Confessions of a Bad Mother (8 page)

I need something to bite on: my mother. She is staying and ventures an
opinion.

‘You’re expecting it to hurt. If you tense up and
expect
it to hurt, it will.’

Not tensing is her answer to everything.
All you have
to do is
the Natural Childbirth breathing.
Pain in childbirth – you were
tensing. Pain at the doctor – injections, smear tests, having your leg
off – you weren’t doing the breathing. There is no such thing as
pain, in the objective, empirical sense. Run over? It wouldn’t have hurt
if you’d been doing the breathing. Rwanda? You haven’t had your
head cut off with a machete: you just weren’t doing the breathing. I put
Lawrence back on again, and wince.

‘No, no, look: like this.’ She breathes v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
‘You’re not doing it!’ She shrugs and walks off.

Shortly afterwards, when I am hoping for death as a merciful release, a
nice man who works for Peter comes round with a present for Lawrence. He takes
in the expression on my face – so unlike the one on the posters, and
says: ‘We had some trouble with this, too. Would you like the number of
our breastfeeding counsellor?’

I can no longer speak, so Peter says: ‘Yes, please.’

The breastfeeding counsellor, Maggie, is from the NCT. She comes round,
takes one look at me and says: ‘Oh yes, there they are.’

‘There what are?’

‘White patches. Go to the doctor, get her to look in
Lawrence’s mouth and they’ll probably be there too.’

‘What will? What is it?’

‘No wonder you were sore. You’ve both got thrush.’

And suddenly I don’t care about the pain any more, because this
proves I’m not stupid or mad. We get some ointment and the pain starts to
go away. And I know that not to have sore tits is all I will ever ask for in
life, ever.

After four weeks, Peter goes back to work.

‘Bye, Lawrence! Bye, darling! Have a good day!’

Oh, God …

‘You too! See you at –
oh no
–
suppertime.’

Don’t go! Please, please don’t go! I don’t know
what to do!
It’s all been a mistake! Please, oh please!

I’ve been left alone in the house with a
baby
. Me.
Wasn’t it just a short while ago I left a toothbrush at Peter’s
flat for the first time, and thought,
hey this isn’t too
bad
… Then we moved in together, didn’t we … and got
married – uh-oh, that was quite grown-up – and then I let go of my
flat … that was a
really
big deal … and then we bought
this place, which was even
more
scary. And now—

Omigod, omigod, omigod.
I got carried away, that’s what I
did. I keep hearing my friend Alison’s answerphone message from when we
first told her our news.

‘
I bet you’re thinking: I’ve been and gone and done
it now …
’

It was the truest thing anyone said to me that whole nine months.

I can feel the panic rising in my throat, like sick.

There’s a person, who I don’t really know, in my house.
And
he’s completely dependent on me.

What do I DO? When Peter was here we could be confused together. But on
my own … It’s like one of those dreams where you’re in a
play and don’t know the lines. There’s plenty of advice on the
shelves about supporting his head, or dipping your elbow in the water to check
the temperature of a bath. But now, right now, alone in this room, what do I
do? It’s slightly embarrassing. I mean, I don’t want to ignore him.
And yet I don’t know what to say. This feeling reminds me of – God,
it’s a blind date.

I’ve made a mistake. It’s like thinking I could perform at
Wembley Arena when I’ve never even sung in public. Or go on the West End
stage. Or fly. What ever possessed me to think I – I, of all people
– could do this? Just because I went into Marks & Spencer’s a
few times and wept over the tiny socks – I was allowed to be an actual
mother
? Because I was interested, because I was curious – does
that make me
qualified
? I’m interested in film-making; that
doesn’t make me Ingmar Bloody Bergman. The sheer chutzpah, the affrontery
of it, makes me gasp. I remember an old saying,
Beware of what you want:
you may get it.
First, I wanted my independence and my father died. Now
this
. I feel like a mortal in one of those awful Greek myths who makes
the wrong wish. We all know about Midas, but I’m thinking of Eos, the
Dawn, who was tricked into asking Zeus for a wish. She asked that her husband
should never die.

‘
Is that your only wish?
’ said Zeus, and she said.
‘
Yes.
’

The husband was young and beautiful for a few years, then started to get
older – and older.

‘
What’s happening?
’ she cried. ‘
You
promised he would
never die!
‘ And Zeus said: ‘
You
didn’t ask that he should
remain forever young.
’

Eventually he was a tiny, shrivelled thing, skittering down the palace
corridors like a grasshopper.

I’ve got to
CALM THE FUCK DOWN.

I sit on the sofa, clutching this – stranger. Maybe I should go to
the lavatory. I always feel calm in there. No, I’d have to put him down.
My whole body is so tensed, I’m barely sitting on the sofa at all. My
arse is so high I’m nearer the ceiling.

Maybe I’ll wait. Only eight hours till Peter gets home.

I won’t ignore him. I may be a shit mother but I do have some
manners.

‘Well! Here we are! I’m your mummy.’

This is pathetic. One thing at a time, come on, do something! People do
this – thick people! I plump the cushions round us.

‘Why don’t we have a video?’ We’ve got loads. I
have a look through some of the things we’ve taped over the months and
indeed years.
Waco: the Rise and Fall of David
Koresh … Myra
Hindley, Portrait of a Killer … The Unabom-
ber.
Or there are
always the six episodes of
Perpetual
Motion: Great Transport Designs
that Refused to Die, Classic
Cars, Classic Trains
and
Classic
Planes
. Peter’s keeping all of them on the grounds that in a couple
of years Lawrence will talk of little else. Well, while I’ve still got
control of the remote: Hmm …
Dr Strangelove
– not quite.
The Fly
…
Bonnie and Clyde
…
La Reine Margot
– featuring the Technicolor massacre of the Protestants in
sixteenth-century France.
Homicide
…
Love Child
–
what was that? Oh, yes: unmarried women in the Sixties whose babies were taken
away from them.

Hey, I could read a book! I’ve been meaning to do that since I
left school. I take Lawrence over to the bookshelves. A friend’s given me
a book of stories about Motherhood, inscribed:
Just the right length to read
between
feeds!
But I can’t face a load of essays where people
stare into their baby’s cot and go all
intense.
Actually, books
are too sort of – wordy. Maybe I’ll read one when I get in the
swing of it more. When he starts crawling; I’ll read then. Or when he
learns to walk.

‘I know! Let’s put on the TV.’ Daytime TV’s
allowed if you’ve just had a baby, right?
The Time, The Place
is
starting, but even that seems a bit challenging.

Noon. I need to wee. I put him down and get up. He sort of warbles. I
sit down again and pick him up. What shall I do? We once gave a mobile to a
friend who’d just had a baby. She sent us a photo of him in his cot,
gazing up at it. On the back of it she’d written:
Thank you –
I
have now been to the lavatory for the first time in eight weeks.
At the time I thought:
How totally ridiculous! Why doesn’t she
just GO?
But that was before I discovered how hard it is to leave the
room.

I try wedging him in with the cushions. He whimpers. I pick him up, then
try to put him back down again, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y so he won’t notice. I
take a step or two. He cries. He doesn’t want me to go. I try again. As
with trying to walk past spiders, I take small steps backwards and forwards for
what seems hours before giving up in defeat. He cries. I pick him up and sit
down with him again. The loo is only on the landing. Look! I can see it, twelve
stairs away. I sit down again. I don’t need to go
that
badly.
I’m sure I can wait until Peter comes home; it’s only another six
hours.

With Lawrence on my chest facing me, the way he sometimes sleeps at
night, we both fall asleep. The feeling of drifting away is like a fantastic
drug.

I wake up with a terrible ache in my bladder, and an idea. I could bring
him with me! We go upstairs together, and he lies on the carpeted landing two
feet away from me, while I pee.

‘Wow! That was wonderful!’

We go back to the sofa again. I’m hungry, but the kitchen is
downstairs. Come to think of it, this isn’t a good house to have a baby
in. Everything is on another floor. Why didn’t we just move to a
lighthouse? I pick him up, and go gingerly down the horribly steep staircase,
at about one step a minute. It has definitely got steeper since we moved in.
Now what? There’s a loaf of bread on the counter, but unsliced.
I’ll need two hands to cut it.

Like the great explorers sailing through unchartered waters in the quest
for El Dorado, I’m driven forward by the thought of Toast. Eventually,
after about four false starts, I hold Lawrence very tightly against me with one
arm, and use that hand to steady the bread while I cut it with the other.

‘Better have two slices,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t
know when we’ll be able to make it back, do we?’ I have butter and
Marmite on it. It is the best meal I have ever had.

After a week of this, I start to feel – as Withnail put it –
unusual
.

Shelley, my neighbour opposite, has also had a baby. She rings me and
says: ‘Shall we push our prams down to the swings?’ To my fevered
brain it sounds like: ‘
Shall
we cross the Arctic Circle in
white stilettos and no tights?
’ But it’s only September, and
still sunny out there. The swings are in the little square at the end of the
road. There are roses. I’ve had a lot of flowers in bunches recently; it
would be amazing to see some growing in the ground.

We do even have a pram, from a friend of Peter’s. It’s a
nice turquoise colour, but very
low
. I’m not tall, and I have to
bend down to reach the handle. Semi-crouched, like a cartoon of a burglar, I
follow Shelley down to the square. The colour of the flowers nearly sends my
retinas into spasm.

YELLOW!

RED!

PINK!

Conversation is beyond me; I sink onto a bench and stare. She
doesn’t say much either. But a thrilling new vista has opened up. We walk
home in triumph.

‘Hello, sweetness. How was your day?’

‘I went to the square! With Shelley! It was brilliant!’

‘The square—’

At the end of the road!’

‘That’s – wonderful.’

‘Yeah! We just – took the prams and went! It was
great!’

‘Well done!’

Looking back on it, I probably should have got out more.

That evening, I tell Peter about my adventures in the next postcode,
while he gives Lawrence his SMA. Having forgotten to heat the first bottle,
we’ve simply carried on with it at room temperature – breaking
another of these so-called ‘rules’.

‘And now …’ he says, eyes gleaming, ‘I have a
present for you.’

‘For me?!’

‘Well, kind of.’ He pours me a glass of wine and opens a
flat cardboard box. Inside is a baby chair, made of cloth stretched over a wire
frame, like a ‘V’ on its side. ‘I’ve heard of
these!’

‘This,’ he says, ‘will give you your arms back.
Lawrence, you are about to go in the Bouncy Chair!’

‘Not – the
Bouncy Chair
?’

‘Yes, the Bouncy Chair!’

It looks a bit as though, when we let go, it might catapault him across
the room. We ease him in, do up the little seat belt, and slowly, ever so
slowly, let go. The seat wobbles slightly, as it’s meant to, and Lawrence
seems – if not ecstatic, at least not to mind. Peter raises his
glass.

‘We’ve had a baby!’ And I think:
OK. We’ve
got everything we need. Please don’t
ever leave the house
again.

On a noticeboard somewhere, I see an appeal for babies to help with
research in the Eye Department of London University. I go along several
times.

‘What’s it for?’ says Peter.

‘I dunno. They have chocolate biscuits. And people to talk
to.’

‘Sounds good. Can you spin it out?’

‘Not too much. I have to pace myself.’

And indeed, the sheer thrill of putting Lawrence in the car and meeting
other adult humans is enough to last me all week. What with that and going out
for nappies, life is a whirl.

A friend brings round a sterilizer.

‘You’ll be needing this,’ she says. Peter and I look
at each other. ‘That’s lovely!’ he says. ‘Thank you so
much!’ After she’s gone, we put it away in a cupboard. One of the
benefits of being stuck in the Neonatal Unit for two weeks was the opportunity
to bother the staff with questions.

‘What about sterilizing?’ was one. ‘Do we need to do
that?’ Along with his job of fetching me coffee and takeaways, Peter sees
his role as editing the parental task load. He loves to seek out and eliminate
bits of unnecessary procedure.

The nurse saids: ‘Actually, no. In fact, we don’t really
recommend sterilizing.’

‘You
don’t
?! Great!’

‘What people don’t realize is, you still have to wash the
things in any case. But because they’re sterilizing, they often
don’t wash them properly. Have you got a dishwasher?’ We got one as
a wedding present! ‘Well, our micro-biologist says just use that. Sixty
degrees and you’ll be fine.’