The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers

by Angela Patrick

  Ten minutes later, the nurse was back, this time with a drip stand and kidney bowl. She put the latter on the bed beside me. ‘Right,’ she said, pulling a swab and some sort of syringe from it. ‘I’m going to fix a drip in your arm now. It will be something like an hour or so before it takes effect, and then you’ll start having contractions.’

  She went then, the job done. She left me alone in the small room, watching the bubbles rise in little streams up the drip bag. The minutes ticked and ticked and ticked by, but nobody came, and I could feel the panic, like the bubbles, rise up inside me. Was it right for me to have to go through this all on my own? Was this what God wanted? To punish me like this? What sort of God would be so cruel?

  I thought of Peter and how lightly God had let him off. Yes, it had been my choice not to tell him I was pregnant, but even if I had done, what difference would that have made? Perhaps he would have offered money for an abortion, like Linda’s boyfriend had. Perhaps he would have promised solidarity, expressing sympathy for my plight, or perhaps he would have run away, as Pauline’s Alessandro had done. I had no way of knowing. One thing was for sure, though: it was me who had to do this now – alone.

  Still, I wondered, having nothing else to do or fix my mind on, what was he doing now? Having fun somewhere, I didn’t doubt, oblivious to the chain of events he’d set in motion, we’d set in motion. Why had I let him persuade me that he’d make it safe? Why had I been so gullible and naive?

  When the first contraction came, it was like a rolling wave of discomfort that swept over my stomach like an arm sweeps across a radar display. Yes, it was more intense than the sensations I’d already been feeling, but not so different – not unmanageable, not too bad. I can do this, I thought. It will be okay. I can do this. If I could keep telling myself that, I’d be okay.

  The hour had passed, but no one had come to see me. So I just lay there, on the bed, waiting for the next wave to roll in, trying to imagine myself lying on a beach, or in the sea, or in a meadow. Who’d suggested that? Was it Mary or one of the others? It didn’t matter, so long as I was anywhere else.

  Except I couldn’t escape, because every time the waves rolled along, they took me to where they wanted me. And with each wave came the realisation that the pain was growing stronger and more scary. Very soon it was like being punched, but in slow motion. It made my teeth gnash and my toes curl involuntarily. It was pain like no other I’d experienced – as if my torso had been taken over by creatures from outer space.

  And then I heard a voice. ‘Oh, you’ve started then,’ it said crisply. ‘That’s good.’ I opened my eyes. It was a different nurse. Her voice was kindly, even if she didn’t have much to say – simply ‘Right, let’s check your pulse, then’ and ‘Just going to hook you up to the monitor’, before disappearing out of the door once again.

  The monitor being strapped to me was a welcome distraction. At least I had company of a sort now, as I could hear my baby’s heartbeat: p-tm, p-tm, p-tm it went, so fast and so furious. Every time a new contraction came surging in towards me, the p-tm, p-tm sound would speed up even more. I could visualise my tiny baby being pummelled mercilessly by my muscles. We’ll get through this together, I silently promised. We will.

  There was a clock on the wall, a big white one. But time had seeped away; it had lost all sense, all meaning. I could only measure it in heartbeats and the spaces between them, the relationship between the pulsing and pounding in my temple and the beating of my baby’s tiny heart, and the way the beats, and the timbre of the sound, rose and fell. With each rise, the pain – the biting twisting agony – of the contractions was building and building and building and building, each one more overwhelming and terrifying than the one before it. P-tm, p-tm, p-tm, p-tm, p-tm . . .

  Where had the spaces between the pains gone? The contractions were coming relentlessly now, leaving me no space in which to breathe. Tears were falling from me, streaming out, a pair of hot tramlines that etched twin paths from the corners of my eyes to fill my ears. And still no one came, no one cared, no one helped me. Could God even see me here, wretched and writhing? Or had He too turned his back on me now?

  Then another nurse appeared suddenly. Or was it the same one? I didn’t know. Tall, brisk. Warm hands moved on my body, between my legs. I cried out then. ‘How long now? I can’t bear this! I can’t bear this!’ There was no response, no word of comfort, no connection, no reassurance. Just a blur of uniform, the metallic flash of wielded instruments, the crackle of a plastic apron, a hand on my thigh now, another on my distended belly. A sudden sharpness – like a knife’s stab – seared through me, then a flood of warmth gushed between my thighs.

  ‘A while,’ she said. ‘A while yet.’ A while yet. A while yet? But how long must I suffer? How many heartbeats of agony? How much must I bear till I’d paid the price for my sin – my terrible, mortal sin. But I was mortal, wasn’t I? How could God be so godless, so heartless, so cruel, so immune to my pleading and my pain?

  My baby. I must try to think straight for my baby. I would bear it. I could bear it. I had to bear it, for it was coming – my child was coming – whether it wanted to be born into such wretchedness or not, it was coming; it was about to be born.

  It grew dark as I writhed there, sopping and screaming. It grew darker. People came; people went. People raised their voices, and lowered their voices, forming a babble of white noise. I couldn’t seem to grasp what was happening to me any more. I had lost all reason. I just drifted. I bobbed and sank with it. Oblivious.

  Only the pain mattered, each new tsunami of agony coming faster than the one before it. I had no time to inhale, no time to cry. Then no breath to cry, only grunts, until I could no longer focus on anything outside of me. I had a desperate need to push, to expel, to keep pushing, to push this thing – this massive thing – out of my body. More noise. Was someone shouting? The head. Was it the head coming? Sudden lucidity: it was the head – oh my GOD. An unstoppable force built in me – a need to extrude, to force it from me, to get it out, to make it gone – but HOW?

  I was pushing against something stronger than I was – God again, to make sure that I learned? That I atoned? That I could be in no doubt how much my wickedness would be repaid ten times over? It was etched in the faces that now swam before me. I was wicked. I had sinned. I must be punished. I must suffer. I must not seek help or solace. I had no right to expect it. I had sinned. I must expect and bear the consequences, the exquisitely perfect agony of feeling my body fight the very thing it had created.

  Push, I chanted. Over and over and over. Push. PUSH! Grit your teeth and push some more. Ignore the pain now, ignore the burning, ignore the fire – the fires of hell? Ignore the flames, ignore the fire. Just pay your price, just pay your price, just pay your price . . .

  And then a voice again. Incongruous. Exclamatory. ‘Big shoulders!’ Big shoulders, I heard someone say. This baby has big shoulders! This baby. My baby. My baby born of mortal sin.

  ‘8.30,’ the midwife said. ‘It’s a boy.’

  I cried then. I sobbed and sobbed, as I held him, this tiny piece of me, in my arms. I was shaking by now, shivering, soaked with sweat. My legs clattering together like marionette limbs, uncontrollable, jerking on strings.

  His hair – oh, his hair! Such a mop of black hair! Slick with blood, wet and coiling, atop his squashed angry face.

  ‘Shhh,’ I soothed as he railed at me, furiously alive now. ‘Shhh,’ as the nurses moved around me, a blur of blue cotton and metal instruments. Shhh, baby, shhh. I’m here. Everything’s okay. But I soothed through fresh tears, as the love welled within me. It would not be okay. I had sinned, I had atoned, but it could never be okay. I had not paid my price yet. The pain of birth, of being ripped raw and torn – the excruciating, searing, stinging agony – was as nothing compared to what was to follow. I would be paying the price forever; this was only the beginning. The clock on the wall had already started counting down.

  New mothers from Loreto
Convent would normally be returned to the mother and baby home straight away – no stay in hospital, no visitors, no flowers. There would be no lingering, in their shame, to clutter up the place with a bad atmosphere. They would be sent straight back, with their babies, even as the blood dried and crusted around their stitches. They would then spend the first few days with their babies in the lying-in room at the convent, well away from the gaze of the society that so shunned them. But not me and my baby, apparently: it was ten at night and we must stay here.

  ‘But why?’ I asked, shocked, already anticipating and looking forward to my departure. I was desperate to go now, anxious to get away with my baby. I’d had so many stitches, each one more agonising than the last. It felt like my baby had been ripped out of me.

  ‘For observation,’ the midwife said, her voice clipped, her expression weary. ‘You had a difficult delivery. The doctor wants to keep an eye on you.’ She made a note on a clipboard attached to my bed. ‘Someone will be along shortly to transfer you to the ward.’

  I lay back against the pillow, anticipating another bout of waiting. My little boy was now serenely asleep. I was exhausted but couldn’t close my eyes in my need to gaze at him. That he’d come from inside me and was now here nestled with me felt like the most incredible thing I had ever achieved in my life. But someone – a porter – did come only a few minutes later, and pushed me, and him, in my hospital bed to a dimly lit four-bedded ward.

  As soon as I got there I realised that being parked in a corridor would have been infinitely preferable to the sight that greeted me. The minute I entered the ward, my hope – that my fellow occupants would be sleeping – was dashed. They were all very much awake and smiling at me, so I smiled wanly back. I felt small and scrutinised, and as though I’d been found wanting. Nothing could have highlighted the difference between us quite as effectively as the huge arrays of flowers and cards that seemed to fill every space that wasn’t already occupied with beaming family members, now leaving, chatting excitedly and cooing over the tiny charges in their white metal cots.

  The other mothers were all older than me, and looked almost alien; they seemed so happy, so assured, so full of life and love and laughter, whereas I, in contrast, was exhausted and tearful and frightened. It was as if on entering the ward I’d physically shrunk. How long would it be before they worked out that I wasn’t one of them?

  Not long. I had hoped I could roll on my side and sleep would claim me. But it wasn’t to be. ‘Was your husband with you at the birth?’ the woman opposite me wanted to know, almost the minute the last visitor had left the ward. They were obviously curious to find out about me – this young girl who’d arrived without so much as a card or a bunch of flowers, let alone the baby’s father or a single visitor.

  I shook my head, my mind already automatically filling up with potential stories. I was used to this now, this lying on the hoof. I hated it so much. But what else could I do? Then it came to me. ‘He’s in South Africa,’ I said, while inside my brain whirred frantically. ‘He’s working out there, temporarily . . .’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ the woman nodded, looking like she didn’t.

  ‘And he couldn’t get back in time,’ I explained. ‘But he’ll be home by the end of this week.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said again. ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Such a shame,’ agreed the mother beside her. ‘And what about your mother?’

  ‘In Ireland,’ I answered, turning over in bed painfully and wishing desperately to be left alone. My mother might just as well have been in Ireland, I thought wretchedly. How could she have let me go through what I’d just been through all alone? Why was no one here to care for me, love me, tell me how brave I’d been, or coo over and hug my perfect baby?

  I knew they didn’t believe me. And they probably knew I knew it, too. It was just a ridiculous façade we all had to maintain because the truth was so difficult to swallow. There I was, alone, my locker top empty apart from a big jug of water, and my two visitors’ chairs depressingly vacant, on what by anyone’s yardstick was the day for loving families, for the celebration of a new life joining them.

  I must have fallen asleep after they took my baby over to the nursery for the night, because the next thing I remember was being woken. It was dawn, and, once I’d been examined and my stitches humiliatingly peered at, I was informed I could leave soon. And I was thankful. Unbelievable as it would have seemed to me before this, I was desperate to get back to the anonymity and sanctuary of the mother and baby home, away from the shame and embarrassment. I hated everyone’s scrutiny, conscious that my ineptitude as I fed and clumsily changed my little boy would make it so obvious that I’d lied, that I wasn’t one of them.

  I was also in a great deal of pain. It felt like my insides had been ripped to shreds, my lower body rent asunder. Every step, every movement caused daggers of burning pain. If the nuns who had sent me here were from an Order of Divine Mother -hood, the likes of me – their luckless charges – were from a place far below. There was nothing divine about my experience of motherhood so far.

  I dressed myself in agony, and dressed my tiny infant in Emmie’s thoughtfully knitted little baby clothes in agony, before making a torturous, shuffling exit from the ward to a waiting ambulance and falling into a stupor for the journey home, despite a non-stop commentary of inane comments from the driver.

  It was only once I had made the excruciating journey up a flight of stairs and was installed in the bed in the lying-in room that I began to take proper conscious stock of my baby, my immediate surroundings and my new life. I was no longer billeted in the little room I’d been staying in, and my possessions had already been transferred here – one of the nuns had probably had one of the girls do it first thing this morning, I imagined. The move from one room to another seemed to be a metaphor for what had just happened to me, for the twenty-four hours that had completely changed my life. I had left the convent this time yesterday a naive young girl, pregnant, unmarried and in a state of mortal sin, and had returned today – albeit, in the eyes of my church, the same sinful young woman – another person, different in every way. I had become a mother. I had given birth. I had had a baby.

  I decided to call him Paul, because it was a name I’d always liked. I had chosen the name Paul for a boy very early in my pregnancy, and, ironically perhaps, Teresa for a girl. The latter had been abandoned when I’d arrived at the convent, for obvious reasons, and I’d switched my allegiance to Bernadette, but I hadn’t had long to consider alternative girls’ names.

  As my baby lay there beside me, asleep and untroubled in his crib, for perhaps the first time since he’d been born, I studied Paul properly. His mop of hair, so very thick and dark, mesmerised me. As did his eyes – those questioning eyes newborn babies always seem to have – they were so blue against his skin, which was olive, just like mine. He’d got that colouring from the Spanish blood on my mother’s side of the family. In fact, I could see so much of myself and my family in him that it took my breath away. He really was an extension of me. This was very much my baby.

  He had an array of little sounds he’d make, peculiar just to him, and I wondered the same thing any new mother would when he made them: what did they mean? Was he hungry? Was he content? Was he sleepy? I also felt the same fears that any novice mother would: that my ignorance of how to care for him might distress him. Though, of course, Mary had been right: looking after your own newborn is instinctive, and in reality we were completely in tune.

  I would look at him and marvel at everything I had gone through to get him – all the unhappiness and the guilt and the pain of giving birth – which now seemed unimportant, a world away, forgotten. But one fact was inescapable: the biggest ordeal was yet to come. Though my baby and I would be parted in a few weeks, there was no going back for me emotionally; I was Paul’s mother and I would love him forever.

  Chapter Seven

  I felt the weight of the coming adoption pressing down on me like a de
ath sentence during those first hours and days. I had given birth to my son knowing only too well that soon he would no longer be mine. Not surprisingly, then, I cherished our brief time in the lying-in room at Loreto Convent, perhaps even more than I might have done if I’d had the luxury of knowing a shared future stretched out ahead of us. I couldn’t allow myself to entertain that prospect, even as I cradled this tiny piece of me in my arms.

  I was happy to be cocooned from the outside world, which carried on without me. I would know nothing of the assassination of President Kennedy until a full week after it had happened – not until I was moved into the dormitory with the other mothers. It was as if time wanted to be kind to me, just for a little while, and stand still.

  But there was something I did find out about – something shocking. That first evening, while Paul was sleeping, I made my way painfully downstairs to phone Emmie and John. I was so anxious to hear the sound of a loving voice, to talk to someone I knew would want to hear about my baby. It was Emmie who answered, and right away she seemed unexpectedly emotional.

  ‘Oh, Angela!’ she cried, when she realised who it was. ‘I’m so, so glad to hear your voice! How are you?’

  ‘Tired,’ I said. ‘In quite a lot of pain from my stitches, but otherwise I’m—’

  ‘Oh, you poor, poor thing. Are you still in hospital? Because I was speaking to John, and he wasn’t sure if they’d let you out yet—’

  ‘No, no. They brought me back here this morning,’ I told her. ‘They only kept me in overnight.’

  ‘Oh, that’s such a relief. I did speak to your mother this morning and she told me the nuns had said you were doing okay, but, well, as you can imagine, I’ve been thinking about you every single minute. We were all so worried about you, and the baby, of course, and they hardly told us anything about what had been going on . . . ’