a friend.

  ‘She is very advanced for two, and I should know – I am an educational psychologist.’

  Stranger (possibly mad), in the foyer of a West Cork hotel.

  ‘Oh, all her geese are swans,’ my mother used to say about boastful mothers.

  In the old days – as we call the 1970s, in Ireland – a mother would dispraise her child automatically. I understand this urge: you don’t want a toddler to get the edge on you, especially when you are trying to get them past a shop full of sweets; so ‘She’s a monkey,’ a mother might say, or ‘Street angel, home devil,’ or even my favourite, ‘She’ll have me in an early grave.’

  It was all part of growing up in a country where praise of any sort was taboo. Of course we are nicer now, we are more confident and positive and relaxed – which does not explain the strange urge I had when a man looked at her photograph. ‘Such lovely eyes,’ he said, and I said, ‘Oh, they’re all right,’ or something even worse. It is true that I felt acutely, burningly praised, but I also felt the deep hiss of a mother who reaches out her hand to say, Give me back my baby.

  People don’t write much about their children. Sometimes they say it is to protect the child’s privacy – but I am not sure how private a ten-year-old feels, for example, about a picture of his two-year-old self, or how connected. I think it is simpler than that. I think people don’t want to write about their children because they think that, if they do, their children might die. And that’s just for starters. I think they do not want to surrender any part of their children, certainly not for money, and particularly not to a crowd.

  So this is just a mock-up. It is not the real girl at all.

  ‘You have a smelly bum.’

  ‘Go away. Go smell your own bum.’

  ‘I can’t smell my bum. I can’t get my face around.’

  She already loves a paradox, and most of them are anatomical.
‘A shark has a long nose so he can’t see his mouth,’ she says (well, you know what she means). Which reminds me, I must get her Alice in Wonderland, though:

  ‘That’s me,’ she said, a while ago.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In that car.’

  ‘Oh. You’re in that car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I going to my house.’

  ‘Where is your house? What kind of house?’

  ‘It has a yellow door.’

  ‘Oh.’

  After a while, I say, ‘And what is your name?’

  ‘Alice,’ she says.

  This spooked me no end. She is not called Alice, and we do not have a yellow (or lello) door. I thought she was having a past-life regression, there in the back of the car – well, I didn’t really, but sometimes I wish I was that bit more credulous. Then later, in the bath, she was all talk of rabbits and my-ears-and-whiskers, and I realised that she had heard, or seen, her first ever Alice in Wonderland.

  Fantastic. The rabbit went down the plug hole, in the end.

  Her father must have been away if I was giving her a bath – these more intriguing dialogues happen when her ordinary life is unbalanced in some way.

  ‘I love him,’ she says, pointing at the picture of the author on the back of one of her books. Colin McNaughton, he is called – a very pleasant, handsome-looking guy. I have to admire her taste, though the writer thing is a bit unsettling. Never fall for a writer, I want to say. Never, ever, ever make that mistake.

  Instead I say, ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. Because my Dada is away.’

  This is nothing (I flatter myself) to the anxiety she feels when her mother is away. Endlessly recounted is the story of the witch in the supermarket, last Hallowe’en. A woman in a mask who came up and, I presume, cackled at her while she was sitting in the trolley and then, when the child started to cry, took off the witch’s mask to show that she was only a nice person underneath. Silly bitch. I think taking the mask off made it worse, but there you go; I suppose it’s too late to sue. Later that evening, she stood with her father in the dark, watching the local fireworks from an upstairs window. When I came home, there were spent rockets in the flower-beds.