by Emma Murray
When I discovered I was pregnant after a year of living together, we married quietly and uneventfully in a civil ceremony in a beautiful historic town hall in central London with my mother and Rose, David’s mother, as witnesses. After watching Rose clean the sparkling silver cutlery with her napkin, sending back her glass because ‘it had smudges on it’, and lamenting the fact that there was no tablecloth on the ornate glass table, I finally understood why David was as anal as he was. As my mother muttered later, ‘It’s not from the wind he got it, Saoirse.’
After the wedding, things settled between David and me; there was a good sense of being properly bonded together. We were nicer to each other, and more willing to let the little things go. This feeling of contentment lasted right up until Anna was born. But I hadn’t predicted that a newborn was just the catalyst necessary to send David back into control freak high-frequency mode, or that I would become a certified nutcase, for that matter. Not long after we brought Anna home from hospital, I told the man I had just married that I wanted a divorce.
6
London, Four Years Ago
Looking back, I realise the trouble between David and me began from the very first moment we saw Anna. It had been a long labour and, in the end, she was suctioned out. To be honest, she wasn’t the best-looking baby I’d ever seen. As I recall, after a good minute of silence, the dialogue between myself and David went something like this:
David: ‘What’s wrong with her nose?’
Me: ‘Poor thing, she looks like a boxer that’s been through at least eight rounds in the ring.’
Husband: ‘Well, she didn’t get that nose from me.’
Me: ‘What are you trying to say?’
Husband: ‘Well, your nose has always been on the large side.’
Me: ‘What? Since when? Fuck off.’
A moment of tense silence.
Me: ‘I knew I should have had a caesarean. Those babies always come out without a mark on them.’
Then the nurse, who was busy doing things to my vagina that I have since blocked out, interjected firmly that our baby’s face and head was only swollen on account of her being suctioned out, adding, ‘The swelling will go down over the next couple of days.’
As soon as she had left the room, I burst into tears. ‘Thank God she’s going to get better-looking,’ I sobbed. ‘I thought she was going to get the shit kicked out of her in school.’
I held her closely to me and watched her poor swollen eyelids flicker as she slept in my arms. In that moment, I was overwhelmed by sensations I had never felt before. For the first time in my life I felt I was capable of murder. I would kill for her without blinking. I also realised that I would choose her over my husband in a heartbeat, which is exactly what ended up happening. Then things got really bad.
It took precisely three days for the newborn baby ‘glow’ to wear off. I had read all about the impact of sleep deprivation and the roller coaster of emotions associated with the ‘new mum’ experience, but I had absorbed this in an abstract sense. I mean, I wasn’t naïve – I knew it was going to be tough – but I was tough. Uncertainty was my friend. I had moved to London from Ireland by myself in my twenties and travelled the world as a marketing expert. I had walked out of my well-paid job and a long-term relationship with Hugo to pursue my dream of writing full time; and I had managed to get through living with David and all his weird quirks.
I was hardy, independent and up for a challenge. I was a survivor. Of course, a new baby was not going to change that. But nothing prepared me for the sheer sense of possession I felt as soon as I held my little girl in my arms for the first time. Never before had I had something that was totally and utterly mine. David was a mere bystander, an unwanted irritation. Besides, I knew that I loved her far more than he ever could.
It took me about three days to realise I had absolutely no idea how to look after her – not the first clue. It turned out that David was as clueless as I was. For some reason, David kept asking me questions that ‘as a woman’ he thought I was supposed to know.
‘Saoirse, why is she crying?’
‘I have no fucking idea, David.’
‘Saoirse, how do you change a nappy?’
‘I have no fucking idea, David.’
‘Saoirse, why is Anna not sleeping?’
‘I have no fucking idea, David.’
‘Saoirse, why is she not breast-feeding properly?’
‘I have no fucking idea, David. All I know is that my boobs are in absolute agony, and I hate every second of it.’
By the time David had finished his two weeks of paternity leave, we were throwing things at each other, with the odd brother/sister-type fisticuffs thrown in. Anna was in the Moses basket beside our bed and every stir and sniffle had me racing to her side. I resented David for sleeping so peacefully while I became more and more sleep-deprived.
It also didn’t help that David had reverted to his super-control-freak ways, but this time targeted at all things baby related. If Anna spat her dummy out and it landed on the cushion, it had to be sterilised straight away or if she spat up (even the tiniest amount) on her Babygro, it had to be washed instantly. He insisted on us both washing our hands before either of us could pick her up. If all that wasn’t enough, David became an authority on breast-feeding, giving me ‘pointers’ as to which way I should hold Anna. When I sobbed that I couldn’t do it as the pain was so bad, he piled on the guilt, trotting out everything that the breast-feeding Nazis had said in the antenatal group, coupled with whatever bullshit he had picked up online.
Between David’s fussiness, my chafed and bleeding hands, the disastrous breast-feeding, and the sleep deprivation, I knew it was only a matter of time before I murdered him and buried him under his sparkling white floorboards. What the hell was happening to us? Before Anna came along, I was the only one who had mattered. He was the one who took care of me – spent hours listening to my crashing anxieties and terrible fears, and was my absolutely favourite person to have dinner with. We joked about being ‘the same person’, and spent many happy minutes wondering if there was really such a thing as a soulmate. I never thought that specialness would ever die away, but here we were, teetering on the brink.
I hoped that things might improve when David went back to work, but they only got worse. More resentment built as I watched him enjoy his usual forty-minute shower-and-shave routine when I would be lucky to have a shower at all. I hated him for leaving the house with only his wallet and keys to think about, when I had to remember to pack all the millions of items Anna needed. The bottom line was that nothing had changed for him: life had just trotted smartly on. But I had been left behind.
The final straw came when David announced one sunny Saturday morning over breakfast, when Anna was three weeks old, that he was off to the other side of London to check out a new food market. He might as well have told me he was visiting a whorehouse.
‘What? You’re going out?’ I shouted at him in disbelief. ‘All day?’
I was aghast. This had been the first week I had looked after Anna all by myself and I was ready for the nuthouse. I hadn’t exactly told David, but I had dreams of a long uninterrupted shower and blissful snoozes between feeds. There was no fucking way he was going out to wander around some poncy market while I did another full shift of baby duty.
‘I don’t know what you’re so upset about,’ he said, irritatingly calm. ‘I mean, I’ve been working all week, and I could do with a break.’
Big mistake.
‘What? And you think I’ve been sitting on my arse all day? I’m up all night. She barely fucking sleeps. You, on the other hand, get to sleep all fucking night because of your precious job, which, by the way, you’re lucky to have because you get to go to the toilet alone, you get to have lunch in peace, and you can have an adult conversation.’
I stopped to take another breath. The floodgates had opened and they were releasing three weeks of pent-up angry lava. There was no stopping me now.
David gave me a dark look. ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about all of that? I can’t feed her because you’re doing that. I can’t walk her in her pram because I’m fucking working all day; and even when I am home, I can’t help out because she screams blue murder every time I try to hold her,’ he said angrily.
In the mist of the red fog, I knew there was some truth to what he saying. Every time he tried to pick her up she screamed, and part of me knew I was to blame for that. I did feel very strongly that Anna was mine and only mine. But then Anna, who had been sleeping upstairs, started to wail and all logical thought went straight out the window.
‘Do you know how you can help me, David? You can start by not going to that shit food market and giving me a fucking break by taking care of your daughter for at least five minutes,’ I said, feeling the heat of rage prickling my skin.
David took one look at my red, twisted face, glanced at the baby monitor, which had reached ‘apoplectic’ on the sound measurements, turned on his heel and walked straight out of the kitchen.
For a moment, I felt relief. Finally, someone else was going to pick up Anna and change her nappy. Maybe I would get that snooze in after all.
But then I heard the jingling of what sounded suspiciously like keys, and then the sound of the front door slamming.
I raced out of the kitchen into the hallway in total disbelief. Instead of tending to Anna, David had taken his keys and walked straight out of the house.
Then I snapped.
Leaving Anna in hysterics, I ran out of the front door, wild with fury. I could just about make out his retreating form halfway down the street.
‘Fuck you, David!’ I screamed. ‘I want a fucking divorce.’
And do you know what he did? He turned around, gave a salute of acknowledgement, and then gave me his middle finger in response.
I turned round so violently that I almost slammed into our elderly neighbour, Joseph, who had been standing just outside his gate, obviously coming out for a bit of a snoop. I am convinced Joseph was a headmaster in his previous life. He has that sort of officious air.
‘Everything OK, Saoirse? I heard a bit of commotion out here,’ he said, in the manner of someone used to handing out detention.
‘All fine here, Joseph,’ I said, breezily. ‘Just some hooded youths having an argument.’
I was sure that Joseph was just the sort of man who blamed everything on hooded youths. My gamble paid off and Joseph spent a few seconds tutting about the youth of today and so on and so forth. I made my excuses – ‘Crying baby, Joseph. Must dash!’ –and raced back into the house.
As I held Anna’s poor frantic mouth to my breast, feeling jolt after jolt of pain with each suck, the determined anger suddenly began to abate. I hung my head over my suckling newborn and cried and cried.
After that row, our relationship changed from loving husband and wife to two people who just happened to be married. I moved into the spare room with Anna and avoided David whenever I could. It was easier than I thought. We existed in different time zones, after all. I would be up with Anna every two hours at night, while he was sleeping in our bedroom, and I would be asleep when he got up for work. Often I was in bed when he got home at 7 p.m. In the space of a few weeks, we had gone from best friends and lovers to flatmates who didn’t much like each other.
I desperately needed a shoulder to cry on. I had told my husband, the father of my baby, that I wanted a divorce, for goodness’ sake, and I was struggling just to get through the day. Very few of my work friends had kids, and I had lost touch with the ones who did. All the visitors I’d had when Anna was first born had faded away and moved on with their baby-free lives. Although I had met David’s friends on many occasions, I didn’t feel close enough to any of them to reveal how badly I was struggling.
The shame of admitting that I couldn’t do what millions of women had been doing over the centuries was too much. I had tried to open up to my mother about Anna’s dreadful night sleeping, and she had told me uselessly, albeit kindly, that things would get better. She had offered to come over and give me a hand, but I declined, mortified that my own mother would see her fiercely independent daughter in such a state. After all, my mother had raised me practically by herself, and worked full time. How could I confess how desperate I felt?
I had so many friends yet nobody I could really confide in. Unconsciously I had divided up my friends into groups for different purposes. I had my banking friends for drinks and larks; my writing friends for work discussions; and my Irish friends for relationship advice. The only problem was I hadn’t got a friend to rant to about babies and shit husbands. I felt totally isolated.
Even Jen, my oldest and best friend from Ireland, couldn’t relate to my new circumstances. Jen and I had been ‘best friends, best friends, never ever break friends’ since our first year at primary school. As I was an only child, Jen was the closest I had to a sister, and I clung to her through every formative stage of adolescence. When Jen tried on make-up for the first time, so did I. When Jen tried her first alcoholic drink at the age of fourteen – bravely breaking The Pledge, a vow Catholic children take to abstain from alcohol before the age of eighteen – I was right along with her. If we were sinners, we sinned together. When Jen had her first kiss (with tongues), I grabbed the nearest hapless fella and did the same.
And that was how it was, all the way up until I moved to London. For all her daring, Jen was a home bird and had no intention of leaving her native Ireland. Besides, she had got herself a job as a personal shopper for the Irish glitterati and there was no way she’d give that up. Before I had Anna, Jen would come over and stay with us every couple of months. Thankfully, Jen and David always got on well, Jen finding David’s ‘quirks’ hilarious rather than ominous (‘he’s a bit of a neat freak but not in a serial killer sort of way’); and David rating Jen as a ‘good house guest’ because she ‘makes her own bed’, ‘doesn’t slam doors’ and ‘doesn’t leave coffee-stained mugs in the sink’.
Yet things started to change between me and Jen when I had Anna. For as long as I have known her, Jen has never wanted children, going so far as calling them ‘shit factories’. I remember once having a deep and meaningful discussion with her about it when we were both pissed. David and I had been talking about trying for a baby and it had made me realise how much I wanted one. Jen had looked thoughtful for a bit, and said, ‘It’s tough to describe, but there has never been any part of me that wants children. I don’t seem to possess the same feelings about babies that other people have. It’s just the way it is.’
And because of the way she explained it, I didn’t feel sad or sorry for her. I respected her: she felt the way she felt, and that was it.
What I hadn’t bargained for was how much our friendship would change when Anna was born. I would see the texts from her flashing up but barely had time to read them, let alone reply. How could she ever understand what I was going through? Keeping Anna alive was as much as I could cope with. Even if I had wanted to text Jen back, I was too sleep-deprived to write anything coherent.
One particularly bad day, the landline rang at 6.30 p.m., just as I was about to put Anna in the bath. I ignored it. The only thing worse than a landline ringing when there is a new baby in the house, is the cheery and over-enthusiastic knock of the postman when both mother and baby are desperately trying to get some sleep. Then the landline rang again. Swearing prolifically, I wrapped my naked daughter in a towel and walked begrudgingly downstairs to pick up the phone. It was Jen.
‘Hey, stranger! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for days,’ she said, traffic noises in the background.
‘Oh, hi, how are you?’ I replied, trying t
o keep hold of the receiver and a wriggly baby at the same time.
‘Fine, fine. You’ll never guess what happened in the pub just now. Do you remember Liam from uni? The one who we all used to fancy? Well, I just bumped into him and he asked me out on a date. Told him I’d think about it. What do you think? He’s not as good-looking as he used to be. I mean, sexy, svelte twenty-year-old Liam with the trendy blond hair is now early forties, chubby, balding Liam, but he’s still a nice guy, you know?’
While she babbled on, I was suddenly struck with a terrible feeling of clarity. I didn’t give a fuck about some guy I couldn’t even remember, or her love life, for that matter.
Stifling my frustration, I said as nicely as I could that I needed to get Anna to bed, and would it be OK to call her back a bit later. And that would have been the end of it, except at that moment Jen decided to quiz me about motherhood in a way she obviously felt was amusing.
‘What? Sure, it’s only six thirty,’ she laughed. ‘My mother used to have me up until all hours, on her lap in front of the telly.’
‘Well,’ I said, trying to match her lightness of tone, ‘if I don’t get Anna into bed by seven o’clock, she will get overtired and will be up on the hour every hour, and then I will be fit for the nuthouse!’
‘Oh, Saoirse,’ Jen laughed, ‘you’re such a first-time mum!’
It was those words that neatly summarised the growing chasm between us. The great kids versus no kids divide. Jen, one of the only people in the whole world who had always ‘got’ me – knew what I was thinking before I opened my mouth and always said the right thing when I was feeling bad about myself – suddenly didn’t get me any more.
YES! I wanted to scream. I am a first-time mum. I live with the fear and guilt of this new role every waking minute. Do you know, Jen, that every night before I go to sleep I lie awake in bed ticking off all the ways I might harm Anna or how she might be harmed by others? No? Well, I could slip and fall and drop her down the stairs, or I could forget to put the brake on the buggy and she could roll right into traffic, or I might accidentally drop her out of the sling when I’m bending down. Do you know why I haven’t set foot in the car since I had Anna? It’s because I am afraid of crashing it and killing her.