We take C to a party and in the late afternoon one of the fathers asks me when Ricky and C and I need to leave. I pause. Why am I being asked? Do I have some special knowledge? I have no idea when we need to leave. But the other attendees are looking at me, even Ricky is looking at me. When do we need to leave? I take out my phone, inspect the time.
“In 20 minutes,” I say with authority and the party goers nod, ah, in 20 minutes.
I have made this up. But everyone believes me. They think I know something about my baby that I don’t, I think, panicking.
Similarly, we leave another lunch in the gloaming after C begins howling uncontrollably.
“Shit,” I say in the car, as she wails in her carseat. “Do you think we stayed too long?”
“I don’t know,” Ricky blurts. “I was following your lead. Aren’t you supposed to have some instinct for this or something?”
“What?” I ask. “What do you mean? How am I supposed to know?”
I feel a dropping sensation in my belly. Oh God, I’m supposed to know, I’m supposed to have a feel, an instinct, and I don’t. I have no idea what is going on.
The baby is my domain, the domain of the mother, given to me by virtue of having seeded, grown and birthed a being. I feel wholly unqualified, and yet I feel solely responsible for everything.I hold on white-knuckled, terrified, full of my own booming authority. I wax and wane, clinging to C, whipping her out of Ricky’s arms at the least sound, but also hot with indignation that he “leaves it all up to me”. I whisper that to myself: It’s all up to me, whimper-glee.
Each of these decisions feels earth-shatteringly important. This is also why other moms, desperate like me and under the most enormous pressure, so viciously defend their – I suspect – equally arbitrary decisions: because they don’t actually feel confident or qualified, and because there is so much at stake.
I wish I could feel this in my body, wish I could find it, a knowing, a body sense to guide me. Yet I also worry about instinct. How do you differentiate it from doing what makes you comfortable, which means doing what was done to you – good or bad? And this body I wish to turn to is itself a complex being, shadowy, animal, layered, full of parts. I cannot wield it like a hammer.
We begin to transition C off our bodies and buy an outsized pram (that doesn’t quite fit into our new car). After her first outing in it, a short walk to the shops and back, C wails and wails, inconsolable. We bounce, bounce, bounce, but she is not soothed. It seems her body just got too full of the new experience of cars and passersby and the bright shop without the buffer of my body, my heart near her ear. She cries to express the overload, her body incapable of holding all of it.
When does this end? Of course, we become courser, more used to it, to the intensity of the world, but we also sometimes come home after a party and feel drained and chastise ourselves. Why can’t I be better? Yet here is this little one crying and crying to let something drain out of her. Long afterwards, she sleeps in my arms. We don’t cry, don’t shake, don’t let any of what we hold out, just consume, becoming fuller and fuller. I don’t think we stop being babies. Not really. Where is the baby C was? That small, small one in her huge fabric nappy? Gone but also not gone. Where is the baby I was?
Twice now someone has asked how it is, looking at C, that people can be so cruel as to hurt such an innocent, defenceless being, and I’ve considered that we do it all the time to the children inside ourselves. We gag them, tell them to be still, tell them to stop crying, tell them to be better, tell them they’re stupid, lock them out the house like dogs. I can feel the small one inside me, whining and wailing and begging for attention and I mostly tell her to shut up, buck up and get with the programme. Be better, I tell myself. This one inside me and the body instinct I am searching for are, I sense, not distinct. They have become intertwined, twinned.
To C I sing the “worth song”, which goes, “Your worth is intrinsic, your worth is intrinsic, it’s in your bum, it’s in your tum, your worth is intrinsic.” I have long discussions with Ricky about how we will tell C that she is not beautiful; she is simply herself. She has beauty – and oh Lord, she does – but that this is not her. It is something she has right now, but that if it were lost she would still be herself. Ricky agrees. On and on we plan how we will not allow her identity to become tied to outward appearance, intelligence, accomplishments and so on. I imagine teaching her to love her body, to listen to its needs, even when those needs are inconvenient, or make others uncomfortable. Oh, the parents we’ll be! Oh, the heartache we’ll save her!
And C just keeps growing and changing, each day – and yet no day can be singled out because everything is so similar and repetitive. She has recently discovered a kind of new growl/screech she is trying out: hack, hack, grrrrrr. This is new, she is new all the time (and yet the day-to-day is so plodding, unremarkable, utterly consuming). I wonder about the visibility of C’s growth. Are we growing at the same rate, just perhaps not outwardly? When do we stop growing? At some point we reach our adult height and our brains finish maturing, but do we? Maybe not. Kids grow and we can see it and be suitably astonished. I wonder if adults are like this too. So much of having a child makes me wonder about when these things stop being true. I remember a friend who worked at a children’s hospital saying people care deeply about sick children until they turn 18, after which they’re on their own in a medical system that now deems them adults and thus expendable.
I start to see in everyone the children they once were. I start to see the little one in myself. So when I ask my body to point the way and it instead gives me terrible back ache, or my hands have an urge to knead dough, or my eyes want to rest on something slow and green, and I take a painkiller, hold a book or watch TV, I begin to suspect I’m numbing someone calling and crying, overwhelmed, small, desperate for her mother’s body, for a heart to soothe her. I must be this body’s mother, and I must be the baby in arms: sobbing and held, both.
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