by Anne Enright
In the bank, a young, eager type of young man slips into the queue ahead of me. It is a neat move: a small weave, and little duck. He is very pleased with himself. He gives me a little smile as though I should be pleased for him, too – all’s fair in love and bank queues. I, who have spent two and a half hours trying to get the baby out the door and into town and into the bank before the mortgage is foreclosed, after my fortieth consecutive night of three-hourly feeds, am not pleased for him. I think he should have let me go first. I think the baby may explode before we get to the top of the queue. To stop the baby exploding I push the buggy back and forwards, a little. Push-pull. Push-pull. It is difficult to do this in the confines of the queue, so I step back a little from the smart-arse in front. Push-pull, push-pull, push-pull. At first I don’t actually hit him with the buggy, I nearly do. I push the buggy just to the back of his ankles, and think about it. I hope you have triplets. Then I tip him a little – just the cloth of his trousers – with the rubber step that slings across the front. Then, I have a bit of a surge, and I do actually hit the back of his leg. Push-pull, push-pull, push-pull. By now he looks quite uncomfortable. Of course, I am just quieting my baby. I am a mother, I don’t attack strangers with a buggy containing my cute-looking baby. It must be some sort of absent-mindedness on my part. But when the queue moves forward I move forward too, and I do it some more. Push-pull, push-pull, push-pull. The eager young man looks dead ahead. He doesn’t say anything. He is quite right.
Don’t mess with me. I am well hard. I have a buggy.
Staring
In the maternity hospital, there are two new parents who look as though they have just survived a war. Grey, shattered; they somehow ignore the smouldering ruins to talk in a very middle-class way into their mobile phones (one each). They look at each other over the receivers, and mouth silently. Then they sign off and say, ‘Oh, Gawd, so-and-so is coming in. Well, I couldn’t put them off, could I?’ They manage to turn it all – the blood, the glory, the raw shock of it – into suburban ennui.
After lunch, the new father leans over the perspex hospital cot to look at his baby. He leans his arms on the end of the trolley and, after a while, slowly hunkers down. As he does so, his trousers ease away from his shirt to show a builder’s cleavage of fantastic dimensions. It beams, speakingly, out at the ward, this bosom, as he stares at his baby; not for one hour, not for two, but all the way to tea. The curtain goes over and the curtain swishes back, and he is still there, and his bum is still there: while the mother sleeps, and the baby sleeps. He stares and stares, and continues staring, and even his backside smiles.
Home Birth
Having a baby is like being run over by a small car – from the inside. Now, if you were facing a small car from the outside, you would certainly make some decisions. Yes, it would help if you lay down. The position you adopt is always important. If lying down makes you feel too panicked or helpless, then you might adopt a sitting position, until the very last minute. Some people even recommend moving around until the car is nearly upon you, they say it will help your body take the weight – these are the kind of people who find the experience of being run down by a small car empowering, who recommend yoga to help you relax. If you practise hard, they say, you may feel no significant pain at all.
Sitting, standing or in the lotus position, whatever way you approach it, there is absolutely no need for the old practice of tying you to the road. You are in charge of this. You must, however, breathe out rapidly while a wheel is on your chest or stomach – this is vital. It really does help.
There are those who would prefer to be run over by a small car while under a general anaesthetic – they don’t want to see the car, they say, they don’t even want to know the colour. But really, it is not a good idea to go all floppy; a certain amount of resistance makes it easier for the motor to get over the hump. It is best to go for something in between – nearly numb, but still able to brace yourself. This is why God invented the epidural – though if the car is coming towards you at speed, it may be too late to ask for one. In any case, some people prefer to be run over quite fast, by a small car. They like to get it over and done with.
Remember that the experience of being run over by a small car is a rare one, and you may want to feel and remember every minute of it for the rest of your life. Some people opt to be run down by a small car in their own home; they find it a more relaxing environment than a cold hospital car park. And really, if you do it properly and don’t panic, then there is no cause for concern. Everyone is afraid the car might get stuck, that you might be pinned under the weight of the car for an unspecified length of time. But this is quite silly. Your stomach is designed to take the weight. Your friends and extended family will be there to cheer you on. It will be like a party, the best party you have ever held.
Of course, there is also, and always, the health of the car to consider – this, for me, is the bottom line. It is the main reason that I would never choose to be run over at home.
(Well, that’s my story and I am sticking to it. Secretly, and for entirely selfish reasons, if I were to be run over by a small car, then I would like to be near an emergency room, and a fire brigade with some cutting equipment, and also a crane. I would also like a pastel-yellow Mini Metro, please. I’m an old-fashioned sort of girl.)
Wriggles
Babies wriggle. Of all the signals – eyes, smell, the tiny stretch at the height of a yawn, the size of their fingers, and the translucent curve of their ears – a baby’s wriggle strikes the keenest note in my mother’s heart.
It is so constant, random, and light. Feet and fists rolling in a gentle spasm; it is not yet a squirm. Babies wriggle like puppets, with an incompetent at the strings. There is an occasional panicked jerk of the arms, then the return, in tics and increments, to swaying equilibrium. There is no rest. Babies wriggle exactly as the mechanical babies made for television do, which is why those mechanical babies are so disgusting. In fact, all wriggling things disgust us, make us shriek and fling them away – if they are not babies.
Naming
How do you name a child? I couldn’t even name my dolls. Not that I was a dolly sort of girl, but I did get a big plastic job for my fourth birthday that said, ‘Mama!’ when you turned her upside down. ‘What are you going to call her?’ said my auntie, and I remember the blankness, the slight panic. What do you call the sky, except ‘sky’, what do you call a doll, except ‘doll’ or, at a push, ‘Dolly’? The capital letter makes all the difference, and I think I sort of knew this. ‘What are you going to call her?’ means, ‘How will you call her into being?’ As if there was a word out there, one simple, magic word, that would bring the plastic alive – if only you knew what it was.
At four years old, I didn’t even know where to look. I don’t know if children do. It is, I suspect, the adults who decide to call the puppy ‘Bobbyfourpence’, the children are more than happy with ‘Spot’. In the event, my auntie decided on ‘Bella’. Why? Because it is the Italian for beautiful, she said. Which made no sense to me at all – I was Irish and the doll was made in Taiwan.
The Chinese for beautiful is, I think, ‘Yan’, but it is too late to rechristen her now, sitting up in my parents’ attic in a pair of gingham knickers, with her voice of plastic perforations fallen out of her back. ‘Mama! Mama!’ Whose name was she calling? Mine?
A name is not only an incantation, it is also a mark. We mark our children as cute or normal (Trixie, Clare), we mark them as Irish (Síofra), or as middle class (Emma-Louise). It’s probably better to go for the social as opposed to the personality choice in all this. The child may not stay cute but it will probably stay Irish (but not too Irish, which rules out Gobnait).
And so, we plan. We pat our tummies and try ‘Bobby’ for size. We cross out all the names of the people we didn’t like at school, also former boyfriends, girlfriends, unpleasant colleagues and, in my case, characters from books that I have written, particularly those who were odd or unhappy wh
ich, let’s face it, most of them were. Strange names are out of the question – it seems that I just want a normal, happy child with a normal, happy name; for which mediocrity of ambition she will, no doubt, come to hate me in time.
And just when I have it figured out, the baby arrives. She doesn’t look normal, or even new. She looks extraordinary and ancient and wise. And now I cannot name her, cannot even know her, let alone mark her with something so banal as a name. She has an old soul. I look at its benign face, the slow lids batting over the murk of her eyes, and, ‘Yoda’! – she is the wrinkled puppet from Star Wars who talks backwards. She is the only one. She is ‘The Squinch’, ‘The Baba’, ‘The Child’. ‘Gorgeous!’ She begins to smile. You cannot call a child ‘Gorgeous’, but in the circumstances ‘Sarah’, for example, is out of the question. Who could call this child ‘Sarah’, when she might be anyone at all?
And so it begins. ‘Thumper’, ‘Squiggledypop’, ‘Sweetie-bump’, ‘Lumdumtious’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Baba’, ‘Babalabaloo’. The gooey litany that keeps our children open for a while, genderless, unlabelled and free.
I was called ‘Funny Foots’ because my father used to tweak my toe, apparently, when he came in from work: ‘Hello, Funnyfoots.’ (I am still quite fond of my feet.) I was also ‘Sausage’, or even the slightly mouldier ‘Fluffy Sausage’, also ‘Bubbles’ and sometimes ‘Panzer’. I once asked my father why he called me ‘Panzer’ – Was it something to do with pansies? to which, being polite, he said, Yes, neglecting to mention that it was also the name of a fairly large German tank. I was a big girl. Funny how you always remember the jokes that you don’t understand – some small smile in the air around your parents, if not exactly on their faces.
My own child now is a ‘Little Belter’ and I might call her ‘Panzer’, but that is my own, special tag, and cannot easily be shared. Soon all her names will have settled down to three or four, and I am curious to see what these might be. Because somewhere in me is the ordinary person my parents called ‘Anne’, but also, and still, the bubbles and the tank. Somewhere in her, perhaps, there will always be the wise child Yoda, as well as the Thumper, as well as the grave and lovely ‘Rachel’ we finally named her, hopefully, to be.
Burps
At first you think the problem is somehow existential, the baby is lonely, the baby is frightened, the baby is in the dark.
‘That baby has wind,’ says my mother.
I tell her not to be silly, the baby is too young to have wind. This is a breast-fed baby, how could it be windy? Why should it be so badly designed?
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says my mother in a voice creaking with resignation. ‘That last bit of wind can be very hard to get.’ She does not take the baby from me, but later – casually, you might say – she puts it to her shoulder and provokes a seismic belch. The baby screams even louder. I wish she wouldn’t do that. I am with the baby on this: I think the wind is my mother’s fault.
Two and a half years later, it is four in the morning and the new baby’s stomach is hard as a board. I sit him on my knee and hinge his torso forward and back. You might call it rocking, or comforting, but I am actually trying to lever the wind out of him, as simply as if I had a spanner and a wrench. I had forgotten all about this, I was kissing and hugging him and changing nappies like a fool until night three, some hours before dawn, when it all came back in a rush. ‘That last bit of wind can be very hard to get.’ After which I couldn’t get the damn sentence out of my head. Thanks, Ma.
At two weeks I can find the bubble of air with the tips of my fingers and squeeze it out, against the palm of my hand. At a month, I jiggle him on my knee, like getting the fizz out of a bottle of pop. And all the time, there is the hingeing from the hip; the tilt, the rock, the belching jive. From day three, both my babies understood the gravity of all this, and leant into my hand in a solemn, hopeful way.
Burp!
In the queue for his six-week check-up, the baby belches into a room full of new parents, to helpless cries of acclaim and relief.
‘Oh, well done!’
‘Oh, that’s what we like to hear.’
‘Uhhh,’ says one woman, groaning as though she has been thumped in the stomach, the sound is so good to her ears. We laugh, and night gathers around each of us; the lonely hours we have spent in the various rooms of our various houses, waiting for just that sound.
In my experience, tiny babies cry more often from wind than from hunger – which is to say that they cry more often after food than before it. There are rich metaphysics here, but Freud, for all his talk of the post-orgasmic look on the sated infant’s face, has very little to say about wind. Being a genius he could discourse on all our holes – oral, anal, genital – but the burp was just, for him, a remnant: a sign of satisfaction, as you might find in any Bavarian Biergarten. He never saw that four-in-the-morning look of utter profundity, as a baby waits on its stomach; thinking about its insides, the volatility of them, how lovely they are and how unfair. You feed a baby and it looks happy, then wary, then aggrieved. After which, the panic rises.
Burp!
Oh, well done!
They always cry louder for a few seconds – it must hurt them, quite a lot – and then they cheer up. After which, a few little possets. After which the hiccups (oh, welcome sound). Then sleep.
You could write a book to this rhythm. You could discuss it all day. How could he miss it? At a guess, Sigmund was not a four-in-the-morning man. At a guess, he was not a man much puked upon.
Hands
There is nothing better, when you can’t get up, than lying in bed with a baby. If the baby gets bored, you can flutter your hand, high above its face, then swoop down to beep-beep its nose. If you are very tired, support the waving arm with your other arm, and close your eyes.
Babies love hands. Anyone’s hands. Hands make them laugh. They could stare at them and smile at them and play with them all day long. A baby also knows, quite quickly, that it too possesses hands, and that they are the same kind of wonderful object as the mother’s. They look from their own fingers to your fingers and back again. Hands!
I find this really exciting. No one else seems to, as far as I know.
Girl / Boy
In the maternity hospital with our baby girl, we are given our first lesson in how to change a nappy. I ask what seems to be a key question; I say, ‘What do you do about the crease?’ This is, after all, an educational event. The nurse is so embarrassed that she pretends not to hear me; she doesn’t even clear her throat. She Moves Swiftly On.
Later, I hear a shriek and settle of women from around one of the nappy tables, like a flock of delighted birds. Another nurse says, ‘Well, you can tell he is a real man, anyway’ (this is absolutely true). A boy baby has just peed into the Dublin air, in the first year of the twenty-first century, Anno Domini.
Crying
Babies sometimes cry while they are still asleep. This gives them an unfair advantage over their parents, who cannot comfort them without waking up. Though sometimes, it is true, you can feed them and keep dreaming at the same time.
Babies cry for all kinds of reasons. About 5 per cent of the time, babies cry because they have just hit themselves in the face. Later, they cry because they are trying to hit themselves in the face and keep missing. Mostly though, it is wind. And after that, hunger. You would be surprised how often a baby gets hungry. You would be astonished by it. If they are twice as big as last week, it goes without saying that they must be twice as hungry, but sometimes these things sneak up on you. If they are fed and burped, and burped again, then it must be teeth. Or ears. Or colic. Or panic. Or just being tired. Or being too cold. Or being too hot. Or being itchy. Or some neurological thing we don’t know about yet.
You can always try holding them upside down. They quite like that, when they are new.
Babies do not go wa-ah. In the first days there is an L in the middle of their cry, a helplessness of the tongue as it slaps up to the roof of their mouth. Ella,
ella – very like the French hélas.
Alas! alas! they wail – the tiny ones, just born. Alas! alas! from plastic hospital cot to plastic hospital cot. Alas.
Or Hello. Or Allah. Allah.
Later the waver goes out of their tongue, and that central L. goes nasal; haNang. haNang. And then, later again, Aaah-ha. Aaah-ha. Aaah-ha. But, in all the years, I have never heard a W in there, except in the broadest sense, when a baby cries through an open grimace, like a Greek tragic mask. The W is more a toddler thing – the wide-mouthed wail, as they struggle to speak through the tears.
‘I wa-ah-ah. I waaah. I wan. Hi. Hi. Hi. I waa-ah.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I wah, I wah, I want a PINK one.’
Babies may say wa-ah when they are hysterical, but these days, unless they have colic, you’re not really supposed to let them get that far. If they do have colic, you are allowed to set them down. In extreme cases, you are allowed to leave the room, but only in order to take your own medication (you must not medicate the child).
A good trick with crying: hand the baby over to someone who does not love the child. Listen. In their arms, it may not sound so bad. Or it may sound a lot worse, in which case, go for a walk.
When you are on your walk you will hear your baby crying behind every car. You will glance over to the pub, wondering what on earth your baby is doing in there, and why is it crying. You will hallucinate, with utter, almost casual, conviction, the sound of your baby’s cry, every three to five minutes.
haNang. haNang. haNang.
A baby’s regular cry takes about one second to complete. Inhale-exhale. Inhale-exhale. haNang. haNang. Some of it is just idle complaint. ‘I smell my dinner, I smell my dinner,’ or ‘That duck is so yellow, that duck is so yellow,’ haNang. haNang. Cycling at about a second per cry, it is easy enough to live with – I can take about twenty of them, some people can take even more. But any faster and it becomes unbearable. You have to pick them up. There is always something you can do. Until there is nothing you can do, any more. haNang. haNang. haNang.
