Early on the morning of her fortieth birthday, Sam Kennedy was woken up by the phone, and not by her beloved Baby Bean pressing a foot or an elbow into her bladder, which had been the case for the past few months.
She struggled out of her cosy cocoon of duvet, disentangling herself from Ted’s long warm leg which was comfortably entwined with her own, and answered.
‘Happy birthday, Samantha!’ said her mother.
‘Who’s phoning at this hour on a Saturday?’ groaned Ted, pulling his pillow over his sleek dark head, and then, remembering what day it was, pulling it off. ‘Happy fortieth birthday, honey,’ he said, putting an arm around his wife’s very pregnant body and kissing her gently on the shoulder through the curtain of her long tangle of untameable caramel curls. ‘Love you.’ He leaned down and kissed her bump, covered with an unsexy floral nightie. ‘Love you, Bean.’
Sam never stopped loving the gesture: Ted bending from his great height to kiss her and her belly with complete adoration. He was six foot two to Sam’s five foot three and their wedding photos had made her realise how incongruous they might have looked together had Sam not been addicted to very high heels. With a four-inch heel, her pocket Venus body in a simple lace dress had looked just right beside her long, lean husband. Up close, her head fitted perfectly against his broad chest and if he sometimes whirled her round with her feet off the floor, nobody noticed.
‘Love you, too,’ Sam murmured now.
‘Samantha, are you still there?’ Her mother’s voice sounded irritated at having been made to wait.
‘Yes, and thank you for calling, Mother,’ Sam said into the phone, not mentioning that pregnant women longed for their Saturday morning lie-in.
‘You sound odd. I hope you’re not getting maudlin about your age,’ her mother went on in the cool tones that commanded respect in St Margaret’s School for Girls, where she’d reigned as headmistress for thirty years. ‘Age is merely a number.’
Six-thirty on a Saturday is merely a number, too, thought Sam but didn’t say it.
Instead, she mildly pointed out: ‘I was asleep.’
‘Right. I trust you’re well and have a good day planned,’ said her mother with the same formality she probably used to address the school’s board of governors. ‘Again, happy birthday. Here’s your father. Goodbye.’
With that unmaternal sign-off, the phone was handed over.
‘Happy birthday, lovie. Sorry for the early call but . . .’
‘I get it, Dad,’ said Sam, warmly. ‘Early morning swim? The garden?’
Her parents lived close to Dublin Bay, where hardy souls swam in all weathers, Sam’s mother among them.
‘The former,’ her father said. They’d communicated this way for years: Sam would speak and he’d answer in the ‘yes/no/absolutely’ code that was hardly Enigma-machine-quality but worked for them.
Her dad, Liam, was as mild, chatty and forbearing as her mother, Jean, was cool, uncommunicative and distant. It was one of the great mysteries of Sam’s life as to how the two of them had ever married. That they’d stayed married, she put down to the social mores of the times and some concept both parents had about staying together for their daughters.
Nobody talked about the ice-cold rows between her parents when she’d been growing up, and now, this part of life appeared to have been airbrushed out of family history. It was like the fridge magnet said: If anyone asks, pretend we come from a nice, normal family.
Only she and Joanne, her younger sister, talked about the past now.
Their parents’ marriage of opposites had made Sam determined to be nothing like her mother and to marry a man she adored, rather than one she merely tolerated.
She’d succeeded. Nestling closer to her beloved Ted in bed, she thought that, yet again, being with him should feature in the number one slot on her daily gratitude list.
‘How are you feeling and how’s the little baba?’ her father asked.
‘Wriggling,’ said Sam, putting a hand automatically on her hugely swollen belly and smiling, another automatic move. She’d been smiling since she’d found out that she was pregnant, which was astonishing because, after three failed IVF cycles in her early thirties, she’d assumed that babies were out of the question.
Ted had been smiling pretty much non-stop too, a giant grin that brought out that dimple in his otherwise acutely masculine face, a dimple Sam really hoped their baby would inherit.
After many painful years of longing, they’d finally somehow come to terms with the fact that they were going to be child-free people, and that a dog/cat/hamster was the answer – or so everyone said.
They would deal with the grief, they would not let it part them. They would do their best to move on.
‘Let’s be happy with each other,’ they’d agreed.
So they’d got two dogs, Ted began the marathon running that had been put on hold during years of planned babymaking schedules (the fertility-drug years) and Sam filled her weekends with botanical watercolours and the odd yoga class, so she could learn again to love the body she’d felt had betrayed her.
And then suddenly, the previously infertile Sam had become pregnant.
Incredibly, miraculously pregnant with no help from anyone apart from Ted.
‘Last dash of the ovaries,’ said her GP. ‘Evolution is incredible. If you haven’t given birth by a certain age, your body can launch into action.’
‘Wow,’ Sam had said, which was almost all she’d said since she’d gone to the GP to discuss her strange tiredness and morning nausea, thinking there must be a medical reason other than the obvious.
On the phone, Dad said it was a good sign the baby was a week late.
‘All first babies are late and the later they are, the smarter they are. I can’t remember what site I read it on, but it’s true.’ Liam spent hours consulting the internet every day on pregnancy issues. ‘I was going to drop round later with your birthday present,’ he added.
‘I’d love that. We’ll be here. Ted’s going to walk the dogs, but I plan to tidy the kitchen cupboards.’
‘Ah, love, not on your birthday,’ begged her father. ‘Watch old movies and drink hot chocolate. That’s the right sort of plan. Do you have marshmallows? I’ll bring some.’
‘Just like old times,’ said Sam, smiling into the phone.
When her father had hung up, Ted nuzzled into her.
‘Happy birthday, sexy pregnant lady,’ he said, sliding up her nightie to stroke her bare belly.
Baby Bean wriggled and they both gasped to feel Sam’s small guest poke an elbow up.
‘Incredible,’ said Ted, marvelling.
‘I know,’ agreed Sam, stroking her belly gently. ‘Incredible.’
Ted swung out of bed.
‘I’ll let the dogs out and bring you tea. Camomile and apple? Earl Grey?’
Sam considered it. ‘Earl Grey. Anymore camomile and I’ll turn into a camomile lawn.’
She used to love her morning coffee but had given it up as soon as she’d learned she was pregnant – not that a certain amount of caffeine was necessarily bad in pregnancy. But Sam had spent too long wishing and praying for this child to do anything but turn her body into a temple until he or she was born. This was the legacy of every failed pregnancy test: a fear of doing something, anything, to hurt her baby.
She snuggled back down into the bed and talked nonsense to Baby Bean. She did that a lot now – running commentaries, telling the baby what she was doing and how she couldn’t wait to do it all with Baby Bean.
‘Grandpa will be over later with a present for me, baba. It’s my birthday today! You’re my best birthday present, though.’
Ted returned with a cup of Earl Grey tea for her. Sam took a sip. She’d never been able to touch it pre-pregnancy, but now she wasn’t drinking coffee and the idea of milk in tea made her want to gag, Earl Grey, black, no lemon, was perfect.
He got back into bed with her and gently stroked her shoulder.
‘Sleep?’ he asked.
‘Bean is undecided about whether to be a footballer or a gymnast,’ Sam sighed. ‘Lots of moving and kicking. I don’t know what that means. Oh, but Dad says that late babies are smarter.’
‘Aren’t you clever,’ crooned Ted to her bump.
He’d been amazing all through her pregnancy: kind no matter how ratty she’d got and perfectly happy to sit on the side of the bath rubbing her back as she soaked in the water. No matter how enormous she’d become – and boy, she was enormous now – he’d still told her every day how gorgeous she was.
‘Now that your dad’s got that new bit of information, there’s still time to start that blog about baby advice,’ Ted suggested.
Sam loved this game. She started first.
‘Number one, people need to know that babies who are carried low can be boys/girls/llamas.’
‘Or that fish is good and bad for you, simultaneously,’ added Ted.
They laughed.
By now, forty-one weeks into her first pregnancy, Sam and Ted had come to the conclusion that everyone on the planet believed themselves to be an expert in babies.
And that they all had advice they wanted to impart – whether Sam or Ted wanted to listen or not.
‘Don’t eat fish – mercury kills babies.’
‘Eat fish – it’s good for their brains.’
‘One glass of wine occasionally relaxes you. I’m sure the World Health Organisation said that. Or was it my sister . . .?’
‘Your baby will be born with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome if you so much as smell alcohol from more than a distance of four feet. I saw it on the Discovery Channel.’
‘Natural births are the best for mother and baby. Who wants drugs in their poor baby’s system?’
‘Ask for the drugs early on, like, really early on. If you don’t get them in time, you’ll scream and the pain . . .’
‘You’re carrying low – definitely a girl.’
‘You’re carrying low – a boy, for sure!’
‘Go back to sleep, Sam. You need to rest,’ Ted said. But Sam felt wide awake now. She knew she’d never get back to sleep for even a few minutes.
‘Dogs still out the back?’
‘Yes. Four magpies in the garden – did you not hear the orgy of barking? The neighbours will love us for dragging them out of their hangovers at this early hour on a Saturday.’
Four magpies, Sam thought, hauling herself out of the bed to hit the bathroom for her first of many trips of the day. Was she having a boy? Three magpies meant you were having a girl, four meant a boy. If she saw five magpies, Sam wondered if a silver baby would slither out.
From all the painful birth stories she’d been told, she hoped slithering out was part of it all.
They’d asked not to be told the sex of the baby. ‘It’s not long until we’ll know and it’s life’s biggest secret,’ she said to Ted. ‘Let’s wait.’
‘I thought life’s biggest secret was whether there is life on another planet,’ said Ted, deadpan. ‘OK, you win. No asking the radiographer if they can see a willy or not.’
The spare bedroom was turned into a nursery decorated in a riot of yellows and white and Ted, whose father had a lathe, had slaved over a handmade cot.
She wriggled her feet into her slippers after the bathroom. It was a long time since she’d been able to see her feet, much less bend down to pull on shoes.
‘You try and snooze,’ she said, kissing Ted on the head as he rearranged the pillows.
She went into their tiny kitchen to make toast with honey – she could eat it for the Olympics. Also ice cream. Gallons of it.
Being pregnant had made her ravenous. Nobody had mentioned that, although she’d been told of women who’d licked coal or consumed Marmite by the bucket.
She had no idea how she was going to get the baby weight off, but from the size of her rear end, which was admittedly hard to see in their wardrobe mirror, Sam was pretty sure it wasn’t all baby.
When she’d confided this to Joanne, her sister had laughed and said, ‘It’ll come off: sleep deprivation does that to you.’
‘I hope you’re joking,’ said Sam, because she knew how shattered Joanne had been when she’d had three children one after the other.
‘I am not joking, not remotely.’
Joanne smiled with the Mona-Lisa-like smile which implied that, for once, the younger sister knew something the older one didn’t.
Sam looked into the back garden to see if Dixie and Horace, the two small, bitsa-everything rescue dogs on whom she and Ted lavished their affection, had finished their morning run around the garden where they barked at birds, gave worms the evil eye and peed liberally in order to remind all other creatures that this was their territory.
But the dogs were busy and, knowing their lap of investigation could take some time, and because her lower back ached strangely, Sam sat down on a kitchen chair.
She hoped the dogs would be fine with the baby and they’d been playing crying baby noises whenever they fed them, as per internet advice, so the dogs would associate the baby with the loveliness of dinner, which was one of the highlights of Dixie and Horace’s day. Pavlov’s bell version of getting the dogs ready for the new arrival.
‘Do you think it will work?’ Sam had asked anxiously.
‘Course. The worst crime they’ll commit is to try to slobber kisses on the baby or clamber onto your lap for breastfeeding,’ Ted teased. ‘They’ll adjust.’
He’d been raised with dogs and was relaxed around them. In contrast, Sam’s mother had an allergy, or so she said, and no animal had ever graced Sam’s childhood home.
On the hard kitchen chair, Sam moved to try to find a comfortable position.
The ache was getting weirdly lower and deeper. Was this a sign that the baby was moving into the birth canal? she wondered.
Some women said pregnancy made them feel at one with their body: Sam, who had spent years having her hormones artificially manipulated in order to stimulate a pregnancy that never came, no longer felt as if she had a clue what was going on with hers. Which worried her, although she hadn’t breathed a word of this to anyone. The baby fear, that something would go wrong to stop her having this child because her body had failed before, was too ridiculous to voice out loud.
And there was another fear, one that loomed bigger each day: in all those years of trying to get pregnant, she’d barely allowed herself to imagine becoming an actual parent.
Now she wondered how on earth she could be a proper mother. Because she had no experience of how a warm, kind motherly figure behaved.
‘Happy birthday, Sam!’
Ted appeared in his T-shirt and boxers, his body marathon-lean and tanned from sunny evenings spent in the garden sanding and painting the crib.
He’d been in a vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt and jeans at the college party where they’d met, a night when Ted said he was walking her home to keep her safe.
‘I can keep myself safe, thank you very much,’ snapped Sam.
Ted had grinned and walked her home anyway.
‘You were like an angry pixie, those eyes flashing at me and I just couldn’t keep away,’ he’d said later, when they were inseparable, Sam’s prickly defences long since lowered.
‘Honey.’ He leaned down and kissed her. ‘I couldn’t sleep and it’s not fair that you’re up alone on your birthday.’ With a flourish, he put a small box on the table in front of her and stood back proudly. ‘It’s a really small gift,’ he explained. ‘Tiny so I can get you a proper something when the baby is born or you can enjoy going out shopping with me, because forty is a special birthday. You should have diamonds and—’
Sam opened the box, gasped suddenly and stared at the interior blankly.
Ted squinted at her. ‘You don’t like? They’re gold-plated earrings. The gold will rub off, it always does, and I can return them if you’d like, but I know you like purple stones and—’
‘Ted!’
‘You really hate them?’ Ted picked up the box and looked at the contents critically. ‘I thought you’d hate it more if I spent money buying any proper jewellery without you—’
‘My waters have just broken,’ hissed Sam, as she felt the surge of liquid move from a trickle to a flood. ‘I love the present, Ted, but we need to go to the hospital. I can’t have the baby on the kitchen floor – it’s not clean enough with the dogs, and the baby will get kennel cough or dog flu or something . . .’
‘Your waters have broken?’ repeated Ted, not sounding like someone with a PhD in data analytics.
He sat down beside her, then immediately got up again as if someone had switched his brain off and then back on, and all the circuits were recalibrating.
‘Right. OK. Will I time your contractions or . . .?’
Her reliable, steadfast husband stared at her as if all rational thought had been sucked out of him and he wanted her to tell him what to do.
‘Get me to the hospital,’ she whispered.
Stopping only to ring the doorbell next door so they could tell their neighbour, Cynthia, that Operation Baby was ON and would she go in and take the dogs, as agreed, Ted helped Sam into the car.
Despite several strong buzzes on her doorbell, Cynthia didn’t appear.
‘She’s in the shower,’ said Shazz, Cynthia’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, coming out onto the shared driveway still in her skimpy denim cut-offs and a leather-look bra top worn with a net top, her short pale pink hair fluffed up into a halo round her head. Definitely just in from the night before.
‘Good luck, Sam, it’ll be fine,’ said Shazz, draping her beautiful, fake-tanned self over the car door and flattening Sam with the scents of fags, booze, club and not-been-to-bedness.
‘How do you know it’ll be fine?’ demanded Sam, her politeness filter entirely knocked out by the knowledge that Baby Bean wanted out and there were no medical professionals around to help.
‘I’ve seen it on the soaps,’ said Shazz thoughtfully. ‘It’ll work out. Babies are, er . . . you know – natural.’
‘The soaps aren’t real!’ Sam yelled. ‘And it’s scary. Imagine giving birth right now. Big baby.’ She lowered her voice and pointed downwards. ‘Small exit.’
‘Yeuch.’ Shazz took a step back, thinking about it. ‘That’s going to mess it all up down there, right? In the lady garden palace.’ She shuddered.
For a brief moment, Sam thought about her own lady garden palace and getting the baby out of it. She’d watched lots of Discovery TV birthing shows and right now, she was scared.
Ted got into the car.
‘Hospital bag!’ Sam reminded him.
He got the bag.
Looking right and left like a racing driver, Ted whizzed through every red light on the way to the maternity hospital. Beside him, Sam panted and screeched with a combination of nerves and pain.
Another wave hit her. This was not what she’d anticipated, not this searing pain that felt as if it would rip her in two. Plus, she might kill Ted before they got to the hospital. He kept going over speed bumps too fast.
That was the problem, she decided grimly as the pain receded. She was having a baby with an idiot. An idiot who loved his computer, thought the sun shone out of the Tipperary hurling team’s collective backsides and had no idea what women had to go through in life. Any of it.
Women understood pain. Or women were pain . . .? Something like that. She’d read it on Pinterest.
Another pain bloomed inside her.
‘Drive faster!’ she hissed.
Ted broke all the speed limits and, at last, they slid to a halt in front of the Rotunda Hospital in the ambulance bay.
As she was put into a wheelchair at the hospital door, she was half sobbing. ‘My waters broke an hour ago and the baby’s coming,’ she said.
A nurse shooed Ted off to park properly because he wasn’t allowed to abandon the car in the ambulance bay.
‘I am going to have this baby here and now!’ went on Sam, watching with dismay as her husband left. She loved him. She’d been so horrible to him . . . he couldn’t go—
‘You probably won’t give birth this quickly on your first,’ soothed the nurse. ‘Let’s see how you’re doing.’
‘No, it’s a week overdue, it’s coming very soon, I can feel it,’ said Sam, who was not feeling remotely soothed.
‘Everyone thinks that, but it’s a first baby and they take time.’
‘No, I do know,’ said Sam wildly. ‘I’m giving birth now, here and now! Get me into the delivery room!’
‘All right, pet, let’s check out how dilated you are.’
Somehow, assisted by two nurses, and a midwife with an even more soothing voice, Sam got onto a bed.
‘It’s coming!’ she shrieked as another pain hit her.
‘It’s not,’ said the midwife calmly as she emerged from between Sam’s legs. ‘You’re only three centimetres dilated.’
‘Three!’
Three centimetres would not let a Barbie doll emerge. Barbie’s insanely perky bosoms would get stuck.
‘Yes, only three, I’m sorry, Sam,’ said the midwife with the awareness of a professional who’d delivered enough babies to know that smugness in delivery rooms did not help anyone.
Three was nothing, Sam knew. Nothing. How could she be in this pain with no sign of a child appearing? What was next? Red-hot pokers of pain?
Ted came back from parking the car as another contraction ripped through Sam.
‘Darling,’ he said, taking her hand.
‘Don’t darling me!’ she yelled, fear coming out as rage. ‘If you ever think you are coming near me again with that . . . that thing, you have another thing coming!’
‘But . . . but . . . we want this baby,’ muttered Ted, who had read all the baby books with mentions of fury bouncing off the walls in the delivery suite. But not his Sam, surely?
After this long journey of IVF, he was going to help, hold Sam’s hand, man the phone.
Not get screamed at.
‘Relax, dear,’ whispered the midwife to Ted. ‘They all say things like that. In fact, that’s mild. No sex forever or having their bits chopped off is what some partners hear in these rooms, but afterwards, it’s OK, you wait and see.’
‘It’s her birthday,’ Ted said, desperately trying to shift the conversation on from parts of his anatomy he did not want to discuss with strange women. ‘She’s forty.’
‘We know, she’s an elderly primigravida.’
‘I am not elderly!’ said Sam, who had nothing wrong with her hearing even if it felt as if a giant wriggling emu with a bowling ball for a head was trying to emerge from her body, sideways. This could not be normal. There must be something wrong.
‘Not old, just old to have your first one,’ soothed the midwife. ‘Once you’re thirty-five or older, they call you elderly.’
‘I’m forty today,’ Sam said, tearfully. ‘That’s not elderly. Life begins at forty: everyone says it.’
‘Happy birthday!’ said the midwife, who was thirty-nine, and hoped so too.
Four hours later, two more centimetres dilated and a lot of screaming at Ted, interspersed with sobbing and saying sorry because she loved him, Sam thought she might just be going mad with pain. Nobody told her it would be like this or that it would take this long.
When people said ‘I was in labour for sixteen hours’, she’d thought it was exaggeration, not reality. Like saying ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night’, or ‘I lost all that weight without doing anything’.
A whopping big baby-birthing fib.
But in this case, it seemed as if it was true.
Doing his best to be helpful, Ted extracted Sam’s birth plan from the hospital bag.
The birth plan was full of ideas for the perfect birth and involved soft music – they’d done a track list and it was on both of their phones – no drugs in case they affected the baby and, if possible, Ted to cut the cord.
The birth plan was a paean to glorious natural childbirth.
The woman in the prenatal class had praised their approach, telling them how it was better for Baby to be shoved, drug-free, into the world.
So Ted innocently handed the sheaf of paper to Sam, who sent it flying as another contraction hit her.
‘Jesus, the pain!’ she roared.
‘Breathe,’ said Ted, watching as the birth plan scattered all over the floor.
‘I can’t,’ gasped Sam as she felt as if her insides were being torn apart. ‘I must have been mad with all that breathing crap. Screw breathing. Where’s the anaesthetist?’
‘The one on call is in theatre with an emergency caesarean,’ said the midwife.
Sam stopped grabbing the bed bars long enough to grab Ted.
‘Find him,’ she hissed, in a voice uncannily like that of the little girl from The Exorcist, ‘and bring him to me.’
‘I can’t,’ said Ted, shocked at seeing his wife behaving like someone possessed.
‘Dr Lennox will be along soon.’
‘I need him now.’
‘Dr Lennox is a she.’
‘Does she have kids?’ growled Sam.
‘Yes.’
‘Then beg her, she knows what this is like.’
‘She had twins first time.’
‘I don’t care if she gave birth to two fully grown hippos without medical intervention, I need her and her bag of drugs. Please.’
‘But your birth plan,’ went on Ted, thinking that perhaps it was his job to make Sam stick with the plan she’d wanted for so long. ‘You know we don’t want drugs for this delivery and I have your music ready to go—’
He ignored the warning looks on the midwife’s and nurses’ faces who had seen all of this played out many times before.
‘Babies don’t read the birth plan,’ began the younger nurse, who was used to shattered husbands, men who came in all gung-ho and went home, bruised and traumatised wrecks. ‘You never really know how a delivery is going to progress.’
Sam launched into Ted: ‘If you are having this baby, you can do it without drugs, but I am having it, I am trying to pass a bowling ball from an orifice that has never had a bowling ball emerge from it before, and I want everything! ALL the drugs! Everything in the hospital.’
There was nothing close for Sam to throw but Ted ducked just in case.
This was nothing like the Sam he knew and loved.
Two more hours elapsed with just pain and the anticipation of it in Sam’s landscape.
‘I love you,’ Ted kept saying.
‘I know,’ she said when she wasn’t in actual pain.
She was tearful and sweaty, and in her saner moments, wondered how people appeared in celebrity magazines at the hospital door a day after giving birth, all groomed and perfect.
She had seen herself in the bathroom mirror when she’d been trying the ‘keep walking and let gravity help’ method. She was puce in the face, sweating and her hair was a greaseball. A month left alone in Sephora with a crack team of beauticians would not make her look good ever again.
‘I keep thinking the baby’s going to come, but it doesn’t,’ she said weepily to Ted, who was half hugging her, half holding her up. ‘I know they say long first labours are normal, but this can’t be normal? They’re not telling us something.’
She began to cry again.
‘We don’t know what normal is here,’ Ted said manfully. He was being ultra-careful in case he upset the balance between possessed wife and crying wife, the latter being upsetting but easier to handle.
The young nurse arrived back in the room to check the foetal heart rate and Sam’s cervix.
‘You’re fully dilated!’ she said, peeping up from between Sam’s legs.
‘You see, nobody knows when a baby wants to make an entrance.’
‘My baby’s coming?’ said Sam, almost shocked.
‘Your baby is coming,’ smiled the nurse.
Within minutes, it was all action and still no anaesthetist.
Ted was, to his delight, up the head end of the bed because he wasn’t sure he could cope with the whole baby emerging from the birth canal end, no matter how much he and Sam had discussed how this was important for both of them.
Instead, he remembered his friend, Lorcan, who’d said: ‘It does something to you, mate, seeing her producing a baby out of down there. Can take a while to get over it, uh, sexually.’
Sam screamed, pushed, and nearly ripped a hole in Ted’s hand as she pushed their baby into the world.
‘Push,’ said the midwife at the right times.
Sam pushed, feeling every tendon straining, every bit of her body ripping.
Despite the noise of machines and other women giving birth, screaming too, there were moments when she felt suspended in time – lost between pain, joy and anxiety and, above all, that wild primal desire to birth her baby safely.
Women had been doing it since the beginning of time, she had to do this. Couldn’t fail.
Now, now, now, please let it be now . . .
And then, the last push—
The baby let out a little bleat and Ted began to cry too.
‘A little girl,’ said the midwife with pride and Sam began to cry, tears of joy and exhaustion.
‘Good breath sounds, pinking up,’ said the paediatrician, swooping in.
When she was finally put in Sam’s arms, Baby Bean – seven pounds exactly and scoring a perfect Apgar score – was the most infinitely precious creature her parents had ever seen.
Almost afraid to touch this little person, astonished that she had grown this child inside her body, Sam touched the tiny fingers with awe. The baby’s little nails were translucent, her fingers tiny but perfect. Even with some of the film of childbirth over her, she was exquisite.
Her lovely eyelids were so delicate, like petals draped over blue eyes that stared up at Sam as if she could see her perfectly.
‘She’s ours,’ said Sam, staring at her baby.
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Ted, and Sam looked up to see his eyes brimming with tears and the trails of more tears down his face. ‘Just beautiful. I never thought this would happen,’ he said, choking the words out, ‘and look at her: perfect and ours and we get to bring her home, bring her up. We are a family . . .’
At that moment, something strange happened to Sam.
Something that made her feel fiercely protective, deeply in love and terrified all at the same time.
This tiny little being was hers to take care of.
She would kill for her baby.
‘Mummy loves you with all her heart and will injure anyone who tries to hurt you,’ she murmured into the baby’s fragile skull with its covering of downy dark hair.
Suddenly, she understood all those nature programmes where lonely leopard mothers risked taking down bigger animals all for their cubs, where birds flew across dangerous deserts to sip water at deadly waterholes surrounded by predators so they could regurgitate the water later to keep their tiny baby birds alive.
She would rip out the throat of anything, anyone, who hurt her baby. Anyone.
And then, the great love and the great sense of protectiveness were overwhelmed by another, fearful thought. The one that had been stalking her.
All her life, she had been in charge. The woman people went to when they wanted a task accomplished and fast.
Suddenly she didn’t feel any of those things. Not organised, not competent.
She had a tiny baby in her arms. In a couple of days, maybe even the next day, she and Ted were going to bring this tiny creature home.
Sam had simply no idea how to do this. No mental template from her own childhood.
How could she now become a proper mother with no background to help her with what was supposed to be the most natural thing in the world?
On her fortieth birthday, cradling her new baby, Sam made a wish.
Please let me learn how to be a good mother. Please.