Authors: Rachel Cusk
A Life's Work (12 page)
I imagine Spock in his office, at the end of the day, sitting in a black leather chair while the world grows dark outside. He is slightly Vulcan in appearance. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. His head is full of his own refrain and he wonders for the hundredth, the thousandth time how he could be at once so accepted and so misunderstood, so dominating and yet so powerless. He has been fair, he's looked at it from all sides, and yet he can't seem to get this procreation-civilisation message over. In his head it is perfect, sound, complete, but on paper he is read as both permissive and oppressing, at once the man who spawned a generation of draft-dodgers and a sort of pediatric prince of darkness presiding over the nocturnal misery of helpless infants. They're all angry with him, and yet what did he ever do but try to help? Nobody has any respect for the medical profession any more, that's the problem, it's all going to pot, more bombs and guns and gas-guzzlers than ever, more spoiled babies â¦
I go to the bookshop myself and purchase
Your Baby and Child
by Penelope Leach. I am looking not just for answers now, but for a narrative that expresses the world of my daughter, that explains her to me again; for my involvement seems to have muddled her and as she grows more complex, less coherent, so like a bewildered lover I search for something to reorganise us and return us to the purity of our early days. Ms Leach appears to be just the thing. Her tone is smart but sympathetic. She has a schoolteacher's plain grasp of Freud and Winnicott, of theories of attachment and childcare trends. Like Mary Poppins, like someone in a fairytale, she is on the side of children.
This baby is a person
she crisply declares, scattering all before her. How would you like it if people just wanted you to go to sleep all the time and never talked to you? Or expected you to spend all night on your own in the dark? Or got angry when you cried and never wanted to play and kept moaning about wanting some time for themselves?
Poor babies!
Penelope Leach's prescription for misery is fun: more fun for baby, she says, is more fun for you. Have conversations! Show her the flowers, the sun, the sky! Don't keep her in that playpen, get in it yourself! She deploys case studies on the un-fun subject of night wakings. When Alison's baby wakes at 2 am, Alison sighs loudly and puts her head under the pillow in a fury. Alison, it seems, is the maternal equivalent of people who wear black hats in Westerns, and gets what she deserves. Her baby cries louder and louder, and when Alison finally drags herself out of bed to feed her, the baby is in such a state that the milk goes down the wrong way and she won't go back to sleep. Beulah, on the other hand, leaps lightly from her bed at her child's polite 2 am summons. Her baby smiles as she is lifted from her crib. She feeds gratefully and returns immediately to sleep. Alison's time score? An hour and a half, and she didn't even want to get up in the first place. Beulah's? Twenty minutes. Hah!
I try talking to my daughter. I sing her songs, rambling epics set to music in which she is the central character. She squirms with delight and makes noises back. One day she laughs, an extraordinary sound that flies from her mouth like a dove produced from a magician's hat. We all work to produce the laugh again, stumbling each time across a different formula to summon it. The baby is moved from her carriage to a chair in which she reclines against a bank of cushions like a tetchy monarch while we, her court, strive to entertain her. Her night wakings become more frequent. By day I feel a burden of social anxiety in the baby's presence, like a hostess. We await her reviews of the theatre the world has become for her. When she sleeps I read the books again until I know some of their passages by heart, and because my daughter changes but they do not their meaning never quite penetrates, the connection with the real is never made. Like schoolwork their pages refuse to spring to life and so I learn them by rote, cribbing for some assessment only I apprehend and fear.
Somebody buys my daughter a book, a cloth thing that is part-toy, and her eyes light up when she sees it. I show her the pictures. She is apparently enthralled. I buy more books for her. She can sit up now, and they surround her in stacks. She sifts through them alone, uncomplaining, for literally hours at a time while I read childcare manuals in an adjacent chair. Eventually it strikes me that there is something wrong with this arrangement. I sit her on my lap and we look at her books together; I show her the sheep, the duck, the cow. I realise that my head is full of mantras, of the maddening phrases of Spock and Leach and their ilk. Their tics have haunted me, have invaded my language. Now I point and make animal noises like someone in an asylum. Presently words begin to appear in my daughter's books and with them a new verbal virus comes to plague me. Oddly I don't mind it as much. It is inane, bizarre, redolent of madness.
Elmer flies in the wind.
I have to check it from spilling from my mouth at inappropriate times.
What's under the table, Spot?
She becomes attached to a book that is too old for her, by Dr Seuss. It is about the alphabet.
O is very useful.
You use it when you say
Oscar's only ostrich oiled an orange owl today.
There is a picture of a flamboyant ostrich holding an oil can over the head of an orange owl. Dr Spock and Dr Seuss have become confused in my mind. I imagine one became the other and these verses strike me sympathetically as the ravings of an addled sensibility, as postcards from the edge.
X is very useful if your name is Nixie Knox.
It also comes in handy
Spelling axe and extra fox.
The extra fox wears a smart yellow jacket. It haunts my dreams, flits dashingly across my waking hours.
I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar: prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a previous civilisation, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly and without misunderstanding.
*
âFrom the first', writes D. H. Lawrence in
The Rainbow
,
He had the infant in his arms, he walked backwards and forwards troubled by the crying of his own flesh and blood. This was his own flesh and blood crying! His soul rose against the voice suddenly breaking out from him, from the distances in him.
Sometimes in the night, the child cried and cried, when the night was heavy and sleep oppressed him. And half asleep, he stretched out his hand to put it over the baby's face to stop the crying. But something arrested his hand: the very inhumanness of the intolerable, continuous crying arrested him. It was so impersonal, without cause or object. Yet he echoed to it directly, his soul answered its madness. It filled him with terror, almost with frenzy â¦
He became accustomed to the child, he knew how to lift and balance the little body. The baby had a beautiful, rounded head that moved him passionately. He would have fought to the last drop to defend that exquisite, perfect round head.
He learned to know the little hands and feet, the strange, unseeing, golden-brown eyes, the mouth that opened only to cry, or to suck, or to show a queer toothless laugh. He could almost understand even the dangling legs, which at first had created in him a feeling of aversion. They could kick in their queer little way, they had their own softness.
One evening, suddenly, he saw the tiny, living thing rolling naked in the mother's lap, and he was sick, it was so utterly helpless and vulnerable and extraneous; in a world of hard surfaces and varying altitudes, it lay vulnerable and naked at every point. Yet it was quite blithe. And yet, in its blind, awful crying, was there not the blind, far-off terror of its own vulnerable nakedness, the terror of being so utterly delivered over, helpless at every point. He could not bear to hear it crying. His heart strained and stood on guard against the whole universe â¦
It had a separate being, but it was his own child. His flesh and blood vibrated to it. He caught the baby to his breast with his passionate, clapping laugh. And the infant knew him.
One day I came across two articles in the newspaper, both written by men. The author of the first had recently become a father. The tone of his article was valedictory, funereal. Its subject was the death of freedom, its untimely murder by the state of parenthood. In form it was curiously poetic: a brisk tour of the man's love for his newborn child â Oh babe, with thy pearly limbs, thy jewel-bright eye!, etc. â is quickly followed â but too late, too late â by his realisation that his custody of this gem poses a serious threat to his ability to go to New York for the weekend, as he was wont to do at this time of year to do his Christmas shopping. New life has arrived like a letter-bomb, a mere wrapping for the death of pleasure. In an imaginative passage, he tries going to New York in his mind with his wife and child, and a miserable trip it certainly is. They can't go out in the evening, shops and museums are a chore, the hours on an airplane pure torture. I shan't bother to go, he declares bitterly. He realises that eighteen years of this lie ahead of him. In New York the Christmas lights are sparkling. The shops glitter with treasure and emanate a delicious fragrance, the smell of the past, of fleeting, irrecoverable happiness. His anger, his disbelief, his sense of injustice are palpable. It is as if he has lost a limb, or been convicted of a crime he didn't commit. I imagine him sitting in a fashionable penthouse flat with his baby like a ball and chain around his ankle, surrounded by expensive purchases from the past, a droplet of regret sliding down his cheek. One gains the distinct impression that he would give the baby back immediately if he could. It is over! he howls in a final, despairing couplet. It is over! Whither youth, glamour, romance? Whither New York?
The author of the second article has three children, and so is more deadpan, more level-headed in what he has to say. He is witty, in a dry way. He has been hardened: his punch is slower in coming but more brutal when it does. He is talking about weekends. He describes, lingeringly, the Saturday morning lie-in. Drowsing, love-making, breakfast in bed. Up, finally, for a coffee and a leaf through the papers. A long bath. Then choices, choices: shopping, a long walk, a late lunch? An afternoon movie, an art gallery? More sleep? A haircut, a trip to the gym. Read a novel. Dinner with friends, the opera, a party. Sunday morning, more of the same. He wishes to know whether people who don't have children realise what weekends are like for people who do. The fact is, there
are
no weekends. What the outside world refers to as âthe weekend' is a round trip to the ninth circle of hell for parents. Weekends are when children don't go to school. Weekends are when child-minders and nannies have time off. You are woken on a Saturday morning at six or seven o'clock by people getting into your bed. They cry or shout loudly in your ear. They kick you in the stomach, in the face. Soon you are up to your elbows in shit â there's no other word for it â in shit and piss and vomit, in congealing milk. Forget about giving your wife a cuddle. You've got to get up and deal with shit. Downstairs in the kitchen a storm of spilled cornflakes, tears and television rages. More shouting in your ear. It's raining outside. After some time both you and they seem to have had enough â could it be lunchtime, time for a nap, for bed? You look at your watch â it's seven fifteen. Like everybody else you've been working all week. Like everybody else you are hungover: you were probably out last night engaging in the usual pretence of being normal. The world forces you to conceal these Saturday mornings like a guilty secret. By eight forty-five it becomes clear that some action must be taken. The question is, do you try to front it out at home in the hope that your children will suddenly become like children in novels, playing long imaginative games that don't involve you, or do you give in immediately and get in the car? You get in the car. Nothing is open yet so you drive around, circling like a predator looking for something to attack. It's raining. You put on a tape, a children's tape, full of jingly music and animal noises. Such tapes have become, for you, the soundtrack of hell. In the back seat the children fight. When you get stuck in traffic, they cry. Someone is sick. Someone else wets their pants. You catch sight of yourself in the rear-view mirror: you haven't shaved, you haven't brushed your hair. You are stinking, soiled, terminally chaotic, like a sink-full of undone dishes. You and your wife are like people in a war, people trying to pilot a tank through battle. You give each other curt orders, your faces sideways. Every now and again one of you loses control and shouts violently, and when this happens the other shows no reaction. He or she has seen it all before. Neither of you has had an unbroken night's sleep in five years. You are aware, vaguely, that there must be a reason things are like this, that other people would say you'd chosen it, done it to yourself, but if that's true you certainly can't remember doing it. You are like someone wrongly in prison, someone in a Kafka novel, fielding your punishment without knowing your crime.
