by Anne Enright
Silly baba.
When I have her safe, I look at Martin, and sometimes I recognise the wan feeling that men get, after a baby is born.
I spend the next while renegotiating this new, triangular love, with its lines of affection and exclusion. I try to make it whole. The thing I have to remember is that love is, in general, a good thing (though it often feels terrible, to me). I can see why people panic about all this: they panic about their partners being lost to them, or they panic about their babies being lost to them. Men, mostly – but not just men. Whoever is most the child in the relationship is the one who is most displaced.
I think that means me.
So, for a while I try to be, and am, that ‘Mother’ thing – the one who holds everyone, even myself, and keeps us safe. The container (the old bag, my dear, the old bag).
The Fifth Month
Development (the baby)
The baby looks, not at her fluffy toys’ faces, eyes, ears or bits of ribbon, but at the label stitched into a seam. They all have one – a big disproportional loop of washing instructions and warnings about flammability. She likes the intricacy of the writing, but perhaps in an endlessly variable world, she is attracted to something constant and small. So much for her blue heffalump with the red feet, so much for her squeaky pink mouse – let’s stick to Surface Wash Only, and the importance of 40 degrees.
Regression (me)
We bring the baby to America, on a book tour. Feeding her in a coffee shop, changing her nappy on the side of the road. Everywhere I travel, I think of refugees, and all the millions of women with babies in their arms, desperate for the next safe place. There is a sixteen-year-old girl in Bosnia who lives in my head, and she is doing this job just as well as I am, with as much tenderness and as much fear.
The book tour goes all right. I think.
I fly to Toronto and the baby goes home with her father. It doesn’t occur to me to feel guilty. I drink my head off. I lactate a little mournfully into hotel sinks and make jokes about Baileys Irish Cream. I have a brilliant time (and I walk back in the door shaking like a lover).
Finished feeding, I go back on the cigarettes. I am addicted to nicotine, but I am also addicted to slipping away for two minutes every hour, and being alone. Just two minutes, maybe three. The cigarettes are in a closed room, and the ashtray is beside my computer. When she is asleep, I work. I think I am becoming addicted to working, too.
I am amazed at how much I have done. The baby sleeps for hours at a time, and I can’t exactly leave the flat. So I might as well sit and type. All kinds of stuff. It doesn’t look stupid to me – maybe that comes later, after you spend a few thousand hours saying, ‘Look at the BLUE balloon.’ So I write even faster, to outrun my fate.
The baby sleeps, and I am free. I have not so much left the human race, as just left the race – which suits my kind of work very well. I feel sorry for all the parents who earn their money in the real world and have to go back out there again. If you spend a few months away from the game – the shopping, shagging, striving game – then it must be hard to see the point of it, quite.
I start a short story, a woman who says, ‘There is a lull, a sort of hopelessness that comes over women just before they have children, or so it was with me. I did not know where it came from. Perhaps it came from my body, perhaps it came from my life, but I had the feeling that what I was doing was no good, or that I was no good at it. I have seen other women sink suddenly like this, they lose confidence, they dither, and then, shortly afterwards, they have children.’
Is this true?
The child sleeps. I write about a woman on a ship, with a baby in her belly. Travelling on.
The Sixth Month
Development (the baby)
The baby has discovered locomotion (and frustration), propelling herself on her nappied bum, on her back, across the room. I experience dread. I cannot bring the toy to her, I cannot help her to the toy. There is a lot of grunting. I wait until it reaches a certain pitch, and give in.
She is no sooner in my arms than she is scrabbling around to reach whatever thing I have not noticed was there in the first place. The world is chock-full of ignored objects, for which the baby has no filter. A discarded CD case, a packet of seeds, a tweezers, a notebook. I am worn out and amazed by her constant ambient, grazing attention, as she flings herself from me to get at one thing or another, obliging me to catch her, time and again. The world is a circus and I am her trapeze, her stilts, her net. Not just mother, also platform and prosthesis. I’m not sure I feel like a person, any more.
I think I feel a little used.
Regression (me)
In the run-up to Christmas we take the baby out, and everyone says she is the image of her father. ‘I’m not a woman,’ I say, ‘I’m a photocopier.’ But Martin is delighted to have a little version of himself, spookily female, in his arms. When I complain, he laughs and says, ‘You were just the venue.’
I am a cheap drunk. Two glasses of mulled wine and I am completely squiffy, going around the room asking, ‘When does the sex thing, you know . . . get back on track?’ I am conducting a straw poll. I ask the men, because they are the ones who classically complain about such things. But instead of answers, I get a pained, melancholic silence. One guy just gives me a hollow look and turns away.
No one wants to talk about sex, but they all will talk about shit. Endlessly. The shit that came out both ends at once, the shit that came out the neck of the babygro, the hard round shit and the shit that is soft and green. There is nothing new parents don’t know about this substance. It makes me wonder why human beings bother with disgust, and whether we will ever be disgusted again.
On Christmas Day, the baby likes the wrapping paper, like every baby who has been in this house, and sat on this carpet and thrown the presents over their shoulder to eat the big, loud, crinkly pictures. Such glorious repetition. Her besotted grandmother, her uncles, cousins and aunts. And I think there is a deal of grief in all this – the family renewing itself in hope, time after time.
The Seventh Month
Development (the baby)
The baby’s eyes change colour. They are blue, edged with navy, they are green with a smoky blue ring and, one day, amber spreads through the iris. Is this you? Are these your final eyes?
I lift the baby over the threshold and carry her around the new house. She loves the way one room unfolds into another, and greets each space with delight. She leans forward, greedy for the fact that corners exist and there is always something else around them. She sits on the floor and likes the echo, and shouts.
Regression (me)
I cannot remember this month. We have bought a house and we are selling our flat. Or we haven’t. There is a lot of talk about bridging finance. Martin sits up late, night after night, doing sums on scraps of paper. I cry a fair amount. Or stop myself from crying.
I won’t spend a night in the new house. It is cold, I say. It is too far away. There is nowhere for the baby to sleep. I am obsessed with her sleep. She will sleep in the car on the way out to the house, but then we must leave the house, so she can sleep on the way home.
Every day I bump the buggy down four flights of stairs to let people view the flat, then pull it back up four flights with the shopping hung off the handles. I look around the flat and I think that we are selling her entire world.
Meanwhile, I have to earn some money, and the baby won’t sleep. When Martin walks in, I hand her over, or even push her towards him, and go to the computer, and will not be spoken to. He must be home in the evening. I must be home in the evening. We are both frozen. No one moves.
It is all too much.
The Eighth Month
Development (the baby)
The baby is in flying form, lying on her back and just laughing and kicking for no reason. I don’t know what she is laughing at. Is this a memory? Is she imagining, for the first time, tickles, even though there are no tickles there?
She may be the o
nly truly happy person on the planet. I look at her and hope she isn’t bonkers.
Regression (me)
I close the door on the flat, busy with removals men. I don’t say goodbye.
On the way to the new house, the clutch cable snaps in the fast lane of the dual carriageway as I gear down to stop at some traffic lights. I break the lights and crawl across the road to find the kerb in a slow swerve. I ring Martin, whose mobile is on answering machine. I ring my mother and father. I run down to a local pub with the baby in my arms and ask does anyone know a local garage. That fella over there owns one, they say. I get to the garage in first gear. And so on, and so forth.
Behind me, the removals men have left the washing-machine connection leaking into the flat, a fact we do not hear about until two days later, when the water spills into the hall. We still have no car. Martin stays late after work in order to dry out the flat while I unpack cardboard boxes – or try to, while looking after the baby – and complain, complain, complain. I have no time to work, I say. I don’t even have time to unpack. How does it always, always, fucking end up like this, with the woman climbing a domestic Everest while the man walks out the door? I would go out and look for a nursery, but I have to start earning before I can pay for a nursery. I have to start earning to pay for the house.
There is a freak snowstorm. We have no milk. I put the baby in the buggy and, slithering along the path, I push her through the gale.
The Ninth Month
Development (the baby)
Spring. The child looks out into the garden at the changing light. There is something about this scene that she understands and I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it is the tree – the fact that the tree is there, or that it is green, or that it is made of so many leaves. I do not know if it is the wind she likes, the way the tree moves when it blows. She raises her hand and starts to shout. It is a long, complicated shout, ‘Aah aaah bleeh oh. Ahh nyha mang bwah!’ She is making a speech. Her hand is lifted high; the palm reaches towards the sky as she declaims. As far as I can tell there is nothing she wants in the garden, she just wants to say that it is there, and that it is good. She wants to say this loudly and at length.
The baba bears witness. The baba testifies.
Regression (me)
I have no notes for this month.
I unpack boxes. I hold the baby and love her, like a tragic event. She loves me like the best joke out.
On the day she is nine months old, I think that she has been outside of me, now, for just as long as she was inside. She is twice as old.
I am the mirror and the hinge. There she is. She is just as old as herself.
Time
MY EARLIEST MEMORY is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting in a chair.
Discussions with my mother lead to just one pot stand, in a seaside cottage the summer I was eighteen months old. It was, she says, made of black iron and it stood beside a real step and the white-haired woman must be her own mother who died when I was six. This image of her is all that I have, and even then it is not so much an image as a sense. She may have been asleep, but I think she was reading. And there was something very quiet and covert about the pot stand, which was a pyramid affair with shelves for four pots. I can remember a little saucepan on the top shelf. I am tempted to say that there was a big saucepan on the bottom one, but this is pushing things a bit. I would give anything to remember what the lino was like.
At nine months, the baby puts her head in a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself. By way of celebration, I put my own head into the pot and say, Aaah Aaah Aaah. Then she does it again. Then I do it again. And so on.
The rest of my family don’t believe that I remember the pot stand, on the grounds that it is a stupid memory and, anyway, I was far too young. It is the job of families to reject each other’s memories, even the pleasant ones, and being the youngest I am sometimes forced to fight for the contents of my own head. But my brother broke his elbow that summer. My mother had to take him to hospital in Dublin and my grandmother looked after us while she was away. This was the first time in my life that I was without my mother for any length of time. If she had stayed, then I am certain that I would not have remembered anything at all of that house – not the pot stand, and not my grandmother either.
We pilfer our own memories, we steal them from the world and salt them away.
I first left the baby when she was four months old. Some of the days when I was away, she spent with my mother. I wonder what image might remain with her from that time: a colour, a smell, a combination of shapes perhaps, affectless and still – and in the distance, someone. Just that. Someone.
And in the foreground? The carpet perhaps. I hope she remembers my parents’ carpet, the one I remember as a child, with a pattern of green leaves like stepping-stones all the way down the hall.
I have another, possibly earlier, memory of pulling the wallpaper off the wall from between the bars of my cot. My mother is absent from this scene too, but though the Pot Stand Memory is neither happy nor unhappy, this one is quite thrilling. I almost certainly ate the paper. The plaster underneath it was pink and powdery, and I imagine now that I can remember the shivery taste of it. I also remember the shape of the tear on the wall, or I think I do. At any rate, I see it in my mind’s eye – a seam on the left, stunningly straight, with four gammy strips pulled away, like a fat raggedy set of fingers, on the right.
I know this memory is, in some sense, true, but when I try to chase it, it disappears. It exists in peripheral vision, and presents itself only when I focus on something else – like typing, for example. When I stop writing this sentence and look up from the screen to try to see the pattern of the wallpaper – a blank. Memories, by their nature, may not be examined, and the mind’s eye is not the eye we use, for example, to cross the road.
I wonder if this is the way that the baby sees things: vaguely and all at once. I imagine it to be a very emotional way to exist in the world. Perhaps I am being romantic – but the visual world yields nothing but delight to her. There are (it seems) no horrors, no frights. Tiny babies see only in monochrome. I imagine colour leaking into her head like a slowly adjusted screen – tremendously slow, like a vegetable television growing silently in the corner of the room. I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens. ‘Oh,’ she says – or something that is the precursor to ‘Oh’, a shallow inhalation, a stillness as she is caught by something, and begins to stalk it: careful, rapt – the most beautiful sound in the world: the sound of a baby’s wondering breath.
Something pulls in me when she is caught like this. For months I am a slave to her attention. The world is all colour, light and texture and I am her proud companion. I have no choice. None of us do. In a café, three women look over to smile at her, and then, as one, they look up. ‘Oh, she likes the light,’ says one, and this fact pleases us all. Immensely.
The light, of course, is horrible, and this is one of the reasons mothers think they are losing their minds: this pride in the baby looking at the light, this pride in the light as they introduce it to the baby, ‘Yes, the light!’ There is a certain zen to it; the world simple and new as we all stop to admire the baby admiring a wrought-iron candelabra with peculiar dangly bits and five – yes, five! – glowing, tulip-shaped bulbs.
She is years away from knowing from what ‘five’ might be, but maybe she already gets the ‘fiveness’ of it. This is the way her eyes move: One, one more! Another one! All of them! The other two. The first one again, another one! Something else.
Sometimes she holds her hand up like the baby Christ, and looks as though she contains everything, and understands it all. I do not ask to be forgiven, but still
I feel redemption in the completeness of her gaze. And I feel the redemption in her fat baby wrists and her infinitely fine, fat baby’s hand. The baby is a blessing, but sometimes she does, she must, also bless, which is to say that she simply sees, and lifts her hand, as a sign.
I pick the baby up and we look in the wardrobe mirror, which has always been for her a complicated delight: What is it? It’s a baby! She smiles, it smiles back! (Complication upon complication! It’s me! It’s me! she says, and all her synapses, as I imagine, going ping! ping! ping!) She sees me smiling at her in the mirror; she sees her mother turning to smile at her in the room, and oh, it’s too much, she lunges forwards to examine the knob on the wardrobe door.
There are actually two knobs on the wardrobe. One is wooden and the other, for some reason, is an amber-coloured plastic. The baby goes from one to the other and back again. One of the first confusions in her young life was when myself and Martin both looked at her at the same time: ‘Oh no, there’s two of them.’ It almost felt unfair.
As she grew older, there was nothing she liked more than to be held by one of us and to look at the other, in a somewhat haughty way. Older still, she is completely content when the two of us are with her, quietly in a room. She has travelled from one, to two, perhaps to many. I think of this as she goes from the wooden knob to the amber one – a fairy tale of sameness and difference. This one. That one.
Of course, the first difference between this and the other is not between mother and father, or even between baby and ‘baby in the mirror’, but between one breast and . . . the other! If women had five teats, then mankind might, by now, be living on the moon.
Yesterday, it was warm, and I took off her socks and stood her on the grass. She loved this, but maybe not so much as I did – her first experience of grass. For her, this green stuff was just as different and as delicious as everything else – the ‘first’ was all mine. Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.
