A Life's Work (7 page)

I have no difficulty in understanding what I read of the early relationship between mother and child. The child's yearning to be repossessed by the mother's body, its discovery of desire and satisfaction, its exploration of the limits of itself, and of another person and the fact of that person's own will; the mother's impulse both to protect and to expose, to yield and to separate, her responsibility both to love and to sort of steer everything in the right direction: I can see it all. The problem is that this vision doesn't much seem to resemble my situation. The baby's objections seem both comprehensive and startlingly personal; my own responses random, off-key and profoundly unmagical. It is not only difficult to believe that I am the object of the baby's desire, an object she is unresting in her attempts to enslave to her own will; it is in fact quite possible that she doesn't like me at all. I have enough imagination to picture the blur of her world, the fog of herself through which differentiation is impossible, the imperatives of her body and yet its paralysis; I do not believe that she is necessarily composing a list of objections to my conduct. It is merely that when I come looming through this fog I don't appear to improve things.

I wake to find her red and rigid on the bed beside me, the room vibrating with sound. It is 9.30 am. I have been up many times in the night to feed her, and at some late point we clearly slumped jointly into an unexpected sleep. Other people have gone to work, to school, while we slept: the world is at its desk. We are in the housewifely slurry of everything that is both too late and too early, of madness and morning television. The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain. The baby is roaring. It is the sort of sound that permits no pause between deep sleep and full activity. I leap to my feet, pick her up and am pacing the reeling room with her within seconds. Dimly I remember feeding her perhaps two hours earlier, but decide to feed her again anyway while I think of something else I can do. My thoughts have become rat-like and rudimentary with guesswork, with lack of sleep. Feeding is something I do with a measure of confidence only because I have done it several times before, not because I understand particularly when and how it should be done. This morning she won't feed. Suddenly it is like trying to feed a kitchen appliance, or a shoe, bizarre and apparently inappropriate. Her body is ramrod-straight, her open mouth a furnace of noise, her face blue and red with fury. Milk runs in untasted rivulets down her affronted cheek. I decide on a change of scene. We go to the bathroom, where I intend to change her nappy. Again, this strategy has worked before, although I am unsure why. I lie her down on the mat. Immediately the crying stops. Delighted at the speed with which I have disarmed her, I sit down on the bathroom floor and lean back against the wall. I trill at the baby as she lies there watching me. Presently I change her nappy. I pick her up. Immediately she roars. I put her down again. She stops. I clean my teeth, I get into the bath, I get out. I get dressed. I try picking her up again in the hope that something has changed, but it hasn't. She roars. When I put her down, she stops. I wonder whether it is possible to spend the whole day in the bathroom. The telephone rings in the next door room and I go to answer it. Back in the bathroom, she roars. I turn on my heel and go back in. I pick her up. She stops.

Downstairs in the kitchen I prepare and eat breakfast with one arm while holding her with the other. She looks around happily enough as she is waltzed from cupboard to table. I read the newspaper. I clear up, again with one arm. The arm that is holding the baby has started to ache, but the consequences of a transfer to the other side are potentially devastating. Presently I see that it is time for her to be fed. Having abandoned feeding as a strategy, I am reluctant to introduce it again. At some point, though, she will grow hungry and cry, and in any case my memory of the earlier crying has become fuzzy. The idea of taking some sort of initiative, of being a mother as opposed to a rapid response unit, is attractive. Offers of milk, this time, are accepted. In the silent kitchen we sit, the baby watching me with bead-bright, unfathomable eyes as she feeds, I watching her as one would watch some exotic, uncaged animal, wondering what she is going to do next. I pray for this stasis to continue, for the telephone and doorbell not to ring, for the city to go about its morning without troubling me. It is in such moments that a drop of confidence wells glittering from the baby and slowly splashes into the gaping vessel of myself.

Her eyelids begin to droop. The sight of them reminds me of the possibility that she might go to sleep and stay that way for two or three hours. She has done this before. The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends. Sometimes these pleasures elude me and I end up gloomily cleaning the house, or standing in front of the mirror striving to recognise myself. Sometimes I miss the baby and lie beside her crib while she sleeps. Sometimes I manage to read, or work, or talk, and am enjoying it when she wakes up unexpectedly and cries; and then the pain of moving from one life to the other is acute. Nevertheless, watching her eyelids droop, my excitement at the prospect of freedom buzzes about my veins. I begin manically to list and consider things I might do, discarding some ideas, cherishing others. Her eyelids droop again and close altogether. In repose her face is as delicate, as tranquil as a shell. As I look, an alarming colour spreads rapidly over it. The skin darkens, promising storms. Her eyes flip open, her body writhes, her small mouth opens like a yawning abyss of grief and pain. She roars. She bellows. She cries out in anger, agony, outrage, terror. I feel as if I have been discovered in some terrible infidelity. My thoughts of freedom cover themselves and scatter and I am filled with fury and shame.

Have I poisoned her? The idea that there was
something in the milk
always occurs to me at such times. I have seen the phrase arrayed in bullet points, stamped out in bold, in the many leaflets and books I have perused on the subject of colic. It is a terrible phrase. It fills the heart with hopelessness and gloom, like stories of corruption in high places. How will I know? How will I root out the evil? Bottle-feeding mothers are generally advised to change the baby's brand of formula milk without delay if such a suspicion adheres to them. Breastfeeders like myself must go through a rather more ascetic process of expiation.
Think back over what you've eaten and drunk over the past twenty-four hours
, I am advised. The suspects are legion, but the proof of their guilt is vague. ‘Culprits', as they are called, include alcohol, coffee and chocolate; cabbage, onions and garlic; citrus fruits and spicy food. Beans. Tea. Anything raw.
Some mothers find that excluding dairy products entirely from their diet improves things somewhat.
I have been told of a woman who would use a breast-pump to remove all the milk from her breasts after she had eaten
anything.
The baby is choking and pulling her knees convulsively up to her chest. I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body. I think for the thousandth time how much I dislike breastfeeding. I want to stop. And yet the memory of the earliness, the unnaturalness of her birth always persuades me to extend her lease on my body a little longer. I am unable to decide whether the symbolic value of this offering outweighs the fact that it appears to have the effect of three-hourly administrations of cyanide.

The health visitor pays us a visit. In the hall she sniffs the air. It seems that she is investigating the house for signs of cigarette smoking. The baby's episode of colic has now concluded, a victory secured, after two hours of walking up and down the stairs, by her chancing to glimpse herself in the hall mirror. We have been standing in front of this mirror for some forty minutes by the time the health visitor arrives. She runs red talons through the baby's feathery hair and the baby flinches. She is so dainty, says the health visitor. Is she good? Yes, I snap. Presently I admit that she cries quite a lot. I am furious to have made this admission, but my search for the cure for colic is now so preoccupying that I cannot neglect the possibility that the woman might possess it. She looks at me sharply, like a bird. Are you feeding her? she says. I realise that she is talking about breastfeeding. Her reluctance to utter the word ‘breast' is clear. I say that I am. In that case it will be something in your milk, she says. Oh, I say. Yes, she is
very
dainty, she continues, stroking the baby's head until I begin to worry that she will wear a patch of it away. Very dainty and
small
, isn't she? How much does she weigh? I tell her. She requests the baby's growth chart. I show it to her. She examines it in silence. Your baby is failing to thrive, she informs me presently. She runs a red nail over the short, plotted line of my daughter's life. It isn't exactly vertical, I admit, but it isn't doing a u-turn back to the womb either. She has colic, I say tearfully. It's difficult for her to eat. You must feed her with formula milk, commands the health visitor. Begin by offering her a bottle after each feed and within two weeks she will have made the switch entirely. I am astonished by this advice, having laboured under the belief – and indeed under its strictures – that breastfeeding was the religion of the health services. Don't you normally advise building up the milk supply when the baby is gaining inadequate weight?, I inquire. I am, if nothing else, well informed. Your baby is failing to thrive, repeats the woman. You risk damaging her brain. Do you want to have a brain-damaged baby? I feel it unnecessary to reply to this question.

The health visitor stays for a long time. The baby and I are braced, unified and silent against her. When finally she leaves I cry. The baby stares at me in amazement. I make an immediate appointment at the doctor's surgery. My baby is failing to thrive, I tell her, bursting into her office. The doctor replies that she is absolutely fine. In fact, she's
lovely
, she says. I look at the baby, who is lying on the doctor's couch kicking her legs and smiling winningly. Can I show you something? I say. I pick her up. Immediately, she roars. I put her down again. She stops. That
is
strange, says the doctor.

I meet a woman who tells me kindly that one day, when the baby is about three months old, the crying will stop. From one day to the next, just like that. By now the fact of the baby's crying, if not its hours, has become predictable, although its causes remain unknown. She has cried in her sling on walks, in her baby carriage when I am trying to shop, on the bus, on the subway, at the houses of friends and relations, in mine and others' arms. She has cried from one end of many dark afternoons to the other, when she and I were alone in the house and there was nothing to do, or it was raining, or I was too tired to do anything but sit with her in a chair while she cried. I have given up trying to contain the crying within a vision of adult normality, of competence. I have run home with her bawling in my arms, pulling the carriage crazily behind us while people stare. I have jumped off buses in the middle of nowhere. I have bolted from cafés. I have ended telephone conversations without explanation. I have cried myself. I have shouted, making her tiny frame jump. I have sat for long evenings while her father paced the kitchen with her, offering advice. It was better when you were doing that jiggling thing, I say; or, try that thing you did the other night when you held her face down, with your other hand on her back. I have put her in a safe place and tried to leave the room, but before I could reach the door her crying has brought me back. We have even taken her to Italy, where for three days she cried beside Lake Garda while boats glided silently beneath the mountains over the pale water and the warm air was filled with the chattering of birds and children.

One evening, sitting outside in the garden in the dusk, I realise that three months have passed and that summer has come. My daughter is lying on a rug looking at the leaves above her. She wriggles and kicks her legs and laughs at things that I can't see. She has red hair and bright eyes. I know that in some inarticulable way I have over the past weeks witnessed again her birth; that the sound of her agony, her despair, was the sound of a terrible, private process of creation. I see that she has become somebody. I realise, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting hours, the particular self I tried to bring to my care of her, have been as superfluous as my fury and despair. All that is required is for me to be there; an ‘all' that is of course everything, because being there involves not being anywhere else, being ready to drop everything. Being myself is no compensation for not being there. And accordingly, the whole peopled surface, the occupation of my life has been swept away by her cries. That she has stopped crying I take as an indication that she judges my training to have been successful and the rank of mother attained; a signal that we can now, cautiously, get on with the business of living together.

Poor Mary Lennox, child-heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett's
The Secret Garden.
Born unwanted by her
distrait
Raj-socialite parents, living an isolated life amongst servants in India, she grew up bitter, unsweetened by love. Had tragedy not felled her, uprooting her and planting her in friendlier soil, she might have stayed that way.