by Anne Enright
Mistake. It is a serious mistake to get that close.
The baby fills her skin, I do not. My hair, which she loves so much, is greying and unkempt. I am wearing (what else?) a tracksuit. I have, I decide, crossed that line between living and ageing; between being alive and getting old. And still the baby likes nothing more than my tickly hair and is addicted to my tracksuit’s various zips. She looks in the mirror and, Mama! Mama! she says.
There is nothing for it. I will have to have more babies. I will have to reproduce and reproduce; have my adored non-existence multiplied over and over, until I am completely crocked, completely happy, and hardly there at all.
It’s Not About You, You Know
I’m not saying that I don’t know how to boil an egg, but there was one evening when there was nothing much to eat in the house and I thought a boiled egg might be just the thing, except I couldn’t remember if you put them in the cold water and heated it all up or waited for it to get hot and dropped them in then. Also the whole salt thing was a bit of an issue. The baby was crawling, I can remember her sitting on the kitchen floor and looking at me in that leaning-forward, hopeful way that they have. She was also crying, of course, because she was hungry. So I picked her up and waited for the egg to boil, and tried to shush her, but a five-minute egg is a very long egg to a hungry baby, so she was quite annoyed by the time I had the damn thing out of the water and hopped from hand to hand and cracked open – which is when I found that the white was still runny. I might have given her this, even, were it not for salmonella, because she really was roaring by now and it is the hardest thing not to be able to feed a baby. ‘I know,’ I thought, ‘I’ll put it in the microwave – it can’t explode, the shell is already cracked open.’ So in it went, for a minute or three, and after I had manhandled it out with an oven glove and a tea towel, I saw that the white had a strange, plastic, but very cooked, look to it, though we would have to wait another three minutes before it had stopped microwaving itself inside. Still, we were on the home straight, so I sang a little to keep the baby distracted while I ran the egg under the tap and peeled the shell off the strange, plasticky white at the same time, and ‘In a minute, In a minute,’ I said, as the yolk sac exploded, upwards, into my face.
The thing is . . . I kept smiling. I might have recoiled a little with the fright, but I didn’t even yelp. Not a squeak. Not a hint. At most, there was a small silence.
Christ, what’s that about? It’s about war-wounded women dragging themselves across the kitchen with bits missing, saying, ‘It’s all right, darling. Your Mama’s here.’ And thinking, ‘They’ve bombed the fridge – what will I feed her now?’
It makes me dizzy just to consider it. That egg was really very hot.
It’s Not About You, You Know, Part 2
I put down the phone and say to the baby, ‘I just won an award for my book. Your Mama just won an award!’ So we do a little dance. She seems quite pleased for me.
Sometimes, it is a lonely business. No, always. It is always a lonely business.
The Moment
There will come a moment when you will seriously consider walking away from it all. You may even take the first steps. Away. Away. Away. You hand the keys to their father and walk away from the car. Or some night, at home, you will put on your coat and head for the door. This is when you find how short is the piece of elastic that holds you. Away. Away. Away. becomes Stop. Stop . . . Stop. You open the door and look out into the rain and realise that there is nowhere for you to go; and even if there were, you cannot leave. You might as well try to walk away from your own arm. And your child, who calls to you (you turn and laugh, then, and come back) will never forget your silhouette as you faced the street that led away from them. They will even remember the rain.
Some people do leave. It is important not to forget this. Leaving is possible. There are such things as amputees – they walk around with their sleeves pinned to the fronts of their jackets, they manage fine.
Worry
You must always check a silence, not because the baby might have choked, but because it is in the middle of destroying something, thoroughly and slowly, with great and secret pleasure. It is important to remember this – you run back to the room, not to see if the baby needs resuscitation, but to save your floppy disks. Once you realise where the balance actually lies you can free yourself from the prison of worry. I know this. I am an expert. Some people, as they mount the stairs, might listen for the sound of a toy still in use – to me, this was the sound of the baby randomly kicking buttons in a sudden choking or epileptic fit. I used to read the ‘Emergencies’ section in the How to Kill Your Baby books all the time. The How To Kill Your Baby books are so popular that I assume some part of us wants to do just that. If the unconscious works by opposites, then it is a murderous business too, giving birth.
How To Kill Your Baby: A List:
Too much salt, fungally infected honey, a slippy bath surface, suddenly jealous pets, permanently jealous siblings, a stupid or pathological babysitter, the stairs, a house that goes on fire while you are ‘outside moving the car’, a child-snatcher, a small plastic toy, a playful jiggle that is as bad as a shake, an open cutlery drawer, a necklace, a string, a plastic bag, a piece of burst balloon, an electric cord, a telephone cord, a lollipop, a curtain cord, an inhaled sweet, an accidentally suffocating pillow, a smoky room, the wrong kind of mattress, an open window, a milk allergy, a nut allergy, a bee sting, a virus, a bacterial infection, a badly balanced walker, a bottle of bleach, all kinds of weedkiller, both on the lawn or in the bottle, pesticides, miscellaneous fumes, all carcinogens including apples, a failure to apply sun cream, the lack of a hat, battery-produced eggs, inorganic meat, cars. You might also have Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy without knowing it, so it is a good idea to check yourself for this, from time to time.
As far as I can see from the news reports, one of the most dangerous creatures in a child’s life is a stepfather, but the books don’t seem to mention them. They warn against mothers’ endless sloppiness with dangerous domestic objects, but they never mention their taste in men.
When the baby is eight months old, she cries every time I move out of sight. This separation anxiety can get quite wearing – it is so large and so illogical. Besides, I don’t need to be reminded that I’m not going anywhere, I am with this baby all the time. But I wonder if part of the problem isn’t my own anxiety when I leave the room. Will she still be alive when I get back? I picture the court case.
‘And why, pray tell, did you leave the baby?’
‘I . . . A call of nature, your honour.’
He pauses. A ripple of sympathy runs through the courtroom.
‘Well, I suppose even the best mothers must er um,’ though you know he thinks we shouldn’t. ‘Case dismissed. I suppose.’
Mothers worry. Fathers worry too, of course. But mothers are supposed to worry, and fathers are supposed to reassure. Yes, she is all right on the swing, no, he will not fall into the stream, yes, I will park the buggy in the shade, oh, please get a grip.
Is it really a gender thing? Maybe the people who worry most are the ones who spend the most time with the baby, because babies train us into it – the desperation of holding, walking, singing, distracting. Babies demand your entire self, but it is a funny kind of self. It is a mixture of the ‘all’ a factory worker gives to the conveyor belt and the ‘all’ a lover offers to the one he adores. It involves, on both counts, a fair degree of self-abnegation.
This is why people who mind children suffer from despair; it happens all of a sudden – they realise, all of a sudden, that they still exist. It is to keep this crux at bay perhaps – that is why we worry. Because worry is a way of not thinking something through.
I think worry is a neglected emotion – it is something that small-minded people do – but it has its existential side too. Here is the fire that burns, the button that chokes, here is the kettle, the car, the bacterium, the man in a mac. On the other side is
something so vulnerable and yet so huge – there is something unknowable about a baby. And between these two uncertainties is the parent; completely responsible, mostly helpless, caught in an ever-shrinking circle of guilt and protectiveness, until a kind of frozen passivity sets in. There is a kind of freedom to it too – the transference of dread from the self to the child is so total: it makes you disappear. Ping! Don’t mind me.
The martyred mother is someone uplifted, someone who has given everything. She is the reason we are all here. She is also, and even to herself, a pain in the neck.
I think mothers worry more than fathers because worry keeps them pregnant. To worry is to possess, contain, hold. It is the most tenacious of emotions. A worry – and a worrier – never lets go. ‘It never ends,’ says my mother, ‘it never ends,’ meaning the love, but also the fret.
Because worry has no narrative, it does not shift, or change. It has no resolution. That is what it is for – not ending, holding on. And sometimes it is terrible to be the one who is held, and mostly it is just irritating, because the object of anxiety is not, after all, you. We slip like phantoms from our parents’ heads, leaving them to clutch some Thing they call by our name, because a mother has no ability to let her child go. And then, much later, in need, or in tragedy, or in the wearing of age, we slip back into her possession, because sometimes you just want your mother to hold you, in her heart if not in her arms, as she is still held by her own mother, even now, from time to time.
Forgetting
The baby is crawling and I have forgotten the girl who could not crawl. She keeps replacing herself.
What It Does
This is what motherhood has done to me. I cannot watch violent films (I used to quite like violent films), I can’t even watch ones where the violence is ironical (I used to love irony). I cry at all funerals. I look with yearning at the airport road. I am complacent to the point of neglect about my body. I shop where the fat girls shop (it is a different place). For months I do not shop at all.
I am more vulnerable and more frightened than I can ever remember being. Some day I will have to let my children out on their own – when they are, for example, thirty-five – and someone might be nasty to them, and I won’t be there to punch the bastard’s lights out.
Meanwhile, I am nice to a whole range of people I wasn’t bothered with before – doctors, public health nurses, Montessori teachers and, above all, other mothers, whether or not they are my type. This sometimes annoys me, but then, also, there are so many of them to like.
A gardener reads a street by its magnolia trees, the house hunter reads it by price, I read it from knee height. I see children everywhere, and they are everywhere surrounded by hazards or pleasures that I check for, even though it is none of my business. ‘Uh-oh, there’s the ice-cream van.’ I look at their shoes and at their hair, and whether they have bobbles or clips, and are they smiling or squirming or yelling the place down. Also if they are beautiful. After which, I look up and check their mothers. I measure them against myself for age, sudden fat, and despair. Then I smile at them a little. Then they smile a little back.
The things we know.
You have to talk to a baby, and smile at it, now and then. You just have to. And all this grinning can make you feel alienated from your real self, or it can make you cheerful. Or a bit of both. Personally, I find it a good exercise. I have no problem filling this smiling shell, most of the time, and the cuddles and hugs and tickles and rolling around the place are great until you have to stop to make the dinner. Motherhood is, for me, a simple thing. This is an achieved simplicity, and I am quite proud of it.
These are the things I miss: I miss swimming with Martin, both of us in the sea at the same time, and no one minding a baby on the strand. I miss being able to walk out the door. I hate, hate, hate, the endless packing and unpacking and repacking. All that clobber.
Motherhood has made me more efficient. I suppose it would have to, really. I used to delay things all the time. There was nothing I enjoyed more than letting it all slide, the house, the job, the potted plant. I was a great believer in staring into space until obliged to leap from the sofa – an hour, a day, a week later. I thought staring into space nourished the soul.
In fact, there is something vicious about procrastination. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ you say, like a little bunny rabbit in a pother, ‘oh, will I, oh, won’t I, oh darn.’ But really you are saying, ‘Fuck it, fuck them, fuck you all. Die, you potted plant. Let it all come down.’
I learnt this when the baby started to crawl. I would look at, say, a safety pin on the floor and think, ‘Oh, what the hell, I’ll pick it up later.’ Then, quite keenly, I would see the disaster I was invoking by leaving it on the floor. Then I would duck down and pick it up. At first I found it just tedious, to be so on the ball. After a while, I found a kind of zen to it, and it became almost pleasant.
Think of how far I would have gone, if I’d known all this ten years ago. If I had been a creature of the moment instead of a creature of the sofa. I would have written many books. I might even be rich. I would finish painting the hall.
* * *
1 Gender indeterminate for reasons, not of transsexuality (there are no transsexuals in my family), but of confidentiality, tact, forgiveness, libel, charity.
Oh, Mortality
WHEN I WAS sixteen I was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer by a woman GP who checked a bizarrely swollen gland in the crook of my leg and took my mother aside for a few quiet words. I don’t remember anything about the trip home, or the days that followed it. I had no reason to, because no one told me that anything was wrong.
I do remember a look my father gave me when I was brushing my hair in the hall mirror. He did not realise I could see him in the glass. I also remember my mother bursting into tears when I announced with delight that I had lost loads of weight. But in general, I was in the flush of adolescence and this was a happy, almost electric time. Every lunch-time I ran two miles to a friend’s house while she cycled beside me, so that we could sneak a cigarette. Then we ran two miles back again. They were the healthiest cigarettes I ever smoked.
One Tuesday or Wednesday I went into hospital to have a biopsy of a gland in my neck. When I say no one told me anything was wrong, this probably isn’t strictly true. I think my mother tried to warn me it could be quite serious, but I told her not to be silly. I found the operation quite exciting. It was done under local anaesthetic in a domestic sort of room. The surgeon made an incision, and then got his fingers around something inside my neck – not ‘inside’ in the way that your throat is inside your neck, but inside the meat of it. To do this he had to push and prise his way around the surrounding tissue, and this might be simple, but it wasn’t easy. I am reminded of it sometimes, when I see someone working with, say, a chicken – how tough the body is, inside. When he had purchase he pulled the thing loose. As he tugged, I could feel a tightening in my armpits and groin, as the network of glands took the strain. Everything is connected. I thought of the different maps inside the body, the living map of the blood system, that I knew about, and this secret map of lymph nodes, whatever they might be. ‘Drainage’ – that was the extent of my knowledge. The surgeon was tugging at my body’s drains. I have an idea that he put his knee up and braced it against the edge of the table. But that can’t be true, can it?
When he got the thing far enough out, he snipped on either side of it and lifted it up and over to a kidney bowl. We had been chatting all the way through, so when he was done, I asked could I see it. In the old days, I seem to recall, children got to keep their tonsils in a jar on the hospital locker so I wondered at the surgeon’s slight shock as he paused and then said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’
I was so chipper and brave during the procedure that I fainted clear away when it was done. After that it was back to school work and boyfriends and my daily, casual, four-mile sprint for a fag. A few weeks later, my mother and I went in to see the consultant and he smiled and t
old us everything was all right. This was no surprise to me, so I was amazed to see my mother running to the pay phone in the hall. She was shaking too much to put the money in. When she finally got it together to dial, she just said to the person who answered, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ and put the phone down again. When I pressed her, she said, ‘Don’t tell your father I told you, don’t tell anyone – but the doctor said you were going to die.’ Of course the ‘Don’t tell anyone’ is the most bizarre thing about that sentence, as I remember it now, but that is my family, all over.
So the GP’s diagnosis was, to say the least, alarmist. I should have gone to the brilliant, grumpy old bastard down the road, but I insisted on seeing a woman. Maybe this was because the grumpy old bastard threw me out of his consulting room once, when I told him I had my period – ‘I can’t examine you like . . . like . . . like that.’ (This man was a god in our neighbourhood. Not for me. My mother told me some years ago that he had died, while out walking his dog. I said, ‘And how’s the dog?’)
Doctors. Don’t you just love them? I think of this sometimes when people complain about a lack of GPs in their area. It seems abundantly apparent to me that the fewer GPs there are the better and that people should be, at all times, discouraged from going to see them. I think of this woman sometimes, with her matronly air. I recall a tweed hat – but that can’t be true. She must have been bareheaded, the woman who told my mother I might have six months to live, or maybe less. The woman who said the school should be informed, so they wouldn’t push me too hard for my final exams. The weeks between the diagnosis and the biopsy results must have been quite a holiday for me. All my faults turned to glories. I might have been too smart and headstrong to live with, but I was certainly too young and bright to die.
