by Anne Enright
Time – that’s what cures crying. It is also what crying destroys – ten minutes of wails is the longest ten minutes you ever have to undergo. It is six hundred individual complaints, six hundred failures, six hundred rejections, six hundred demonstrations of your helplessness in the face of another’s pain.
Let your eyes sink into it. Pause a while.
haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang.
haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang.
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haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang.
haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang. haNang.
And you are involved with each haNang, you understand. You dip and lift, and do your best six hundred times. At each breath your mind surges with sympathy and a pleading that is barely articulated.
There there. There there. There there. You’re all right. You’re all right. You’re all right. That’s it, oh, there, that’s it, that’s it. That’s it, that’s it, that’s it. Oh, shush now, please stop, yes, stop, do stop, please. You’re all right. You’re all right. You’re all right. There there. There there. There there. That’s it. That’s it. Please stop, hush, hush, oh, please. There there. There there. You’re all right. You’re all right. You’re all right. That’s it, shush, that’s it, that’s it. Oh, that’s it, oh, there, that’s it, that’s it. Oh, please stop, yes, stop, shush, shhhh. You’re all right. You’re all right. You’re all right. There there. There there. There there. Shush now.
Until you break into speech with a rhythmic groaning as the baby is bounced on your shoulder, adding your own uhHung. uhHung. uhHung. uhHung to the monotony of its distress. After which you might rise to the shush itself, that most irritating sound, Sssss. Sssshhh. Shush. Ssss or the falling song of Doh! doh doh do do. Doh! doh doh do do. Doh! doh doh do do. Or even a real song, gasped at speed, then slowly deepened into its true lyrical–tragical version as in ‘Bob . . . the . . . builder . . . Can . . . we . . . fix . . . it?’ which becomes quite moving, really, when you repeat it twenty-seven times. All of which will cover the first five minutes, after which there is another five minutes to go.
The worst, in my experience, is the tired-feed-burp cycle. This happens when you try to knock a baby out by feeding it, and end up giving it wind instead. A tired baby knows what it wants and it does not like to be thwarted, but because food is very like sleep to the wanting baby, you deliver another liquid cosh, after which you have to burp it again and so on, until it becomes too enraged to fall asleep, and you give it more food, unt
il . . . until . . . until . . . I don’t know what happens in the end. They must fall asleep. No one is still awake at the age of twenty. Are they?
I don’t know.
It is like when you are in the middle of toilet training and there is misplaced shit, and secret shit, and helpless shit on various surfaces about the home that were not designed to take it, like for example the handle of the phone, and people say, as you hurl the receiver away from you, ‘Don’t worry, no one ever went to college in nappies.’ And what you want to shout back is, Are you sure?
Still, time does pass. The wind eases, the world becomes less alarming, the baby learns how to want in a simpler way, as you learn how to supply. And, just when you think you are through the worst of it, the baby starts teething, or it gets an ear infection, or it forgets how to go to sleep; or it starts getting lonely, especially at night.
At some stage towards the end of the first year, we all try what is called ‘controlled crying’. This involves leaving a baby to cry for more than thirty seconds at a time. Actually, you are supposed to leave the baby for as many minutes as it has months, and then increase it, or decrease it, or something. It mostly means fathers tying mothers to some solid piece of furniture and saying, ‘It’s fine, the baby is fine.’
The baby is manifestly not fine. In this scenario, as the baby lies there and the crying escalates and turns to rage, and cranks up to raw panic, and then hits a wild note that sounds like guilt to me (what have I done, to be so abandoned?) I have only one question. At this precise moment, who hates who the most? Does the mother hate the father more than the father hates the baby? Does the father hate the mother more than the mother hates the father? Does she hate him more than she hates the baby? Does no one hate the baby? Who does the baby hate? Does no one hate anyone? Why is everyone screaming, now? Answers on a postcard, please.
If it is the mother who leaves the baby to wail, saying for instance, ‘It doesn’t make any difference what I do,’ then it may be time to bring the mother to the doctor. Or it may just be a passing thing she is going through; a Tuesday thing, that is gone by Wednesday afternoon.
None of this is true for the second baby, by the way. You put a second baby into the cot and the second baby turns on to its side and goes to sleep. Then you go to sleep. It is just as you suspected – it was all your fault in the first place.
Both my babies were very moderate criers. I had this theory about panic. I thought, if you let them panic in their first days, then that will be the way their brains are made. I decided that if you give the first three months to a baby, entirely and without stint, then it will reward you by being easy for the rest of its life.
Of course, people with theories should, at all times, be scorned. And instead of ‘months’, I should have said ‘decades’.
Why do we assume that babies are happy in the womb? They come out looking for your face, so who is to say they are not lonely, all those weeks when there is no face there? And maybe their guts are at them, maybe the bones of their face ache from the early beginnings of teeth; maybe growth itself hurts, in the womb, as it does outside, and all that squawking in the early weeks is not a mourning for paradise lost, but just making up for lost time.
Evolution
I have a few new theories for the evolutionary sociologists, that pack of intellectual baboons.
Men went out to hunt because if they didn’t bring home a dead antelope their pregnant women would eat them in the middle of the night. She wakes up. She suffers a nameless hunger. She sees a nice bit of leg.
Why do we give birth in pain? Humans give birth in pain so that they can’t run away afterwards.
Authority
At the baby’s six-week check-up, the paediatrician lies her down on the couch and drifts away from her. This woman moves in slow motion. She gives out no signals; she is so calm and contained that I cannot tell where she is, behind me in the room. This is what happens when you work with sick babies all the time. Beside her we are massively overwrought. This is our baby, please tell us that she is all right (of course the baby is all right – just look at her). Please tell us that we are doing it properly. Please do not take her from us, even for a minute, even behind a screen. I pick the babygro off one sleeve at a time. The baby does not cry. Is this good? Perhaps she should cry. In the white towelling there is an errant pubic hair that must have come from our bed. It is a deeply shocking pubic hair. The paediatrician bends over the baby and moves her limbs, then she obliges us to make her smile. Then she says that we have a happy, healthy baby. Then we give her forty-five pounds. We would have given her four thousand five hundred. We would have given her anything.
Poo
Babies need you to smile at them when they are feeding and also – and more urgently – when it is coming out the other end. This is what the rest of the world has to come to terms with. Often, when a mother is whispering to a baby, she is whispering about shit.
‘Oh, go on then,’ says one woman, lovingly. ‘Have a good poo.’
We keep our voices light, our tone of voice adoring.
‘Have you a secret in your nappy?’ coos another woman, ‘Have you a little present for me?’ We nuzzle and agree and admire. We help them along, as though they were doing something delicate and sweet and difficult, like blowing the seeds off a dandelion clock.
‘There you go!’
This is probably all necessary to the child’s mental health. But still – I don’t know. Is this where that dreadful female impulse comes from, to put little crocheted dollies over the toilet rolls?
Smell
In order to wash a tiny baby’s hair, you have to wrap them up and turn them upside down, often in the bathroom sink, often with someone else whimpering outside the door, saying, ‘Careful.’ Really, there is not much point in washing a tiny baby’s hair, and so you get the nostalgic smell of scalp that is soap-free. A baby’s hair smells keenly of humanity. It makes people groan, small but deep – a kind of creaking in their gut as they inhale and say, ‘Hmmm.’
Babies smell of rusks, even if they don’t eat them. Tiny babies smell like kissing someone in a field: also of milk, and asparagus, and – it’s up to you really – pancakes cooked in the Frytex of your youth; baby lotion, even if they are wearing none; sunshine, even in the middle of winter; and so on. They smell of all lost things, now regained.
Babies’ feet smell, bizarrely, of feet. It starts early.
Babies’ shit smells a little like ham going off. Also biscuits. Sometimes, if their tummy is upset, there is a whiff of fried egg. One day, much later, you turn from the nappy table and say, ‘Christ, that actually smells like shit.’
Babies’ earwax smells like earwax, from the word go. It creeps out a week after they are born and makes you wonder if there is not some amniotic remant in there; some crease in the baby in which a part of you is still lodged. But no, it is earwax. The real thing. My goodness, everything works!
Babies finally smell like you and they smell like your partner. This is as it should be. This was the way they are made. But I wonder if they don’t just take our imprint on to their skin, which is to say, the imprint of the last person to hold them – the mother’s, the father’s, the baby-minder’s, the woman in the doctor’s waiting-room who asks can she ‘have a go’. Some parents can smell a stranger off their baby as soon as they pick them up – I am speaking of quite normal parents here – they can smell musty old talc, and women who wear Obsession, and the baby-minder’s car with its little bottle of aromatherapy oil, plugged into the place where the cigarette hghter used to go.
Perhaps babies are just olfactory blotting paper. They smell of the person who last minded them. They smell of You.
What do we do with babies? We inhale them, our face hovers over them, we hold them and keep a tiny, delicious distance between their skin and our own. We kiss them thoughtfully on the crown of the head, and we kiss them playfully in the fat, soft cushion under the chin. All day, we sniff them up and down. We do not lick th
em.
Too Much Information
Yes, it is possible to breast-feed if you have cosmetic implants. In fact, the silicone used by cosmetic surgeons, methyl polydimethylsiloxane, has a structure very similar to that used in a popular remedy for colic, simethicone – which binds with the minute bubbles of air in the baby’s gut, joining them together to make bigger bubbles, for the easier burp experience.
Bonus.
Baby-talk
What used to be called baby-talk is now called ‘parentese’. It used to be frowned on as exceptionally silly and dangerous, but now, if you want your child to grow up to be a genius you talk iida ickle baba like dis for the first . . . well, they don’t say, actually. How Long? How Long O Lord? are we supposed iid talk to de a baba ike dis, yes, we ARE! How long do we have to? Yes, how long wong? Fifteen years maybe? For fifteen years we talk to our children, Yes, We Do! like this! We say, Don’t take those nasty druggy-wuggies! We say, Don’t stay too late at the dancie dancie. At the wave.
Long ago, in another life, I was a media hack, chasing a story in Dublin town. It was a serious story, a complex story, a story about corruption, graft, injustice. We were driving along, chewing it over, when my fellow hack, my co-hack, you might say, said, Oh! Look at the big GREEN bus. What can you do? Nothing. We threw our fag-ends out of the window and stepped on the gas. That night . . . she did a lot of overtime.
She couldn’t help it. Children are actually a form of brainwashing. They are a cult, a perfectly legal cult. Think about it. When you join a cult you are undernourished, you are denied sleep, you are forced to do repetitive and pointless tasks at random hours of the day and night, then you stare deep into your despotic leader’s eyes, repeating meaningless phrases, or mantras, like Ooh da gorgeous. Yes, you are! Cult members, like parents, are overwhelmed by spiritual feelings and often burst into tears. Cult members, like parents, spout nonsense with a happy, blank look in their eyes. They know they’re sort of mad, but they can’t help it. They call it love.
