Making Babies Read online

  A hundred renditions of the witch-in-the-supermarket story later, I hit on the key. I was away at the time – does she remember? She certainly does. She remembers that I was in Paris. What was I doing in there? she suddenly asks, Was I frightened? Was I watching the fireworks, too?

  ‘I was,’ I say, and once I am placed in the picture – somewhere on the other side of the fireworks – the story is allowed to fade. But she is still obsessed by witches, which is presumably, somehow, my fault – also bad fairies and wicked stepmothers. There are no nice women in the old stories. Though one morning she announces a dream – a good dream. What was it about?

  ‘Barbie,’ she says, looking very coy.

  ‘Oh? And what was Barbie doing?’

  ‘She was reading me a book.’

  Which is one of the things that I do, of course – my tendency to interpret the child mocked by an image of myself as a six-foot plastic toy. And maybe it is not all a drama of good mother / bad mother, maybe she was just angling for a Barbie and knows how much I’d love to know what happens in her dreams. She is two. She has – perhaps they all have – a delicious mind.

  She has a quality, sometimes, when she is tired. Her eyes become distant, and slightly blissed. She looks at you strangely, as though she has been here before.

  I am heavily pregnant and under the shower. We are alone in the house, and I think, What would happen if I fell? Would she be able to fetch the phone? I can see it all: the gravid woman, wedged into the bath, the water playing on her senseless belly, the toddler bereft, the time passing; all this flashing through my mind in a moment, while she tilts her face up to me, and says, ‘Don’t fall.’

  Or I am going up the stairs with her in my arms. I think, I must ring my mother and she says, ‘Does Granny have stairs?’

  They are so tiny and inconsequential, these coincidences of mind. They always surprise me, even though they are not so surprising – after all, for most of the time we live the same life – and I begin to build a little wall against my Midwich Cuckoo. Some of my thoughts are so unbecoming. I catch myself and think, ‘I hope she didn’t get that one.’

  All of this is very slight, you understand, and nothing you could absolutely put a finger on. It never involves a future event, but when she talks about someone, I might ring them, just to check that they are still alive. They always are.

  I tell her about her Granny and Granda, how they met at a dance, in a hotel by the sea. She says, ‘Was I watching?’

  I am tempted to say, ‘I don’t know.’

  What else?

  She is very bossy about the world. She is always putting it in its place and sometimes there is very little difference between ordering it, and ordering it around. ‘Cars don’t go into houses, they are too big.’ ‘That car [a convertible] has no lid.’ ‘Cars have roofs and motor bikes have helmets.’

  Yes,’ I say to all this. I have to say, Yes, or she will repeat it ad infinitum. ‘Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yes.’

  For months we were trapped in a kind of Beckettian rhapsody, as she tried to make the world safe. From the back seat:

  ‘Mama, cars don’t go into houses, do they?’

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘No, they certainly don’t, they’re too big.’

  ‘And they don’t go on the path.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They go on the road.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘People go on the path.’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely.’

  ‘Where’s it gone?’

  ‘Where’s what gone?’

  ‘Where’s the street light gone?’

  ‘It’s behind us.’

  ‘But where’s it gone?’

  ‘We’ll see another one.’

  ‘But where’s it gone?’

  ‘Oh, take it easy.’

  It happens on the same stretch of road – she always grieves the disappearing street lights: the way they keep coming, only to flick away.

  It was around here that I once said, ‘I used to work over there, before you were born.’

  ‘When I was a baby.’

  ‘No, before that. Before you were born.’

  ‘When I was just a teeny-tiny baby?’

  ‘No, before you were even here. Before you were in my tummy.’

  ‘I was . . . Where.’

  ‘You were just a twinkle in your Daddy’s eye.’

  ‘I not a twinkle. I NOT a twinkle!!!’ And she started to kick and squawk. I suppose I did sound a little smug; a little complacent about the idea that she was once non-existent. Too tough, really, for any age, but especially tough for two.

  Her favourite story is Sleeping Beauty. But only recently. Fairy tales happened in the last few weeks, at the end of ‘two’ and the beginning of ‘nearly three’, because ‘two’ is a very long place. She started the year obsessed by gender, moved into a long toilet phase, and ended with witches, princesses, and sleep. But also in there were numbers, which gave her huge pleasure, as did all kinds of repetition and ritual and make-believe. There was also the endless amusement to be got from ordering her parents around and giving them grief.

  ‘Not the blue cup with the straw.’

  ‘I thought you wanted a straw.’

  ‘I don’t want a straw.’

  ‘Do you want the blue cup?’

  ‘I don’t want a straw.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I don’t want a straw!’

  And so on, all the way to wails, screams, tears. Of course the dialogue is edited to make me look like a saint, which I am not. (‘The cup goes in the bin. All right? The cup – see this cup? – it’s going in the bin.’) Months of attrition later I realise that the best thing to do is to become benignly invisible. If I can manage simply not to exist, there is no escalation.

  She is only two.

  Though sometimes, I am two, too.

  And when she has done every single, possible thing to provoke, thwart, whine, refuse, baulk, delay, complicate and annoy, I wonder how the human race survived.

  ‘I’ll swing for you,’ I heard myself saying once. Which is Irish for ‘I will kill you and take the consequences.’

  She is two. She is only two.

  There is nothing better than watching her play shopping. When she walks across the room to the ‘shops’ she does not so much walk as ‘walk’ with an exaggeration of hip and heel that says, ‘Here I am “walking” to the shops.’ She hums to the rhythm of it. Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk.

  All her inverted commas are huge, and even in ordinary conversation she will sometimes use an ‘other’ voice; fake wise, or fake grown-up, with much use of the word ‘actually’. As in, ‘That looks like a duck, actually.’

  There is a place on the wall where she gets things, like broccoli, or sweets, or water. She runs over to the wall and goes, ‘Ssszzsst,’ rolling and twiddling her hands in a ‘complicated’ way. Then she runs back from the wall with my imaginary cup of tea.

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  Her anxiety about the baby that is on the way brings back all kinds of eating games. ‘Gobble gobble nyum nyum,’ she says, ‘I am eating your arm.’ She does not like it so much when I eat her back. ‘Nyum nyum, scarf scarf gobble nyum.’ She runs to her special place on the wall and takes down bits of herself, which she sticks along her arm, and pats back into place. She is getting her real arm back, she says. I have just eaten her pretend one.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, thinking, as I often do, that she is an outrageously wonderful child. Sometimes, of course, she is just outrageous.

  She is two.

  ‘Can I be two?’ I say, and have a pretend tantrum on the floor. Just a small one. I lie on my back and drum my heels. She doesn’t like the look of this at all.

  It is a very long year. When November comes I miss the child October gave us, that paradise, when I was only moderately pregnant and potty training had not yet begun. And I miss the baby, just walking, who looked at the bl
ack and yellow stripes of the Kilkenny hurling team and said, ‘Bees! Bees!’

  This is the girl who was entranced by every flying thing, who followed a plane across the sky in her Granny’s back garden and never took her eyes away once, whose first or second word may have been ‘bird’, whose first big word was ‘helicopter’, who can already tell a hoverfly from a bee (but not a bee from a wasp), and a tweet-tweet birdie from one that goes caw-caw. This is the girl who got ‘a moth’ from Santa Claus for Christmas. She is also, of course, fond of woodlice, but give her a glider, a kite, a cloud, a woman under a parachute, a fairy, or a balloon, and she will choose them over a slug or snail any day. She is close to the ground, which might be the reason that she is always looking up, but the reason she loves butterflies is the reason she likes the mirror and also the reason that she likes hands: it is that one side is the same as the other side, and nothing has given her greater joy, I think, than folding a piece of paper over some splashes of paint, and opening a Rorschach of complete delight. It is always a butterfly, because this is the best thing it could be, and other things that mirror and match are butterflies too.

  ‘A bum is like a butterfly,’ she said once.

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  The first play she ever went to was about bees and, when the actors gave her a set of paper wings, she declared into the stillness of the audience, ‘I can fly.’

  Of Christ on the Cross she says, ‘Are they wings?’ and I say, ‘No, darling, those are His arms.’

  ‘When I was a little baby’ she says, wrestling with the idea of growing up, now that there is another baby in Mammy’s tummy.

  ‘When I was a little baby,’ she says (because these things are always said twice), ‘I used to say “pine-a-cacket”.’

  ‘And what do you say now?’

  ‘I say, “pineapple”.’

  We are both amused by this. We are both fond of her former self. Now she is a big girl, she looks with tenderness at a picture of herself newborn. ‘Look how pleased your Dada is to see you,’ I say. She looks at this for a while, and then walks over to embrace him, properly and formally. Sometimes she has astonishing emotional clarity; and I have to catch my breath at the rightness of her.

  She is nearly three. She is learning, she told me, not to cry at things. I said she could still cry at some things but she shook her head. No, she would not cry. And when she is three, she says, she will not be scared of the witch in the supermarket. It is a serious business, growing up; a heavy responsibility.

  On the Friday before her birthday, I bring a (pink!) cake into the crèche, and she asks, ‘I’m going to have a cake, even though I am still two?’ and I realise that it is not the cake, or the candles, or the party, or the presents that matter to her, so much as being three. It is a different place.

  Groundhog Day

  WHEN I WAS a child, I used to ask my mother about childbirth and how much it hurt and she would always say, ‘You know, you forget.’

  I thought she was being tactful. After all, I was the source of the pain – if you could call that emerging thing ‘me’.

  ‘But does it hurt, though? Does it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she might say, eventually. ‘But really – you forget.’

  Later I thought it was a Catholic thing, a long-suffering thing, an attempt to sucker me into the reproduction game. But there was an edge to her voice, or a distance. Was this fear, or outrage? Was it the sound of my mother lying?

  ‘How could you forget?’

  Now I know what it was. It was the push in someone’s voice when they are trying to get at the actual, real truth of something: the central paradox, you might say. And I also know what that truth is:

  You FORGET!!!

  So there I am, lying half-assed on the fully adjustable birthing bed – quite literally, because the epidural is spreading, or not spreading, from one side of me to the other, so that one leg is all tingling and the other a dead weight. Lying there, as I say, with an enormous weight bearing out of one, but not the other, side of my backside, so that it feels as though I am giving birth in segments, and all I can think is, ‘How did I forget? How COULD I forget this?! How could anyone?’

  There is something quite dispiriting about a second birth – you feel like such a fool.

  ‘Isn’t nature wonderful?’ my mother says. By which she means, Isn’t God wonderfully clever to make us all as stupid as we are?

  Of course, technically speaking, it isn’t your arse that the weight is pushing into, or out of, it isn’t your backside, so much as your frontside. So I should say ‘vagina’ or ‘birth canal’. But really – a baby rearranges your body, it shoulders your kidneys out of the way, it flattens your bladder with its head, squishes your intestines like an intemperate cook squeezing the meat out of a string of sausages; a baby obliges your legs to pop out of their sockets, and it doesn’t care whether they pop back in again once it is through – and where is all this happening? ‘Vagina’ is too small a word somehow – ‘vagina’ is just an indication of where its path might lie, ‘vagina’ is just a direction.

  I prefer ‘soft tissue’. A baby makes its way out of your body through the softest route available, and for quite a while on that fully adjustable birthing bed, I feel as though the softest route is a dead end.

  I am being enjoined to push, and I do push. I push very hard. I keep pushing. And then I push again. And for some time – seconds, or minutes, or more – I feel that all this was not a good idea: I feel it as a drowning person might feel about the inclination to go for a swim. The consequences are too huge. I am flat against the thing itself again. I am looking at the thing itself again, and the violence of it, the implacability, shocks me just as it did the last time. I think, How could I forget this? How reduced you become. And sometimes that is just great and sometimes . . . Christ.

  I do not think I can get this baby out.

  This is how people used to die.

  In the circumstances, there is something banal about the room. The door opens like an ordinary door. People come through it. First the student midwife, full of chat, then the midwife, fast and effective (it is in a hurry, this baby); she organises the epidural and then works on me, doing – I don’t know what; it feels as if someone is taking a light bulb out of a too-narrow shade. After her, the sister in charge, easy and reassuring. Then the consultant, who stares a little fixedly at the business end. Waking up. It is 3.00 a.m. Who will come in next? The master of the hospital, the Minister for Health, and then perhaps, God, as the baby puts its head out to taste the air.

  They are looking after me. And like the prayer for those in peril on the sea, I feel there should be a hymn at least for the night workers who toil through the storm of childbirth, pushing, hauling, shouting, while the rest of the world sleeps.

  ‘Push!’

  I can’t see down. I am sure that there is something they are not telling me and I am cold, all the way through. I don’t remember being cold. Was it like this before? Was it worse? This baby is bigger, perhaps. I remember all this, as it happens; and it is all completely new.

  The body has no imagination; this is why you never take a jumper with you on a warm day, just in case. The body has no memory, which is why sex is always such a surprise. The body lives in the present tense. The body makes a fool of you, every time.

  ‘Push!’

  They put me on my side for a while to save my pelvis, but that doesn’t work, so they put me on my back again, but still I feel sort of crocked and wrong – like insomnia, but magnified. I feel like that picture in Alice in Wonderland where she has grown to fill the house – I can’t get a purchase, somehow, on myself, and the baby, it seems to me, is heading in the wrong direction entirely.

  They are trying to take it easy with my pelvis because, over the last while, it has become apparent that the last birth left it all a bit . . . disjointed. As the ligaments softened with this second pregnancy, the bones started to ease away from each other, like a slowly cracking bowl. Somewhere in th
e fifth month, I sat down on the floor of the hall to untie my daughter’s shoe, and realised that I could not get up again. Also, that I would have to stay like this until her father came home, which might be in half an hour, or forty minutes – or maybe he had a meeting I had forgotten about, it could be any time at all. In fact, it was just twenty minutes, which we whiled away quite merrily, singing songs, for example, or ‘having a little chat’, until she ran up and down the hall taking off not just her shoes, but all her clothes, up to, and then including, her nappy which mercifully contained only pee. And this was all fine and really quite funny, except I couldn’t walk.

  The physiotherapist gave me some exercises which helped a lot, and I got a stretchy belt to support my pelvis which I was delighted to call a ‘truss’; and the world separated, very cleanly, into those people who are nice to you when you are in pain, and those who are not. The ways in which they are not, and the reasons why they are not, is a vastly interesting subject, but I had no time to think about it, because I was in pain. I was fine sitting in a chair but in order to walk, or climb the stairs, I had to tune people out so that they became distant and slightly distorted. Pain is a muted, and empty, and mildly paranoid place. Which is to say that you would be paranoid if you had the space for it – in the meantime, you get by on a little irritation.

  The body is an optimist: it always tells you the pain is waning, the pain is nearly gone. At this rate, you always think, it will be fine by morning. So I was always nearly better, and there was no point making a fuss. I sat down for most of the time, and promised myself that, once this was done, I would never turn down a paracetamol again.

  But it is hard to control a two-year-old without getting up out of your chair. One morning when her father is away, and I have lost my stretchy belt, and I cannot blandish, cajole, or threaten this toddler into her clothes in order to bring her down to the crèche, I go downstairs and weep loud, salt tears. I weep for twenty minutes or so and go back up to a shocked, and slightly hilarious, little girl and we ‘start again’, and it doesn’t work this time either. So I go and weep some more, and because this isn’t good for her, and I can see no end to it, I climb the stairs again and announce a change of plan. We pack a bag and get into the car and drive to my parents’ house, where there is – as you must know – a video of the Teletubbies, and we ring at the door. My mother is in her seventies, so she probably had mixed feelings when she found her middle-aged, half-mad, pregnant daughter on the doorstep, with a wired, gorgeous grandchild in tow. But she took us in, and I slept for three days.