At least, thought Sam, cleaning up another nappy, the black faeces that had frightened the hell out of her had stopped. It was meconium, the nurses had explained to her in hospital when she’d stared aghast at the black liquid coming out of her exquisite little baby’s bottom. ‘This can’t be normal,’ she’d cried, fearing there was something wrong with India.
‘It’s perfectly normal,’ said the nurse talking to her, an old hand at explaining this sort of thing to new, terrified mothers. ‘Meconium is the early excreta and nothing to worry about, although it looks a little bit frightening. Soon the baby’s stools should be a more normal colour.’
Sam wanted this confirmed once more. In fact, she’d really have liked a notebook where she could write all this down and then have it typed up in triplicate and stuck around the house, because she needed to know that whatever her baby was doing was normal.
Plus she was beyond irritated with Ted, who seemed more upset at the scent of India’s tiny nappies – why was he so upset about that? How dare he get upset about it when she was the one in the hospital dealing with the impossible task of taking care of their tiny child, of worrying full-time.
The next difficult step in taking care of the baby was the feeding, or latching on as the nurses called it. ‘Latching on’ was such an innocuous phrase, sort of like hanging a picture frame onto a wall. At no point did the words latching on imply getting a small, bewildered, hungry and increasingly cross baby to attach itself to a nipple that was already painful and then make said baby suck.
That first day, when the lactation nurse had been off and India had had a bottle, had made Sam terrified she’d mess up breastfeeding again. The more terrified she was, the more India sensed it, cried and refused to feed. Sam’s breasts ached. India wailed with misery and Sam’s breasts ached even more at her child’s cries.
‘How is this so hard?’ Sam had said tearfully twenty minutes after her fifth attempt at feeding, when India had just cried harder, pitiful little wails that broke Sam’s heart. The inner voice screamed at her: bad mother!
‘It can take a while,’ said the lactation nurse. ‘Not everyone finds it easy at first, but keep trying, you’ll do it.’
They gave India a little bit of milk that Sam had laboriously expressed earlier from a machine that sounded like it was pumping oil from eight thousand feet beneath the earth.
‘I know you are going to manage this when you go home tomorrow,’ said the lactation nurse, beaming with encouragement, and she left Sam with a sheaf of papers about the right way to do it.
Finally, India slept in her little bassinet, Ted was gone and the ward was mercifully quiet because all the visitors had been sent home by the ringing of a bell.
There was snoring in some corners where exhausted women tried to sleep. There were little murmuring baby noises, the odd small whimper and, sometimes, full-blown baby wailing. And all the while, Sam looked at beautiful India with that precious little face, the fluffed-up dark hair. She looked so like Ted with those huge eyes and all Sam could think was that she had failed her baby because she hadn’t been able to feed her.
The woman next door, Larissa, who was on her third child, had juggled her baby onto enormous bosoms and the baby had grappled on like a mountaineer grabbing a crampon expertly.
‘It’s very easy,’ said Larissa, in a relaxed tone that Sam envied from the bottom of her heart. ‘I don’t know what you need all them bits of paper for. Come here, I’ll show you,’ she said, when Sam had been lying in bed on the verge of tears, still failing to get India to latch on.
‘No, no, I’ll try later,’ Sam had said.
The nurse passed by again and, seeing Sam’s devastated face, said: ‘It can be a little stressful if you have people beside you who are doing it so easily, and remember, Larissa has had two more babies. She’s used to this now, it’s all new to you and it’s new to India.’
‘But it’s new to Larissa’s baby too and he seems to know how,’ said Sam tremulously. ‘India doesn’t know how and that’s all my fault, because if I knew, then India would know and I would be able to transfer that information to her and . . .’
‘She’s not a computer,’ the nurse said kindly. ‘Now get a bit of rest and it will look easier the next time.’
The next time was two o’clock in the morning and Sam did not feel as if it was any easier. She was zombified with tiredness, woken from an uneasy sleep and desperately trying to get India’s tiny little mouth to attach onto her nipple. Another nurse tried to help her, holding Sam’s breast and squashing it up into India’s little mouth, trying to squeeze milk out and get India to suck. But it was no good.
‘Why am I such a failure at this?’ said Sam, giving up and bursting into tears.
‘You’re not a failure at all,’ said the nurse. ‘I’ll get the pump.’
The breast pump, nicknamed Daisy by Larissa next door, made enough noise to wake the dead, but miraculously none of the other women or babies on the ward stirred. It hurt, too. Sam had thought that the whole breastfeeding business was such an earth-mother thing to do that it wouldn’t feel uncomfortable in the slightest and yet letting the pump remove the milk from painfully engorged breasts was agony.
‘You might have a touch of mastitis there,’ said the nurse kindly.
‘Mastitis?’ said Sam, ‘I thought cows got that?’
‘We’re mammals too,’ the nurse said wryly.
When she’d expressed enough milk via Daisy, she managed to feed little India from a bottle and at least there was the pleasure of watching her baby drink her milk even if it hadn’t come straight from the breast. Where were all her visions of perfect motherhood now?
She’d thought of the ideas she’d had of lying on her hospital bed and her darling baby snuggled up beside her attached to a breast, happy and serene like an Old Masters’ painting of motherhood. It was nothing like that. It was messy and sore and she felt she was doing everything wrong. What was gloriously joyful about that? The only perfect thing was India herself, who was the most exquisitely beautiful creature to have emerged into the world. Despite years of yearning for this very time, Sam’s primary emotion was fear.
The next morning, both mama and baby were ready to go. No breastfeeding had been managed.
Instead of feeling like the serene madonna Sam had imagined she would be, she felt on the edge of an enormous panic attack.
‘Have you fixed the car seat properly?’ she snapped at Ted.
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘The guy came out of the shop when we bought it and made sure I knew how, plus Patrick came over this morning and helped me, OK?’
‘Fine.’ Sam sat uncomfortably on the edge of the hospital bed, and knew she sounded like a bitch, not Earth Mother supreme, but everything was suddenly so complicated. She didn’t know what to do, and it was scaring her. Apparently fear emerged as wild irritation and bitchiness. But she couldn’t help it. Today, somewhat less than two and a half days since India had been born, they were leaving the hospital.
Sam didn’t want to go. Only her long, painful labour had meant she’d been kept in a second night. Today was going-home day, come what may. But she needed this place, despite the noise and screaming babies and no sleep. At least it was safe.
Here, there were people who knew how to handle babies. The fear that resided in Sam was enveloping her.
‘Did Patrick say Joanne was going to be there?’ she asked Ted again.
Joanne had promised to be at Ted and Sam’s when they got home from hospital. And Ted’s mum, Vera, was going to be there too. Both women understood what to do.
‘I thought you’d want a bit of time on your own,’ Joanne had said when Sam asked if some of the family could be there when she and Ted brought India home.
‘It’s a celebration!’ Sam had said, injecting excitement into her voice.
It was insurance.
Without people around, people who knew about babies, she might cry. Or worse, she’d kill Ted.
He appeared to expect her to know everything now.
He looked to her as the baby guru.
‘Is this all right, the way I’m holding her?’ he’d asked anxiously in the hospital and Sam had stared at him in annoyance. He knew as much as she did. And he’d had more sleep. Bizarrely, instead of this momentous event bonding them, the birth of their baby made Sam feel that every woman-clouting-stupid-man-over-head-with-rolling-pin cliché was entirely true. She wished she had her own rolling pin around, just in case.
India cried when Sam shakily woke her from sleep. Despite how tiny she looked, she could make a lot of noise.
‘Our little yeller,’ said Ted affectionately, touching his daughter’s downy head with a large, gentle hand.
How could Ted find India’s screaming to be endearing? Sam found it frightening because she couldn’t decode the yells. Was it normal for a tiny baby to scream when she was woken up?
All her working life, she’d asked questions and studied to learn how to do her job better. But there was no MBA in being a mother, no book of diagrams and handy hints. It was on-the-job learning. In work, Sam had never minded this. She was enthusiastic and eager. But here, with India, she was such a novice.
She felt entirely out of her comfort zone, terrified of that fact, and even more terrified that this great abyss of knowledge would harm her precious baby.
This was no bank division to be run; no charity to oversee. This was a human life she was responsible for and she was singularly unprepared for it. The thought was terrifying.
She’d asked the nurses so many questions, trying to get some sort of procedural baseline for what was normal.
‘All babies are different,’ said one of the older nurses happily, a woman who had two children of her own and had worked in the maternity hospital for twenty years.
She was an expert and this was her best answer?
‘But it’s daunting, isn’t it – trying to work out what your baby wants . . .?’ Sam went on in desperation.
‘Ah, Sam, you have maturity on your side. You’ll work it out: mothers do. Now, some of the very young girls who come here to have babies, they’re so young, they’re almost babies themselves: eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who haven’t the first clue about looking after themselves, never mind a baby. A few years makes all the difference. Of course, they have the energy. You want to make sure you have a good diet and take care of yourself too, because when you’re that little bit older, your age means it can be a bit tougher from the point of lack of sleep and general energy levels. Research shows that the ideal time to have a baby is—’
‘Yeah, twenty-five,’ said Sam drily, who had heard this many times.
At twenty-five, she’d been trying not to get pregnant.
At forty, she was apparently too lacking in energy to take care of a baby.
Nobody had mentioned the fear that came with facing this exquisite little human being who would be in her sole care soon.
The fear that was overwhelming her.