by Rachel Cusk
The health visitor pays us a visit. In the hall she sniffs the air. It seems that she is investigating the house for signs of cigarette smoking. The baby’s episode of colic has now concluded, a victory secured, after two hours of walking up and down the stairs, by her chancing to glimpse herself in the hall mirror. We have been standing in front of this mirror for some forty minutes by the time the health visitor arrives. She runs red talons through the baby’s feathery hair and the baby flinches. She is so dainty, says the health visitor. Is she good? Yes, I snap. Presently I admit that she cries quite a lot. I am furious to have made this admission, but my search for the cure for colic is now so preoccupying that I cannot neglect the possibility that the woman might possess it. She looks at me sharply, like a bird. Are you feeding her? she says. I realise that she is talking about breastfeeding. Her reluctance to utter the word ‘breast’ is clear. I say that I am. In that case it will be something in your milk, she says. Oh, I say. Yes, she is very dainty, she continues, stroking the baby’s head until I begin to worry that she will wear a patch of it away. Very dainty and small, isn’t she? How much does she weigh? I tell her. She requests the baby’s growth chart. I show it to her. She examines it in silence. Your baby is failing to thrive, she informs me presently. She runs a red nail over the short, plotted line of my daughter’s life. It isn’t exactly vertical, I admit, but it isn’t doing a u-turn back to the womb either. She has colic, I say tearfully. It’s difficult for her to eat. You must feed her with formula milk, commands the health visitor. Begin by offering her a bottle after each feed and within two weeks she will have made the switch entirely. I am astonished by this advice, having laboured under the belief – and indeed under its strictures – that breastfeeding was the religion of the health services. Don’t you normally advise building up the milk supply when the baby is gaining inadequate weight?, I inquire. I am, if nothing else, well informed. Your baby is failing to thrive, repeats the woman. You risk damaging her brain. Do you want to have a brain-damaged baby? I feel it unnecessary to reply to this question.
The health visitor stays for a long time. The baby and I are braced, unified and silent against her. When finally she leaves I cry. The baby stares at me in amazement. I make an immediate appointment at the doctor’s surgery. My baby is failing to thrive, I tell her, bursting into her office. The doctor replies that she is absolutely fine. In fact, she’s lovely, she says. I look at the baby, who is lying on the doctor’s couch kicking her legs and smiling winningly. Can I show you something? I say. I pick her up. Immediately, she roars. I put her down again. She stops. That is strange, says the doctor.
I meet a woman who tells me kindly that one day, when the baby is about three months old, the crying will stop. From one day to the next, just like that. By now the fact of the baby’s crying, if not its hours, has become predictable, although its causes remain unknown. She has cried in her sling on walks, in her baby carriage when I am trying to shop, on the bus, on the subway, at the houses of friends and relations, in mine and others’ arms. She has cried from one end of many dark afternoons to the other, when she and I were alone in the house and there was nothing to do, or it was raining, or I was too tired to do anything but sit with her in a chair while she cried. I have given up trying to contain the crying within a vision of adult normality, of competence. I have run home with her bawling in my arms, pulling the carriage crazily behind us while people stare. I have jumped off buses in the middle of nowhere. I have bolted from cafés. I have ended telephone conversations without explanation. I have cried myself. I have shouted, making her tiny frame jump. I have sat for long evenings while her father paced the kitchen with her, offering advice. It was better when you were doing that jiggling thing, I say; or, try that thing you did the other night when you held her face down, with your other hand on her back. I have put her in a safe place and tried to leave the room, but before I could reach the door her crying has brought me back. We have even taken her to Italy, where for three days she cried beside Lake Garda while boats glided silently beneath the mountains over the pale water and the warm air was filled with the chattering of birds and children.
One evening, sitting outside in the garden in the dusk, I realise that three months have passed and that summer has come. My daughter is lying on a rug looking at the leaves above her. She wriggles and kicks her legs and laughs at things that I can’t see. She has red hair and bright eyes. I know that in some inarticulable way I have over the past weeks witnessed again her birth; that the sound of her agony, her despair, was the sound of a terrible, private process of creation. I see that she has become somebody. I realise, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting hours, the particular self I tried to bring to my care of her, have been as superfluous as my fury and despair. All that is required is for me to be there; an ‘all’ that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else, being ready to drop everything. Being myself is no compensation for not being there. And accordingly, the whole peopled surface, the occupation of my life has been swept away by her cries. That she has stopped crying I take as an indication that she judges my training to have been successful and the rank of mother attained; a signal that we can now, cautiously, get on with the business of living together.
Loving, Leaving
Poor Mary Lennox, child-heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Born unwanted by her distrait Raj-socialite parents, living an isolated life amongst servants in India, she grew up bitter, unsweetened by love. Had tragedy not felled her, uprooting her and planting her in friendlier soil, she might have stayed that way.
The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies … Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours. She only knew that people were ill and that she heard mysterious and frightening sounds. Once she crept into the dining-room and found it empty, though a partly finished meal was on the table and chairs and plates looked as if they had been hastily pushed back when the diners rose suddenly for some reason. The child ate some fruit and biscuits, and being thirsty she drank a glass of wine which stood nearly filled. It was sweet, and she did not know how strong it was. Very soon it made her intensely drowsy, and she went back to her nursery and shut herself in again, frightened by the cries she heard in the huts and by the hurrying sound of feet. The wine made her so sleepy that she could scarcely keep her eyes open, and she lay down on her bed and knew nothing more for a long time.
When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before. She heard neither voices nor footsteps, and wondered if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over. She wondered also who would take care of her now her Ayah was dead. There would be a new Ayah, and perhaps she would know some new stories … The noise and hurrying about and wailing over the cholera had frightened her, and she had been angry because no one seemed to remember that she was alive. Everyone was too panic-stricken to think of a little girl no one was fond of. When people had the cholera it seemed that they remembered nothing but themselves. But if everyone had got well again, surely someone would remember and come to look for her.
But no one came, and as she lay waiting the house seemed to grow more and more silent … It was in that strange way that Mary found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none o
f them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib.
I am occasionally struck by the obsessive concern for the physical safety of small children which pervades any discussion of pregnancy, birth and the early years of life. From the moment of her conception my daughter became a magnet for prescription, embroiled in debate: about alcohol units, smoke-free zones and breast versus bottle, about future dairy and gluten allergies, room temperature and sleeping position, about immunisation schedules and vitamins. Even from before conception, in fact, when I was urged to purge and scrub my body for her future sake, to convert it from inferred hell-hole to temple. I find something unsavoury in such puritanism, as if dark thoughts were being kept at bay. I am told to sterilise everything with which the baby comes into contact. This can be achieved either by boiling it in water for at least ten minutes, or by soaking in sterilising solution for half an hour and then rinsing thoroughly in boiled water. The environmental consequences of such procedures are brushed aside. Maintaining the sterility of my child, my home, myself, is paramount. Germs and evil are everywhere. I overhear a conversation concerning the difficulty of safeguarding the sterility of rubber nipples as they make the perilous journey from boiling pan to mouth. Although you can’t see it happen, apparently germs, or Germans as E. Nesbit called them, land by the thousand in a matter of seconds. In the supermarket I see little jars of baby food and they are like jars of processed, denatured love. It is love that is vacuum-packed and sterilised. Sealed bags impregnated with strong fragrance are provided for its disposal after use. It is love that can make no connection with other loves, with the contaminating world.
Mary Lennox, it seems, has been sterilised by lack of love. Her friend Dickon tells her to get some fresh air, to get outside and watch things grow, to get dirty. In the newspaper I read what claims to be a counterblast against the clean, an article suggesting that children who are not exposed to germs are in fact more vulnerable to them. The article is not a counterblast at all. It merely transposes the subject to a shriller pitch. It lobbies for the creation of cleanliness within dirt, for dirt not to be avoided but to be encompassed by, converted to sterility. Bad dirt, dirty dirt, exists on the margins of love. It suggests neglect, failure and lack of care. Obsessive precautions against bad dirt may hint, it now seems, at a certain proximity to these margins. To own good dirt is to proclaim the superiority of your care, your love; its fearlessness and flexibility, the purity of its thought and deed, its distance from hate.
D.W. Winnicott, the eccentric but revered pediatrician and psychoanalyst of the 1940s, famously proclaimed that all mothers hate their babies ‘from the word go’. He didn’t mean that they didn’t love them; just that they hated them too. The ‘good’ mother is in part the projection of this hatred, sterilising away her ambivalence, her feelings of violence and displacement, keeping her urges to abandonment in tiny, vacuum-sealed jars. What’s more, says Winnicott, ‘the mother hates the baby before the baby can know his mother hates him.’ It is a situation quivering with the possibility of cruelty, and of regret. Winnicott also thought that there was no such thing as a baby. The baby exists only as part of the mother. While the baby has no personality, and no independent existence, what is there to love, what to hate but yourself? Freud, more conventionally, wrote that ‘in the child which [mothers] bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an extraneous object to which, starting out from their narcissism, they can give complete object-love’; and indeed everywhere in the culture of maternity one can see the difficult precedence of motherly emotion, its one-sidedness, the lonely fantasy of its frilly bassinets, its tiny snow-white garments, its angelic cribs and insignia of stars and teddy bears. Like a teenager in her postered room dreaming of pop stars, a new mother’s love exists in the mind and in the regalia of her material devotion. I see in the evolution of this regalia the promise of the tables being turned at some future point: in the next aisle at the supermarket things with helmets and weapons and cone-shaped breasts have replaced the angels and teddy bears; packets illegible with additives filled with things that look like small road accidents or explosions have superceded the tiny, perfect jars. The extraneous object clearly gets his own back.
I ought not to be surprised at the violent contrasts that distinguish my emotion for my baby daughter, but I am. Like most people, I have been troubled by love all my life. My loves have observed the conventions first of the familial narrative, then of the romantic. I have never sought to rewrite these conventions. I have accorded with their cadences, their plot. But of this new love I am, apparently, in charge. When I think of my child I am seized by the desire to make good all my former powerlessness, to love as I would like to be loved: mercifully, completely, unambiguously. Her experience of this love is for the moment rather shady and unclear. I want to write it down and put it in a drawer for her, like the title deeds to something, so that she will have some proof, some inheritance, should something happen to me before I get a chance to explain it to her. The need for such an explanation asserts itself almost from the beginning, not because she is too small to understand that she is loved, but because the love itself, or at least my management of it, has a few teething difficulties of which I, being in charge, feel it necessary to give some kind of account.
One morning, when she is six weeks old, I am alone at home trying to get her to go to sleep. I am extremely tired. The night has been filled with fireworks, with surreal adventures and Olympian feats of endurance, and dawn has arrived like a hangover. She, and hence I, have not slept for many hours. For perhaps the twentieth time in ten hours I feed her and put her down in her cradle. I am not asking for a solid stretch: I merely require a few minutes to myself gluing parts of my face back on and saying things aloud in front of the mirror to see if I’ve actually gone mad. At this point I don’t just want her to go to sleep. She has to go to sleep otherwise I don’t know what will happen. My position is at once reasonable, utterly desperate, and non-negotiable. I put her firmly in her crib. I remove myself to the bathroom and close the door. There is a long moment of silence that is both blessed and threatening. It is filled with my command, and with the possibility that her requirements will not yield to mine, that she continues to exist beyond the limit of my patience, my love, my ability to own her. Then, next door, she cries. I begin to shout. I don’t quite know what I am shouting, something about it being unfair, about it clearly being completely unreasonable that I should want FIVE MINUTES on my own. GO TO SLEEP! I shout, now standing directly over her crib. I shout not because I think she might obey me but because I am aware of an urge to hurl her out of the window. She looks at me in utter terror. It is the first frankly emotional look she has given me in her life. It is not really what I was hoping for.
Eventually she goes to sleep, silently, submissively, declining my help. Her withdrawal from me fills me with shame; the sleep itself, so longed for, is unbearable. I want to wake her up, proffering love. Now that she is still and quiet my love is once more perfect, and she is not even awake to see it. I drag myself to the telephone and sob. I shouted at her, I confess. In the end I confess it to several different people, none of whom gives me the absolution I am looking for. Oh dear, they say. Poor baby. They do not mean me. Don’t worry, they say, I suppose she’ll forget it. I understand that I am alone with my outburst, that I myself have moved outside the shelter of love. As a mother I do not exist within the forgiving context of another person. I realise that this is what being in charge is.
As time passes, I grow more and more tormented by the idea of children being unloved. My heart clenches at stories of abandonment and abuse. I weep before pictures on the news of orphans, refugees, children of war. A weekly television programme devoted to children having operations causes me to tear at the sofa with frantic nails. My compassion, my generalised human pity, has become concentrated into a single wound, a dark sore of knowing and of the ability to inflict. I realise that in love I have always considered myself to be victim rather than aggressor, that I h
ave cherished a belief in my own innocence, in what nevertheless I have styled as a conflict, an irreconcilable struggle. Like a state benefit, love has always seemed to me something to which people have inalienable rights, a belief that is a mere mask for my terror at the possibility of being unloved. In the street I see a well-dressed woman berating a refugee who holds a baby in a bundle of cloth against her chest. You get money from the government! enunciates the woman, slowly and cruelly. She speaks in a loud, shrill voice that quavers with education and outrage. She wishes to be clearly understood. I hate her, and give the woman money under her nose just to spite her. To me she seems full of the self-confidence of the unloving, with their mysterious ability to withhold, to use against others the weapon of their own helplessness. Later, on my way home, the refugee importunes me again and confusedly I walk past her. It seems that it is not to love but to its lack that I am suddenly alive. I have not, in fact, become more loving, more generous, more capacious. I have merely become more afraid of love’s limits, and more certain that they exist.
