by Anne Enright
I have stopped talking. The midwife is behind me, arranging things on a stand. Martin is gone, there is silence in the room. She is thinking about something. She isn’t happy. It is very peaceful.
Or: She tries to put in the needle for the drip. Martin is on my right-hand side. I seem to cooperate but I won’t turn my hand around. The stain from the missed vein starts to spread and she tries again. I am completely uninterested in the pain from the needle.
Or: A woman walks in, looks at me, glances between my legs. ‘Well done!’ she says, and walks back out again. Perhaps she just walked into the wrong room.
Even at a low dose, the oxytocin works fast. It is bucking through my system, the contractions gathering speed: the donkey who is kicking me is getting really, really annoyed. The midwife goes to turn up the drip and I say, ‘You’re not touching that until I get my epidural.’ A joke.
A woman puts her head round the door, then edges into the room. She says something to the midwife, but they are really talking about something else. She half-turns to me with a smile. There is something wrong with one of the blood tests. She tells me this, then she tells the midwife that we can go ahead anyway. The midwife relaxes. I realise that, sometimes, they don’t give you an epidural. Even if you want one. They just can’t. Then everyone has a bad morning.
The midwife goes to the phone. Martin helps to turn me on my side. The contractions now are almost continuous. Within minutes, a woman in surgical greens walks in. ‘Hi!’ she says. ‘I’m your pain-relief consultant.’ She reaches over my bare backside to shake my hand. This is a woman who loves her job. Martin cups my heels and pushes my knees up towards my chest, while she sticks the needle in my spine, speaking clearly and loudly, and working at speed. I am bellowing by now, pretty much. FIVE, I roar (which seems to surprise them – five what?) FOUR. THREE. (Oh, good woman! That’s it!) TWO. One. FIVE. They hold me like an animal that is trying to kick free, but I am not – I am doing this, I am getting this done. When it is over, the anaesthetist breaks it to me that it might be another ten minutes before I feel the full effect. I do not have ten minutes to spare, I want to tell her this, but fortunately, the pain has already begun to dull.
The room turns to me. The anaesthetist pats down her gown and smiles. She is used to the most abject gratitude, but I thank the midwife instead, for getting the timing spot on. The woman who talked about my blood tests has come back and the midwife tells me that she is finishing up now, Sally will see me through. This is a minor sort of betrayal, but I feel it quite keenly. Everyone leaves. Martin goes for a sandwich and Sally runs ice-cubes up my belly to check the line of the epidural. There is no more pain.
Sally is lovely: sweetness itself. She is the kind of woman who is good all the way through. It is perhaps 1.30 and in the white light, with no pain, I am having the time of my life. Literally. Karen, the obstetrician, tells me my cervix has gone from practically 0 to 8 centimetres, in no time flat. The heavens have opened, the sun has come shining through. Martin is called back from the canteen. He watches the machines as they register the pain that I cannot feel any more. He says the contractions are off the scale now. We chat a bit and have a laugh, and quite soon Sally says it is time to push. Already.
For twenty hours women have been telling me I am wonderful, but I did not believe them until now. I know how to do this, I have done it in my dreams. I ask to sit up a bit and the bed rises with a whirr. Martin is invited to ‘take a leg’ and he politely accepts, ‘Oh, thank you.’ Sally takes the other one, and braces it – my shin against her ribs. Push! They both lean into me. I wait for the top of the contraction, catch it, and ride the wave. I can feel the head, deliciously large under my pubic bone. I can feel it as it eases further down. I look at Martin, all the while – here is a present for you, mister, this one is for you – but he is busy watching the business end. Karen is back, and they are all willing me on like football hooligans, Go on! Go on! One more now, and Push! Good woman! Good girl! I can hear the knocking of the baby’s hearbeat on the foetal monitor, and the dreadful silence as I push. Then, long before I expect it, Sally says, ‘I want you to pant through this one. Pant.’ The child has come down, the child is there. Karen says, Yes, you can see the head. I send Martin down to check the colour of the hair. (A joke?) Another push. I ask may I touch, and there is the top of the head, slimy and hot and – what is most terrifying – soft. Bizarrely, I pick up Martin’s finger to check that it is clean, then tell him he must feel how soft it is. So he does. After which – enough nonsense now – it is back to pushing. Sally reaches in with her flat-bladed scissors and Martin, watching, lets my leg go suddenly slack. We are mid-push. I kick out, and he braces against me again. Karen, delighted, commands me to, ‘Look down now, and see your baby being born.’ I tilt my head to the maximum; and there is the back of the baby’s head, easing out beyond my belly’s horizon line. It is black and red, and wet. On the next push, machine perfect, it slowly turns. And here it comes – my child; my child’s particular profile. A look of intense concentration, the nose tilted up, mouth and eyes tentatively shut. A blind man’s face, vivid with sensation. On the next push, Sally catches the shoulders and lifts the baby out and up – in the middle of which movement the mouth opens, quite simply, for a first breath. It simply starts to breathe.
‘It’s a girl!’
Sally says afterwards that we were very quiet when she came out. But I didn’t want to say the first thing that came to mind – which was, ‘Is it? Are you sure?’ A newborn’s genitals are swollen and red and a bit peculiar looking, and the cord was surprisingly grey and twisted like a baroque pillar. Besides, I was shy. How to make the introduction? I think I eventually said, ‘Oh, I knew you would be,’ I think I also said, ‘Oh, come here to me, darling.’ She was handed to me, smeared as she was with something a bit stickier than cream cheese. I laid her on my stomach and pulled at my T-shirt to clear a place for her on my breast. She opened her eyes for the first time, looking into my face, her irises cloudy. She blinked and found my eyes. It was a very suspicious, grumpy look, and I was devastated.
Martin, doing the honours at a festive dinner, cut the cord. After I pushed out the placenta, Karen held it up for inspection, twirling it on her hand like a connoisseur: a bloody hairnet, though heavier and more slippy.
The baby was long. Her face looked like mine. I had not prepared myself for this: this really astonished me. ‘She looks like me.’ And Martin said (an old joke), ‘But she’s got my legs.’ At some stage, she was wrapped rigid in a blue blanket, which was a mercy, because I could hardly bear the smallness of her. At some stage, they slipped out, leaving us to say, ‘Oh, my God,’ a lot. I put her to a nipple and she suckled. ‘Oh, my God,’ said Martin. I looked at him as if to say, ‘Well, what did you expect?’ I rang my mother who said, ‘Welcome to the happiest day of your life,’ and started to cry. I thought this was a little over the top. In a photograph taken at this time, I look pragmatic and unsurprised, as though I had just cleaned the oven and was about to tackle the fridge.
I am not stricken until they wheel us down to the ward. The child looks at the passing scene with alert pleasure. She is so clear and sharp. She is saturated with life, she is intensely alive. Her face is a little triangle and her eyes are shaped like leaves, and she looks out of them, liking the world.
Two hours later I am in the shower. When I clean between my legs I am surprised to find everything numb and mushy. I wonder why that is. Then I remember that a baby’s head came out of there, actually came out. When I come to, I am sitting on a nurse. She is sitting on the toilet beside the shower. The shower is still going. I am very wet. She is saying, ‘You’re all right, you’re all right, I’ve got you.’ I think I am saying, ‘I just had a baby. I just had a baby,’ but I might be trying to say it, and not saying anything at all.
Milk
THE MILK SURPRISES me. It does not disgust me as much as I thought it would, unless it is not fresh. It is disturbing that a piece of you should
go off so quickly. I don’t think Freud ever discussed lactation, but the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bodily products here is very fine. Women leak so much. Perhaps this is why we clean – which is to say that a man who cleans is always ‘anal’, a woman who cleans is just a woman.
There certainly is a lot of it, and it gets everywhere, and the laundry is a fright. But what fun! to be granted a new bodily function so late in life. As if you woke up one morning and could play the piano. From day to day the child is heavier in your arms, she plumps up from wrist to ankle, she has dimples where her knuckles were, she has fat on her toes. I thought we might trade weight, pound for pound, but she is gaining more than I am losing. I am faced with bizarre and difficult calculations – the weight of the groceries in a bag versus the weight of her nappies in a bag. Or my weight, plus a pint of water, minus four ounces of milk, versus her weight, plus four ounces, divided by yesterday. When I was at school, a big-chested friend put her breasts on the scales and figured that they weighed 2 pounds each. I don’t know how she did it, but I still think that she was wrong. Heavier. Much heavier.
It is quite pleasant when a part of your body makes sense, after many years. A man can fancy your backside, but you still get to sit on it; breasts, on the other hand, were always just there. Even so, the anxiety of pregnancy is the anxiety of puberty all over again. I am thirty-seven. I don’t want my body to start ‘doing’ things, like some kind of axolotl. I do not believe people when they say these things will be wonderful, that they are ‘meant’. I am suspicious of the gleam in women’s eyes, that pack of believers, and listen instead to the voice of a friend who breast-fed her children until they were twenty-eight and a half, and who now says, ‘They’re like ticks.’
So I feed the child because I should, and resign myself to staying home. I never liked being around nursing women – there was always too much love, too much need in the room. I also suspected it to be sexually gratifying. For whom? Oh, for everyone: for the mother, the child, the father, the father-in-law. Everyone’s voice that little bit nervy, as though it weren’t happening: everyone taking pleasure in a perv-lite middle-class sort of way. Ick. ‘The only women who breast-feed are doctors’ wives and tinkers,’ a friend’s mother was told forty years ago, by the nurse who delivered her. I thought I sensed a similar distaste in the midwives, a couple of months ago, who were obliged by hospital and government policy to prod the child and pinch my nipple, though perhaps – let’s face it, sisters – not quite that hard. It is probably easier for men, who like breasts in general, but I have always found them mildly disgusting, at least up close. They also often make me jealous. Even the word ‘breast’ is difficult. Funny how many people say they find public breast-feeding a bit ‘in your face’. Oh, the rage.
So, let us call it ‘nursing’ and let us be discreet – it is still the best way I know to clear a room. My breast is not the problem (left, or right, whichever is at issue), the ‘problem’ is the noise. Sometimes the child drinks as simply as from a cup, other times she snorts and gulps, half-drowns, sputters and gasps; then she squawks a bit, and starts all over again. This may be an iconised activity made sacred by some and disgusting by others, but it is first and foremost a meal. It is only occasionally serene. It also takes a long time. I do smile at her and coo a bit, but I also read a lot (she will hate books), talk, or type (this, for example). Afterwards she throws up. People stare at the whiteness of it, as I did at first. Look. Milk.
‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all appalled me.’ The nineteenth century took their breasts very seriously, or so I suspect – I can’t really get into a library to check. I am thinking of those references I found particularly exciting or unsettling as a child. The heroes of King Solomon’s Mines, for example, as they toil up Sheba’s left Breast (a mountain) suffering from a torturing thirst. The chapter is called ‘Water Water!’ and comes from a time when you were allowed to be so obvious it hurt. ‘Heavens, how we did drink!’ These extinct volcanoes are ‘inexpressibly solemn and overpowering’ and difficult to describe. They are wreathed about with ‘strange mists and clouds [that] gathered and increased around them, till presently we could only trace their pure and gigantic outline swelling ghostlike through the fleecy envelope’. In a desperate drama of hunger and satiation our heroes climb through lava and snow up to the hillock of the enormous, freezing nipple. There they find a cave, occupied by a dead man (what?! what?!), and in this cave one of their party also dies: Ventvogel, a ‘hottentot’ whose ‘snub-nose’ had, when he was alive, the ability to sniff out water (we don’t want to know).
So far, so infantile. I watch the child’s drama at the breast, and (when I am not reading, typing, or talking) cheer her along. She wakes with a shout in the middle of the night, and I wonder at her dreams; there is a dead man in a cave, perhaps, somewhere about my person. Oh, dear. When did it all get so serious? I turn to Swift for the comedy, as opposed to tragedy, of scale, but Gulliver perched on a Brobdingnagian nipple turns out, on rereading, to be part of a great disgustfest about giant women pissing. None of this seems true to me. I have no use for the child’s disgust, as she has no use for mine. I am besotted by a being who is, at this stage, just a set of emotions arranged around a gut. Who is just a shitter, who is just a soul.
Are all mothers Manicheans? This is just one of the hundreds of questions that have never been asked about motherhood. What I am interested in is not the drama of being a child, but this new drama of being a mother (yes, there are cannibals in my dreams, yes) about which so little has been written. Can mothers not hold a pen? Or is it just the fact that we are all children, when we write?
I go to Books Upstairs in Dublin, to find a poem by Eavan Boland. The child in the stroller is ghetto fabulous in a white babygro complete with hoodie. I am inordinately, sadly proud of the fact that she is clean. We negotiate the steps, we knock over some books. The child does a spectacular crap in the silence of the shop, in front of the section marked ‘Philosophy’. I say, ‘Oh, look at all the books. Oh, look at all the books,’ because I believe in talking to her, and I don’t know what else to say.
The poem is called ‘Night Feed’ and is beautifully measured and very satisfying: ‘A silt of milk. / The last suck. / And now your eyes are open, / Birth coloured and offended.’
But the poet chooses a bottle not a breast, placing the poem in the bland modernity of the suburbs. I grew up in those suburbs. I know what we were running away from. Because the unpalatable fact is that the Ireland of my childhood had the closest thing to a cow cult outside of India. When I was eleven, I won a Kodak Instamatic camera in the Milk Competition, a major annual event, when every school child in the country had to write an essay called ‘The Story of Milk’. I can still remember the arrival of the Charolais cattle, which marked the beginning of Ireland’s love affair with Europe. The most exciting thing about economic union, for my farming relatives, was not the promise of government grants but this big-eyed, nougat-coloured breed of bull whose semen could be used in beef or dairy herds – as good, if you will pardon the phrase, for meat as for milk. It was a romantic animal, as hopeful as the moon shot. There were cuff-links made in the shape of the Charolais and men wore them to Mass and to the mart. And the romance lingers on. A couple of years ago, a media personality of my acquaintance bought four of them, to match her curtains.
The country was awash with milk. Kitchens and bedrooms were hung with pictures of the Madonna and child. After the arrival of infant formula in the fifties, breast-feeding became more of a chosen, middle-class activity, but it was still common in the countryside, and was everywhere practised as a fairly optimistic form of contraception. Still, though general all over Ireland, breast-feeding was absolutely hidden. The closest the culture came to an image of actual nursing was in the icon of the Sacred Heart, endlessly offering his male breast, open and glowing, and crowned with thorns.
Actually, you know, breast-feeding hurts. Certainly, at first, it really fucking
hurts. On the third night of my daughter’s life I was left with a human being the size of a cat and nothing to sustain her with but this stub. Madwomen (apparently) think that their babies are possessed. And they are. They look at you, possessed by their own astonishing selves. You say, Where did that come from? You say, Where did YOU come from? This baby is pure need – a need you never knew you had. And all you have to offer is a mute part of your body which, you are told, will somehow start ‘expressing’, as though it might start singing ‘Summertime’. You feed your child, it seems, on hope alone. There is nothing to see. You do not believe the milk exists until she throws it back up, and when she does, you want to cry. What is not quite yours as it leaves you, is definitely yours as it comes back.
So there we were in the hospital dark; me and my white Dracula, her chin running with milk and her eyes black. What I remember is how fully human her gaze was, even though it was so new. She seemed to say that this was a serious business, that we were in it together. Tiny babies have such emotional complexity. I am amazed that ‘bravery’ is one of the feelings she has already experienced, that she should be born so intrepid and easily affronted, that she should be born so much herself.
She is also, at this early stage, almost gender free. This is useful. The statistics on how much less girl babies are breast-fed, as opposed to boys, are shocking. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but one of them surely is the degree to which our society has sexualised the breast. All in all, sex has ruined breast-feeding. It is a moral business these days – a slightly dirty, slightly wonderful, always unsettling, duty. It has no comic aspects. No one has told the child this: she seems to find it, finally, quite amusing – as indeed do I.
