A Life's Work (11 page)

I attempt to unravel the tangle of crying and feeding in which the baby and I have become knotted up. She is now crying all of the time that she isn't feeding; I cannot physically feed her any more than I do. We appear to be approaching critical mass. Feeding has reached its logical limit. Feeding, I tell the baby silently, is not a substitute for living. Feeding is an overloaded socket that is growing hot and dangerous as every day the voltage passing through it increases.

In spite of all this, her weight gain is slow. It does indeed seem to be impossible to overfeed a breastfed baby, and I have certainly tried. I try to see things from her point of view. Every time she cries my breasts appear like prison warders investigating a disturbance, two dumb, moonfaced henchmen closing in on her, silencing her, administering opiates. She could be crying because she's tired, or in pain; she could be crying in the attempt to express herself; she could be crying, God knows, with surfeit, crying in order to relocate the silence of satisfaction, of content. I begin to suspect that I have presided over some kind of bureaucratic madness, wherein feeding has become the penalty for crying and hence creates
more
crying. Or perhaps there is some deeper root to the problem, some stealthy malaise plaguing the organism of motherbaby. Is my milk polluted by its passage through my unclean self? Is it carrying messages? Is the dark turmoil of what I feel being broadcast by my daughter's cries? There is, I suspect, some connection between my sense of etherealness, of non-being, and her increasingly furious and desperate assertions. I know that this curious function is meant to bring body and mind into a state of harmony unique in human experience. I know that other women derive feelings of fulfilment and well-being from breastfeeding. Why don't I?

Thoughts of bottles fill my head, pristine, final, dense with calories. Through them I imagine I can create a decoy, a third being who will break up the intensity of motherbaby. I imagine myself stealing out from behind her matronly façade. I imagine the baby and I allying ourselves against her, this
milchcow
, this feeder, revelling together rebelliously in unfettered emotion. These feelings are not commendable but they have at least some explanatory virtue. They express my desire to shed my motherly persona, a persona I cannot seem to support without injury to what I have come to know as my self. I remember reading a magazine article about people whose brains housed two or more alternative personalities; how these personalities just arrived one day, with their own thoughts and memories and impulses, and took up tenancy in a person's mind. Long arguments could occur between host and tenant; parties could be held if there were enough people in there. This is, I suppose, what is more commonly known as madness. Am I, then, going mad? If so it is a madness that has its genesis in pregnancy; it is the whole reproductive act, not just its postscript in breastfeeding, that has shaken my sanity. But I steeled myself to endure its strangeness, as one would endure pain, believing that on the day of her birth it would end. Like a dreamer who retains the knowledge that they are dreaming, and hence knows that they will not dream forever, I remained certain that the same physical process that had taken me away would return me to myself. I would cross back over the border, back into the country of myself, and I would know that I had done it as surely as the dreamer knows that they have woken up. What has now begun to alarm me is the fact that the dream is going on and on, is each day gathering to itself more of the appearance of reality.

Covertly, I go to a shop and buy bottles, sterilising tablets, tins of powdered formula milk. At home I lay them out like someone preparing to assemble a bomb. The baby is three months old: very soon she will stop crying as abruptly as if someone had flicked a switch, but I don't know that, will never know whether her crossing of this line was the slow and stately work of nature or the violent result of my own intervention. When evening comes I prepare the bottle. Her father is to give it to her, for we are advised that this treachery is best committed not by the traitor herself but by a hired assassin. I watch as he nudges her lips with the rubber nipple. She gnaws at it obligingly, wrinkling her nose. Presently she takes the hint of his persistence. This is not, as she had at first thought, a strange new game. She stares at the bottle and I see the realisation dawn. Her head snaps round and her eyes lock with mine. Her gaze is wondering and wounded. She sees that I am officiating over this crime. She begins to cry. I move to retract, to propitiate; my hand goes automatically to my shirt buttons. I am told to go upstairs and I go. I sit on the bed, tearful, a pain in the pit of my stomach. Minutes later I creep back down and peer around the corner. They are sitting in a pool of lamplight. The room is warm and silent. The baby is sucking the bottle. I rush back upstairs as if I had witnessed an infidelity.

It was, I reflected later, something of a pact with the devil. With the end of breastfeeding my sense of normality was duly returned to me, but for a while, whenever I picked her up or held her on my lap my daughter would turn her head towards my empty breast and I would feel the pang of her loss. Guiltily I would think that I had baptised her early in the eternal doctrine of human pain, of things passing, of what was loved vanishing, never to return. As for myself, that lactating, matronly spectre, that mother I so feared, went away, and in her place was just me. I was not so ample, so proprietorial, so necessary as she. Behind my breasts I was revealed to be doubtful, unconfident, unreliable. Over the weeks I noticed the baby moving towards her father like a plant towards a new source of light. I had lost one sort of authority, but perhaps another would come to take its place. I had defected from the throne of motherhood, but I liked to think I would evolve my own presidential style. Sometimes, in the afternoons, I would get into bed with her for a nap, and she would lie beside me drinking her bottle, her eyes fixed in fascination on my body. A preliminary wave of sleep would roll warmly over us. I could feel us falling together through the bright constellations of our thoughts. Even as I crossed the line into sleep I felt her cross it too; I felt her go to sleep just as when I was a child I used to feel snow falling outside my window. Later I would open my eyes to find her sleeping head on my stomach, her body curled as if in homecoming around my side, and I would lie very still, knowing that if I moved she would wake.

There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of recorded human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.

It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must re-learn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. Most of these books begin, like science fiction, with a sort of apocalyptic scenario in which the world we know has vanished, replaced by another in whose principles we must be educated. The vanished world is the mother's own. It is the world of her childhood, and her own mother was its last living inhabitant. In those days, the story goes, mothers were told what to do by
their
mothers. The apocalypse, of unspecified cause but generally agreed to have been recent, put paid to that. Like the great library of Alexandria, a world of knowledge has gone up in flames. A chain of command has been broken. We will never know what these mothers whispered to their daughters, what secrets they handed down the years. Something about leaving babies in prams at the bottom of the garden, we think. But the point is that this is a new – in many ways a
better
– world. You are its first mother. And this is its first book.

My mother didn't tell me much about motherhood, it's true. She said she couldn't remember. None of you ever cried, she said vaguely, and then added that she might have got that wrong. She too seemed to have heard about this apocalypse. You all do it differently now, she said. She bought me a childcare manual, with a picture of an ugly baby sticking its tongue out on the cover. Every time I look at the picture it reminds me of what I thought about children before I had one, and what they thought about me. The recollection is a shock, like an unexpected glimpse in a mirror. The text inside is righteous and faintly bullying. It bristles with lists and bullet points, and with exclamation marks too, apparently denoting humour: they swim before me, mad as eyebrows, embarrassing as politicians' jokes. Their conviviality cannot conceal the dictatorial lust belonging to scientists of baby management. The authors prescribe a regime of mandatory, indiscriminate, perhaps life-long breastfeeding. There are pictures supplied, of women breastfeeding naked, in bed, in the bath, in groups and alone. There is a picture of a woman breastfeeding a girl of at least six. They are identically dressed, with long, shining blonde hair. Breastfed children, the book states, are not only healthier, longer-lived and more disease resistant than the other sort, they
may also be more intelligent.
I read this last claim several times, unable to make sense of it. As far as I know I myself was not breastfed, which may explain the problem. A quantity of evangelical fire is reserved for those tempted to sin with the bottle. There are lists, mnemonic, like the doodlings of schoolgirls, with headings such as ‘Benefits of Breastfeeding' and ‘Problems with Breastfeeding'. Problems with breastfeeding, I discover, are almost always the mother's fault.

I feel hated, chastised. I feel repelled by these naked women with their pendulous breasts. The chapter on bottle-feeding has a sombre tone, an atmosphere of reprimand like a headmistress's study. This book supports all mothers, it says insincerely, not just those who breastfeed their babies. If you really feel you must bottle-feed then at least make sure that your baby doesn't miss out
too
much. Hold her close when you feed her, perhaps pressing her against your naked breast, or alternatively use a feeding tube. This is a small tube that you can tape to your breast, through which the baby can suck. It is especially helpful for mothers who have adopted a baby and are saddened by having to miss out on the experience of breastfeeding. Briefly, bizarrely, I find myself considering the use of a feeding tube, but before I know it we are on to ‘Returning to Work'. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly going back to the office, except me. The breastfeeding angle is closely examined. What you do is, you take your breastpump to work, and at the times when the baby usually feeds you pump the milk from your breasts. I sense that all this pumping at meaningful hours is not just for old time's sake. At the end of the day you take the milk home and either freeze it or store it in the fridge. Then somebody gives it to the baby the next day while you're at work. It seems an awful lot of bother to me. I'm still in my dressing gown trying to work it out when they all come charging back for a final chapter on ‘Having Another Baby'.

I am given another book by a friend, an old book that seems to date from before the apocalypse. This book does not mention breastfeeding. Instead it advises a practice run with the sterilising equipment before the birth, and the application of full make-up immediately after. The author recounts an incident after the birth of her first child (she's had four, all strapping boys) when she and her husband worked flat out in the kitchen for a full forty minutes getting that hungry baby his first bottle! There are no pictures of naked women here. Instead there are pictures of babies, clean as pins, wrapped in crisp white towelling as if the stork had just brought them. The mechanics of bathing, sterilising, scouring and nappy changing are dwelt on. The pristine chamber of the baby's room is toured. Nursery equipment is listed and illustrated. The baby spends a lot of time in the white depths of his crib, like something in a cloud or a casket, while his mother folds starched nappies into different shapes in a nearby room. These babies don't cry, or perhaps you just can't hear them all the way from the nursery. A tactful door is closed upon the sinful, rumpled warmth of the adult bed, its flesh, its secretions. We are crisply advised against ever taking baby into our bed, not if we want to keep our marriages, and besides, we'll have all hell to pay getting him out again! Night feeding appears to occur in the nursery, covertly, like an infidelity, while husbands slumber on unawares, but is quickly stamped out. The book ends abruptly on a series of cliffhangers and unanswered questions: is the baby ever taken out of his crib, or does he stay there silently before one day just getting up and going to school? Does the mother wear full make-up for night feeds? Is her husband, last seen alive working flat out in the kitchen on day one, dead, or just asleep?

My mother tries again, this time with more success. She gives me Dr Spock's
Baby and Child Care.
Dr Spock is engrossing on the subject of rashes. In fact he is a fund of information on most things, having appointed himself a sort of missionary to aid those inhabitants of swamps, mines and oil platforms who are mysteriously beyond the reach of the medical profession. His prose is full of danger and emergency: ‘if you can't get to a doctor', ‘if you're in a situation where you have to sterilise', ‘if your milk supply is fading fast and you don't have access to a doctor, health nurse, or other medical professional'. Spock is a passionate advocate of doctors as the only things that stand between families and full-scale nuclear meltdown. Spock's doctors want nothing more than to know if your child's temperature is nudging three figures, if she won't eat her supper, if she has a flat rash of spots roughly three millimetres in diameter that rise and form hay-coloured crusts on the third day. Together, Spock hopes, doctors and parents will see off capitalism, consumerism and environmental catastrophe, for social change can only start in the home, with parents who defy traditional gender roles and act as domestic equals, who don't let their children play with toy guns or watch violent films, who explain their reasons and set a charitable example and what's more can identify the rash of impetigo, a red area of infection that blisters after three days and forms hay-coloured crusts and is highly contagious. Spock's babies are cheerful souls, in spite of their temperatures, their constant gastro-enteritis and chronic excrescences of the skin, in spite of the shadow of global destruction that hangs over them. They like their milk, and when the time comes they like their turnip too. They could use more fresh air than they generally get. They don't like being fussed too much by guilty working parents, by fathers full of suppressed anger, by mothers who want them to be walking before the baby next door. In their anomic, tyrannical hearts they like to know who's boss, for weakness drives them to enslave and dominate, to make fools of their parents. Spock has seen it all, parents who follow their children around the house with bowls of rejected food, who act as human zimmer frames for toddlers, who are in and out of bed like jacks-in-the-box all night fetching milk and rocking and soothing. It's only natural that a baby should have a lusty, rebellious nature: what's important is that you sculpt it into something decent and upstanding, something civilised.