The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers (9 page)

Still, I wondered, having nothing else to do or fix my mind on, what was
he
doing now? Having fun somewhere, I didn’t doubt, oblivious to the chain of events he’d set in
motion,
we’d
set in motion. Why had I let him persuade me that he’d make it safe? Why had I been so gullible and naive?

When the first contraction came, it was like a rolling wave of discomfort that swept over my stomach like an arm sweeps across a radar display. Yes, it was more intense than the sensations
I’d already been feeling, but not
so
different – not unmanageable, not too bad. I can do this, I thought. It will be okay. I
can
do this. If I could keep telling myself
that, I’d be okay.

The hour had passed, but no one had come to see me. So I just lay there, on the bed, waiting for the next wave to roll in, trying to imagine myself lying on a beach, or in the sea, or in a
meadow. Who’d suggested that? Was it Mary or one of the others? It didn’t matter, so long as I was anywhere else.

Except I couldn’t escape, because every time the waves rolled along, they took me to where
they
wanted me. And with each wave came the realisation that the pain was growing stronger
and more scary. Very soon it was like being punched, but in slow motion. It made my teeth gnash and my toes curl involuntarily. It was pain like no other I’d experienced – as if my
torso had been taken over by creatures from outer space.

And then I heard a voice. ‘Oh, you’ve started then,’ it said crisply. ‘That’s good.’ I opened my eyes. It was a different nurse. Her voice was kindly, even if
she didn’t have much to say – simply ‘Right, let’s check your pulse, then’ and ‘Just going to hook you up to the monitor’, before disappearing out of the
door once again.

The monitor being strapped to me was a welcome distraction. At least I had company of a sort now, as I could hear my baby’s heartbeat:
p-tm, p-tm, p-tm
it went, so fast and so
furious. Every time a new contraction came surging in towards me, the
p-tm, p-tm
sound would speed up even more. I could visualise my tiny baby being pummelled mercilessly by my muscles.
We’ll get through this together
, I silently promised.
We will
.

There was a clock on the wall, a big white one. But time had seeped away; it had lost all sense, all meaning. I could only measure it in heartbeats and the spaces between them, the relationship
between the pulsing and pounding in my temple and the beating of my baby’s tiny heart, and the way the beats, and the timbre of the sound, rose and fell. With each rise, the pain – the
biting twisting
agony
– of the contractions was building and building and building and building, each one more overwhelming and terrifying than the one before it.
P-tm, p-tm, p-tm,
p-tm, p-tm
. . .

Where had the spaces between the pains gone? The contractions were coming relentlessly now, leaving me no space in which to breathe. Tears were falling from me, streaming out, a pair of hot
tramlines that etched twin paths from the corners of my eyes to fill my ears. And still no one came, no one cared, no one helped me. Could God even see me here, wretched and writhing? Or had He too
turned his back on me now?

Then another nurse appeared suddenly. Or was it the same one? I didn’t know. Tall, brisk. Warm hands moved on my body, between my legs. I cried out then. ‘How long now? I can’t
bear this! I can’t
bear
this!’ There was no response, no word of comfort, no connection, no reassurance. Just a blur of uniform, the metallic flash of wielded instruments, the
crackle of a plastic apron, a hand on my thigh now, another on my distended belly. A sudden sharpness – like a knife’s stab – seared through me, then a flood of warmth gushed
between my thighs.

‘A while,’ she said. ‘A while yet.’ A while yet. A
while
yet? But how long must I suffer? How many heartbeats of agony? How much must I bear till I’d paid
the price for my sin – my terrible, mortal sin. But I
was
mortal, wasn’t I? How could God be so godless, so heartless, so cruel, so immune to my pleading and my pain?

My baby. I must try to think straight for my baby. I would bear it. I
could
bear it. I had to bear it, for it was coming – my child was
coming –
whether it wanted to be
born into such wretchedness or not, it was coming; it was about to be born.

It grew dark as I writhed there, sopping and screaming. It grew darker. People came; people went. People raised their voices, and lowered their voices, forming a babble of white noise. I
couldn’t seem to grasp what was happening to me any more. I had lost all reason. I just drifted. I bobbed and sank with it. Oblivious.

Only the pain mattered, each new tsunami of agony coming faster than the one before it. I had no time to inhale, no time to cry. Then no breath to cry, only grunts, until I could no longer focus
on anything outside of me. I had a desperate need to push, to expel, to keep pushing, to push this thing – this
massive
thing – out of my body. More noise. Was someone shouting?
The head. Was it the head coming? Sudden lucidity: it
was
the head
–
oh my
GOD
. An unstoppable force built in me – a need to extrude, to force it from me, to get it
out, to make it gone – but
HOW
?

I was pushing against something stronger than I was – God again, to make sure that I learned? That I atoned? That I could be in no doubt how much my wickedness would be repaid ten times
over? It was etched in the faces that now swam before me. I was wicked. I had sinned. I must be punished. I must suffer. I must not seek help or solace. I had no right to expect it. I had sinned. I
must expect and bear the consequences, the exquisitely perfect agony of feeling my body fight the very thing it had created.

Push
, I chanted. Over and over and over.
Push. PUSH! Grit your teeth and push some more. Ignore the pain now, ignore the burning, ignore the fire – the fires of hell? Ignore the
flames, ignore the fire. Just pay your price, just pay your price, just pay your price
. . .

And then a voice again. Incongruous. Exclamatory. ‘Big shoulders!’
Big shoulders
, I heard someone say.
This baby has big shoulders
! This baby.
My
baby. My baby
born of mortal sin.

‘8.30,’ the midwife said. ‘It’s a boy.’

I cried then. I sobbed and sobbed, as I held him, this tiny piece of me, in my arms. I was shaking by now, shivering, soaked with sweat. My legs clattering together like
marionette limbs, uncontrollable, jerking on strings.

His hair – oh, his hair! Such a mop of black hair! Slick with blood, wet and coiling, atop his squashed angry face.

‘Shhh,’ I soothed as he railed at me, furiously alive now. ‘Shhh,’ as the nurses moved around me, a blur of blue cotton and metal instruments.
Shhh, baby, shhh.
I’m here. Everything’s okay.
But I soothed through fresh tears, as the love welled within me. It would
not
be okay. I had sinned, I had atoned, but it could never be okay. I
had not paid my price yet. The pain of birth, of being ripped raw and torn – the excruciating, searing, stinging agony – was as nothing compared to what was to follow. I would be paying
the price forever; this was only the beginning. The clock on the wall had already started counting down.

New mothers from Loreto Convent would normally be returned to the mother and baby home straight away – no stay in hospital, no visitors, no flowers. There would be no
lingering, in their shame, to clutter up the place with a bad atmosphere. They would be sent straight back, with their babies, even as the blood dried and crusted around their stitches. They would
then spend the first few days with their babies in the lying-in room at the convent, well away from the gaze of the society that so shunned them. But not me and my baby, apparently: it was ten at
night and we must stay here.

‘But why?’ I asked, shocked, already anticipating and looking forward to my departure. I was desperate to go now, anxious to get away with my baby. I’d had so many stitches,
each one more agonising than the last. It felt like my baby had been ripped out of me.

‘For observation,’ the midwife said, her voice clipped, her expression weary. ‘You had a difficult delivery. The doctor wants to keep an eye on you.’ She made a note on a
clipboard attached to my bed. ‘Someone will be along shortly to transfer you to the ward.’

I lay back against the pillow, anticipating another bout of waiting. My little boy was now serenely asleep. I was exhausted but couldn’t close my eyes in my need to gaze at him. That
he’d come from inside me and was now here nestled with me felt like the most incredible thing I had ever achieved in my life. But someone – a porter – did come only a few minutes
later, and pushed me, and him, in my hospital bed to a dimly lit four-bedded ward.

As soon as I got there I realised that being parked in a corridor would have been infinitely preferable to the sight that greeted me. The minute I entered the ward, my hope – that my
fellow occupants would be sleeping – was dashed. They were all very much awake and smiling at me, so I smiled wanly back. I felt small and scrutinised, and as though I’d been found
wanting. Nothing could have highlighted the difference between us quite as effectively as the huge arrays of flowers and cards that seemed to fill every space that wasn’t already occupied
with beaming family members, now leaving, chatting excitedly and cooing over the tiny charges in their white metal cots.

The other mothers were all older than me, and looked almost alien; they seemed so happy, so assured, so full of life and love and laughter, whereas I, in contrast, was exhausted and tearful and
frightened. It was as if on entering the ward I’d physically shrunk. How long would it be before they worked out that I wasn’t one of them?

Not long. I had hoped I could roll on my side and sleep would claim me. But it wasn’t to be. ‘Was your husband with you at the birth?’ the woman opposite me wanted to know,
almost the minute the last visitor had left the ward. They were obviously curious to find out about me – this young girl who’d arrived without so much as a card or a bunch of flowers,
let alone the baby’s father or a single visitor.

I shook my head, my mind already automatically filling up with potential stories. I was used to this now, this lying on the hoof. I hated it so much. But what else could I do? Then it came to
me. ‘He’s in South Africa,’ I said, while inside my brain whirred frantically. ‘He’s working out there, temporarily . . .’

‘Oh, I see,’ the woman nodded, looking like she didn’t.

‘And he couldn’t get back in time,’ I explained. ‘But he’ll be home by the end of this week.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said again. ‘That’s a shame.’

‘Such a shame,’ agreed the mother beside her. ‘And what about your mother?’

‘In Ireland,’ I answered, turning over in bed painfully and wishing desperately to be left alone. My mother might just as well have been in Ireland, I thought wretchedly. How could
she have let me go through what I’d just been through all alone? Why was no one here to care for me, love me, tell me how brave I’d been, or coo over and hug my perfect baby?

I knew they didn’t believe me. And they probably knew I knew it, too. It was just a ridiculous façade we all had to maintain because the truth was so difficult to swallow. There I
was, alone, my locker top empty apart from a big jug of water, and my two visitors’ chairs depressingly vacant, on what by anyone’s yardstick was
the
day for loving families, for
the celebration of a new life joining them.

I must have fallen asleep after they took my baby over to the nursery for the night, because the next thing I remember was being woken. It was dawn, and, once I’d been examined and my
stitches humiliatingly peered at, I was informed I could leave soon. And I was thankful. Unbelievable as it would have seemed to me before this, I was desperate to get back to the anonymity and
sanctuary of the mother and baby home, away from the shame and embarrassment. I hated everyone’s scrutiny, conscious that my ineptitude as I fed and clumsily changed my little boy would make
it so obvious that I’d lied, that I wasn’t one of them.

I was also in a great deal of pain. It felt like my insides had been ripped to shreds, my lower body rent asunder. Every step, every movement caused daggers of burning pain. If the nuns who had
sent me here were from an Order of Divine Mother -hood, the likes of me – their luckless charges – were from a place far below. There was nothing divine about my experience of
motherhood so far.

I dressed myself in agony, and dressed my tiny infant in Emmie’s thoughtfully knitted little baby clothes in agony, before making a torturous, shuffling exit from the ward to a waiting
ambulance and falling into a stupor for the journey home, despite a non-stop commentary of inane comments from the driver.

It was only once I had made the excruciating journey up a flight of stairs and was installed in the bed in the lying-in room that I began to take proper conscious stock of my baby, my immediate
surroundings and my new life. I was no longer billeted in the little room I’d been staying in, and my possessions had already been transferred here – one of the nuns had probably had
one of the girls do it first thing this morning, I imagined. The move from one room to another seemed to be a metaphor for what had just happened to me, for the twenty-four hours that had
completely changed my life. I had left the convent this time yesterday a naive young girl, pregnant, unmarried and in a state of mortal sin, and had returned today – albeit, in the eyes of my
church, the same sinful young woman – another person, different in every way. I had become a mother. I had given birth. I had had a baby.

I decided to call him Paul, because it was a name I’d always liked. I had chosen the name Paul for a boy very early in my pregnancy, and, ironically perhaps, Teresa for a girl. The latter
had been abandoned when I’d arrived at the convent, for obvious reasons, and I’d switched my allegiance to Bernadette, but I hadn’t had long to consider alternative girls’
names.