But he did. Because I didn’t hear from him for the rest of the morning. Anyway, I didn’t have time to think about this latest example of Tony’s complete indifference, as I needed to be at the hospital on time or further darken my reputation as a harpy. So I ducked into the shower, and slapped some makeup on my face, and was at the Mattingly by eleven AM.
“Is your husband with you this morning?” the head nurse asked, eyeing me over, evidently wondering just what my emotional temperature might be this morning.
“I’m afraid he had a crisis at work.”
“I see. And how do you plan to get your son home?”
I hoisted up the carrier, which in my crazy rush to get out of the house I had managed to remember to bring.
“And you did bring some clothes for him?”
Oh please, I’m not a total deadbeat.
“Of course,” I said politely.
“Very well then.”
Jack still reacted with upset when I touched him. And he didn’t enjoy my diaper-changing technique—which was supervised by the head nurse, just to make certain that I was doing it properly.
It was also a struggle to get him into his onesie. He also hated being strapped into the carrier.
“I presume your local health visitor will be calling on you tomorrow,” she said.
“I don’t know—I haven’t heard from anyone yet.”
“Well, no doubt, she will be visiting you very soon—so if you have any postpartum questions, she’s the person to ask . . .”
In other words: if you’re making a total mess of things, help will be on its way . . .
“Thank you for that. In fact, thank you for everything.”
“I hope he makes you very happy,” she said.
One of the nurses helped me downstairs with the carrier. She also got one of the porters to call me a cab. On the way back to Putney, the driver spent most of his time on his cell phone, and seemed genuinely oblivious to the fact that I had a newborn in the back of his cab. But when he swerved to dodge an oncoming white minivan, he rolled down his window and shouted, “Stupid cunt! Don’t you know I’ve got a little baby in the back?”
When we reached Sefton Street, the driver got out of the car and helped me with Jack to the front door.
“Where’s your husband then?” he asked after I settled the fare.
“At the office.”
“Guess someone has to earn the dosh,” he said.
It was so strange entering my empty house with this tiny creature.
Like all of life’s bigger passages, you expect a sense of profundity to accompany the occasion. And like all of life’s bigger passages, the event itself is a complete letdown. I opened the door. I picked up the carrier. I brought Jack inside. I closed the door behind me. End of story. And, once again, all I could think was: this might have been an occasion if my husband was here.
Jack had fallen asleep during the cab ride, so I hoisted him upstairs to the nursery and unfastened the straps. Exercising the utmost care, I lifted him gently into his crib. He pulled his arms tight against himself as I covered him with the little quilt that Sandy had sent me. He didn’t stir. I sat down in the wicker chair opposite the crib, my head splitting from the ongoing aftereffects of the night before. I looked at my son. I waited to feel rapture, delight, maternal concern, and vulnerability—all those damn emotions that every writer of every motherhood guide promises you will inhabit in the days after your child’s birth. But all I felt was a profound, terrible hollowness—and a sense that, bar the fact that this child had been literally cut out of me, I had no further connection with him.
A ringing phone snapped me out of this desperate, vacant reverie. I was hoping it was Tony—sounding contrite and suitably humble. Or Sandy—with whom I could have bitched at length about my detached, taciturn husband. Instead, I received a call from a woman with a decidedly London accent who introduced herself as Jane Sanjay, and said that she was my health visitor. Her tone was surprising—breezy, pleasant, I’m here to help. And she wondered if she might drop by and see me this afternoon.
“Is there any reason why you need to see me right away?” I asked.
She laughed. “Don’t panic—I’m not the baby police.”
“But what did they tell you at the hospital?”
More laughter. “Honestly nothing. We don’t talk to the hospitals anyway—unless there’s something seriously wrong. And you don’t sound like the sort of person with whom there’s anything wrong.”
Don’t let the American accent fool you. I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
“So,” she asked, “might I come by in an hour or so?”
Jane Sanjay was around thirty with an easy smile and an unfussy manner. Having expected a real social worker type, I was rather taken aback to see this quietly attractive Anglo-Indian woman, decked out in black leggings and electric silver Nikes. Her face-to-face manner echoed her phone style—and she put me immediately at ease, making all the right jolly noises about Jack, asking me a bit about how an American ended up in London (and sounding highly impressed when she learned about my Egyptian stint with the Boston Post), and questioning me gently about my general postpartum state. Part of me wanted to put on a happy face and tell her that everything was just hunky-dory—out of fear of looking like the height of incompetence. But who doesn’t want to take another person into their confidence—especially someone who, though in an official capacity, seems to have a sympathetic ear? So after running through what she described as a standard checklist of baby care concerns—his feeding and sleep patterns, how often I was having to change his diapers (or nappies, to use the local parlance), and how to deal with standard infant complaints like colic and diaper rash—she then asked me (in her breezy way) how I was bearing up. And when I answered with a hesitant shrug, she said, “Like I said on the phone, I’m not the baby police. And everyone who has a baby always gets regular visits from a health visitor. So really, Sally, you mustn’t think that I’m snooping here.”
“But they have told you something, haven’t they?” I asked.
“Who is they?”
“The people at the Mattingly.”
“Honestly, no. But did something happen there that I should know about?”
“Nothing specific. I just think . . . uh . . .” I hesitated for a moment, then said, “Well, put it this way: I don’t think they liked my style there. Perhaps because I was a little overwrought.”
“So what?” she said with a smile. “You had a terribly difficult delivery, and then your child was in an intensive care unit for an extended period of time. So you had a perfect right to feel distraught.”
“But I did manage to get up the nose of the consultant.”
“Between you and me . . . that’s his problem. Anyway, like I said on the phone, I heard nothing from the hospital—and, believe me, had they been worried about you, I would have heard.”
“Well, that’s good news, I guess.”
“So, if you do want to tell me anything . . .”
A pause. Instinctually, I started rocking the little baby seat in which Jack was currently sleeping. Then I said, “I guess I’ve been feeling a little up-and-down since his arrival.”
“Nothing uncommon about that.”
“And, of course, I’m sure things will be different now that he’s finally home with us. But . . . uh . . . well, up to this point . . .”
I broke off, wondering how the hell to phrase what I was about to say. To her credit, Jane Sanjay didn’t jump in, prodding me to finish the sentence. Instead, she said nothing, and waited for me to pick up the thread of conversation.
“Let me ask you something directly,” I finally said.
“Of course,” she said.
“Is it unusual to feel as if you’re not exactly . . . bonding . . . with your child straightaway?”
“Unusual? You must be joking. In fact, just about every other new mum I see ends up asking me the same question. Because everyone expects t
hat they’re going to instantly bond with their baby. Or, at least, that’s what they read in all the baby books. Whereas the truth is usually a little more complex than that—and it can take a considerable amount of time to adjust to this new creature in your life. So, really, it’s nothing to sweat, eh?”
But that night, there was plenty to sweat. To begin with, Jack woke up around ten PM and then refused to stop crying for the next five hours. To heighten the awfulness of this nonstop bawling, both of my breasts became blocked again—and despite Jack’s vacuum-like jaws (and repeated uses of the dreaded breast pump), milk refused to flow. So I rushed into the kitchen and frantically spooned several scoops of formula powder into a bottle, then poured in the specified amount of water, shook it up, popped it into the microwave, nearly burned my hand on the heated bottle, pulled a rubber nipple out of the sterilizer, attached it to the bottle, raced back to the nursery, where Jack was now wailing, picked him up, sat him on my knee, and plugged him into the bottle. But after three or four slurps of the formula, he suddenly became ill and vomited up milk all over me. Then the screaming really started.
“Oh, Jesus, Jack,” I said, watching regurgitated formula dribble down my T-shirt. At which point, I heard Tony’s voice behind me, saying, “Don’t blame him.”
“I’m not blaming him,” I said. “I just don’t like being covered in puke.”
“What do you expect, giving him a bottle? He needs your milk, not . . .”
“Who the hell are you, Dr. Spock?”
“Any fool knows that.”
“My tits are blocked again.”
“Then unblock them.”
“And why don’t you fuck off back to your aerie?”
“With pleasure,” he said, slamming the door behind him.
Tony had never slammed a door behind him before. And he did it with such force that it not only startled me, but also scared Jack. His crying redoubled in response to the loud bang. I suddenly had this absolute, immediate urge to punch out a window with my fist. Instead, I stripped off my vomit-drenched shirt, pulled up my bra, and—picking up Jack from the crib—attached him to the right nipple. As he sucked and sucked, I felt as if my head was about to implode—the pain from the obstructed breast suddenly feeling minor compared to the amplifying pressure cooker between my ears. And when—out of nowhere—the breast unclogged and Jack began to greedily feed, my reaction wasn’t one of relief. Rather, I entered a strange new terrain . . . a place I’d never ventured before. A realm called hysteria.
Or, at least, that’s what it felt like to me. Incessant sobbing, accentuated by a mounting internal scream. It was a most peculiar sensation, this silent wail. It was as if I had retreated into a corner of my skull, from which I could hear myself—at a distant remove—crying. But gradually, these external tears were overwhelmed by a huge lunatic screech. When this howl reached such a magnitude that it threatened to deafen me, I had no choice but to pull Jack off my breast, lay him down in his crib, and negotiate the corridor toward our bedroom. Whereupon I fell onto the bed, grabbed a pillow, and used it to baffle my ears.
Curiously, this seemed to have a salutary effect. Within seconds, the internal howling stopped. So too did my sobbing. But in its place came silence. Or what, at first, seemed like silence . . . but then, out of nowhere, turned out to be the absence of sound. It was as if both eardrums had been perforated and now I was hearing nothing, which was something of a relief, as I could no longer take the wail between my ears. So I lay there for what seemed to be only a few moments, luxuriating in this newfound deafness. Until the door flew open and Tony came in, looking surprisingly agitated. Initially, I couldn’t hear what he was saying (even though I had removed the pillow from around my ears). But then, out of nowhere, my hearing snapped back into life. One moment, Tony was silent pantomime, the next, his voice came crashing into my ears. And underscoring his angry tone was the nearby sound of Jack crying.
“—don’t understand how the hell you can just lie there when your son’s—” Tony said, this sentence crashing into my ears.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said, jumping to my feet and brushing past him. When I reached the nursery, I retrieved Jack from the crib and had him back on my left nipple within seconds. Fortunately, the milk flowed immediately—and Jack’s cries were temporarily silenced. We all stop crying when we get what we want . . . for a moment or two anyway.
I leaned back in the wicker chair as he fed away. I shut my eyes, I willed myself back into the realm of deafness. Instead, I heard Tony’s voice. It was back in his usual modulated range.
“What happened there?”
I opened my eyes. I sounded peculiarly calm.
“What happened where?” I asked.
“You on the bed—with the pillow ’round your head. Remember?”
“My ears . . .”
“Your ears?”
“Yeah—earache or something. Couldn’t take it . . . the earache, that is. Just a momentary thing. Just . . .”
I shut my eyes again, unable to stand the sound of my own jerky train of thought.
“Should I call the doctor?”
My eyes jumped open again.
“No need,” I said, suddenly sounding lucid. Anything but some doctor—looking warily at my fragile state, and adding to (what I imagined was) an ever-growing file about my maternal incompetence.
“I really do think . . .”
“Everything’s fine now,” I said, cutting him off. “It was just a little temporary distress.”
Temporary distress. How bloody English of me.
Tony studied me carefully, saying nothing
“You ever get a flash earache?” I asked. “Hurts like a bastard. And then . . . bam, it’s gone.”
“If you say so,” he said, sounding unconvinced.
“Sorry I shouted at you.”
“Comme d’habitude,” he said. “Mind if I go back to work?”
“No problem.”
“I’m upstairs if you need me.”
And he left.
Comme d’habitude. You bastard. Spending a derisory half hour with me and your new son (on the first day he’s home) before retreating to your sanctum sanctorum. And then getting all affronted when I get just a little peeved by your little lecture about Mother’s Milk versus Formula. (How the hell did he know that? Some article on the Chronicle’s women’s pages, no doubt—which Tony probably glanced at for around fifteen seconds.) No doubt, once Jack started crying again, my husband would plead the need for sleep (because somebody has to earn the money around here) and head for the silent comfort of his office sofa bed, leaving me to walk the floors for the night.
Which is exactly what happened. To make things even more maddening, I encouraged Tony to sleep elsewhere. Because by the time he came downstairs again—it was sometime after one AM—Jack was back in bawling mode, the thirty minute feed being his sole respite from a long evening’s cry. So when Tony found me in the living room with Jack, occasionally stealing a glance at the television, while simultaneously trying to rock him to sleep, I tried to play nice.
“Poor you,” Tony said. “How long has he been going on like that?”
“Too long.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Get some sleep. You need it.”
“You sure about that?”
“This can’t go on all night. He’s going to have to pass out eventually.”
Eventually was the operative word here—as Jack did not settle down again until 3:17 AM exactly (I was watching BBC News 24 at the time—which always has the precise time in one corner of the screen). By this time, not only were both breasts unblocked, but had been wrung dry by his persistent feeding. After five hours of tears, he burped a milk-saturated burp, and passed right out.
I couldn’t believe my luck—and swiftly got him upstairs into his crib, then stripped off my grungy clothes, took a very hot shower, and crawled into bed, expecting sleep to hit me like a sucker punch.
But nothing happ
ened. I stared up at the ceiling, willing myself to pass out. No sale. I reached for a book from the pile of reading matter by the bed. I tried to read a couple of pages of Portrait of a Lady (well, I was an American in Europe, after all). But even Henry James’s dense, lugubrious style didn’t put me to sleep. So I got up and made myself a cup of chamomile tea, and looked in on Jack (still conked out), and washed down two aspirins, and got back into bed, and tried to negotiate the further adventures of Isabel Archer, and waited for sleep to arrive, and . . .
Suddenly, it was crowding five AM, and I was reaching the point in the novel where Isabel was about to ruin her life by marrying that malignant nobody, Gilbert Osmond, and I kept thinking that Edith Wharton did this sort of thing far more smartly in The House of Mirth and, God, didn’t James write long sentences, and if he couldn’t put me to sleep, nobody could, and . . .
Jack began to cry again. I put down the book. I went into the nursery. I removed his dirty diaper. I cleaned his dirty bottom. I dressed him in a clean diaper. I picked him up. I sat down in the wicker chair. I lifted up my T-shirt. He attached himself to my left nipple. I winced in anticipation of the forthcoming pain. And . . .
Miracle of miracles—a no-problem flow of milk.
“Well, that’s good news,” Jane Sanjay said when she dropped by late that afternoon to check on my progress. “How many feeds now without a blockage?”
“I’ve just done the third of the day.”
“Houston, it looks like we’ve got full flow,” she said.
I laughed, but then added, “Now, if I can just get some sleep.”
“Was he up all night?”
“No—just me.”
“Well, hopefully it’s a one-off bad night. But you seem to be holding up pretty well under the circumstances. Better than I would, believe me.”
“You’ve no kids.”
“Hey, do I look crazy?”
However, by two the next morning, I was seriously beginning to wonder if I was veering into craziness. Tony had been out all evening at some foreign correspondents’ dinner, and rolled in drunk around two AM—to find me slumped in front of the television, with Jack on my lap, crying his eyes out, unable to settle down, and completely satiated from an extended one-hour feed.
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