A Life's Work (6 page)

The baby and I are conveyed home through the streets of London in a taxi; like a cortège after a royal wedding driving through cheering crowds, a conventionally great moment underpinned by the suspicion of deep unfamiliarity, entertained in the glare of the utterly inescapable. We are, I have no doubt, a couple, a pair. I have not written off the many fleshly associations she has with others, but they have yet to make themselves real. All that is clear at this point is that I have replicated, like a Russian doll. I left home one; I have come back two.

It is only when I walk through the front door to my house that I realise things have changed. It is as if I have come to the house of someone who has just died, someone I loved, someone I can't believe has gone. The rooms, the furniture, the pictures and possessions all wear an unbearable patina of familiarity: standing there I feel bludgeoned by tragedy, as though I were standing in the irretrievable past. Minutes later the same rooms, the same possessions arouse in me a terrible panic, the panic of confinement. A violent anger seizes me at the sight of them; I recoil from their closeness as if in dislike. I feel burdened with secrets; an adulterous desire sets me apart from myself, fills me with both longing and revulsion for that which I have betrayed. I cannot explain these feelings. Instead I sit on the sofa and cry.

The baby is very small, I am repeatedly told. Her skin is brushed with blue. Her eyes remain closed. I, meanwhile, am disabled by my scar and can barely walk. We are still so close to our sundering that neither of us seems entire: the painful stump of our jointness, livid and fresh, remains. I don't quite understand what has happened and therefore I determine to conduct myself as though nothing had. I make tea and phone calls; I invite people round. They exclaim when I open the door, fully dressed, normal: at the returned fact of me, like an undelivered letter. Where's it gone? they laugh, pointing at my stomach. Pregnancy is a hallucination now. The mystery of the baby inside me has passed unsolved.

My ownership of my daughter is preoccupying, uncertain and fraught. In hospital I felt immediately a sort of animal-like habituation with her presence; at home I am in transactional shock, as if I had gone out and bought something extremely expensive, something for which in the shop I felt the fiercest, most private desire, and were now regarding it with shrivelled courage in my sitting room. I show it to other people, fearing their assessment. I let them touch and even hold it, silently frantic at the damage they might do, desperate to have it back. I both want and fear it, and yet can consummate neither my desire nor my fear, can neither use nor relinquish this precious purchase, for my feelings obstruct each other and hold me in a kind of deadlock. My daughter sleeps on, pale and silent. She begins to seem to me not subject to crass analogies with shopping at all, but rather autonomous and self-possessed. I wonder whether she, in fact, knows what to do, and will inform us presently; whether her hours of rumination are being devoted to the formation of some kind of manifesto laying out exactly how we are to conduct things. She seems very
good
, I say helplessly to the midwife when she visits. The midwife laughs. They usually explode around the third day, she says. She illustrates this explosion with her hands.

One evening the baby opens her eyes. We take photographs of her, like something rare glimpsed in the wild. She stares at the cruel flash, unblinking. She stares at us. Her gaze is like a clear sky, unclouded by recognition, judgement, emotion. I feel frightened for her. We could be people who didn't care for her. We could, after all, be anybody. She closes her eyes. We put her in our bed between us. Later, during the night, I wake to find her staring at me again in the dark. She doesn't blink. Already her expression has changed, has acquired a layer of depth. I try to go back to sleep, but my sense that I am still pinioned by this disconcerting regard makes it impossible to keep my eyes closed. Guiltily, I find something eerie in it, as if the baby were absorbing information from me at high speed while I slept; as if she had been sent not to replace me exactly, but to use me as a sort of base or HQ where she would receive her instructions and await her readiness to head off on her top-secret mission. She cries briefly and I feed her. At intervals I change her nappy. Occasionally, hopefully, I remove a blanket or add one. She closes her eyes and opens them again. We wait, as if for her to state her purpose, or for her people to come from their planet and retrieve her.

In this brief period, while the baby lies enshrined in her separateness – or is receiving, as I now see it, the slow shock of that separateness, is being administered the powerful and momentarily paralysing charge of her humanity – I feel a profound bewilderment. It is as if I am unable to find any connection between my physical implication in the fact of her existence, and the emotional world I had imagined would automatically accompany it, a world in which I would as automatically be included. Pregnancy begins to seem to me more and more of a lie, a place populated by evangelicals and moralists and control-freaks, a place haunted by crazies with their delusions of motherhood. Or perhaps it is the clinical, hospital-appointed nature of the birth itself that has caused me to lose the thread of things, for in truth my experience of birth was more like the experience of having an appendix removed than what most people would understand by ‘labour'. Without its connecting hours, the glue of its pain, the literalness of its passage, I fear that I will not make it to motherhood; that I will remain stranded as someone who merely had an operation, leaving the baby with no more sense of how she came to be here than if she had been left on the doorstep by a stork.

My physical possession of a child is, nevertheless, compelling; or rather, the physical fact of her remains a surprising embodiment of my feelings of emptiness. These sensations do not belong to my voided and sutured body. I have felt them before, throughout my life: a yearning for some correspondence with an object outside myself, a yearning to have, to experience otherness through ownership. As yet these yearnings, and their satisfaction by the object of the baby, are not so distinct from material cravings. The baby, after all, is a doll whom I dress and feed and carry about as proudly as a little girl. These libations are modest, but the premium of their object is high. Other possessions have faded in their interest, or have suffered from my irresponsibility or the changing fashions of my desire. Now I am held in a kind of stasis of expectation and unstated commitment as I wait to discover the complexity of what I have. My certainty that this complexity will show itself, and that when it does I might well be unequal to it, occasionally fades and is forgotten as the baby sleeps and feeds and silently stares. She is pale and pretty and tiny. Other people exclaim at her goodness. I am, apparently, her mother.

When she explodes, rather later but no less spectacularly than the midwife predicted, I am caught languid and somewhat unprepared in the pleasant rays of my false dawn. I have taken her for a walk in the park with a friend. I am, I believe, being rather successful: walking, talking, while the baby sleeps on in a pouch against my chest. In the two or so weeks since her birth I appear to have soldered together my past and present, to be both myself and a mother. I have physical contact with my child. I talk to my friend. I decide to risk this vision by taking us all to a café on the other side of the park, where I must remove the baby from her pouch and sit with her on my lap at a table and drink coffee. The perturbation I feel while contemplating and then executing this feat belongs, as does my vision, to a dream: it is the feeling that will press against and then puncture my sleep, letting in the first rivulet of consciousness and behind it the raging flood of the real. The fact is that I know neither what it is to be myself nor to be a mother. I know neither my child nor my friend. I don't even know about the weather. We sit at an outside table. A bruised bank of cloud gathers over us. It starts to rain, hard. I try to pack the baby back into her pouch, and I do it clumsily and unconfidently, and suddenly she starts to cry, to scream with an extraordinary, primitive anguish; and I am in disarray, knocking over coffee cups, fumbling with change, trying to speak, to pacify, to explain, holding the baby this way and that in the drenching rain and finally running through the park, the empty pouch flapping at my front, the roaring baby held out before me like something on fire, my friend trotting embarrassed behind, until we reach the road and madly, desperately, I flag down a taxi and somehow force the chaos of us into it. I'll call you soon, says my friend strangely. I glimpse her through the window, slim and well-dressed, compact, somehow extraordinarily demanding and utterly implacable, politely waving from the pavement. A feeling of social anxiety, of terrible, private unease dogs me on the way home as I fight in the swaying taxi to stem my daughter's grief, the breathtaking geyser of it as if from somewhere deep and dark and without limit. These two trains of thought do not disturb each other. I am surprised to discover how easily I have split in two. I worry; I console. Like a divided stream, the person and the mother pay each other no heed, although moments earlier they were indistinguishable: they tumble forwards, each with its separate life, driven by the same source but seeking no longer to correspond.

The vision of myself that I briefly glimpsed in the park – unified, capable, experiencing ‘the solidarity of life' – is one that I will continue to pursue over the coming months. It proves elusive. Its constituents, resolutely hostile, are equally unruly. To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other. The break between mother and self was less clean than I had imagined it in the taxi: and yet it was a premonition, too; for later, even in my best moments, I never feel myself to have progressed beyond this division. I merely learn to legislate for two states, and to secure the border between them. At first, though, I am driven to work at the newer of the two skills, which is motherhood; and it is with a shock that I see, like a plummeting stock market, the resulting plunge in my own significance. Consequently I bury myself further in the small successes of nurture. After three or four weeks I reach a distant point, a remote outpost at which my grasp of the baby's calorific intake, hours of sleep, motor development and patterns of crying is professorial, while the rest of my life resembles a deserted settlement, an abandoned building in which a rotten timber occasionally breaks and comes crashing to the floor, scattering mice. I am invited to a party, and though I decide to go, and bathe and dress at the appointed hour, I end up sitting in the kitchen and crying while elsewhere its frivolous minutes tick by and then elapse.

The baby develops colic, and the bauble of motherhood is once more crushed as easily as eggshell. The question of what a woman is if she is not a mother has been superceded for me by that of what a woman is if she
is
a mother; and of what a mother, in fact, is.

My daughter has colic. Horses, I was of the opinion, had colic. It seems a callous appellation for what afflicts her, the wordless suffering of babies and beasts. I am sure there must be a word for it in German, something compound like
lifegrief
that would translate as
outpouring of sorrow at the human condition
, for I do not entirely believe that it is a digestive malaise. Nor, I suspect, does the medical profession: I see it referred to variously as three-month colic, ‘colic', and ‘what many people understand by the term “colic”'. Occasionally a brutal practitioner will call it ‘wind', hinting at a view of emotion in children as pestilential and unsavoury. All, however, agree that it presents itself as bouts of apparently causeless crying which occur at specific times of the day and for which there is no cure or consolation.

My daughter's symptoms correspond exactly to this description, save for some confusion over the times at which the colic occurs, which seem not specific but general, random and frequent. I consult books on the subject, all of which insist that colic, like a Swiss train, arrives and departs on time. My experience of the regularity of hours and days and seasons has altered so dramatically over the past few weeks that time has become a sort of undifferentiated mass ordered only by the exigencies of the baby's sleeping and waking, her crying and equally baffling contentment. The idea of her displaying a particular behaviour ‘in the afternoons', as the books suggest, or ‘between four and six o'clock' is outlandish. The books advise walking up and down with the baby, rhythmic rocking, putting her in a pouch or sling, singing or dancing. I have recently read that the government is providing underprivileged teenaged girls with dolls that wet their nappies and cry incessantly, in the attempt to acquaint them with the realities of motherhood. The suggestion is that these dolls will rain down upon the pavements from the top floors of tower blocks within an hour of their issue, leaving the girls free to pursue careers in high finance. My books, similarly, carry health warnings on the subject of crying. A baby's crying, I am told, can cause depression and psychosis, and can result in you harming your baby. If you feel that you would like to harm your baby, put it in a safe place and leave the room for ten minutes. The tone of this instruction is curt, following on from mellifluous pages on the subjects of breastfeeding, bonding, and how you and your partner might divert yourselves sexually until you are able to resume what is described as ‘full intercourse'. It peters out into a series of telephone numbers, for organisations with names like CRY-SIS.

Having apparently reached a sort of Land's End of charted motherhood, I quickly see that the problem is one I must study and solve myself.
Mothers soon come to recognise the meaning of their baby's different cries
, I read. I have indeed worked out that on those occasions when the crying is halted by feeding, I might interpret in retrospect its meaning to have been that of hunger; or one of its meanings, in any case. The baby's cries are so deafening, so urgent, so redolent of emergency that my first instinct on hearing them is always to rush her to hospital, or leave the building as if a fire alarm were going off. I understand that crying, being the baby's only means of communication, has any number of causes, which it falls to me, as her chief companion and link to the world, to interpret. Further, it is suggested to me that this interpretation is being used as the information upon which she is with every passing minute founding the structure of her personality. My response to these early cries, in other words, is formative. I should do nothing that I don't intend to continue doing, should make no false moves, lest I find myself co-habiting in the months and years to come with the terrible embodiment of my weaknesses, a creature formed from the patchwork of my faults held together by the glue of her own apparently limitless, denatured, monstrous will.