A Life's Work (19 page)

My friend Miranda told me that at night she lies awake listening to her baby breathe. Miranda's baby, Alexander, is three weeks older than mine. He has a large white head and a small face with precise features. His forehead is enormous, like a great sea on a globe banking away from the detail of his eyebrows, meeting the North Pole of his cap of fine hair. He is voluble and his gesturing arms fly about, as if he were conversing enthusiastically in a language I don't understand. When Miranda and I were pregnant I thought that we were in it together, that we were somehow doing it together, but in fact it hasn't turned out like that. When I spoke to her after Alexander was born I knew straight away that it wasn't going to be like that. After the conspiracy of pregnancy, having the baby amounts almost to a betrayal. Her husband called her to the phone and she took such a long time to come that it was clear she had gone somewhere far away, alone, and come back altered. I didn't know, I thought maybe that was just what happened. She told me all about the birth, about the baby, in the same way I sensed she was telling everybody about it. So how are
you
? she said at the end. The way she said it made me feel uncomfortable, like someone she was taking pity on standing on their own at a party. It was like she had been elected to something, chosen above me. Anyway, I still phone her most weeks, whether I think she wants me to or not. The stark bond of our common predicament is enough for me. Like immigrants from the same tiny, distant island, it seems to me that we're stuck with each other.

When she said it I almost asked why, so strange at first did the idea seem to me of listening to Alexander breathe. At night I sometimes put my pillow over my head to block out my own baby's sounds, the tortuous narrative of her breath, the strange hoots and squeaks that people her nocturnal life, the pauses. I can't sleep otherwise. For some reason I imagine Alexander's breath to be more regular, the vigorous in-out in-out of bellows, Miranda alert as a hospital monitor next to him in the dark, ready to go off like an alarm if the breathing stops. I didn't mean to find her concern ridiculous. It's just that my own was so raw and rude and new, so engulfing. Alexander's shape and smell, his being, did not trigger my love. I could only understand Miranda's vigilance by translating it into my own maternal tongue.

She said that she lay awake hour after hour, logging his breaths, amassing them, and that it was only when he began to wake up, stuttering into life with the ignition of hunger, that correspondingly, finally, having guided him through the death-parallax of sleep, she could be submerged in it herself. This was inconvenient, given that this was also the moment at which she had to get up and feed him. A vista of her life opened out before me, plunging and dramatic and untraversable. I had imagined that no one could be as tired as I, as bruised by the violence done to their nights. But when do you sleep? I asked. Ah,
sleep
, she said in a funny voice. Sleep is over. Sleep is as far out of fashion as shoulder-pads. She said this on the phone so I couldn't see her face. I wondered what she looked like, and whether what she was saying was true. I wondered if her particularly groomed beauty was in disarray. People told me I looked fine, but I felt interrupted, bugged, like an invaded microchip.

What do you think is going to happen, I said, that he's just going to stop breathing? I had heard of people rushing day and night to their babies' cribs to check they were still alive, but I had never felt the urge to do it myself. I took my daughter's sleep forcibly, like a gift I wanted but the giver was prevaricating in handing over. I know it's silly, Miranda said; and I imagined these other people would say exactly the same thing, but it still added up to make me feel that I lacked something, some importance, some force of presumption. I did not think to investigate the bureaucracy of breathing. I laboured under it and expected my child to labour too. Well, I said, he's got to be able to breathe. He's got to be able to do that for himself. The way I said it reminded me of someone crushing and conservative, someone I didn't like. I know, said Miranda. Then she admitted that she'd read a book about babies who died in their sleep, who just stopped like unwound clocks, for no reason anyone could discover, and now she couldn't think about anything else.

This admission didn't, in fact, surprise me. It merely gave substance to a feeling I'd had about Miranda all these weeks, that she was like something out of a book, a textbook, a manual, the kind of book I had begun to read since having a baby had provided me, for the first time, with an experience that was apparently normal and yet entirely unintelligible. Anyway, everything it said in these books, Miranda seemed to feel. Her life was in agreement with them where mine was not. The things she said increasingly merged in my mind with the so-called mothers' comments these books are full of.
I had expected to need drugs in my labour, but when it came to it the breathing exercises I'd learned in antenatal classes were enough.
Or,
Breastfeeding was a little tricky at first, but then we both came to love it!
Or,
Making love was a little tricky at first, but once we'd got the hang of it, it was even better than before!
There was something even about Miranda's vulnerability, her fear that struck me as official and endorsed, where my own anxieties shrank from the light, dreading disclosure. Still, I'd read enough to keep me in the conversation, and others like it.

That's not going to happen to Alexander, I said. I know, said Miranda. It's very, very rare, I said. I
know
, wailed Miranda, I just can't get the image out of my head! It turned out that this book she'd read was written by a woman who had found her four-month-old son dead in his crib one morning. The ‘image' was in fact many images: of the summer beauty of the morning she found him, of his stiff little body rising entire from the mattress when she lifted his arm, of his bottle of milk found still curdling in the warming pan hours later, when his death had become a fact and his life a memory. Of course, Miranda said, that baby was left to sleep face-down in a room on his own on a hot night. And he was bottle-fed, she added. What's that got to do with it? I said. Well, they now think that breastfeeding offers some protection against crib death, she said. I mentioned that my daughter slept face-down, her legs curled beneath her, her cheek pressed against the rotating earth; the clinging, elemental posture of something growing. Does she, said Miranda. Her voice was surprised and polite.

Not long after that conversation, Miranda came with Alexander to see me. Or perhaps it wasn't to see me: perhaps she came because she had to, because I had made the journey to her house with my daughter several times while she had never once visited me, because in spite of her silence I continued to phone her, to ask her to come. So finally, one day, she came, and when she arrived full of relief and pride at having taken the bus all the way across town without incident, without Alexander having cried or dirtied his nappy or gone off like a bomb in a public place as she seemed to expect him to, I saw that it was not that she disdained my company, but that she was afraid; of the city, of its noise and poisonous air and danger, of stepping out into its unpredictability; and of Alexander, of what he might do once moved outside the limits of her house, her control, the known world of her care of him. I saw that her mastery of him was glancing and rudimentary. Like a complex piece of equipment in whose use she was untrained, he responded to certain things she did without her really knowing why, and so she adhered to those things and dared try nothing else. The truth was that I felt the same fear of my own baby, but in me it provoked a certain violence, made me embark with her on long journeys by tube or train, take her on camping trips or to parties. I was always miserable at these times, rigid with responsibility and worry, so full of anticipation that I forgot to breathe. My head would begin to hurt and an ache would creep across my chest, and then I would remember and take great scalding gulps of air that sluiced over my parched lungs and made my throat burn. It was as if at these times I just stopped living because I was so taken up with looking after someone else.

Alexander whined and grizzled the whole afternoon. Miranda said it was because he was teething, because he needed his nap, because he was in a strange place. It didn't matter to me. She plugged and unplugged him raging from her breast, his limbs flailing, his clothes riding up uncomfortably around his plump little body. Milk tipped from his mouth as they wrestled and spilled over her clothes, and she scrubbed at it with his knitted hat. Don't use that, I said, I'll get a cloth. I offered to hold him, wanting her to relax, and she gave him to me as if she had to, for the sake of politeness. He was unfamiliar, much heavier than my daughter and different-smelling. His uncoordinated body was strong and muscled and frantic with tension. Grappling with him was like trying to rescue someone who was drowning. I was so used to holding my daughter that it felt like a sort of infidelity. We talked while all this was going on. Everything I said Miranda agreed with, meekly, which just made me talk more. I talked about how difficult it all was, about the anarchy of nights, the fog of days, about friendlessness and exile from the past and exclusion, about the wordless tyranny of babies and the strange, obsessive task of being alone with them all day, about my feelings of claustrophobia, my feeling that I was shut in a box, that I couldn't breathe. That's right, that's right, Miranda would say, nodding her head distantly. It got to the point where I thought she wasn't listening, until just then she spoke. But it's great as well, she said. You mustn't forget all the good things. She said it quite firmly, but for a minute I really didn't know what she was talking about. It was as if I was reading one of those books again. I almost said, there aren't any good things. She had Alexander back by this time and he was quiet because she was feeding him again. I wondered if she had said it because she thought she ought to. I wanted to ask her what the good things were. She went home saying she'd had a really nice time, that it was a real achievement to have got out of the house, and I believed her.

One day, in the bookshop, I found that book Miranda had talked about. My daughter was asleep in her stroller, so I parked it up by the bookshelf and began to read there in the shop. I read quickly, skimming over chapters, plunging in where I sensed something important was occurring. There were photos and I lingered over those. The baby who'd died looked older than I had expected, more robust. I couldn't believe he'd died. I couldn't believe Miranda had actually bought so ghoulish, so sentimental a book either. When I got to the morning on which she found him, tears surged powerfully and painfully to my eyes. I rubbed at them behind my glasses. The author described holding the stiff little body with its cruciform arms, and I wanted to pick up my sleeping daughter and hold her too. I realised then that I could have her for ever, could keep her, and the thought engulfed me in uncontrollable feeling, in the ferment of love. At the end of the book the author describes going on holiday with her family – later, when it was all over – to a place she had last been to when the baby was alive. Getting up one morning she puts on a sundress, a dress she hasn't worn since that last time. In the pocket she finds one of the baby's tiny socks; and she smells it and it smells of him, and she cries and cries.

My daughter fell and cut her head on a sharp stone, and when I picked her up to comfort her she fought to escape my arms, her face a panicked blur of tears and mucus. She wanted her father; frantically, blindly, she wanted to get away from me. Even in the heat of her injury I felt my own more keenly. I remain surprised by how proximate the mythology of motherhood is to its reality. I needed to be her mother more than she needed my mothering. The perfect regard with which I wanted to arm my daughter is still joined to me and I cannot cut the cord. I see that my desire for her sufficiency is in fact my own, my own desire to be sufficient to another, and it remains thwarted.
You came from my body!
I wanted to say. I was offering her what I had craved often in my life, another body in which to be absorbed, enfolded, enclosed, an element in which to be reincorporated, and she didn't want it. In this moment a vista of the future was lit up, a brief vision illuminated as if by lightening. In this vision I could see myself feeling exactly the same thing ten, twenty, thirty years hence, unanaesthetised by time or custom.

I miss my daughter's babyhood already. In her growing up I have watched the present become the past, have seen at first hand how life acquires the savour of longing. The storm of emotion, of the new, that accompanied her arrival is over now. I find that I am living in the knowledge of what I have, so that I see happiness before it quite passes. It has taken me a year to achieve this feat, this skill that has eluded me over a lifetime. I understand that it means that I am standing still. Motherhood sometimes seems to me like a sort of relay race, a journey whose purpose is to pass on the baton of life, all work and heat and hurry one minute and mere panting spectatorship the next; a team enterprise in which stardom is endlessly reconfigured, transferred. I see my daughter hurrying away from me, hurtling towards her future, and in that sight I recognise my ending, my frontier, the boundary of my life.

Mothers are the countries we come from: sometimes when I hold my daughter I try to apprehend this belonging for her, to feel myself as solid and fixed, to capture my smell and shape and atmosphere. I try to flesh out her native landscape. I try to imagine what it would be like to have me as a mother, and when I do it seems remarkable to me that this mysterious and momentous transaction has been accomplished here, in my house. The transaction I refer to is not that which has brought my daughter into existence: it is the process by which a mother has been made of me, and though I know it is the hardest work I have ever done I still worry that my execution of it has been somehow flawed and unauthentic, a burned offering, a botched canvas. Perhaps it is only children who confer upon their parents this meaning I feel myself to lack. I don't think it is. I think, rather, that there is some conservatism inherent in the constitution of families, that it is parents who inflict on their children the onerous culture of leadership, so that like politicians they conform once they themselves are in power, living out their childish fear of authority by assuming its harsh and dreary mantle. Their resolutions forgotten, they become that against which they used to rail and protest. They find respect for those they hated. They feel a marvellous, secret sense of peace when the same words come out of their mouths that used to anger them so. I often hear people say that they really understand their parents now that they have become parents themselves, and the sentiment fills me with unease and foreboding, with the sense of some wrong being passed down the generations like a disease. It makes me want to tolerate my daughter until I am negated, so that there can be no years lost to misunderstanding. I vow to own my feelings of inadequacy and inauthenticity. I vow to end this succession, this history of ruler and ruled, here, with me.