by Kris Webb
Dr Daniels looked up from the print-out which showed the timing and strength of my contractions.
‘All right, I think we’re down to the serious end of things now. You might want to leave pretty soon, Debbie.’
Despite the fact that Debbie had made him promise to warn her when the birth was close, she looked at him in horror.
‘Leave? Are you serious? I’m not going anywhere.’
Another contraction started, almost on top of the last one, and I pushed my head back into the pillow and closed my eyes, unable to focus on anything but the pain. When I opened them again, Debbie was emerging from the bathroom, having abandoned her shimmering dress and stiletto heels for a loose T-shirt and a pair of elastic-waisted trousers she’d obviously found in my bag.
‘Right, I’ve changed my mind,’ I announced, figuring I didn’t have long before the next contraction. ‘I want drugs. Give me an epidural now.’ I couldn’t imagine what had possessed me to decide not to have one.
Dr Daniels was moving around the room and giving instructions to a nurse who had suddenly appeared.
‘Sorry, Sophie, but it’s too late,’ he threw over his shoulder as, to my horror, he pulled on white gum boots and a plastic apron. His words took a moment to sink in but as they did I sat bolt upright.
‘What? You told me I could let you know if I changed my mind!’
‘Yes, I know,’ he replied calmly. ‘But you’ve advanced through this stage very quickly; we don’t have time for an epidural now.’
‘You have got to be kidding!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this might happen?’
Dr Daniels stopped what he was doing and walked over to the bed.
‘You can still use gas, Sophie. Here, take a deep breath of this.’ He pulled the mask towards me but I brushed it aside.
‘Do they give you happy gas when they cut your leg off?’ I yelled.
Debbie put her hand on my shoulder.
‘Soph, it will be all right, just relax.’
I caught a look that passed between them and opened my mouth to comment. Before I could, though, I felt the next contraction and gripped the sides of the hospital bed.
Debbie dislodged one of my hands and put it around hers.
‘Here, squeeze this. Right, I think we need to focus on the name for this baby. What about Humperdink? Now, there’s a name you don’t hear enough these days.’
The contractions came one after the other and I didn’t have the energy to argue any more. All of my energy was focused on just getting through each one.
Debbie stayed resolutely at my head, not even glancing towards Dr Daniels and the midwife. She mopped my forehead with a cloth and kept her hand in mine throughout the next hour.
When the little wet and screaming body that was my daughter finally appeared, Debbie burst into tears.
Dr Daniels handed my baby to me and I looked down at her in awe. Every part of her was perfectly formed, from her tiny ears to the nails on her long fingers. I noticed with a pang that the large gap between her first two toes was an exact replica of Max’s.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I whispered, reaching out a finger to touch her nose.
Looking up, I saw Debbie smiling through her tears at me.
‘It’s a little girl, Debbie. I have a little girl,’ I said in a voice that I couldn’t stop from trembling.
‘Oh, Sophie,’ she said, her eyes not leaving the baby. ‘She is absolutely beautiful.’
‘Hello, Sarah,’ I said, any lingering doubts about naming my daughter after my mother gone.
As if she heard, Sarah opened her eyes and looked up at me. In a moment all the doubts I’d had during my pregnancy about whether I really wanted a baby were swept away. Now that she was here, I couldn’t imagine not having her. I was under no illusions that bringing her up by myself would be easy, but I was certain I could handle whatever came along. From now on there would always be the two of us and suddenly that felt exactly how it was meant to be.
‘Oh, Sophie,’ Debbie whispered again. ‘Think of the clothes we can buy her.’
SIX
My first day home was clearly not the time to attempt to decipher the instructions on erecting the change table, which seemed to have been written by someone whose knowledge of the English language rivalled my high school French. Figuring babies had probably been changed on floors before, I lay Sarah on the rug and grabbed the bag with nappies and various other bits and pieces from the living room.
What had seemed, not easy, but definitely achievable, when I had someone holding Sarah’s legs for me, suddenly became impossible now that I was alone. I tried desperately to remember how the nurse had managed to hold Sarah’s squirming legs and clean her simultaneously. Thankfully, Sarah seemed to sense that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and stopped moving. After sticking down the second nappy tag, I looked at my watch – ten minutes. Doing a quick calculation in my head, I figured that if I changed Sarah twelve times a day (which I had been informed was quite a conservative estimate) then, unless I managed to streamline the operation, I was going to spend two hours a day just changing nappies.
Given that I had fed Sarah just before we left the hospital and I had now changed her nappy, I couldn’t think of anything else to do with her except put her to bed in the hope she might be tired. Thankfully, the family I’d bought the crib from through the classified ads in the newspaper had taken pity on my obviously single state and had not only delivered the crib but had put it back together for me before leaving.
Wrapping Sarah in a bunny-rug was a skill I hadn’t even come close to mastering in the hospital. In about three quick moves the nurses had managed to make a little bundle that resembled a straightjacket, while my attempts produced something Sarah could dislodge with a decent-sized yawn. Nevertheless I did my best and settled her in the crib, which suddenly looked huge compared to the tiny figure that was my four-day-old daughter.
During the later stages of my pregnancy I had found the feeling of the baby moving around in my belly amazing. Without even having seen the baby, I knew that I loved it, and by the time I was eight months pregnant, I couldn’t imagine the feeling becoming any stronger once it was born. As I looked at Sarah now, I realised how wrong I had been.
Every time I looked at her I fell a little bit deeper under her spell. I felt like a cartoon character who spies a love interest and whose heart starts to swell and beat faster and faster until it fills the whole room.
Although I knew that the little miracle in the crib had been inside me a week ago, I still didn’t feel as though she was mine. I half expected a real mother wearing a housecoat (whatever that was) to knock on the door, thank me for looking after Sarah and say, ‘I’ll take it from here.’
Miraculously Sarah closed her eyes, and I backed quietly out of the room, wincing as I turned in the doorway without remembering to add the extra clearance my newfound figure now required. I hadn’t always had DD-cup breasts, any cleavage I’d previously managed being solely the result of a bra with a large amount of foam in it.
The transformation had occurred on the third night after Sarah was born, while a friend was visiting me in hospital. It was actually quite appropriate that it happened in front of Andrew as, one way or another, he’d been trying to change my body shape for years.
The company I worked for when I first moved to Sydney had a tiny gym which consisted of not much more than a couple of running machines and some huge weights. It had been roundly ignored by all of the staff until the CEO had a midlife crisis and found fitness, deciding that healthy bodies equalled healthy minds. He hired Andrew’s services as a personal trainer and enlisted him to design an exercise program for all employees who were interested. The project had become something of a standing joke in the office and Andrew spent more time staring at the four walls of the dingy gym than revitalising our flagging energy levels.
However, one depressing day when I discovered I couldn’t do up the button on my favourite pair of bla
ck trousers, I snuck down to the gym at lunchtime in desperation. On walking into the gym, I spotted a very muscular blond man bench-pressing lumps of metal that looked like they weighed as much as a small car. Horrified, I began backing out. However, Andrew had spotted the movement in the mirrors, flicked the weights back onto the stand and bolted upright, greeting me with enthusiasm. Cornered, I was coerced into what turned out to be the first of many fitness regimes designed for me by Andrew.
Despite my initial reservations, I found myself enjoying Andrew’s company, and on discovering his weakness for red wine and double espressos, I decided I could overlook the fact that his idea of a great morning was jogging ten kilometres on his toes (to strengthen his calves, he informed me enthusiastically).
Debbie recoiled in horror when, soon after I’d met Andrew, I told her that he was a personal trainer.
‘Sophie!’ she shrieked. ‘Have I taught you nothing? If there are two rules to live your life by, one of them is never give your phone number to a man wearing sneakers and jeans, and the other is never, ever make friends with anyone who receives an income in any way connected with fitness.’ Her words would ring in my ears whenever Andrew had me sweating over some gruelling course.
Despite outward appearances, Andrew’s IQ far exceeded his bicep measurement. For his twelfth birthday, his grandfather had given him a small portfolio of shares. Until he’d turned eighteen he had had to justify each trade to the old man, thereby learning the value of research and understanding the economy. He had been buying and selling shares ever since and his gym bag was usually crammed with issues of financial magazines and business papers rather than the muscle magazines you might expect. I’d learnt never to seat him at dinner next to Karen’s husband Sam, who worked for a big American bank, as they could be guaranteed to spend the evening talking endlessly about recent moves in the NASDAQ and Nikkei.
Andrew’s biggest problem was his taste in women. Over the years I’d seen a succession of women, all of them fitness junkies who had six-pack stomachs and biceps that would do the average male proud. The trouble was that once we’d exhausted the topic of their latest exercise regime, conversation would come to a screaming halt. I had never been able to figure out what he saw in them. The best that I could come up with was that he’d fallen into the habit of asking women out because they looked good, never giving himself the chance to find out first if he liked them.
Andrew had become a good friend over the years and on that fateful third night he sidled uncomfortably into my hospital room bearing a huge teddy bear, obviously feeling distinctly out of place in the maternity ward. My years of private hospital insurance had finally paid off and I had a room to myself, for which I was very grateful – all other considerations aside, I didn’t think I could have fitted my mini florist’s shop into anything smaller.
From what I could gather, the first few days of breastfeeding were a bit of a warm-up period to get both Sarah and me ready for the main event when my milk arrived. Things had seemed to go quite well so far. We were getting very good at the ‘latch’ (otherwise known as opening your baby’s mouth and sticking it on your breast), and Sarah spent a lot of time sleeping, which I assumed meant she wasn’t starving to death. However, I struggled not to smirk every time the nurses told me in hushed tones that my ‘milk would soon be coming in’. I pictured a carton of milk standing outside my door, politely knocking until I let it in.
I was sitting on the bed and Andrew was perched on a hard hospital chair beside me. He had just been quizzing me as to whether there was anywhere in the hospital grounds where I could get out for a brisk walk, when I noticed him look at my chest for about the fourth time in the last five minutes.
‘Sophie…’ Andrew said tentatively. ‘No, don’t worry,’ he quickly added.
‘What on earth is wrong, Andrew?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he squirmed in embarrassment. ‘Have you had a look at your chest recently?’
I looked down quickly, expecting to see that Sarah had thrown up on me when I wasn’t looking.
‘Oh my God!’ I exclaimed, sliding off the bed and rushing to look in the wall mirror on the other side of the room.
I had refused to receive visitors in my pyjamas and was wearing a linen shirt that buttoned down the front. While I had been aware of a vague ache in my breasts since Sarah’s last feed, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, but now protruding out of the top of my shirt was the biggest cleavage I had ever seen on any person who didn’t work in Hollywood.
Oblivious to Andrew’s presence, I pulled my shirt away from my body, peered down the front and let out a gasp. It looked like someone had glued two medicine balls, which were only vaguely disguised as breasts, onto the front of my chest.
‘Will you look at this?’ I asked Andrew, pulling my shirt down to reveal my bra, all considerations of modesty out the window in this moment of crisis.
He looked at me with his mouth open and it took him several seconds to find his voice. ‘I hope you packed your little red bikini in your hospital bag,’ he said. ‘So you can audition for Baywatch,’ he continued weakly on seeing that I did not consider this a laughing matter.
As I gazed down at what used to be my breasts, I became aware that the dull ache was becoming worse. While I had often wished for slightly larger breasts, these huge bazookas that had emerged from nowhere were way beyond what I had ever contemplated and I wasn’t entirely sure that they were normal.
Andrew had obviously decided that he did not want to be in a hospital room with a three-day-old baby and a woman with decidedly bizarre things happening to her body and a crazed expression in her eyes. As I looked up from another contemplation of the mounds of flesh under my shirt, he was edging out of the room and muttering his goodbyes.
As soon as he was gone, I called the nurses’ station and asked one of them if they would come in and see me. I was still examining my new figure in the mirror when a brisk, no-nonsense nurse arrived.
‘Yes, Sophie, how can I help you?’
‘Well…’ I began, not quite knowing what to say. ‘Look, I know your breasts are supposed to get bigger when you breastfeed, but I think there’s something wrong with mine.’ I showed her, half expecting her to turn pale and run for a doctor.
‘Ah,’ said the nurse matter-of-factly, ‘your breasts are engorged.’
After ten months of pregnancy (don’t let anyone tell you it is nine months, unless of course forty weeks equals nine months by your calculations) and the act of childbirth, I had heard a lot of hideous terms for the things that happen to your body, but this was a new one to me.
‘Engorged?’ I echoed nervously. ‘Is that serious?’
‘No, it’s perfectly normal when your milk comes in,’ the nurse replied as she tidied up the various items I’d been using to bath Sarah when Andrew arrived.
‘Although some women do get it worse than others. It looks like you’ve got a pretty good dose, but it should settle down in a couple of days.’
The pain seemed to be rapidly getting worse and a couple of days sounded like an awfully long time.
‘Is there anything I can do to help it?’ I asked, trying not to sound too desperate.
‘The only things that really work are icepacks or frozen cabbage,’ she replied.
‘Please tell me you eat the cabbage,’ I pleaded. That at least got a smile out of her.
‘Sorry, Sophie, but no, you put it on your breasts. There’s something about the chemical makeup of the cabbage that helps to reduce the swelling.’
‘The icepacks will be just fine, thanks,’ I replied firmly, refusing to contemplate sticking cabbage leaves down my bra.
An hour later, after a series of icepacks that had done nothing to alleviate the pain, I was back on the phone to the nurses’ station requesting cabbage leaves.
Something you realise pretty quickly about hospitals is that the doctors and nurses have seen it all before and don’t flicker an eyelid at personal indignities that make patients s
hrivel up in mortification. The nurse didn’t even snigger as she delivered my frozen cabbage leaves and explained what I should do with them.
As soon as she left the room, I stuck them underneath my bra and the relief was immediate. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the smell. The heat radiating from my burning breasts cooked the cabbage, and within a couple of minutes there was a distinct smell of steaming vegetable that brought to mind memories of my grandmother’s kitchen.
As a green watery substance soaked through my only nursing bra and dripped down my stomach and into the waistband of my trousers, it struck me as highly unfair that humankind could clone Dolly the Sheep, but had been unable to come up with a better remedy for milk-filled breasts than a frozen vegetable.
SEVEN
Saturday mornings at a favourite cafe had been an institution of ours for years (long before they took it up on Friends) and today was Sarah’s official ‘coming-out’.
The weekly ritual had begun when Ben, a friend of Debbie’s younger brother, quit university in the fourth year of his medicine degree and, much to the horror of his parents, bought the King Street Cafe. His claims that he could still use his first aid skills to patch up the drunks who came in for a pick-me-up coffee hadn’t cheered his parents up much.
Ben threw himself into redecorating the place, removing the grease-laden brown wallpaper and replacing it with brightly coloured paint and furniture. He scrubbed the whole place from top to bottom, bought every magazine that had been published in the last two years and threw open the doors with great enthusiasm.
And not a soul turned up.
In those days Newtown was still considered a bit dangerous and people from the eastern suburbs didn’t often make the journey across town (even though it was all of fifteen minutes). Debbie heard about Ben’s plight and immediately insisted that a group of us meet for breakfast at the cafe every Saturday morning.
While we could all munch our way through a lot of fry-ups and drink a lot of lattes, our efforts alone wouldn’t have been enough to keep Ben afloat. Luckily, though, his business grew quickly as Newtown became a place to be seen and people discovered the King Street Cafe. By then our habit had stuck and we all still took these weekend sessions seriously. The group had changed with time – Debbie’s brother had left for a job on Wall Street, and various others had drifted in and out – but five of us had been meeting almost every Saturday for the last few years.
