by Anne Enright
Rats who are fed a diet rich in lard are more likely to produce offspring that develop cardiovascular problems, so even those women you meet who put on 70 pounds for the good of the child, retiring to bed every night with a pint of Häagen-Dazs, these, the best-intentioned of all possible women, are harming their children more than they know. It makes you wonder – should women be allowed to have children at all? Surely there is a better way.
Or perhaps it is not the scientists – perhaps it is women’s fault that we think it is all our fault. When it comes to food guilt, we are quite gleefully neurotic. What we love most is that pause between fork and lip: Should I? Shouldn’t I? Oh no, oh dear, unnngggh . . . Gobble gobble munch slurp burp.
When my second baby seemed ‘colicky’, the advice from other women on the Internet was that, while I was feeding him, I should give up milk, wheat, eggs, citrus fruits, caffeine, chocolate, peanuts, tree nuts, and a very long list of vegetables. As far as I could work out, I could eat brown rice and maybe a little turkey. There was no scientific basis for any of this advice that I could find – except perhaps, in the most distant sense, for cow’s milk. Meanwhile, at seven weeks the baby was squawking four hours a night, every night, by the clock. I gave up cow’s milk (also, therefore, bread, chocolate, coffee, tea). I lived on brown rice and chanced a bit of fish. The baby stopped crying.
Em. Maybe he had ‘peaked’.
These days, what the middle classes worry about most, after autism, is impulse control. Fatty acids, E-numbers; it’s not about rickets any more, as much as how to stop them scribbling on the good wallpaper. The middle-class pregnant live on filtered water and grilled wild salmon and too much chocolate ice-cream. And still, there is an overwhelming sense that no matter how properly we reproduce, we are all DOING SOMETHING WRONG! and no one knows what it is. All babies are perfect. They are given to us so that we can wreck them in some tiny but catastrophic way.
Why isn’t there a study done about the harm housework does to your unborn child? But scientists rarely research against the interests of industry. They believe in products. Taking vitamins while pregnant, for example, is said to cut the risk of your child contracting neuroblastoma, a particularly horrible and rare kind of tumour, by one-third. Which means that you can take your vitamins, and the child still gets it (bummer). The study does not say what else the mothers were eating. It does not say what toilet cleaner they were using, and how often. It does not say how close they lived to an electricity pylon, or how many of them believed in God, or who had the flu at six months gone. It does not say how many of the children were recovering from their parents’ divorce when they developed the cancer, though no doubt these studies will follow, because if there is one thing science loves more than industry, it is a green vegetable, and even more than that, the nuclear family. So we, poor bastards with our weakness for prawn-flavoured Skips and our messy, messy lives, buy the multi-vitamins, and to this act of consumption we cling; or should I say, ‘act of purchase’, because nobody actually consumes these things, they just leave them in the cupboard until they are past the sell-by date, then go out and buy some more.
Meanwhile, one in every hundred babies born in the US has been involved in a car crash before they see the light of day. One in six pregnant women surveyed in East London had experienced domestic violence during their pregnancy; this study found that ‘domestic violence often starts or intensifies during pregnancy’, and is ‘associated with increases in miscarriage, low birth weight, premature birth, foetal injury and foetal death’. So keep taking the vitamins, girls. Keep taking the vitamins, most especially if you are yourself a child when you have your first child, because 31 births per thousand in Britain are to a mother aged between fifteen and nineteen. And in America 52 per thousand. And in Ireland 53 per thousand.
Sometimes I think scientists and sociologists are just Big Babies. They want mothers to be on hand all day every day and to the child alone. They talk like eight-month-olds with separation anxiety. They talk like toddlers suffering from the unspecified and universal hurt that ‘Mother’ provokes – because she has left them to go to the shops, for example; or she has betrayed them by having another child; or there is a dog that she pets from time to time; or a book she wants to read; or a television programme that interests her; or any of the things that our babies do not like us to do.
I don’t underestimate this anxiety – the idea that a mother can be elsewhere, that she can look at other things, other one conclusion: that everyone must die, including the mother, but most especially the Great-I-Am. Children live on the edge, this is why it is important to be as nice to them as you possibly can. But in the same way that toddler insatiability cannot be allowed to run a family, so the unassuageable hunger for the mother cannot be allowed to run society, even if the people who suffer from it are over thirty years old.
Dr Jay Belsky pops up from time to time to give all the working mothers of the world a fright. He is big on the damage that may (his italics) be done to children if they are placed in ‘non-maternal care’ during their first year – which is to say, if their mother goes back to work full-, or even part-, time.
We are all agreed, it seems, that it is both pleasant and important for the mother to be around in a baby’s first year – and as many subsequent years, indeed, as we can manage. No one wants us gone. Some countries, like Sweden, even make it possible for mothers to stay at home to look after a new child. What we are not agreed on, what we cannot agree on, is whether, and to what extent, a child is damaged when the mother doesn’t spend all her time with it in those first twelve months. We can’t agree on it because we can’t, many of us, stay at home. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the patience. But also because we sense that the debate is overblown, that sociology, psychology, or the media’s representation of them – society perhaps – is just a child pulling at our skirts. The child’s need is real, but it is not in some way ‘true’. It is not well-founded. Yes, I am leaving – but I will be back in five minutes, or in five hours, and you will be all right. There must be limits to being a mother: not in the spiritual sense, not even in the emotional sense, but between 4.30 and 5.00 on a Tuesday, say, there must be limits to being a mother.
The debate over child care is a debate about a mother’s right to work. If there is a risk to the child’s development (and this is by no means clear), then it is a risk that many will take, balancing it with the knowledge that so much of our children’s happiness depends on our own. Also, that children need good genes, a good father and a deal of money if they are to thrive. Or excel. Or be happy. (Who, by the way, is ever happy?) It is not all down to us. In short, it would be lovely if everything was lovely. In the meantime, fuck off.
Dr Belsky says that long-term effects on children who spend more than twenty hours per week in non-maternal care ‘. . . may be associated with diminished compliance and cooperation with adults, increased aggressiveness, and possibly even greater social maladjustment in the preschool and early school years’.
The study used the Strange Situation test. The infant is placed in a room with its mother for three minutes, then a stranger comes in and stays for three minutes, then the mother leaves. Three minutes later she comes back, comforts the child, and leaves it with the stranger again. Then, finally, she comes back for good. Dr Belsky watched for signs of an ‘insecure bond’ between mother and child – how quickly does the baby stop crying when she picks it up? Also, does the baby push the mother away?
According to this test, 36 per cent of children in child care showed an ‘insecure bond’ with their mother. Stop press, we have a headline: WORKING MOTHERS DAMAGE THEIR CHILDREN. In the light of which, it is worth saying that 64 per cent of children in child care did not show an insecure bond. Also, that 27 per cent of children who were cared for full-time by their mothers also showed an insecure bond – so I want to know, What is wrong with the 27 per cent of mothers who stay at home and still don’t get it right?
Actually, what I
want to know is what did the Stranger look like? Was it a man? Did he have a beard? (Beards used to make my baby daughter howl.) Was it, even, Dr Belsky himself? But science, of course, never tells you the most important thing.
I misunderstand the whole scientific project, of course. The 27 per cent are not statistically significant, the 36 per cent are statistically significant, and so, by shaving the numbers, we get a curl of ‘Truth’, that can be verified time after time. So it is some comfort to know that even Belsky could not reproduce his result by using a different attachment test set in a familiar environment, and that there are at least seven other American studies that find no appreciable behavioural difference between children based on their early child care. One Swedish study reports that, at the age of eight, children who had entered child care before the age of one were rated by their teachers as less anxious and more independent than children who entered child care later or who were cared for full-time by their mothers. But who reported that?
There are women on the Internet who carry their babies around all the time; who never ever put them down. It is a fashion. They carry them for every waking moment and then they sleep beside them at night. I do not know how long they do this for – certainly the first twelve months, but maybe more. I do not know how they go to the toilet, or have a shower. But I know that no one is going to make them feel guilty. No one is going accuse them of inadequate mothering. No way.
Meanwhile, may Dr Belsky grow breasts. May he send his children off to college after eighteen years of making their dinners, and cry, and cry.
Babies: A Breeder’s Guide
God
IT WAS ALWAYS a mystery to me why the churches of Ireland were filled with women, and empty of men. I looked up at the crucifix and thought it was a bizarre thing for women to worship a man in a church run by men. As far as I was concerned being a Catholic was silly, and being a Jew meant so much more washing-up. What all religions do, however, is what most political systems fail to do – they prize and praise the figure of the mother.
She is the machine, the hidden power. She is the ideal, the revered one, the truly loved. Which makes up, in a way, for being skipped in shop queues and looking like a heap.
And more. On the third night of my child’s life I looked into her eyes and realised that nothing I believed could explain this. It was an embarrassing moment. I think I saw her soul. I suffered from the conviction that a part of her was ancient; and that part chose to be there with me at the beginning of something new. I had a wise child.
Carrying her out of the hospital and into the noise of the traffic; driving her home in second gear; feeding her in the middle of the night, and at the beginning of the night, and at dawn – so precious – I found myself shrinking in the face of her vast and unknowable future. How would she turn out? What would she do? When would she die? Not for many, many years, I hoped; not for the longest time. The mechanisms of fate, the grinding of her days that would lead to one end or another, became urgently opaque to me. There were a thousand things that could hurt this child, or even estrange her from me. What could I do? Nothing. My best.
These are all feelings that religion understands.
I had, I thought, become human in a different and perhaps more radical way. I had let something slip into the stream of time. What else can you do, but trust the river – put it all into the hands of a higher power?
Oh, all right.
And who else, but the suffering Christ, could know the suffering that motherhood brings?
Actually, I will resist the tug of it, if you don’t mind. Still, I will resist.
Buggies
All women with buggies look as though they are on welfare. Pushing a buggy makes you look as though you’re on the way to the methadone clinic. You look as though you had this baby in a working-class, selfish sort of way – you had this baby even though you couldn’t afford a car. A man pushing a buggy looks as though he is someone the global economy left behind. This is why the middle classes have taken to the three-wheeler. People with three-wheelers look as though they go jogging up mountain tracks, whereas in fact, all they do is plonk their fat, post-partum arses behind the steering-wheel of their cars. Because, even though it folds up, a three-wheeler is too heavy and unwieldy to get on to a bus. You can only get a three-wheeler into the back of a Volvo estate.
In classless America, you can buy buggies in the supermarket for a fraction of the price. They hang them up in rows; ordinary things of plastic and chrome, and dirt cheap. This is because, in America, no one walks, everyone drives.
In Dublin’s inner city, on the other hand, you might get a buggy instead of a car, they are so fitted and upholstered and sprung; with a milometer and a watch on the broad handle where you park your drink. They have one bit that locks into another bit for all sizes and circumstances, each guaranteed to provoke a nervous breakdown in hissing men and muttering women as they wrestle with straps and clicky bits, and search for the one thing you need to press that no one can find (and meanwhile, who holds the baby?).
In the baby-care shop I am affected by shopping dyslexia. I cannot read these machines. I would put the baby in backwards. I do not know how to want a buggy. So we get something simple, in black.
How to buy your first buggy: You have seventeen minutes. You are in tears. You can’t go out any more because the baby weighs a ton and your spine is pulled into a question mark by the baby sling you thought would be more appropriate for those early months. But the baby sling makes you feel as though you are monstrously pregnant – only on the outside – and the baby has grown past your chin, so you go to the posh buggy shop and realise just how much poor people spend on their buggies. Then you go to the ordinary buggy shop and get something to match your coat. You put the baby into it. The shop assistant says that they shouldn’t be sitting up at that age; she shows you one that allows the baby to he down, but it is the size and cost of a small house. Besides, it doesn’t match your coat. The baby lolls in a roughly seated position in the probably wrong buggy. You pay at the till and say, Can I walk it out? You push the buggy. You experience bliss.
How to get your second buggy: Go to the sales. Get the three-wheeler. Conceive.
Walking along the sea front, my mother takes a turn with the new machine with its glorious suspension and she says, ‘Ah, that’s more like the way they used to be.’ Oh, the satisfaction, and all the pride, of a good pram.
Remember, when you are buying a buggy, that you will pack and unpack this thing four times a day with a possibly screaming, and always resentful, baby tucked under one arm. You must be able to fold or unfold whatever you buy with one foot (this is not a joke). There is also the weather and the traffic to contend with, as well as outraged shoppers who think that junkie mothers should be locked up, and some young feller who pushes past you, nearly making you drop the baby, because he is in a hurry and you are taking up too much space, and stopping is not what the street is for.
How to buy your third buggy: Throw out everything; give it away; send it hurtling down a slope into the waters of your local canal; then go and get the lightest, smallest, cheapest thing you can find.
On all three buggies, remember that you must be able to hang your shopping off the back. Sponge handles are always nice, as is the lie-down seat; though a child will doze off in any position, so long as you keep it moving. It is the bumping that does it, or the unscroffing world that confuses them to sleep. Their brain shuts down as they dream of becoming a racing driver, or something else very fast and inexplicable. Buggies are the reason older children take drugs and become joyriders, but who cares? A child could actually live in a buggy most of the time. They love them as a knight might love his horse. A child can also push its own buggy for endless amusement, thus reducing the need for toys.
Walking the streets at 10 a.m., I meet an acquaintance who says, ‘Are you still lugging that baby around town?’ Perhaps he said, ‘toting’: ‘Are you still toting that child around town?’ He might have said, �
��dragging’. I look at the baby, her face tight with happiness. She loves being out. She is mad about her buggy. I push on and spend the rest of the day thinking bad thoughts about his sperm count. Build me a house, please, with a split-level living-room and a sprinkler on the lawn. I will live in it with my baby and I will never tote her anywhere again. (Also, fuck you, I will tote her wherever we please.)
Some people don’t like children. Some people like children well enough, they just find their mothers annoying, or actually enraging. Especially if they push a buggy. ‘Young wans,’ one man calls them, complaining about how dangerous we are to cars.
‘That’s right,’ I yelled once at a woman, as she pushed off the kerb and into the path of my bike, ‘kill the child, why don’t you?’ Because women with buggies, as we know, became recklessly pregnant at an early age, so that they can drag their trashy kids around town, while using them to bark the shins of respectable shoppers. Women with buggies do not love their children, they are too busy slapping them at bus-stops, after getting them overexcited with E-numbered sweets. If you want to shop, then you should leave the child with the hired help.
