I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  ‘And I love it,’ said Josh.

  Lou

  1 March, 2011

  My baby looks like Len.

  She’s a tiny, hours-old girl who looks like my arsehole father-in-law wrapped in a pink-and-blue-striped blanket.

  That’s what Lou was thinking in the surreal small hours of the first day, lying in the half-dark of the maternity ward, with the background soundtrack of shuffling feet and whimpering newborns, beeping machines and the occasional muffled sob of a shell-shocked woman.

  Little Len. Look at you.

  How typical that the most troublesome member of the family also apparently had the strongest genes.

  Josh had gone home an hour before and Lou was on the semi-elevated hospital bed, trying to lie on her side so she could watch this new baby sleeping and snuffling in a see-through plastic crib next to her head.

  Moving wasn’t easy. Lou’s body felt like it had been pulled inside out, everything was aching, she appeared to be wearing a giant nappy and exhaustion felt like a literal weight on her shoulders, pushing her down. And still, she couldn’t sleep, which was what the midwife had advised her to do ‘while you can’.

  How strange this was, that this helpless little person was ‘hers’ – or, rather, theirs. And that, eventually, she and Josh would be taking her home, back to the Erskineville unit, to sleep in a basket next to their bed. This tiny little thing who would literally die without them. It barely seemed legal.

  They couldn’t agree on a name. Lou wanted Stella, just because it was a name that she had always loved. Josh wanted Rose, because Rose had been his nan, his mum’s mum, and she was a woman who’d always been there for Josh when he was a confused little boy.

  Lou thought that was all very nice but not a good enough reason for a namesake.

  They’d decided to wait and see what she looked like – not that they’d known their baby was a she. They both agreed they liked surprises and Lou had also enjoyed being at the ultrasound check-ups and telling the sonographer that neither of them wanted to know. Look how compatible we are.

  But this morning a baby girl had fought her way out of Lou, looking like Len, not Rose, but certainly a tangible being of her own with round brown eyes. And still they didn’t know what to call her. She was here, with no name. The midwives and doctors were calling her ‘Baby’ and Lou ‘Mum’.

  ‘How’s Mum?’ and ‘If Mum would just like to turn over . . .’ and ‘Does Mum need any more pain relief?’

  ‘I’m Lou,’ Lou had said three times today.

  And the midwives had smiled, and called her ‘Mum’ again.

  Baby opened her eyes a crack and let out a panting little mewl, and Lou’s stomach flipped. What was wrong?

  Lou pulled herself into a more upright sitting position – ouch, ouch – and peered over the edge of the crib.

  Another mewl, a little arm moving.

  Lou looked around. There was another bed in the room, but there was no-one in it. The sliding door to the wider ward was half open; the corridor looked quiet.

  Was she allowed to just pick her daughter up?

  Lou’s head felt like it was full of thick, murky slime. Thoughts had to wade through the sludgy mess to make it to clarity. She was allowed to pick her baby up, right? And try to feed her like the nurses had shown her?

  Baby inhaled and let out a big, squawking wail. And another. Uh-oh. Lou suddenly felt fear. There was something wrong. And she didn’t know what to do. Of course she didn’t.

  She looked around for the button to press when you needed someone to come. She could just reach it without having to twist. Lou kept her thumb on it for a while, as Baby wailed beside her, until a young midwife appeared at the sliding door.

  ‘My baby’s crying!’ said Lou. It came out more like a plea.

  Lou could have sworn the midwife stifled a smile as she came over to the bed. ‘Let’s have a look at Baby, shall we?’ she said brightly.

  And she scooped up Lou’s daughter with palpable confidence, tucked her blanket back around her and looked up at Lou. ‘Are you comfortable, Mum?’ the young woman asked her. ‘Might be time to have another try with the feeding.’

  Then the young midwife passed Baby to Lou, whose mind went completely blank. What was she was meant to do with her? The baby was yelling as loudly as a tiny baby could and her face was scrunched up in fury.

  ‘Just try to put her on,’ said the midwife, who was nodding at Lou’s chest at the same time as shoving a pillow under her arm for support, and pushing another one into the small of her back. Ouch, ouch.

  ‘It’s going to take a while to get used to,’ the midwife added, as Lou struggled to free a boob from her pyjama top with both hands full of Baby. ‘That’s totally normal.’

  ‘But is she . . . starving?’ Lou asked as the angry little mouth tried to close around Lou’s suddenly enormous-seeming nipple. Ouch, ouch.

  ‘No.’ The midwife smiled, manhandling Lou into position. ‘Just move that arm a bit under there to support her . . . yes, that’s right.’

  Lou’s baby had been out in the world for less than twelve hours and Lou could have sworn that every midwife who came past had told her a different way to breastfeed.

  ‘Is she getting anything?’ Lou asked.

  ‘Your milk won’t come in for a while,’ the midwife said. ‘But she’s getting colostrum, and that’s liquid gold. The milk is probably three days away.’

  Three days?

  ‘Just let her suck. As long as the position is right, it’s going to help bring the milk in. But if the position’s wrong, well, your nipples are going to shred.’

  Shred?

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the midwife said, and tucked the now-flapping wrap under Baby again and turned to leave.

  ‘Wait!’ Lou was suddenly terrified again. ‘What do I do next? How do I know when she’s finished?’

  ‘She’ll let you know,’ the midwife said. ‘And then just try to get her to have a little sleep. New babies are sleepy. And you could do with the rest, too.’

  So Lou’s first night as a mother was spent crying, sporadically pushing the button – ‘She’s got hiccups, is that normal?’ – texting Josh, who didn’t reply, and being gripped by a kind of seismic dread that what people said was true: she really was never going to sleep again.

  The clock crept around from three to four to five, with Lou falling off the edge of consciousness every so often only to be yanked back by a whimper from the crib. She’d try to pull herself up to sitting, swing her legs around to the side of the bed – ouch, ouch – to pick Baby up. She’d try to get her to latch on to a giant nipple for a while and then pat her and lay her back down. She did it again, and again, and again. The midwives changed shifts. The young woman was replaced by an older one who didn’t smile much. Her tactic for breastfeeding was different again. ‘Just shove it in any old way you can get her to take it,’ the woman said. ‘It’s the sucking that’s important.’

  It did feel very important to get this right.

  The exhaustion had moved to her head and was now crushing it like a vice. It was 7 a.m. when she called Josh. Still no answer.

  ‘You need to come,’ she said to his voicemail. Was he . . . asleep? ‘I need you to hold the baby while I get some rest then wake me up to try to feed so my boobs learn what to do and my nipples don’t shred.’

  *

  Being pregnant had felt like an invasion. Lou hadn’t felt like herself anymore, not even a little bit.

  She’d looked at her swollen feet and didn’t recognise them. Her puffy lips, her thickened neck. Her breasts were complete strangers, thick with veins, nipples the colour of cocoa. Even her hair was like someone else’s hair – someone who had twice as much but was simultaneously losing it in fistfuls.

  ‘The baby’s taking everything,’ her mum had said, as if this was meant to comfort her. ‘I lost a tooth when I was having you. You sucked all the calcium out of me.’

  Annabelle never missed an opportu
nity to point out to Lou how much of herself she’d sacrificed for her family, even if in the next breath she was making it clear that becoming a mother and raising respectable children was the pinnacle of a woman’s achievement. The take-home message seemed to be: This is the only thing worth doing, but it’s also the worst thing that can happen to you.

  And sometimes, as Lou’s body swelled and pulsed, that seemed terrifyingly true. One month before her due date, Lou had been watching the little invader travel under her skin, rippling across her body in some strange, unguided movement. She and Josh were lying together on their bed in their apartment’s only bedroom, too hot for covers, his hand on her naked stomach, tracing the baby’s journey.

  ‘You’re witnessing the traditional migration of the as-yet-unnamed Baby Poole,’ Josh was narrating, in a pretty ordinary impersonation of David Attenborough. ‘From one side of their mother’s tummy to the other, in search of a more comfortable spot from which to stick their foot right between her ribs . . .’

  Lou laughed and pushed his hand away. ‘Help me up, sir,’ she said, holding out an arm.

  ‘But of course.’ Josh jumped up, hauled Lou off the bed. ‘Where are you going? It’s Sunday. We don’t have to be anywhere for ages.’

  ‘I can’t lie around, feeling like a blob,’ Lou said. ‘I want to go for a walk. Get some breakfast.’

  The truth was, as hard as it was becoming to move around, to sit up and stand up and lie down, if Lou stayed in one place for too long, contemplating what was happening to her, and what was about to happen to them, she began to panic. Ever since she’d seen the double lines on the pee-stick, she’d been very prone to panic.

  ‘I’m going to call Gretch, see if she’ll meet us.’

  ‘Gretchen won’t be out of bed, Lou,’ Josh called after her as she closed the bathroom door, her new iPhone in hand. ‘She probably won’t even be home.’

  Lou sat down on the toilet seat, looked at her alien ankles. The giddy feeling that had just made her laugh at Josh’s lame dad jokes was draining away.

  This is all happening too quickly, she thought. And she sent Gretchen a message saying the same thing, and sat there looking at her phone for a reply.

  Nothing. Maybe Josh had been right, and Gretchen was sleeping something off or still out dancing. Maybe she and Gretch were destined to grow apart now, with the baby coming. Maybe all her friends were going to find her so boring with her bulging veins and, soon, her crying baby. Maybe they wouldn’t ever return her text messages again, and no-one would invite her to anything anymore, because who would want a mum around? Then Josh would wake up from this dreamy state he seemed to be in and he’d realise that the woman he loved had turned into a tired old hag. And she would probably lose her job, because she’d seen women return to school from maternity leave. They arrived late and left early and the head started talking about them differently and, before you knew it, they were telling you it just hadn’t worked out and they wanted to spend more time with their kids, so, you know . . .

  Everything was going to change.

  Tears were dripping onto her phone and Lou bent over her belly and stifled a sob, but clearly not very well, because almost instantly Josh was knocking on the door.

  ‘Lou, are you okay? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Everything’s wrong!’ she shouted back. ‘Nothing will be alright again.’

  She heard him laugh and she sprang up from the toilet seat as fast as she could physically move and threw open the door. ‘Fuck off, Josh!’ she yelled into his face. ‘You have no idea what this is like.’

  Lou had caught sight of herself in the bedroom mirror behind her husband. She was a big, naked, pregnant woman with hair across her face and snot around her nose.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ Josh said, taking hold of the arms she was holding out to push him back from the door. ‘It’s okay, Lou.’

  And Lou had kept on crying and she knew she was becoming just a badly drawn stereotype of a pregnant woman, complete with drastic mood swings, being tolerated and whispered about by those around her. ‘Hormones, man,’ Josh was probably saying to Mick when he caught up with him for a beer after a job. And yes, Lou knew it probably was hormones, but how was that helpful? This had become her life. Her reality. Her body.

  Her phone had pinged and she pushed Josh away to look at it. Gretchen: I’m sure it feels that way, babe. I’ve been at bloody boxing. Go me. Brekkie?

  ‘See,’ Lou said to Josh, waving the phone in his face. ‘Gretch does want to have breakfast. My friends don’t think I’m boring.’

  ‘I didn’t say . . .’ But she could see him deciding to abort that sentence. ‘Of course she wants to,’ he said instead. ‘Why wouldn’t she? You’re her favourite person.’

  And Lou smiled through her snotty tears because she knew he was trying to make her feel better, and that was a role he had played often over the last few months.

  It wasn’t like they hadn’t wanted this. They had really wanted this. Lou had never considered herself maternal when she was younger, but after her first years of teaching, and of learning to live with Josh, she had changed her opinion about that. They both had, slowly. She had told him she didn’t want to be a mother like her mother, whose constant state of disappointment she felt so keenly, and Josh said he didn’t want to be a father like his father, because he was awful, and they’d agreed that they would be completely different, their own people. Build a family their way.

  So she’d gone off the pill and they agreed to ‘see what happened’. They didn’t tell anyone. Lou knew her mother would say they weren’t financially secure, which was true, and Gretchen would say that there was still too much fun to be had, which was questionable, but what they were whispering to each other was that this was their next great adventure. That having a baby wouldn’t change anything in their lives; Lou would still teach and Josh would keep plugging away at his music until his luck changed and they’d still travel and go to parties and all of that, just with a baby in tow.

  They certainly weren’t going to move to the suburbs. That would never happen. Babies were small, their apartment was great.

  But as the big change approached, Lou had worried that the way she saw Josh was shifting.

  It sounded ridiculous, she knew, but she felt like she was doing all of this – and what was he doing?

  Her body was plotting and scheming so hard, knitting fingernails and building brain cells and forming feet, and his was doing what it had always done. Eating and sleeping and going to work.

  And God forbid we should talk about Josh’s work, thought Lou. About the fact that just a few short years ago the path he saw himself on was one where he was writing songs and soundtracks and jingles, and that from being a sideline it would grow into a business; he’d be doing something he loved, something that made him feel whole. They would talk for ages about the best way for him to achieve that, discussing who was doing it well, the connections he’d made through some of the small successes he’d had – selling a song to a soap opera, scoring the theme to an old friend’s play – and what things would look like for them when, as was inevitable, success came calling and they’d have to pack up and move. Lou had always told him that she would travel for him, support that dream for a time, because she could do what she loved to do, teaching, almost anywhere. Until they had kids, at least.

  That was the conversation they’d been having for years, as they snuggled up in bed, or walked through a park on the way to meet friends at a pub, or sat around a campfire on a camping trip.

  But not lately. Lately he had been taking on more and more building jobs with Mick. Lou knew she should be thankful for that; it was regular money and they were facing some time where that’s all they would be living on – which would be difficult, but doable if they were careful.

  But Josh didn’t love carpentry the way he loved his guitar. He didn’t love building a staircase like he loved writing a song. They’d stopped talking about what was going to happen when his big breakthrough
came. Josh had taken on jobs on weekends when he might have otherwise gigged. She knew he was being responsible, but she worried he was losing himself in the process.

  That Sunday morning, standing at the bathroom door with her big naked belly, she’d looked at Josh and felt, for the first time she could remember, frustration. Was this going to be it for him? Despite all their talk of a baby not changing them, pregnancy was already changing her. Was Josh’s change going to be that he settled comfortably into his second-choice life? Was that going to be her fault? Would they be happy being ‘just’ the teacher and the carpenter? Should she feel guilty about how that made her see him a little differently?

  Hormones, she thought. This is all just hormones.

  ‘Let’s go for breakfast,’ she’d said, taking his hands. ‘We won’t be able to afford to soon – and anyway, you can’t fit a pram in that hipster place with the good coffee.’

  *

  When Josh returned her call, Lou was crying.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ he said. ‘I’m picking you up a coffee.’

  ‘I can’t drink coffee,’ Lou sobbed. ‘I’m trying to make milk.’

  ‘Then I’ll bring you a muffin.’

  ‘Just. Come. Now.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Do I’ – sob – ‘sound okay?’

  By the time he made it in to the hospital, with a muffin, Baby was twenty-four hours old and Lou had made a decision.

  ‘I’m calling her Stella,’ she said to Josh. ‘I love it, and I’m the one with the broken vagina and the soon-to-be-shredded boobs.’

  Josh was standing over the plastic crib, where Baby was finally sleeping. He bent over and sniffed her noisily. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘What did you do last night?’ Lou asked him.

  He looked at her blankly.

  ‘What did you do last night?’

  ‘I left here and had a drink with Mick,’ he said, looking up from the crib. ‘She’s perfect, isn’t she?’

  ‘She looks like your dad, but yes, she is.’

  Lou saw Josh look harder at his little daughter. ‘You think?’