by Camilla Gibb
And yet here we were, entering my house that was now our house, my bedroom, now our bedroom, settling into my bed that was now ours. Here she was turning to me every two hours to feed. Feed on what, though? There was no milk. She cried, tried to feed, cried again, gave up, dozed. She woke up two hours later, cried, tried to feed, cried again, dozed. It was excruciating for both of us, nothing natural about it. We were failing in the most fundamental of ways.
Anna held the baby, changed her diaper, swaddled her in pink. She propped a pillow behind my back while I tried to breastfeed. She was practical and efficient, but she couldn’t give me what I needed most in that moment. It was brutal to be in her presence at my most open-wounded.
In the precious hours I slept I had nightmares and woke up crying. I fell asleep crying, for that matter. I cried in the time between waking up and falling asleep.
My sense of isolation was acute: we were four strangers in this house, no clear emotional ties between us, not even the connection I should feel to my baby. I had a sense of random bodies on water after a shipwreck, of gulping and gasping for air in the rough dark, of reaching but finding nothing solid to take hold of.
And then it was evening, the day over. Tita retired to her room. Anna left. And I was alone with a newborn. I’d never held a newborn until the night before, never changed one or fed one before that day. I was terrified to be alone with her. I was terrified to be alone. I was supposed to be feeling things that would triumph over terror. I was supposed to be feeling love. But all I felt was an acute sense of alienation. My baby and I were not in this together. Neither of us knew who we were or what we were doing. I felt very afraid for us both.
Later that night, an overwhelming transformation occurred. This dozing, placid baby erupted into a writhing, distressed creature with a big set of lungs. I would eventually discover a whole sheet about this second night in the literature the hospital sent me home with, but who had had time to read it? I would get to the page describing the baby’s sudden shock at her change in circumstances about a month too late. For the time being, I was beside myself, weeping from my inability to breastfeed or otherwise console her, agonized by the sight of her tiny, trembling tongue, the pink back of her throat, the rawness of my own battered, stitched and bleeding body doing lunges around the room as I had once seen someone else do with an inconsolable baby.
This went on for hours. I had slept only intermittently over the past five days. I was going to break. I didn’t feel there was anyone I could call.
But there was another adult in my house. I didn’t know what else to do. I knocked timidly on Tita’s door.
She was half-asleep, her long black hair loose around her shoulders. She saw my distress. “It’s okay, Mum,” she said, grabbing the duvet off her bed. “We do shift work. We be a team.”
She laid the duvet down on our bedroom floor in that narrow space between the bed and the closet. It felt like the three of us were aboard a life raft; lone survivors in the middle of a vast ocean, too concerned with simply staying afloat to even scour the horizon for something that looked like land.
Tita, thankfully, knew some basic survival techniques. She picked that baby up and asked her: What’s wrong, baby, are you hungry? Are you cold? Your diaper full? Your clothes tight? She talked to that baby until that baby made sense to her. She communicated that sense to me.
14
That first week was like an English winter: all black nights and grey days. Time didn’t progress; the same two hours just repeated over and over. The focus was on feeding, getting enough liquid into this baby. A product of my culture and generation, I was determined to breastfeed, but I was expressing only a tiny amount of milk, in so much pain for all the trying, and the little thing was losing more weight than she should.
The midwife visited twice a day, trying to help us get the hang of it. She brought me fenugreek and milk thistle to increase milk supply and a gravity-feed tube to use in the meantime. I pumped what I could into a bottle, pulled it up into the tube, put it into the baby’s mouth as if she were a bird. It required four hands, four hands every two to three hours. Tita’s hands, my mother’s, Anna’s.
Only Tita’s presence offered some comfort. With the exception of weekends, Tita was always there, discreetly omnipresent, kind. She could hear the baby crying from her room—the walls were paper-thin, just the bathroom separating her room from ours. You could hear everything in this house everywhere in this house—the shower, the sink, the toilet, the dishwasher, the splat of the mail landing in the front hall, Tita’s conversations with relatives thousands of miles away, my crying, hers.
It was two o’clock one morning and the baby’s cries had once again woken Tita. There she was standing in the doorway. I had trusted that with my baby’s arrival instinct would just take over, but there was nothing instinctive about this to me.
It wasn’t just the practical help for which I was grateful, but the simple, uncomplicated presence of another person. I had fallen down a deep well, a well full of glue, but Tita was there at the top, leaning over the side, calling out my name.
Then, morning again and there, hazy through the translucence, stood the midwife. I was living my life in the twelve-hour intervals between her visits. But I didn’t think she could hear me through the glue. Voices warbled over the top of the well. I reached up, my arm long, my hand grasping. I heard my voice say: I was worth something.
The midwife looked at me like you might look at a person who has lost a leg but thinks it is still there.
It was the best I could do through the glue to communicate my desperation.
The milk still didn’t come. After a humiliating hour with a lactation consultant, my midwife sent me to my doctor for a prescription for domperidone, to increase milk supply. My doctor seemed more concerned about my mood than my failure to breastfeed. My midwife had called her expressing concern. It turned out she had not been visiting me twice a day simply because of the breastfeeding issue. This was not the reason the parenting mediator was calling me twice a day either. I cried all the time before the baby was born, but apparently crying all the time after a baby is born is a problem. A doctor, a midwife and a therapist were all concerned that I had postpartum depression.
When does grief and fear and exhaustion become depression? I couldn’t be depressed, not now. I was afraid of a diagnosis, of its implications.
I said to my doctor, “I’m not thinking about harming myself or my baby, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Listen, Camilla, crying all the time? It’s not normal.”
I remember holding up my hennaed hands, trying to convince three British psychiatrists that I had legitimate reasons for feeling as I did.
My reasons didn’t matter. They didn’t matter then, they didn’t matter in this moment.
I felt this hazy cloud of collusion—voices speaking above me, no one speaking down into the well, no one looking me in the eye—hovering above.
I had been spared any real depression for so many years. I hadn’t taken a pill in almost a decade. I was once again disembodied: the woman who had walked into Dr. P’s office thirteen years before. I would take the pills the doctor was prescribing. Because this time I was at risk of losing more than my autonomy.
It was the middle of the night again and I was wondering how I was going to survive. I was reminded of another writer asking much the same question in the middle of another night, alone with his infant son. Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon, a memoir of a man seeking sense and connection to a severely disabled child, was the only book I had managed to read all year.
The first months of a baby’s life are all hunger, all need. What if you cannot fulfill those needs? What if that need never ends?
“I could feel the heavy tragic years coming on ahead of me, as certain as bad weather,” Brown writes; “there were nights when I even welcomed them. At last a fate I didn’t have to choose, a destiny I couldn’t avoid. There was a tiny prick of light in that though
t, the relief of submitting to the unavoidable. Otherwise, they were the worst nights of my life. I can’t explain why I wouldn’t change them.”
I copied those words down into a red notebook. I read them over and over again, trying to suck the life in them into me. A tiny prick of light. Neither Ian Brown nor his wife slept uninterrupted for two nights in a row for the first eight years of their son’s life. And that heavy certainty of the years ahead. Where did he find that glimmer? When does the weight of circumstances tip into something so leaden that there is not even the tiniest glow in the furthest distance? Where light ceases to even be possible in the imagination.
I found myself emailing Ian, an acquaintance, in the middle of the night. I have no idea what I said. I hope I said thank you; that in a year of only the barest reading, his were the only words that had really reached me.
Just write it all down, he emailed back. Write it all down because you must.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion has written. I had an obligation to live; motherhood takes away any other option. And writing is the only way I know how.
A red notebook lay to one side of me every night, a swaddled baby on the other. I believed that if I could find words, I could be a human again. And if I could be a human again, perhaps I could be a mother.
Clench clench these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth. Of my body. This is me speaking, not mouthing, began a draft of a first novel written a lifetime ago. I was scared then, too. Scared to speak, scared to tell a story. But even more scared not to.
15
The only privacy I had was inside my head. Tita lowered me into the bath, cleaned the breast pump, propped me up, changed bloodied sheets, washed them, saw the hours of tears. I apologized, embarrassed. I had no choice. Neither did she. She was unembarrassed, matter-of-fact.
When I had first interviewed her, I had asked her what she wanted from me. Respect was what she said, that was all. She accorded me, at my most undignified, that as well.
I apologized for the messiness of my situation. For the intensity of it all and what it required of her. I asked her how she was finding it so far, living here, whether she felt she was getting the respect she deserved.
Tita sat down on the end of my bed while I fed the baby. She started to tell me something about her experience so far in Canada. The Filipino agency that had brought her to Toronto from Hong Kong two years before had told her she would be working for a “difficult employer,” but said they had no doubt she would be up to the task. Tita took care of their children and was expected to oversee their homework, in a second language, one she doesn’t speak. She could recognize tone of voice, though. When the parents spoke at the dinner table, they not only excluded her but talked about her. The children picked up on their parents’ disregard; during the day they hurled insults, trekked mud quite deliberately across newly washed floors, and spat toothpaste in her face. She didn’t blame them, though. She loved them.
She loved the children and cleaned their house, did the laundry, ironing, shopping, cooking, gardening, snow shovelling. And she was yelled at every single day. For leaving a light on, for wasting an egg, for simply being in the line of fire. She was threatened with being deported, told she couldn’t use the dishwasher or use the washing machine for her own clothes. She had to buy her own mug from which to drink tea, keeping it in her room. She was not allowed visitors; she was never even given her own key.
They expected her to leave at seven-thirty on Friday night and not return until late Sunday. And go where, exactly? They didn’t care. She was forced to trek to the bus stop on cold, dark winter nights where she would wait as long as half an hour on a lonely stretch of unlit road in the suburbs. She bought a winter hat and found refuge with an elderly Filipina lady. But the old lady was of modest means and Tita couldn’t use the washing machine at her place either. She took her bedsheets to this woman’s apartment in her knapsack, washed them in the bathtub, then hung them over the shower rail to dry.
She sat at the end of my bed while I fed this little baby and cried at the memory of it.
“I didn’t think I could survive another year,” she said. But she was too afraid of being fired or deported to raise any objection. All nannies in her position are afraid. They are powerless, at the mercy of their employers, to whom their work permits are exclusively tied, and of the exploitative agencies that keep them indentured. It took Tita two years to repay the agency the fee they charged for placing her with employers who, it turned out, had burned through ten nannies in as many years.
When those employers decided to go on holiday for a month, they told her she would not be paid. And so when they left on holiday, Tita left their house for good, rendered homeless and jobless, with a work permit that prevented her from working for anyone else and an entire family back home dependent upon her income. Her former employer still owed her two weeks’ pay and a record of employment. That was a fight I was willing to take on. If there was anything I could do for her, it was this.
So we were both, it turned out, reeling from a traumatic year. Neither of us had any reason to trust the other, and yet we were forced into this mutually dependent relationship where trust just had to be.
We did shift work, a baby being passed between us. Whoever had the free hands made dinner—that was our unspoken arrangement. We were, as she had said from the beginning, a team.
16
Twelve days after giving birth, I was on a stage, talking about a book I had written in some other lifetime. I wasn’t nervous—not about speaking that morning or about reactions to the book—because I was no longer the woman who wrote that book. The woman who was standing on stage was that woman turned inside out: only the clothes and the tangible evidence of printed pages concealed the truth. I was an empty body asking a limited brain to do all the work.
Perhaps one needs a three-hour break from a baby in the first two weeks in order to fully comprehend what has happened. I couldn’t feel anything that morning except my daughter’s absence. I was incomplete. I had become a we. Was I not me without her? Was she she? Was this love? I had no idea; it didn’t feel like anything I’d ever felt before. I just knew that I had to get home right away. That we had to breathe each other in. Skin on skin. That we must be we; our very survival depended upon it.
“She’s so good,” I say to Anna, who has spent these hours with her. “How did I get such a good baby?”
“Because you deserve it,” she replies.
17
For the first time in a long time I was aware of the sun shining. Perhaps the antidepressants had begun to work: edges were becoming discernible; the haze that had dulled everything burning off like a morning fog. The fall leaves were a fire of red and orange, the weather was brisk. We were at Riverdale Farm, a little oasis in the middle of the city, the egg strapped into the BabyBjörn, blinking into the sunlight, her eyes that deep-water navy of all newborns.
Tita was shuffling her feet, unimpressed. “Smells like my country,” she said.
She comes from a poor farming community on the Visayan island of Bohol. She grew up on a small farm, the second youngest of four children. Her father had given each of his children a plot of his land on which to build their own houses. Tita was so far the only one who had been able to do so; Tita, the first of two children to go abroad. It had been nine years by this point, first in Singapore, then in Hong Kong, now Toronto. Nine years of minimum-wage labour and she had built her family back home a house.
I had seen the photographs of it posted on her sister’s Facebook page. The new house had two bedrooms and indoor plumbing. Tita had just had a white granite floor installed in the living room. Her parents were critical of it, saying it would get filthy. But that way, Tita countered, you can see the dirt. Nine years before, when Tita had told her mother she was going abroad to work as a nanny, her mother had asked her what she was thinking. But you can’t even tidy up your room! she had said. Now her parents, younger sister and husband
were living in a house with white granite floors while Tita tidied up other people’s messes far away.
She missed her husband, Nico, terribly. They spoke on the phone every night. B1 and B2, they called each other: “Babes.” They’d been married for four years but had seen each other only twice since the wedding, only once since Tita had arrived in Canada. They were applying for permanent residency as a couple. It would be at least a couple of years before he arrived. In the meantime, he had overseen construction of the new house and was trying his hand at raising pigs.
“What do you think of these pigs?” I asked Tita, leaning on the fence at Riverdale Farm.
“Useless,” she said. “Smaller than the pigs in my place.”
She told me that at one point during her university education in the island capital, Tagbilaran, her parents could no longer afford the tuition. Tita was already working half-days so she could pay for her board. She was forced to drop out of school. She went to Cebu, a larger island nearby, to get a job. After six months her mother called and said: You can come back—the pig is getting fat. That pig paid her tuition. Two more saw her through to graduation.
“What do you think Nico will do when he gets here?” I asked her.
Tita shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Factory job.”
They would begin to build a new life together. Maybe one day they’d have a child of their own. The sacrifices they have both been willing to make for the prospect of a better future.
