by Kris Webb
‘Dad, as far as I’m concerned I had a great childhood and you are a wonderful father,’ I said. ‘Maybe there were times when I missed having a mother, but never enough to want to see you with someone you didn’t love.’ My voice wavered. ‘Although, come to think of it, I’m still emotionally scarred by some of the hairdos you sent me off to school with,’ I added, trying to lighten the conversation and avoid breaking into tears.
My father’s artistic skills, which made him a highly regarded architect, deserted him whenever a hairbrush and hairband were put in his hands and I’d had some humiliating experiences with ponytails sticking out at all angles until I learnt to do my hair myself.
He laughed briefly and then became serious again. ‘All I’m saying, Sophie, is give Max a chance to be involved if that’s what he wants. A child deserves two parents, even if they don’t live together.’
‘Okay, Dad, I will,’ I promised, doubting that it was ever going to be an issue, considering the way Max felt.
‘You do know what this will do to my image, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I asked apprehensively, worried that he would say he’d be shunned in London social circles because of his daughter having an illegitimate child.
‘Well, I’ll be a grandfather,’ he said. ‘People will stand up for me on the bus and offer to help me across the street. Elizabeth might even decide that she should dump me for a younger man.’
I laughed for the first time in days. ‘Sorry, Dad, your image has not been top of my list of worries over the last couple of weeks.’
‘No, I guess not,’ he replied. ‘Well, what we need to do is figure out how Elizabeth and I can help. We’ll come across for the birth, obviously.’
‘That would be great, Dad,’ I said, feeling suddenly happy as I hung up. His reaction had reminded me that we weren’t living in the fifties. Far from being a scandal, having a baby alone was almost a status symbol, I decided. Determined to enjoy this rare moment of optimism, I managed to ignore the fact that most single-parent celebrities earned about fifty times more than I did and seemed to spend most of their life on European beaches.
After I found myself in floods of tears midway through a Sunday afternoon rerun of An Officer and a Gentleman, I knew that my movie viewing habits had to change. Out went my all-time favourite Breakfast at Tiffany’s and in came films like Reservoir Dogs and Psycho.
By some bizarre hormonal twist I attributed to being pregnant, I wasn’t even slightly disturbed by haunted houses and mass murderers, but I had suddenly developed a tendency to cry whenever I heard a sad country and western song. It got so bad that Debbie banned me from listening to the local country music radio station (a habit I’d picked up from Max) because every time another cowboy lost his woman, his pick-up truck or his dog, I’d end up sobbing on the couch.
Debbie also disapproved of the fact that I no longer felt like going out and spent most of my evenings at home. The last thing I felt like doing was being sociable, and given that I couldn’t even drown my sorrows with alcohol, a night in front of the television was infinitely preferable to being with people who regarded me with a mix of sympathy and pity now that word was out about my impending motherhood.
I’d broken the news to Karen, my only friend who had children, in the park down the road from her house. We were standing at the playground watching her eldest two, Emily and Jack, attempt to throw themselves off the highest point on the climbing frame, while Pat, her eighteen month old, sat in the sandpit shovelling handfuls of sand into his mouth.
Karen is happily married at thirty-five, which in this day and age is statistically improbable. To make her even more remarkable, she has managed to retain a sense of herself (and a high-maintenance hairstyle), and with or without the kids, she is always fun to be around. Despite the fact that she only comes up to my shoulder and wouldn’t weigh more than forty-five kilos wringing wet, she also has an amazing ability to down spirits without getting drunk and can outdrink most people, including men, if the need arises.
Any looming mortal danger to her brood forgotten at the enormity of my revelation, she turned to me in astonishment and pulled her dark shoulder-length hair back from her face.
I was getting used to people’s responses to news of my pregnancy and I braced myself for the standard list of questions about whether Max knew, how I was going to support myself and the baby, and how I was dealing with it all.
‘That’s wonderful news, Sophie!’
For that response alone, I nearly fell into her arms in gratitude. Instead, I just smiled weakly.
Karen went on seriously, ‘I’m sure everyone has told you about how hard it will be and how much your life will change.’
I nodded grimly, trying to hold back the tears that had suddenly appeared – again.
‘Take it from me, there is absolutely nothing better in this world than having a child,’ she said. ‘Mind you,’ she mused, ‘if you’d told me yesterday when all three of mine were competing for horror child of the year, I might have had a different reaction.’
I still couldn’t speak around the lump in my throat and she looked closely at me.
‘This can’t be easy, I know. It’s a frightening enough thing to deal with when you’ve got a husband and actually set out to get pregnant. But, believe me, there’ll be more good times than bad.’
‘I’ve got a huge knot in my stomach all the time,’ I confessed. Karen stayed silent as I groped for the words to explain how I felt. ‘I don’t even have one tiny memory of my mother. Not even the smallest impression. What if I get it all wrong?’
As the tears poured down my face, Karen took my hand. Dimly I noticed that Emily and Jack had indeed thrown themselves off the play equipment, but by some miracle had managed to survive.
‘Sophie, all you have to do is love them,’ Karen said softly. ‘I promise you, everything else will work out from there.’
I tried to hide my disappointment in her answer. I had wanted her to tell me that I’d make a perfect mother, that my maternal instinct would kick in and I wouldn’t put a foot wrong.
‘Maybe there’s some kind of hormone released during labour that compels you to grow tomatoes and always have a chocolate cake in the freezer?’ I asked hopefully.
Karen laughed. ‘No such luck. The last time I had chocolate cake in the freezer was when my mother came to stay. Are you going to find out if the baby is a boy or a girl?’
I shook my head. I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, but I liked the idea of having a surprise to look forward to at the end of the labour.
‘What about names?’
I started to shake my head. I was only just starting to come to terms with the fact that I was pregnant, and a name for the baby seemed like way too much reality.
A sudden thought struck me. ‘Actually, maybe I do know what I’ll call the baby if it’s a girl. My mother’s name was Sarah – I think I’d like to call her that.’
Karen smiled. ‘That sounds perfect.’
Karen had sent me home with two pregnancy books. She said that one of them was funny and reassuring, and that the other was a Nazi-style manual but contained useful information as long as it was taken with a large grain of salt.
Even without Karen’s advice I would have been prejudiced against the second book as its cover featured a photo of a glowing pregnant woman wearing denim overalls. I’d never seen anyone who wasn’t pregnant in denim overalls and immediately vowed to myself that they would not make their way into my wardrobe.
Figuring that I may as well get the bad news first, I opened the Nazi manual randomly, trying to ignore the cover, and found myself looking at the ‘Eating for Baby’ section.
The author declared that you didn’t need to totally avoid alcohol and that it was perfectly acceptable to have half a glass of champagne on special occasions. Resisting the urge to throw the book across the room, I pressed on. Pâté, sushi, prawns, soft cheese, meat rarer than shoe leather . . . The list of prohibited foods
sounded like a rollcall of all things good in life and I was only surprised to see that chocolate didn’t rate a mention.
The next paragraph showed the reason for that omission, as the book warned against the dire consequences of overeating and suggested restricting sweet foods to the special treat of one square of chocolate after dinner at weekends. After all, it proclaimed, low-fat yoghurt sweetened with a little organic apple juice was a perfectly good substitute.
Deciding it was time for a bit of down-to-earth reassurance, I turned to the book Karen had said was more down-to-earth. This one was part of a series which covered pregnancy and early childhood, but as I read the title I realised Karen had accidentally given me a book that came later in the series.
I opened the cover anyway. Ten minutes later I was still reading, mouth open in horror and eyes glazed with shock. The book should have been emblazoned with a warning that it was not to be opened by any woman who had not given birth, I thought with a touch of hysteria. It began with a description of the state your body would be in and how you should expect to feel post-labour. Although I slammed the book shut after reading the section comparing the bleeding to something Lady Macbeth would be proud of, it was too late and the graphic images the book conjured up stayed in my mind.
Turning back to the first book I thumbed desperately through the index for the section on elective caesareans. Despite the disapproving discussion of such an option in the text, I immediately decided that the only way this baby was coming out of me was with the help of a surgeon and under general anaesthetic.
When I had made the decision to bring the baby up alone, I pictured myself as a fearless Amazon gazing into the middle distance with my child clasped to my breast and hair billowing behind me (although when I’d heard that the Amazons cut off their right breasts to allow for better arrow shooting, my regard for them had dipped significantly). However, it didn’t take long for those strong and noble feelings to fade, leaving me lonely and scared.
Max had been a big part of my life for the last two years and his sudden disappearance left a huge hole which I had no idea how to fill. I used to love waking up on weekend mornings to see him lying beside me, with the prospect of a whole day to wander through shops, spend on the beach or just sit in a cafe eating and drinking. Suddenly that feeling of weekend anticipation had been replaced by a dread of the empty hours I’d have to fill before I could get back to work and bury my head in paper to make the pain go away.
I also missed the phone calls during the day. We’d often call each other for no real reason – sometimes it was just to share a particularly good Far Side cartoon from the desk calendars we had coincidentally given each other at Christmas. It wasn’t until Max had been gone for a couple of months that I finally changed the quick dial button on my work phone that was programmed to his work number.
Knowing that he was halfway around the world didn’t stop me half expecting to run into him and looking for him in our favourite haunts. Even though I’d said there was no point in talking about things any further, I perversely hoped it was him every time the telephone rang, and I found myself looking in the newspaper each morning to see what the weather was like in San Francisco.
Karen had convinced me that perhaps a caesarean was not the answer and so, deciding that I should try to find out about the birth process, I enrolled in antenatal classes at the local clinic. I felt conspicuously alone amongst all the couples. There was no one for me to hold muttered discussions with, or to ask questions on my behalf, and everyone looked at me in disapproval when I snorted involuntarily at the suggestion that aromatherapy was a pain-relief option. Pain-relief drugs were something to which I was giving serious consideration, but no one was going to convince me that burning scented candles would help take my mind off the process of moving a baby from inside to outside my body.
However, in my more positive moments, I convinced myself that the drama of being pregnant helped take my mind off Max.
By the time I’d reached the stage where I could leave the house in maternity clothes without feeling that people were laughing at me, the hurt his departure had caused was reduced from a constant stabbing pain to a dull ache. The day I walked past a building site dripping with workers without one whistle or catcall coming my way, I realised that I hadn’t thought of him at all for at least forty-eight hours. Once I could no longer tie my shoelaces without major contortions, life alone seemed normal and my time with Max a thing of the distant past.
FOUR
As the nurse handed me my four-day-old baby, I barely resisted the urge to handcuff myself to the hospital bed and make her promise not to make me leave until this helpless little bundle was a teenager.
But it was too late. Sarah was already dressed in her street wear (a purple and red grow suit, which had received some disapproving stares from the older members of the hospital staff) and it was time to go home.
So, putting on a face I hoped resembled that of a cool, calm and collected mother, I laid Sarah in her pram, loaded the net carrier underneath with flowers, hung some more baskets of flowers over the handles, grabbed my suitcase with the other hand and headed for the lifts. Debbie chattered away next to me, carrying only her designer handbag and a small pink teddy bear someone had given Sarah.
As we entered the car park and I spotted the familiar red car, I stopped in my tracks.
‘Debbie, you said you were going to go and pick up my car. I cannot fit two thousand flowers and a newborn baby in your tiny convertible,’ I exclaimed.
Debbie had the good grace to look slightly shamefaced as she tried to explain. ‘I meant to pick up your car last night but everyone was going for cocktails and then we went to this great little French restaurant for dinner and I know you don’t approve of drink-driving and –’
‘Enough, Debbie,’ I interrupted. ‘Just explain to me how you were planning to take Sarah without her capsule?’
‘Ah,’ she brightened. ‘Her capsule was still at my place from when we bought it, and Alexander discovered that there was already a hole in the back seat to hook it into. So it’s all safely installed ready for Sarah’s first trip.’
I stifled a smile. Alexander, Debbie’s latest love, struck me as someone who had never done anything more practical than change a light bulb, and I could picture him being reluctantly pushed out of bed to install Sarah’s capsule this morning.
‘There’s heaps of room,’ Debbie continued. ‘If I can fit the bags from a day’s shopping in, then a baby and a few flowers will be easy.’
Debbie had a point, given that the results of her shopping trips could usually fill a small truck. However, I looked enviously at the couple on the other side of the car park who were carefully strapping their baby into its capsule in their station wagon, stopping when they’d finished to gaze in wonder and then kiss it tenderly. I’d never been accused of doing things the traditional way, and usually that was fine with me, but sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice if things weren’t always so . . . untraditional.
I sighed and gingerly picked Sarah up. Debbie leant against the car, reapplying her lipstick as I lowered Sarah into her capsule, and after a few false starts I had my tiny daughter securely strapped in.
Finally we were off, and I had to admit Sarah did seem pretty pleased about her first road trip. Warm in her capsule, a little flannel rug dotted with pink bears tucked around her, she stared wide-eyed in wonder at the blue Sydney sky.
Debbie, meanwhile, seemed to have suddenly learnt how to drive. Normally she was a menace to other drivers, cutting in and out of lanes with reckless abandon and braking without warning. Today she was driving as though I was an examiner and she was hoping to get her licence.
I hadn’t made it to the age of thirty, however, without learning that sometimes it is best to say nothing, and we sat in silence.
My friendship with Debbie had been cemented forever when we were eleven years old and she took pity on me and showed me how to kiss.
It was the afternoon
of our first school social and Mark Johnson had asked me if we could ‘see’ each other that night. Even the lapse of almost two decades hasn’t allowed me to delude myself that he was the coolest guy in the school, and I recall all too clearly that he was short and spotty with greasy blond hair and carried his school books in a vinyl briefcase.
But at eleven years old, it was shaping up to be the most intimate moment I’d ever had with a man.
Somehow, even at such a tender age, Debbie knew about such things, so it was natural that I turned to her for advice. To her credit, she treated the matter with the seriousness I thought it deserved and I spent two hours alternating between slobbering over a mirror (to observe how I looked) and a sliced rockmelon (Debbie thought it best that I be prepared for the worst possible scenario).
The night itself was less than momentous as Mark lost his nerve and we didn’t even speak to each other, let alone join the other kissing couples on the school football oval.
In fact, despite my preparations, I didn’t actually score my first kiss until I was nearly fourteen, by which time Debbie was threatening to disown me and find a best friend who had done more than hold hands with a boy on the train on the way home from school.
Despite vowing to be friends forever, we lost track of each other after high school until I ran into her in a bar a week after I’d moved to Sydney.
I was out with people from my new job, and although they were trying hard to include me, I was feeling a bit like an interloper and was about to call it a night. I recognised Debbie immediately. She was dressed in a slinky orange dress (Debbie was never one for muted colours) and even at two a.m. looked spectacularly glamorous with her long hair falling seductively around her face and her makeup as perfect as if she had just left home. My black trousers and pin-striped shirt, which had looked all right when I left home, now felt incredibly boring and I was sure that after an evening in hot, smoky bars, my mascara had created raccoon rings around my eyes.
