by Rachel Cusk
The rules and regulations of pregnancy are artfully laid out in a volume entitled Emma’s Diary. Have you got a copy of Emma? I am asked at the hospital, in what is patently not a reference to Jane Austen. Take another, just in case. Emma, I learn, is a fictional character created by the National Health Service who has written a week-by-week diary account of her pregnancy. She has a husband called Peter and a fondness for exclamation marks. She has neat brown hair and blue eyes and wears well-ironed clothes in pastel shades. She has two friends, both of whom are also pregnant. The first is an unmarried good-time girl with a wavering boyfriend. The second is an older black woman with an unreconstructed husband and two daughters. Emma’s friendship with these two ladies, which Peter gallantly allows her to pursue, takes the form of her recording of the difficulties they encounter in lives that are rather more complicated, we are given to understand, than Emma’s own. Emma reports that her unmarried friend is arguing a lot with her boyfriend. I’m so glad Peter and I don’t do that! Her other friend’s husband, meanwhile, is copping off the childcare. I’m really glad, says Emma, that Peter and I have agreed to share everything equally! Emma informs us that she has cut her lustrous hair short ‘for convenience’. Peter, in tight pleated trousers, is pictured hoovering around the sofa on which she lies leafing through a magazine. He does that on Saturday mornings, to give her a break. Together they decorate the nursery and buy baby clothes. Emma’s parents come to stay for the weekend and do DIY around the house. Her father tells her she is ‘blooming’. Emma is fastidious on points of health and safety. Unpasteurised cheese and alcohol do not pass her lips. Even one cigarette a day, she reflects, would be harmful for the baby, and we are amazed the thought has even crossed her mind. She supports and promotes the existence of baby-exploiting multinational companies and their environmentally unfriendly products, of which each pregnant woman is promised an introductory pack courtesy of Emma on arrival of their baby. She is, confusingly, passionate on the subject of breastfeeding. She hopes to endure labour without the aid of drugs, and expects the baby to be a boy. I turn to the end immediately. The baby is a girl. She calls it Jane. She did manage to get through labour without drugs. It was bad, she says, but not as bad as I expected. This expectation has been well concealed by Emma from her diary. What form, I wish to know, did it take? I myself have no happier or more rational expectation of labour than I have of being murdered. And yet the suggestion must surely be that labour is not so bad after all, for I cannot believe that Emma possesses a particularly lively imagination. I think of the women I know who have had children, none of whom has remarked of birth that it wasn’t nearly as bad as they were expecting. Most appear unable to speak about the subject at all, except one, who told me that at one point she begged the midwife to shoot her.
Preparation, I am repeatedly told in my leaflets, is the pregnant woman’s defence against pain. People who are tense and out of touch with their bodies, people who resist labour, above all people who are afraid of pain feel more pain. If this sort of statement is a threat, its objective appears to be the encouragement of a curious communality. Joining groups, attending classes and courses, enlisting the help of your partner or a friend in the business of preparation are all recommended means of curing yourself of the faults of hubris, terror and independence of mind before labour commences. The literature tactfully tones down references to the ultimately solitary nature of childbirth, and to the fact that attending classes for it is like attending classes for death: indeed, every effort is made to strip the process of any personal significance at all, so that having read a certain number of these leaflets I am no longer sure whether it is I who will be going through labour or the woman in the orange tracksuit demonstrating with a grapefruit. Although it is not stated as such, as I understand it, by making yourself into a different person – one who breathes deeply, one who does exercises, one whose partner is willing to massage you with oil at all times of day and night – you give yourself a chance if not of lessening the rigours of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth, then at least of believing that it is happening to someone else.
Books about pregnancy go into this process of transformation, or sublimation, in sinister detail. You are offered a list of foods to eat, recipes for how to combine them, and occasionally photographs of the finished result, with captions such as Salad or Bowl of Granola. You are told, with the help of illustrations, how to get into bed, how to lie in it, and how to get up again. You are told, again with illustrations, how to make love. Possible conversations you might have with your partner concerning the impending birth and parenthood are detailed. You can conduct these over a cocktail if you like; non-alcoholic for you, of course! Find recipes for non-alcoholic cocktails on page 73. A section on antenatal appointments advises you to take a book or magazine, or perhaps some knitting, in case you have to wait. When you go to have your ultrasound scan, leave plenty of time to find the correct hospital department. When you have found it and your name has been called, go into the scanning room. Remove your clothes and lie on the couch while the operator performs the scan. Go shopping for baby clothes before you get too large. Decorate the nursery, preferably in primary colours using lead-free paint. At night, when you can’t sleep and your mind is racing, violently suppress this insurrection of identity and use the time to get in touch with your baby. Afflicted by sleeplessness, I follow this last piece of advice, but my communications with the baby always end up taking the undignified form of my pleading with it not to hurt me. As my stomach grows bigger I realise that getting in touch with it is about as useful as a field getting in touch with the motorway being built through it.
Like a bad parent, the literature of pregnancy bristles with threats and the promise of reprisal, with ghoulish hints at the consequences of thoughtless actions. Eat pâté and your baby will get liver damage. Eat blue cheese and your baby will get listeria, a silent and symptomless disease that will nonetheless leave your baby hideously deformed. Stroke the cat and your baby will get toxoplasmosis, a silent and symptomless disease that will nonetheless leave your baby hideously deformed. A temperature of more than 104 degrees sustained for several days could damage your baby in the first seven weeks of gestation, so don’t use saunas, have hot baths, or for that matter wear a jersey at any point in pregnancy lest your baby be hideously deformed. Don’t drink or smoke, you murderer. Don’t take aspirin. Wear a seatbelt when you travel in a car; you can loosen the lower strap if you have problems stretching it over your abdomen. Anyone thinking that pregnancy is the one time in their life when they are allowed to be fat can think again. Don’t eat cakes, biscuits, refined white flour, chocolate, sweets, fizzy drinks or chips. When you raise your fork to your lips, reads one book on this subject, look at it and think, Is this the best bite I can give my baby? If the answer is no, put your fork down.
The baby plays a curious role in the culture of pregnancy. It is at once victim and autocrat. It is a being destined to live only in the moment of perfection that is its birth, after which it degenerates and decays, becomes human and sinful, cries and is returned to the realm of the real. But in pregnancy the baby is a wonder, a miracle, an expiation. The literature dwells upon its formation week by week, the accretion of its tiny fingers and toes, its perfect little nails, its large, lidless, innocent eyes. Commerce with this being is actively sought. Most books claim you can feel its movements in the fourteenth week of pregnancy, little flutters, like the wings of butterflies. (A rather more robust, and hence outdated, volume informs me that this is just wind: proper movements are unlikely to be felt until a month later. Don’t worry about falling over, the book cheerfully adds, or indeed about car accidents or falling down the stairs. The only thing capable of harming the baby is a really forceful blow with a heavy object directly to the abdomen.) In the seventeenth week the baby develops hearing. It can hear your voice, the voice of its mother! It has plenty of time, I feel, to get over and indeed tire of this development. When the baby is being active, I am instructed to
smooth my hands over my belly and speak or sing to it. It will quieten. You have soothed your baby.
Such faux motherhood, solitary, perfect and bizarre, is not, I notice, recommended for women who have already had a child, and not only because they are less gullible. In one book, I find a section dedicated to these unfortunates, entitled ‘Pregnant Again’. It is very short. It mentions the reactions you can expect from other people on informing them of your second or subsequent pregnancy. What, again? they may say; or, Haven’t you had enough? You will be feeling, the section adds, physically and emotionally drained. Your body, used up by a previous pregnancy, will sag and bloat. What with all the incessant tidying up, washing and cooking created by children who fling carefully prepared dishes to the floor and empty out boxes of toys as quickly as you can fill them, as well as waking up several times a night and screaming, you probably won’t have any time to yourself to think about this pregnancy. You may feel that you cannot possibly find the extra love to give to a new baby. You may be existing on burgers and fries. You may worry about your relationship with your partner, about money, about whether you need a bigger house. At least labour won’t be so bad this time, it adds, because all your muscles will have been bent out of shape by the last one.
I telephone the hospital to book an antenatal class. You’re too late, I’m told, we’re full. You should have booked earlier. I wasn’t pregnant earlier, I reply. I see that I have entered a world of obsessive foresight, in which women at my stage of pregnancy are now putting their unborn children down for desirable schools. A feeling of panic at being left behind, unprepared and hence exposed to pain like someone abandoned unarmed in a jungle full of wild animals, seizes me. I make several more telephone calls and finally find a pregnancy yoga class being conducted in a suburban community centre. I turn up and sit with six or seven other pregnant women in a circle on the floor. The teacher sits in our midst, cross-legged. I have not yet experienced such a gathering of my own species. We appear imprisoned behind our stomachs like people behind bars, like people who need help. I feel a certain relief at our communality, a sense of assuagement. I wonder why I have ridiculed and resisted it. The teacher tells us of her own experiences of birth. They are yogic and positive. She tells us of her moment of illumination, when she realised that pregnant women just needed people to be nice to them, and that given the short supply of such people, the solution was for pregnant women to be nice to each other. So here we are, we are told, about to be nice to each other! The teacher flings her arms in the air and laughs effervescently. We are instructed to breathe deeply. We adopt various positions. Birth is mentioned several times, vaguely. We stand against a wall and do things with our legs. One girl can do the splits. Presently we are told to find partners. The instruction cauterises my enthusiasm. I don’t want a partner. In fact, I want to go home as quickly as possible. Nevertheless I select, or am selected, mutely. We are, it appears, going to give each other a massage. This is what is known as being nice. We are told to divide ourselves into masseur and massee. I am massee. My partner, a girl with fuzzy white hair, a deep tan and a nose ring, whose name I have forgotten, proceeds with her work. I close my eyes. I am as rigid as steel. The teacher issues her instructions in a soft voice, as if someone were asleep next door. I leave my body and drift determinedly elsewhere, while tension rises in me like a tide. After a very long time, the massage stops. I meet the girl’s eye awkwardly and laugh. My own tenure as masseur I embark on with professional zeal. I am not going to be found wanting. The girl’s skin is foreign and private, and though I will gentleness upon myself I am brisk with the consciousness of invasion. Afterwards cookies and tea are produced. I make an excuse and leave. Glancing back from the door I see the women all sitting in a circle with their mugs, their silhouettes fertile and vulnerable. No one is saying much. I feel like a man, caught in some shameful act of abandonment.
Winter draws in. I begin to feel a more or less constant despair at my predicament. In the mornings, when I wake up, I observe the rising mountain of my stomach and have to fight surges of intense claustrophobia. With many weeks of pregnancy remaining I am marooned as far from myself as I will ever be. It is not just abstinence, stripped of the pleasure of the possibility of giving in to temptation, that grates upon me; nor even the extremity of my physical transformation, nor the strange pains that accompany it, nor the surreally floundering being that writhes like a live fish in my stomach, nor the disempowerment I feel, the vulnerability to others’ eyes and assumptions. (Don’t worry, says a young man with no arms, bitterly, walking past me at the bus stop, it won’t be like me. I want to run after him and reclaim as my rightful property whatever glance he thought it was I had given him. I don’t care if it is like you, I want to say, I’m not like that, I just want to get out of this.) It is the population of my privacy, as if the door to my room were wide open and strangers were in there, rifling about, that I find hard to endure. It is as if I have been arrested or called to account, summoned by the tax inspector, isolated and searched. I am living not freely but in some curious tithe. I have surrendered my solitude and become, for these nine months, a bridge, a link, a vehicle. I read newspaper reports of women in America being prosecuted for harming their unborn foetuses and wonder how this can be; how the body can become a public space, like a telephone box, that can unlawfully vandalise itself. It is my fear of authority, of conformity, that is pricked by such stories. I am someone who has always dreaded the discovery and announcement of my shortcomings. Now it is as if some spy is embedded within me, before whose scrutiny I am guilty and self-conscious. It is not, I feel sure, the baby who exerts this watchful pressure: it is the baby’s meaning for other people, the world’s sense of ownership stating its claim.
But I am not merely the chauffeur of this precious cargo; I am also its box, its container, and while my fastnesses are regulated and supervised, the manner in which I will be broken open on arrival at our destination remains shrouded in mystery. Some women find birth the most intensely pleasurable experience of their lives, I read. This miraculous claim is made by proponents of natural, or ‘active’, birth. It is an attractive one; the best the medical establishment can offer, by contrast, is that it won’t hurt too much if you submit to being forcefully injected with powerful drugs. Having been brought up to think it remarkable that after centuries of agony and death in childbirth women had finally been offered anaesthetics, it takes me some time to come around to the notion of natural birth. It is a philosophy based largely on the birth experiences of women in primitive societies. Who and where these women are is not gone into in any detail: the important thing about them is that when their time comes, they do not dial 911 and proffer their flank for a syringe. They go through it naturally, because that is what they have always done, because the medical establishment has not meddled with their natural instincts, because their traditions of birth remain intact: and the thing is, it doesn’t hurt. Pain, in other words, has been created by its expectation, and also by the fact that MEN make women lie on their backs and stay still during labour, when any primitive woman could tell you to stick with your sisters, stay on your feet, and keep MEN well out of it. Diagrams are supplied, the same diagrams that illustrate the baby coming out of the woman’s stomach except turned the other way to demonstrate the force of gravity. I wonder whether it is permitted to stay on your feet, but in hospital. It’s up to you, comes the answer; as long as you realise that hospital is a place where MEN are, and hence that as soon as you set foot in one your chances of artificial rupture of membranes, chemical induction of labour, electronic foetal monitoring, stalled labour, epidural, paralysis, forceps delivery, Caesarean section and the need for the baby to be artifically respirated afterwards are greatly increased. Why not have it at home, amongst friends, in peaceful surroundings? In a warm birthpool perhaps? Photographs of this procedure are supplied. The pool, a sort of deep inflatable ring surrounded by house plants, seems very crowded. In it are a naked woman with long plaits, a heavily b
earded man in very small swimming trunks and several children.
A sense of political outrage at the patriarchal medicalisation of birth, unfortunately, is not a sufficient qualification for going it alone. Yogic preparation, in this arena, is more important than ever. Natural birth relies on the labouring woman following her instincts. I have certainly mislaid these instincts, if I ever had them. My instinct for avoiding hospital, however, is vigorously alive. I know, from lengthy childhood illness, that hospital is a place of steel, a place where things happen, where event is irresistible. Secretly, I imagine that if I never go to hospital I won’t have to have the baby at all. I read more books about natural childbirth. With every exhortation to draw closer to my own physical state, I retreat further into a deluded solitude. My will, my power to evade pain, becomes entrancing, but not in the sense intended: I have found, at last, a narrative of childbirth that is as unreal as my own vision of it. Now that I am closer to labour, other women begin to drop louder hints about it. I hear of episiotomies, of Caesareans in which the anaesthetic didn’t quite work, of badly sewn stitches, of painful internal examinations, of fifty-hour confinements. Words like mutilation and tearing are mentioned. I no longer know whether I am more afraid of the pain of childbirth or the interventions it invites. I tell the hospital that I have decided to have the baby at home. The midwife brings a sinister case of implements to the house, and I am close to physically attacking her. I catch a glimpse of scalpels, scissors, needles. Why do we need those? I want to know, somewhat hysterically. She insists on leaving the case in my bedroom, so that if I go into labour early it will all be to hand. I sense that the moment I have always feared is drawing closer, closing in: the moment not of birth, nor even of pain, but of recognition, of the arrival of some terrible apparition whose shadow I have fancied myself to have glimpsed so often in my life. At night I open my eyes and look at the midwife’s case in the dark. In its dense, concentrated blackness, like a bomb, I see a long moment of forestalled horror, of disbelief, of dammed-up but pressingly, explosively imminent reality.
