A Life's Work (3 page)

My mother has always been fairly honest about her own experiences of birth. When the time comes, she says, take any drugs they offer you. I have had troubling hints from other women, too, women who bark with jaded laughter at the mention of the word ‘pain', or who remark mysteriously that afterwards
you're never the same again.
Such clues are never explained; indeed, everything suddenly seems to go rather quiet, as if some vow of silence has been unintentionally broken. I myself decide to broadcast my experiences at every opportunity, once I've had them; but the fact that I have never personally encountered such a disciple of truth, have neither heard nor read during the course of my life a straightforward account of this most ubiquitous of happenings, suggests to me the presence of an additional horror surrounding the mystery: that somehow, during those tortured hours, some fundamental component of oneself is removed, so that afterwards although one looks and sounds more or less exactly as one did before, one is in fact a simulacrum, a brainwashed being programmed not to bear witness to the truth. I recall in the film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
a moment of similar realisation, when one of only two remaining characters who have not been taken over by aliens reveals that he has, in fact, been taken over by aliens. The film ends with a close-up of the terror-striken face of his girlfriend, as she realises that she is alone now in a world of automatons.

The modern, privileged woman is a creature for whom the fact of her sex can remain, indefinitely if she chooses, a superficial characteristic. What do I understand by the term ‘female'? A false thing; a repository of the cosmetic, a world of scented boutiques and tissue-wrapped purchases, of fake eyelashes, French unguents, powder and paint, a world in which words such as suffering, self-control and endurance occur, but usually in reference to weight loss; a world steeped in its own mild, voluntary oppression, a world at whose fringes one may find intersections to the real: to particular kinds of unhappiness, or discrimination, or fear, or to a whole realm of existence both past and present that grows more individuated and indeterminate and inarticulable as time goes by. What it once meant to be a woman, if such a meaning can ever be fixed, it no longer means; and yet in one, great sense, the sense of procreation, it means it still. The biological destiny of women remains standing amidst the ruins of their inequality, and in approaching it I have the sense of stepping off the proper path of my life, of travelling forwards but at some unbreachable distance; as if I had boarded a train and could see through the window the road on which I had always been, a road with which for a while my train ran parallel before gaining speed and moving steadily away to east or west, to a vista of unfamiliar hills, leaving everything vanishing behind it.

I go on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. The only evidence, as yet, of my altered state is the fact that I am followed for the entire week by a swarm of small insects who mill about me like fans, like bodyguards. Towards the end of the week I leave the path to visit a frozen lake at high altitude. I cannot reconnect with my route without going all the way back down the mountain, and I decide to walk through the snow in the right direction in the hope of rejoining it on the other side of the pass. I set off around the lake, a preternatural arctic swirl from which the earth rises steeply like the sides of a bowl. These sides, being covered in snow and ice, are extremely slippery, and after I have crawled some way around the lake it becomes clear that I am in danger of sliding down beneath the ice and sinking to the bottom with the weight of my rucksack. I inch my way back and try going round the other side, where a faint path threads its way jaggedly and near-vertically upwards to the pass. At the top, in the tiny gap of the pass, I find a shrine containing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Superstitiously, I pray. In front of me there lies what appears to be the whole of France, miles below. The mountain sheers steeply downwards at my feet in a narrow snowy gully through which it appears I must descend. The snow looks fluffy and deep, like a cloud, the gully bottom as far away as the earth seen from the sky. A sort of madness seizes me. Like a child who believes she can fly, my sense of the reality of my own body and its limitations disappears. The beautiful and terrible vista seems suddenly tiny and magical, like the world of a doll through which I am convinced I can take giant steps. For days I have inched and trudged and clung to these mountains and now, delightedly, as if I had reached heaven, I jump down into the snow with a shriek of abandon. The snow, of course, is not snow. It is ice. I understand what I have done too late as the sky and mountain fly past me in a blur of speed. The slope is very steep and I plummet down it quickly on my back, frantically trying to dig my feet and elbows into the rough, glass-hard surface, but my rucksack acts as a sort of sledge, making me go faster. In front of me, like a long ski-run, the mountain dips away and then levels out far below before meeting a wall of rock. My skin burns as it speeds over the ice. Like a stone I begin to skip and bounce, cartwheeling in the air. I am, I realise, utterly unprepared to meet pain, even though I know that very soon I will probably break my neck. There is, as far as I can see, nothing that will stop me from falling and falling, and though I try to summon something from myself, some understanding, some ability to prepare, some native acknowledgement or recognition from my body of the prospect of its own demise, I remain the same as I always have been; in a stupor, certainly, of terror and disbelief, but myself all the same. It is this unexpected fact that frightens me more than anything else. I hit a large boulder, and as my body hurtles up and over it I catch frantically at it with my fingernails. They tear off like paper but I cling to the rock with my hands and arms, clasping it in a mortal embrace. Abruptly, I stop. Around the boulder there is a pool of shingle on to which I presently edge myself. My arms are numb and running with blood. My tiny rocky island is about halfway down the slope. I sit on it and cry as evening begins to tint the vast, enamel-bright mountain. I appear to have dispersed any claim I might ever have made to courage or sense or humanity. I have surrendered the pretence of personality, its fraudulent offers of shelter, its nonexistent provision. I can help nobody, can protect nobody, can only sit and cry over the sorry fact of myself, a fact I appear only to have learned in the shadow of its destruction.

The question of how I am to get down the rest of the gulley before night falls remains unanswered. Presently an apparition, at first ant-like then slowly larger, approaches from far beneath me. A man is ice-picking his way up the gulley using ropes and crampons. He has not, like a mother, come to gather me up and take me home. Like a different kind of mother, he intends to instruct me in how properly to descend an ice field on my own. You always face the mountain, he says. You make holes for your own feet and hands. Filled with self-pity, I am angered that he does not intend to take me down himself. I had imagined a stretcher, helicopters perhaps. I am injured and afraid of the slope, and unsure, more importantly, of whether I have the nerve to move at all. I hope that he will notice this, but we are not in an emotional place. I am merely emotional. Having given me my instructions, the man turns and proceeds upwards through the gloaming. I remove my rucksack and throw it down the mountain to make things easier. It bounces and flies down and disappears like a pebble. I know that I have no choice but to go back out on to the ice, and consequently I go, and climb slowly down, with the reality of falling, the breathing memory of it at my back. What I feel, it seems, is no obstacle to what I am able to do. Having lived always in a world of feeling, I have not yet in my life experienced so direct a contest between the two. Sometimes, while I am climbing down, I think that I would prefer to be like this, to be practical and brave. But that night in the tent, I am privately distraught with fear of what happened. I wonder whether there exists some superior response to what has occurred. I wonder whether my survival matters more or less than my terror. I have not yet thought much about motherhood, but I suspect that it combines fact and feeling in exactly this disturbing way.

Back home I get into bed and stay there for two weeks. I appear to be suffering from vertigo. The force of gravity, the dizzy revolutions of the earth, my fear of the vertical, keep me pinned to my back. My insides stir premonitorily with nausea. Beneath the covers my body grows warm and soft: my calloused feet, my flesh toughened by exposure and climbing, seem to yield and melt and dilate as the days go by. When I get out of bed again I have become a cocoon.

*

Just wiggle your hips up and down, commands the sonographer, and we'll see if we can get it to move. On the computer screen beside the bed, a small, monochrome crustacean lies in a snowstorm of static. Obediently, resentfully, I shake my hips. Come on, the sonographer urges the creature harshly, let's see you move! She presses the scanner down harder on my stomach. The creature waves its thin arms as if distressed. I feel that I should be protecting it from torments of this sort but say nothing. I am told to shake my hips for some further minutes, wondering whether this is a medical procedure, but the sight of the creature moving is apparently for nothing but my own entertainment. I am reminded of a western in which an Indian is made to dance by a cowboy firing bullets at his feet. I am asked if I would like a photograph, and receive a slip of shiny paper on which the screen's snowy image is imprinted.

I look at it on the way home. The creature is seen indistinctly from the side, reclining in shadows, its head a brainy bubble attached to the pale keyboard of its spine. I have also been presented with a spray of leaflets by the hospital, about diet, acupuncture, yoga, antenatal classes, parentcraft classes, hypnotism and waterbirth, none of which contains any information I don't already know, for modern pregnancy is governed by a regime breathtaking in the homogeneity of its propaganda, its insignia, its language. No Korean cheerleading team was ever ruled with so iron a rod as pregnant women in the English-speaking world. I long to receive some signal of subterfuge, some coded reference to a resistance. My sex has become an exiguous, long-laid, lovingly furnished trap into which I have inadvertently wandered and from which now there is no escape. I have been tagged, as if electronically, by pregnancy. My womanly movements are being closely monitored.

The rules and regulations of pregnancy are artfully laid out in a volume entitled
Emma's
Diary.
Have you got a copy of
Emma?
I am asked at the hospital, in what is patently not a reference to Jane Austen. Take another, just in case. Emma, I learn, is a fictional character created by the National Health Service who has written a week-by-week diary account of her pregnancy. She has a husband called Peter and a fondness for exclamation marks. She has neat brown hair and blue eyes and wears well-ironed clothes in pastel shades. She has two friends, both of whom are also pregnant. The first is an unmarried good-time girl with a wavering boyfriend. The second is an older black woman with an unreconstructed husband and two daughters. Emma's friendship with these two ladies, which Peter gallantly allows her to pursue, takes the form of her recording of the difficulties they encounter in lives that are rather more complicated, we are given to understand, than Emma's own. Emma reports that her unmarried friend is arguing a lot with her boyfriend. I'm so glad Peter and I don't do that! Her other friend's husband, meanwhile, is copping off the childcare. I'm really glad, says Emma, that Peter and I have agreed to share everything equally! Emma informs us that she has cut her lustrous hair short ‘for convenience'. Peter, in tight pleated trousers, is pictured hoovering around the sofa on which she lies leafing through a magazine. He does that on Saturday mornings, to give her a break. Together they decorate the nursery and buy baby clothes. Emma's parents come to stay for the weekend and do DIY around the house. Her father tells her she is ‘blooming'. Emma is fastidious on points of health and safety. Unpasteurised cheese and alcohol do not pass her lips. Even one cigarette a day, she reflects, would be harmful for the baby, and we are amazed the thought has even crossed her mind. She supports and promotes the existence of baby-exploiting multinational companies and their environmentally unfriendly products, of which each pregnant woman is promised an introductory pack courtesy of Emma on arrival of their baby. She is, confusingly, passionate on the subject of breastfeeding. She hopes to endure labour without the aid of drugs, and expects the baby to be a boy. I turn to the end immediately. The baby is a girl. She calls it Jane. She did manage to get through labour without drugs. It was bad, she says, but not as bad as I expected. This expectation has been well concealed by Emma from her diary. What form, I wish to know, did it take? I myself have no happier or more rational expectation of labour than I have of being murdered. And yet the suggestion must surely be that labour is not so bad after all, for I cannot believe that Emma possesses a particularly lively imagination. I think of the women I know who have had children, none of whom has remarked of birth that it wasn't nearly as bad as they were expecting. Most appear unable to speak about the subject at all, except one, who told me that at one point she begged the midwife to shoot her.

Preparation, I am repeatedly told in my leaflets, is the pregnant woman's defence against pain. People who are tense and out of touch with their bodies, people who resist labour, above all people who are afraid of pain feel more pain. If this sort of statement is a threat, its objective appears to be the encouragement of a curious communality. Joining groups, attending classes and courses, enlisting the help of your partner or a friend in the business of preparation are all recommended means of curing yourself of the faults of hubris, terror and independence of mind before labour commences. The literature tactfully tones down references to the ultimately solitary nature of childbirth, and to the fact that attending classes for it is like attending classes for death: indeed, every effort is made to strip the process of any personal significance at all, so that having read a certain number of these leaflets I am no longer sure whether it is I who will be going through labour or the woman in the orange tracksuit demonstrating with a grapefruit. Although it is not stated as such, as I understand it, by making yourself into a different person – one who breathes deeply, one who does exercises, one whose partner is willing to massage you with oil at all times of day and night – you give yourself a chance if not of lessening the rigours of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth, then at least of believing that it is happening to someone else.