Making Babies

by Anne Enright

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Enright

  Praise

  Title Page

  Apologies All Round

  Breeding

  The Glass Wall

  Dream-Time

  Birth

  Milk

  Nine Months

  Time

  Advice

  Being Two

  Groundhog Day

  Science

  Babies: A Breeder’s Guide

  God

  Buggies

  Staring

  Home Birth

  Wriggles

  Naming

  Burps

  Hands

  Girl / Boy

  Crying

  Evolution

  Authority

  Poo

  Smell

  Too Much Information

  Baby-talk

  The Killing Cup

  Kissing

  How to Panic

  Romance

  The Lip of the Rug

  By the Time You Read This, It Will be True

  Staring, Part 2

  What’s Wrong with Velcro?

  Unforgiven

  Fair

  Second Pregnancies

  Siblings

  Toys

  Dirt

  Other Mothers, Other Fathers

  How to Get Trolleyed While Breast-feeding

  Entertaining

  On Giving Birth to a Genius

  Dreams

  Speech

  On Being Loved

  It’s Not About You, You Know

  It’s Not About You, You Know, Part 2

  The Moment

  Worry

  Forgetting

  What It Does

  Oh, Mortality

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Anne Enright, one of Ireland’s most remarkable writers, has just had two babies: a girl and a boy. Her new book, Making Babies, is the intimate, engaging, and very funny record of the journey from early pregnancy to age two. Written in dispatches, typed with a sleeping baby in the room, it has the rush of good news – full of the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of it all. An antidote to the high-minded, polemical ‘How-to’ baby manuals, Making Babies also bears a visceral and dreamlike witness to the first years of parenthood. Anne Enright wrote the truth of it as it happened, because, for these months and years, it is impossible for a woman to lie.

  About the Author

  Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published two collections of stories, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies, and five novels, including The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year, and won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

  ALSO BY ANNE ENRIGHT

  Fiction

  The Portable Virgin

  The Wig My Father Wore

  What Are You Like?

  The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

  Taking Pictures

  Yesterday’s Weather

  The Forgotten Waltz

  The Gathering

  Anthology

  The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (editor)

  ‘Lyrical and elegantly written. It is very, very funny. This is a book for every thinking woman who ever had a baby, or will have a baby, or simply wondered what all the fuss was about’

  Irish Times

  ‘An eloquent writer . . . dazzlingly funny’

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘I have always wanted to know what it’s like to have a baby, but have been afraid to ask. Now, courtesy of Anne Enright, we have the true facts in all their gore and glory. Much of the book is astonishingly funny; the rest would break your heart’

  Colm Tóibín

  ‘Making Babies is not just a good book, it’s a good thing. It induces hope. It creates an appetite for life. It is also a very effective contraceptive’

  Ian Sansom

  ‘A very funny, truth-telling distillation of the intellectual and emotional turmoil – as well as the charms – of motherhood’

  Jenny Diski

  ‘Wry, astringent, frequently hilarious’

  Time Out

  ‘Split-your-sides humour. It is gasp-making, jaw-dropping and eloquently astounding’

  Irish Independent

  ‘It brings common sense, powerful intelligence, unflinching detail and above all a sense of humour. Enright has pulled off that rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness’

  Sunday Times

  ‘I would like to buy Making Babies for people who’ve had babies, people who want babies, and people who don’t. Everyone, in fact’

  Maggie O’Farrell

  ‘The perfect, intelligent antidote to poisonous books on the subject’

  India Knight

  Making Babies

  Stumbling into Motherhood

  Anne Enright

  Apologies All Round

  SPEECH IS A selfish act, and mothers should probably remain silent. When one of these essays, about pregnancy, appeared in the Guardian magazine there was a ferocious response on the letters page. Who does she think she is? and Why should we be obliged to read about her insides? and Shouldn’t she be writing about the sorrow of miscarriage instead?

  So I’d like to say sorry to everyone in advance. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

  I’d like apologise to all those people who find the whole idea of talking about things as opposed to just getting on with them mildly indecent, or provoking – I do know what they mean. Also to those who like to read about the dreadful things that happen to other people, when nothing particularly dreadful has happened to me, or my children, so far, touch wood, Deo gratias. Also to those readers who would prefer me not to think so much (because mothers just shouldn’t), and to those thinkers who will realise that in the last few years I have not had time to research, or check a reference – the only books I have finished, since I had children, being the ones I wrote myself (not quite true, but it’s a nice thing to say). And, of course, people who don’t have children are just as good and fine and real as those who do, I would hate to imply otherwise. Also, sorry about my insides: I was reared with the idea that, for a woman, anatomy is destiny, so I have always paid close attention to what the body is and what it actually does. Call it a hobby.

  ‘MARRIED WOMAN HAS CHILDREN IN THE SUBURBS’ – it’s not exactly a call to arms, and I do genuinely apologise for being so ordinary, in the worst sense. Here I am, all fortunate, living a 1950s ideal of baby powder and burps, except that, in the twenty-first century we know that talc is linked, bizarrely, to ovarian cancer, so there is no baby powder in this house, and we also know that the hand that rocks the cradle also pays for the cradle, or a fair amount of it, and that, for many people, babies are a luxury that they cannot yet afford. But even for the twenty-first century I am doing well: I have flexible working hours, no commuting, I have a partner who took six weeks off for the birth of his first baby and three months for the second (unpaid, unpaid, unpaid). He also does the breakfasts. And the baths. So you might well say, ‘Oh, it’s all right for her,’ as I do when I read women writing about the problems they have with their nannies or other domestic staff. More usually, though, when I read women writing about having children, it is not their circumstances that annoy me so much as their tone. I think, ‘What a wretch, would someone please call the social services.’ It is the way they are both smug and astonished. It is the way we think we have done something amazing, when we have done no more than most other people on the planet – except we, in our over-educated way, have to brag about it.

  Most of these pieces were started after my first child
, a daughter, was born. I played around with them in the two years before I became pregnant again, and they were finished soon after the birth of my son, so though the baby is a ‘she’, both children are in there, somewhere. The reason I kept writing about my babies, even when they were asleep in the room, was that I could not think about anything else. This might account for any wildness of tone. The pieces were typed fast. They were written to the sound of a baby’s sleeping breath. Some were assembled, later, from notes, but I have tried to keep the flavour of the original scraps. This applies to all except the essay about UFOs (which was written before I ever got pregnant), and I do really apologise for writing about aliens and God and mortality when I should be talking dimple, gurgle, puke-down-the-back-of-my-Armani-jacket, but I wanted to say something about the anxiety of reproduction, the oddness of it, and how it feels like dying, pulled inside out.

  Anyway, these are the material facts (for which I also apologise). I met my husband, Martin, a long time ago, we married I can’t remember when, and after eighteen years of this and that we knuckled down to having children. It was not an impulse decision.

  After our first child was born I worked while she slept, for the first year, and also in the evenings when her father came home. When she was one, she went to a nursery for (count them) six and a half hours per day, three of which were spent having a nap. When she was two and a half, she got a baby brother, and I worked while he slept. And so on. I would really like a rest, now.

  Finally, and quietly, I have to apologise to my family and hope that they will forgive me for loving them in this formal, public, plundering way. Starting with my own mother – whose voice comes through my own, from time to time – and working down the generations. Like all women who write about their children, I have a wonderful partner – except in my case it is true. I also have to apologise to my children for writing about their baby selves; either too much, or not enough, or whatever changing way this book takes them, over the years.

  My only excuse is that I think it is important. I wanted to say what it was like.

  Anne Enright

  September 2003

  Breeding

  GROWING UP IN Ireland, we didn’t need aliens – we already had a race of higher beings to gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will: we called them priests. It is great being Catholic. A loopy Protestant, on the other hand, has to make it up as she goes along. And no one makes it up better than your American Protestant, driven mad by all that sky. In the 1980s, while we were fighting for contraception and abortion, they were fighting for the future of the human race. I am talking about those people who are forced to carry alien foetuses against their knowledge or will. In 1994 it was said that the alien breeding programme had already affected ‘up to two million’ carefully selected Americans. What I want to know is – who was counting? How do you get on this programme? And why do you have to be white to qualify?

  Not that I am smug about being Irish, Catholic and obliged to give birth in a field – personally I would rather see a flying saucer than a vision of the Virgin Mary, I think it would be less frightening. The alien breeding programme that leaves strange bruises around the genitals of middle America, though spooky, may just have been preferable to the vicious fight in Ireland over who owns your insides. ‘Get your rosaries off our ovaries,’ was the battle cry as we voted, over and over, for or against abortion, while the pro-life louts hung around the Dublin streets with their short hair and jars full of dead baby. I used to live in the centre of town and passed them on my way to the shops, waving their grim placards. Instead of spitting or shouting, I would amuse myself by imagining shafts of light with small putty-coloured creatures floating in them; creatures with rubbery fingers and blank, shiny eyes. Because nothing looks more like a foetus, of course, than your average small grey from beyond the Horsehead Nebula.

  Never mind the folk legends, the National Enquirer, or trash paranoia on the Internet, for easy reference aliens in America can be sorted into two types – boys’ aliens and girls’ aliens. The boys’ aliens are the ones that everyone knows about. They fly around the place in different-shaped craft, many of which could turn on a dime. They come from big mother ships that are so big you just couldn’t say how big they are. These craft appear over long roads and in big skies; they glow strangely and don’t do a lot – a few scorch marks in the grass, a crop circle, some mutilated cattle. The CIA know all about boys’ aliens, the radar blips and the pilot’s black box, because boys can not only verify their aliens scientifically, they also suspect other boys of conspiring to cover this proof up.

  Girls do not deal in proof. Girls’ aliens happen under the skin. Girls’ aliens make you fall in love; they manifest themselves in the things that you have forgotten, until you remember it, all in a rush. Despite the fact that girls not only meet the aliens, but also have their babies, they do not remember their impregnation, except under hypnotic regression. How can Hollywood get it so wrong? There are no tentacles, and no one speaks English – aliens have no need of mere speech. There are enough transcripts of these women weeping as they recover the details of their alien abduction for us to arrive at a reasonably consistent anatomy. We’re talking three fingers here, not five, or none, or six. Aliens have no knuckles, no knees, and no muscular structure. They have difficulty walking. Their mouths never open when they speak. Above all, aliens never ever have sexual organs and a pregnant alien is a contradiction in terms.

  Things move fast in the alien business. Abductees are so up in the nature of the beasts that float them out of their cars or beds on shafts of light that, though distressed, they are never old-fashioned. ‘There was just this usual grey crap,’ says one woman, recovering her first memory of being on board an alien craft. Still, they are surprisingly hard to describe. At the borders of conscious memory, when they are walking around our planet, aliens may use strange props, something slightly ‘off’: a stetson hat of unnatural size, a miner’s lamp, or a false moustache pinned beneath a non-existent grey nose. The silver suits of the fifties are well gone, as are the space-bitches of the sixties: ‘I am Lamxhia and I need your earth sperm.’ When you’re on the ship these days, with your clothes in a heap on the floor, lying on a one-legged table with your ankles in (optional) stirrups, there are only two types of alien – small greys and tall greys. Small greys move you around despite your protests and the fact that your legs don’t work, and when they have attended to all those little surgical details, taking tissue, scraping out eggs, putting in foetuses or nasal implants or the small implant that goes in the back of your calf, then it’s time for the tall grey to come in, wave them off, and gaze deep into your eyes. This is the moment when it all makes sense. Aliens’ eyes are large, lanceolate and black, they are non-reflective and have no pupils. It is a terrifying thing to look into an alien’s eyes, but, against your will, you may find yourself saturated with emotion and a sense of meaning; helpless with love.

  Abductees are 94 per cent Caucasian, 75 per cent female and they have 1.9 children. All of them arrive at the hypnotherapist’s office seeking help, frightened and distressed, with a story about missing time. They saw something strange at the foot of the bed, they saw something strange at the side of the road – then it’s two hours later and they are in the wrong place with no idea how they got there. They are heading south on the wrong highway and the tank is still full of gas. They wake with the sheets awry and a husband who is sleeping too soundly. They arrive for work two hours late with their blouse on the wrong way around. (You see? It’s happened to you.)

  What they remember, eventually, is a hidden reproductive history. Men may have their sperm mechanically harvested, in a sudden access of unwelcome pleasure, but it is the women (mostly) who get pregnant. The pregnancy will subsequently disappear, with no evidence of a miscarriage. Sometimes the hymen is left unbroken. Where does the foetus go? On the spaceship, victims might see rows of jars with something growing in them; whole walls or rooms full of them. They
might remember, like Debbie Tomey, being spreadeagled on a table with ‘a terrible pressure within her loins’, shouting, ‘It’s not fair! It’s mine! It’s mine!’ They might remember later – years later – meeting a slender, hybrid daughter with ivory skin, no eyebrows, and sparse, cotton-coloured hair.

  One of the main practitioners in the field of hypnotic regression is Budd Hopkins, the New York artist who stumbled into the aliens business when an article he wrote for the Village Voice, SANE CITIZEN SEES UFO IN NEW JERSEY, won him a postbag of frightened people who wanted to know what had happened to them after they, too, saw a strange light in the sky. He is now experienced in the techniques of hypnotic regression, or assisted imagination – ‘Let’s allow it to start getting dark in the room . . . I want you to get the feeling of getting into your bed.’ His abductees have group therapy sessions to deal with their sense of isolation, helplessness and overwhelming anger. They are now abducted so regularly, they don’t know what to do any more. Their children are abducted, their parents are abducted, and their grandparents feel a bit off-colour.

  Budd seems like a nice man – like many other regression therapists who investigate alien abduction. Many are handsome in a rugged kind of way and admit to being brought up as ‘strict materialists’. They really do want to do something. They really don’t know what is going on. Their world view has been exploded by a series of highly distressed women whom only they can help. The women’s sincerity, the weirdness of their accounts, the fact that they are so normal (read stupid), convinces them that ‘she couldn’t be making it all up’. How, for example, could you make up the detail about a small grey trying on your shoes? Speaking as someone who makes things up for a living, who can spot a ‘strict materialist’ from five hundred paces, I think the shoes are a nice detail, as is the green elevator shaft with eyes, and the man in blue striped pyjamas.

  Nine of Hopkins’s abductees were tested blind by an independent psychologist who found them to be ‘of above average intelligence’, with a ‘considerable richness of inner life’, which is tied to a ‘risk of being overwhelmed by the urgency of their impulses’. They suffer from lowered self-esteem and relative egocentricity. Under stressful conditions ‘at least six of the nine showed a potential for more or less transient pyschotic experiences . . . with confused and disordered thinking that can be bizarre, peculiar, or very primitive and emotionally charged’. These people are not pathological liars, paranoid schizophrenics or hysteroid characters subject to fugue states and/or multiple personalities. They are normal. They are not making it up – at least, they don’t know that they are making it up. Perhaps you could say that the story is making them up instead.