From Here to Maternity

by Kris Webb

  The day care was a sanctuary, with soothing background music instead of the thumping techno beat which reverberated through the remainder of the building. I left Sarah smiling up from her pram at the very capable-looking supervisor and headed back into the fray.

  Self-discipline had always been one of my fundamental problems when it came to exercising. The ‘no pain no gain’ concept had never made any sense to me. I found it very difficult not to stop, or at least slow down, when any significant discomfort was involved. However, the presence of a yelling aerobics instructor, a room full of people who were working hard, and mirrored walls which showed any low-energy performances off to all and sundry, did help somewhat, so I decided to opt for the aerobics class that was about to start.

  As soon as I entered the room I realised that it was full of women who were kitted from head to foot in the latest gym wear. My pinkish-white T-shirt (a result of one of Sarah’s little red socks getting stuck in the washing machine), sagging shorts, and sneakers which bore the traces of mud from a walk I’d done a few weeks before Sarah was born, stood out like a sore thumb.

  Refusing to be intimidated I marched to the back of the room, grabbed a step and some blocks and assembled them in a spare spot. Only when I’d finished did I look up and realise I was the only person in the room who had a step in front of them. Obviously my assumption that this was a step class was wrong. Ignoring the pitying glances of my fellow aerobicees, I pulled the step apart and returned the pieces to the piles behind me, wondering what this aerobics class was if it wasn’t step.

  A tiny instructor, who couldn’t have been any more than five feet tall, bounced into the room and up to the front. Fixing her headset and slapping a tape in the machine behind her, she started marching furiously on the spot and yelled, ‘Right, everyone, let’s fight!’

  My vain hope that I had misheard her dissolved as I saw the words ‘Fight Class’ emblazoned on her gym top and shorts and realised that I’d unwittingly stumbled into one of the new wave of exercise classes that were based on boxing and martial arts.

  Everyone except for me leapt into a boxer’s crouch and followed the instructor in a series of moves which she said was a warm-up but looked to me to require serious flexibility and strength. I was starting to get sideways glances from my fellow exercisers, and after I saw two girls off to my left look at me and smile at each other in amusement, I figured I’d better at least make an effort.

  When I tuned in to the instructor I heard her say that the aim was to fight yourself in the mirror. I concentrated on trying to do a slow neck chop and then a series of chin jabs to my reflection, but couldn’t quite figure out why everyone else looked like Mike Tyson while I looked like Mr Bean trying to punch himself in the face.

  Determined to persevere, I followed everyone in a fast sideways shuffle from one side of the studio to the other. As I shuffled, I suddenly realised that my breasts were moving at a different pace to the rest of my body. Having always dismissed as grandstanding the complaints of my better-endowed friends, I was now faced with the reality that DD-cup breasts do not move as part of your body but have a life of their own. In an effort to stop the painful jiggling, I clamped an arm across my front. Unfortunately this threw my balance out and slowed down my already snail-like motion, which meant that all of the people to my left who had been shuffling towards the right-hand side of the studio were bunched up beside me. Nevertheless I shuffled gamely on and managed to resume my original position.

  There was a pause as the instructor changed the music for the main part of the class. I took the opportunity to lean over, my hands on my knees, to try to get my breath back. From under my arms I could see the rest of the class throwing punches and Bruce Lee-style side kicks as they prepared themselves for what was to come.

  I reached the sudden decision that no degree of fitness was worth this amount of public humiliation. There was no way of sliding out discreetly so I decided on the brazen approach, marching between the instructor and the rest of the class and out the door.

  The aerobics schedule was posted outside the door and I ran my eye down it so that I could avoid Fight Class should I ever have an exercise urge again (which at this stage I felt was extremely unlikely). The names of most of the classes were all totally foreign to me – ‘Jazzercise’, ‘TBC’, ‘Kickbox’, ‘Latin Dance’. Didn’t anyone do plain old aerobics classes any more?

  I toyed briefly with the idea of using one of the battery of machines lined up against the window, on which people were jogging, sliding or stepping, but decided that I had had enough for one day and headed back up to the day care. The woman minding Sarah smiled at me as I opened the door.

  ‘First time back?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted sheepishly, given that she would hardly have had time to take Sarah out of the pram while I was away.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ she replied. ‘I see it all the time. Just take it easy, your mind and body are working overtime at the moment, anyway.’

  Feeling slightly mollified, I gave her a grateful smile and wheeled Sarah away.

  Having not expended any energy whatsoever, I felt restless once I arrived home. One thing that my baby book said was good for babies was a varied environment.

  ‘Right, Sarah,’ I said. ‘We’re going for a walk.’

  One mothering skill I had picked up with ease was talking to Sarah and describing to her what was happening, although on a couple of worrying occasions I had found myself still doing it after I’d put her to bed.

  I unfolded the pram and slung the baby bag in the carrier underneath. When I was buying baby equipment I had looked longingly at the expensive jogging prams in the shop. The thought of actually jogging with one filled me with horror – after all, jogging was a hellish enough activity without pushing a baby in front of you – it was just that they looked so cool. I had briefly considered saying that a jogging pram had been stolen from my front verandah and claiming it on insurance. However, I had always been an obsessively law-abiding citizen (my heart rate doubled if I jaywalked at an intersection) and even if I had been capable of insurance fraud, I was sure that any half-competent insurance inspector would have been able to figure out that I wasn’t the jogging-pram type before he stepped out of his car. So I had settled for a more traditional number which I’d managed to pick up second hand.

  It was nearing seven on a Friday evening. The traffic was picking up and people were streaming along King Street, heading for happy hour at their favourite bar. As I walked past Effervescence, my old Friday evening haunt, I looked in wistfully. Not working had a lot of advantages, but I did miss that wonderful Friday evening, start-of-the-weekend feeling which I could see reflected on the faces of the people I passed.

  Sarah seemed to be having a lovely time as I pushed the pram along the footpath, although she was focused more on the row of little teddy bears that hung across the pram than on the big wide world. Given the things that sometimes happened in Newtown, that probably wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Deciding that it would be nice to sit down for a while, I wheeled Sarah towards some tables and chairs set up outside a busy bar. There was a spare table at the back of the terrace and I headed for it. Driving a car is not one of my most highly developed skills and unfortunately I had found that there is a direct correlation between car-driving skill and pram-driving skill. The space between the two front tables looked quite big enough for the pram to fit through, until the wheels hit the chairs on either side. I smiled sweetly in apology at the chairs’ occupants and pushed on through as they shuffled their chairs back. After making a sharp right turn I headed towards the empty table, only to sideswipe the one next to it with the pram, causing all of its occupants’ drinks to slop onto the table. My sweet smile didn’t work as well this time as they had obviously been watching my whole rally-driving progress. Ignoring their annoyed looks I dropped into the seat and took a deep breath.

  Sarah took a deep breath too and released it in the form of a high-
pitched scream. The few people in the cafe who hadn’t already been watching me turned to look, frowning at this interruption to their Friday evening revelry.

  Picking Sarah up and jiggling her didn’t improve the situation and I wished vehemently that I’d kept walking. She must be hungry, I decided. Lying her on my lap, I lifted up my shirt and tried to undo the flap on my bra. Despite my increasingly vigorous efforts I couldn’t undo it with one hand. Surely they had tested the damn clasp in this kind of pressure situation, I fumed to myself. Tilting my knees upward to stop Sarah rolling onto the floor, I took my other hand off her and stuck it through the neck of my T-shirt. As Sarah balanced precariously on my legs, I managed to get the clip undone, lifted up my shirt and pulled her face towards my chest. The whole cafe gave a collective sigh of relief and turned back to their conversations as Sarah stopped mid bellow.

  A waiter approached (he’d obviously been hiding around the corner until I had got the situation under control) and asked me what I’d like. I was about to order a lime soda but, catching sight of some cocktail glasses on the table beside me, changed my mind and asked for a margarita instead. It was Friday, after all.

  Sarah’s slurping noises became louder as she settled in, and I wondered whether I should hum loudly to drown them out. Thankfully, though, the new CD which had begun playing in the background was louder than the previous one and I relaxed slightly.

  My drink arrived and I closed my eyes and took a large mouthful. When I opened them I was looking straight at a couple of middle-aged women sitting at a neighbouring table. They were staring at me with disapproving faces. For a second I wondered if my whole chest was showing, but a quick look established that my T-shirt was discreetly tucked over Sarah’s head and I wasn’t displaying my breasts for the crowd.

  Suddenly it hit me. These were the Mother Police Karen had told me about. Her theory was that there was an underground organisation of women who patrolled the streets looking for unfit mothers. She swore she had seen members of this group make notes on their clipboards with grim faces when they spotted her children out in temperatures under 30°C without a jacket. She was also convinced she had seen them peering in her baby bag trying to count the number of spare nappies she carried with her.

  Judging by the looks on the faces of the pair sitting near me, drinking a cocktail while breastfeeding was enough to earn me a significant number of demerit points. No one, however, was going to prevent me enjoying my drink and I pointedly turned my back on the disapproving duo and took another sip.

  ELEVEN

  By the time Sarah was nine weeks old I’d decided that having a baby wasn’t all that hard. A piece of cake, really. Either that or I had an amazingly good baby. Yeah, sure, it was boring getting up to feed her every four hours through the night, but she was so cute, and when I put her back down she just went back to sleep again. No big deal.

  However, on the day Sarah was nine weeks and one day old, I found out what the big deal was.

  Suddenly, she seemed to realise that she liked being held – always.

  The first time it happened was after one of her early morning feeds. I put her down exactly as I had every other time. But instead of drifting off to sleep, she opened her eyes, gazed at me for a long second and then let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  I grabbed her, certain that something was terribly wrong.

  Silence descended.

  I took off her nappy and checked that it didn’t need changing. She looked at me calmly as I established this wasn’t the problem. Slightly worried, I rocked her back to sleep again.

  Sighing with relief, I put her back in her crib, and immediately her eyes opened and she let out another bloodcurdling yell.

  Confused, but less panicky this time, I picked her up. Maybe, I thought, she had wind which caused her pain when she was lying down.

  For a second time she was silent as soon as I picked her up.

  Bringing her back out into my bedroom, I grabbed a baby book and lay down on the bed with her on my chest.

  Instantly, I heard her sigh and relax into a deep sleep.

  Okay, I could sort this out. Let’s see … Sleeping – page 162-3.

  Flipping to the appropriate page I started to read.

  ‘There are as many sleeping habits as there are babies and unfortunately a lot of them don’t suit their parents. One thing that is vital though, is that she must be able to fall asleep by herself, not while being held or rocked. Often this doesn’t come easily and your baby will protest when left alone in her crib. The best (but not necessarily the easiest) way to deal with this is to let her cry herself to sleep.’

  Quickly I slammed the book shut, causing Sarah to jump. That just wasn’t going to work. For a start, Sarah was way too little, and secondly, I could never just let her cry. There had to be another way.

  Three days later I opened page 162 again, acknowledging that my sixty-centimetre-tall daughter had defeated me in our battle of wills.

  The only way she would sleep was lying on my chest. The second I tried to move, either to put her beside me or back in her crib, she was instantly awake. Consequently, for the past three nights I had only slept for about fifteen minutes at a time, terrified I would roll over and suffocate her.

  I was so tired I felt as though a fog had descended over my brain. When I discovered the cereal packet in the freezer, I knew something had to be done.

  I tried calling Karen for advice, but for the first time she told me she couldn’t help.

  ‘Sorry, Soph, you’re on your own. This is one of those decisions only you can make. All I can say is that you gotta do what you gotta do.’

  Just as I hung up the telephone, it rang again. I pounced on it. Maybe Karen had decided to take pity on me and tell me what to do.

  My heart sank as I heard Debbie’s voice.

  ‘Hey, Sophie. Do you fancy coming shopping with me? I’ve got the day off and Lisa Ho has a sale on.’

  To my horror, I burst into tears. Through my sobs I tried to talk. ‘I just … I just can’t…’ And then I had to stop for breath.

  ‘Sophie, I’m sorry. I know you don’t have heaps of money, but I thought we could have fun anyway.’

  Frustrated I shook my head, although the gesture didn’t help Debbie on the other end of the line.

  ‘I just can’t…’ I tried again, ‘get Sarah to sleep.’

  This statement was greeted with silence and then a tentative, ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ve tried everything I can think of and nothing helps. Warming the sheets with a hot-water bottle so that the cold doesn’t give her a shock, singing nursery rhymes … hell, I’ve even tried tilting the crib on two legs and rocking it while I hide underneath.’

  More silence from Debbie and then a hesitant, ‘What does Karen say?’

  If I hadn’t felt so desperate, I would have laughed. This was definitely not Debbie’s area of expertise.

  ‘She says I have to decide by myself. I know you’re supposed to let them cry. I just can’t do it. I can’t…’ To my dismay I dissolved into tears again.

  ‘Okay,’ Debbie said, obviously trying to stay calm. ‘I remember seeing this on an episode of Oprah once. Don’t you have to leave them cry for five minutes, then ten and then twenty, until they go to sleep?’

  ‘That’s what they say,’ I agreed glumly.

  ‘And once you’ve done it for a couple of days, aren’t they supposed to drift off to sleep by themselves?’

  ‘But…’ I could hardly say the words. ‘What if Sarah thinks I don’t love her, that she’s been abandoned?’

  ‘Well, I’ll take her out drinking when she’s eighteen and set her straight,’ Debbie replied more firmly. ‘I don’t know much about babies, but I think you’d have to do more than that before you ruin her life. If you were talking about abandoning her wrapped in an old cardigan on a church step, I’d be a bit more concerned.’

  I knew Debbie was right and I was overreacting, but it didn’t help much.

  ‘W
hat about if I come around tonight and keep you company? It’ll be like a pyjama party,’ she continued. ‘Only with alcohol.’

  ‘And a screaming baby…’ I muttered.

  By the time the doorbell rang at seven that night, I had decided to send Debbie home. It was ridiculous to think that I couldn’t deal with this on my own, and I certainly didn’t need Debbie, of all people, to hold my hand.

  When I opened the door, though, I knew there was no going back.

  Standing on the doorstep like the three wise men were Andrew, Debbie and Ben. However, instead of bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh, they were holding beer, wine and pizzas.

  ‘Just how long are you planning on staying?’ I asked nervously as Debbie produced her entire Twin Peaks video collection, a family block of chocolate and a huge tub of caramel swirl ice-cream from the bag over her shoulder. ‘You look like you packed for a siege.’

  ‘Well, if we’re going to do this thing we might as well have fun,’ Debbie replied merrily.

  The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach increased. I wished fervently that I hadn’t said anything to Debbie. She, Andrew and Ben had no idea what they were in for.

  During the afternoon I had been to the local library and borrowed six books on children and sleeping. The librarian had looked up at me as she scanned the titles.

  ‘Won’t sleep, hey?’ she asked sympathetically.

  I felt tears looming again, so I just shook my head, willing her to change the subject. The last thing I needed was advice from a perfect stranger.