“Look at him in his little white dress!” Dee said.
“That’s actually a christening shawl,” Emily clarified, and they all guffawed again, even more heartily.
“He’s gorgeous,” Laura chimed in magnanimously. “He’s the spit of you. The absolute spit.”
“Um, thank you,” Emily said awkwardly. She still found it disconcerting, this need people seemed to have to reassure her that the baby bore some resemblance to either of his parents. They would chop him up into parts, and insist that he had Conor’s nose but Emily’s eyes. It was like a kind of false flattery – as though either of them had had any control over the matter at all.
“Come on. Sit down, Emily,” Maggie urged.
Out of the corner of her eye, Emily saw Liz, Eamon and the five boys enter and go to the top of the church.
“I shouldn’t really . . .”
“Just for a minute,” Maggie insisted. Emily squeezed in beside them, adding her car seat to the cluster on the pew in front. “Tell us, are you expecting a big crowd?” Maggie wanted to know.
“No,” Emily admitted. “It’s all very last minute, what with Conor going away tomorrow.”
“Of course,” Maggie said. “We were thinking of having Chloe’s christening on a Friday – you know, when most people are at work. Tiernan’s relatives alone would come to two hundred and forty-three.”
“We’re keeping it to a hundred,” Dee confided. “A nice manageable number.”
Emily and Conor were only having forty people today, but Emily had been up since dawn disinfecting toilets and making interesting sandwiches in the shapes of boats. She was exhausted.
There was a funny little silence now. “Isn’t it great that we’re all together again?” Maggie heartily declared.
“Great,” the women all echoed.
“And we thought we’d never get out of St Martha’s!”
“Well, you didn’t, Maggie. Imagine, sixteen days overdue! It must have been a record!”
And they all laughed again.
Now that the formalities were over, the women got down to the real business. They huddled in together over the five baby car seats. Emily huddled in too. Wasn’t it great to catch up with them all again?
“How is Chloe feeding?” Dee immediately wanted to know.
“Great,” Maggie confided. “She’s on juice and everything now.”
“Juice!” Laura cried. “Baby 2 won’t even drink water. But he’s putting on weight really well.”
“Good for him! And how’s Robert’s cradle-cap, Emily?”
Emily wanted to tell Maggie to keep her voice down. Announcing it to the whole church! “Fine. I’m massaging it with olive oil.”
“Olive oil?” Dee was disapproving. “No, no, you need some of that special shampoo, Emily. That’ll clear it up in no time.”
“Right,” Emily said, a bit stiff. She’d already tried the shampoo; half of Robert’s head had washed away with the suds.
“And how’s Regina sleeping for you, Dee?”
“Oh, great. We got eight hours of a stretch out of her last night!”
“Eight hours!” Everyone was very envious.
“Chloe only slept for six,” Maggie said.
“My boys went for five,” Laura said.
Emily said nothing. Robert had never slept for more than three hours at a stretch since the day he’d been born two months ago. Maybe if he were a better sleeper Emily wouldn’t look so much like a washed-out old rag. She wished now that she’d made more of an effort for today. She was wearing a loose-fitting outfit she’d already had in her wardrobe, which she had thought looked perfectly respectable. She just didn’t have the energy to traipse down to Cork to scour the outsize shops with Robert in tow. She wished she had now. The girls all looked fantastic, like they were going to a wedding. Maggie’s cream trousers still had the shop creases in them. And how come they all looked so thin?
On the pew in front, Robert stirred and started a low, lone whinge. Emily looked down at him, willing him to go back to sleep. He cried quite a lot for no apparent reason, usually in the car when she was in the fast lane on the motorway. Or at night, just as she was falling into an exhausted asleep. She would strip him down and look for signs of rashes or stray nappy flaps, but there would be nothing. Up and down they would walk on the landing, him grief-stricken and her guilt-ridden that she did not know what was wrong with him.
“Maybe you should pick him up,” Dee eventually said. Emily’s face felt hot at the implication of neglect.
“He sometimes settles on his own,” she said defensively. It was true.
He didn’t. His whinge changed into a cry.
“Now, now,” Emily said, furiously rocking the car seat. She was aware of the girls monitoring the situation closely, hoping against hope that Robert didn’t wake up their own babies. Laura had started to rock the twins a bit nervously.
More embarrassed, Emily reached down and undid Robert’s harness, and scooped him up from the car seat. She took off his little white christening hat and the shawl. He was probably boiling, that was what was bothering him.
“So tell us, Laura, are you breast-feeding the twins?” she asked brightly, bobbing Robert up and down with an air of nonchalance. Shut up now, Robert, she pleaded. After all I do for you, give me a fucking break.
“Oh no,” Laura declared, looking shocked. “Nobody could manage that. Besides, it gives Mark a chance to get involved.”
No wonder she looked so bloody fresh if the husband was doing all the work.
Robert’s face grew redder and redder as he looked at Emily pathetically. She saw Conor’s family, seated near the top of the church, turn around with concern, and she teetered between mortification and total sympathy with Robert. Did he have a dirty nappy? A quick sniff told her no. She put her hand on his forehead. But he had no temperature. Tell me what’s wrong with you, she begged him.
“Poor Robert!” Maggie said, awkwardly. Dee and Laura exchanged looks. Chloe, Regina, Baby 1 and Baby 2 slept on angelically.
Robert’s heartfelt wails filled the church now, and everyone looked distressed, apart from Liz’s five boys who looked down avidly. Emily craned her neck for Conor. Where the hell was he? She bitterly regretted her airy decision that they should drive to the church separately. After all, they lived separately. Both of them were very careful not to lose sight of that.
“Do you think maybe he’s hungry?” Dee ventured, rocking her own silent, gorgeous daughter.
“I fed him an hour ago,” Emily said stiffly.
But, on cue, he started rooting around her chest, trying to find a nipple. He was starving.
“Oh!” Emily said. “Look at that!”
And indeed they did, the whole damned congregation now, including the priest who had ambled out to prepare the readings. She felt watchful eyes on her as she tried to hitch up her top and open down the flap on her maternity bra without dropping Robert. It was hard enough to do in the solitude of your own home, never mind in front of a bloody audience and God.
What she really wanted to do was go out to the car and feed him there. But the girls would probably think she was acting like breastfeeding was something to be ashamed of. But she just didn’t feel competent or confident enough just yet to whip them out wherever she happened to be. And they were her breasts at the end of the day, a private part of herself. She didn’t feel they had become any less private just because she was breastfeeding.
Robert, sensing a good nosh-up on the way, grew frantic now, clawing at her skin with his little fingers. She turned away from the watching eyes and hiked him up under her jumper. For once, he latched on immediately and closed his eyes in bliss. She always liked this bit. It was the one time he made her feel really useful, and she wished that she were alone with him to enjoy it.
“There’s a restaurant in Cork that doesn’t allow breastfeeding at the table,” Dee announced. “When I rang to make a booking, I asked.”
“Disgraceful,” Emily
muttered.
“Maybe we should boycott it,” Laura declared.
Emily didn’t have the energy to boycott anything. How come Maggie, Dee and Laura were coping so well? Did they just have easier babies?
Emily felt guilty now for heaping the blame for her own shortcomings onto Robert, and she hugged him closer. She would try harder. And she would never be caught again wearing her dressinggown at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Robert’s guzzling sounds filled the church, or so Emily thought anyway, and he was taking twice as long as he usually did. Maggie, Dee and Laura occasionally clucked benignly, and checked every now and again to see how he was doing.
“There! Isn’t that better?” Dee said to Robert as he eventually finished up and Emily sat him upright on her knee. Raging, Emily patted his back rather harder than usual, and he gave a huge burp. At the top of the church, Tommy and Robbie broke into loud sniggers. Eamon roundly clipped them around the ear. Robbie started to cry.
Emily felt fresh sweat break out under her armpits. This day was turning into a disaster.
“I was reading a new report that said formula could well be better for children in the long run,” Dee offered into the silence.
“Is that a fact,” Emily said tightly, regretting even inviting Dee. Inviting any of them! But they had all been so close in Martha’s, sisters-in-arms, taking on the world together. Giving birth together. Dee had even had a look at Emily’s perineum after the birth to tell her what the damage was. And now look at her – at all of them – sitting there prim and superior! It was like they were strangers.
Suddenly, Dee’s immaculately made-up face gave a violent twitch. Her eyes screwed up uncontrollably and she started crying. Really crying, sobbing, and a thin keen of despair came from her mouth.
Emily was so taken aback that she just gawked. So did Laura and Maggie. The rest of the congregation pretended not to notice.
“I tried to breastfeed. I wore the nipples off myself,” Dee sobbed. “After two weeks she was nearly dead with starvation and the district nurse said I had to go on formula.”
Maggie and Laura didn’t seem to know what to say. Emily stepped in, strongly. “You really shouldn’t take the breastfeeding thing so seriously, Dee. She looks great on formula. Doesn’t she, girls?” She looked hard at Maggie and Laura for a bit of support. She was getting the strong whiff of pretence all around. Well, bugger that. “Come on. It’s hard work,” she declared. “We all know it’s bloody hard work.”
“Thank you, Emily!” Dee cried. “And everyone expects you to be so fucking happy all the time! Derek coming home from work and wondering why I’m not grinning from ear to ear with joy when all I’ve talked about for the past three years is having a baby!”
Laura’s composure disintegrated even more rapidly. “And they try to help, don’t they? To make the dinner, to pick up some of the filthy laundry off the floor, but that just makes you feel like you’ve been sitting around on your arse all day long!”
They seemed to have forgotten entirely that they were in a church.
“And the visitors!” Maggie chimed in avidly. “All Tiernan’s bloody sisters who keep telling me to get the baby into a routine. A routine! And there’s me sitting on the couch hoping they won’t stay long enough for me to offer them coffee, because I haven’t made it to the shops for milk because she’s puked once and poohed twice before we’ve even made it to the car and I just don’t have the energy left!”
Emily sat back and let them have their say. They were dying to. Honestly! What a crowd of ninnies they all were, herself included, trying to put up a good front, trying to be superwomen!
Dee had stopped crying now, and went on in a low, ashamed voice. “Sometimes I hate Regina. Sometimes I wish she had never been born. That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? If the district nurse knew I was thinking these things, they’d whip her away from me and into care.”
She didn’t hate her at all. That was obvious from the way she was cradling her so protectively. Laura and Maggie put their arms around her to comfort her.
“It’s just that you can’t imagine life going on and on like this,” Emily said sensibly. “No sleep, no life outside the house, nothing in common with your friends any more who come over to tell you about their nights out and who’s shagging who in work. And they coo over her and rock her and tell you how lucky you are. Then they hand her back and go off to join the real world,” she finished up.
Dee and Laura and Maggie looked up, their perfect mascara a bit streaked now. “You’ve had those days too?” Maggie asked incredulously. Emily? Surely not!
“I’ve had those weeks,” Emily declared.
“Oh thank God, I thought I was a freak,” Dee shouted happily, and the priest on the altar looked down sharply. “I even thought I might have postnatal depression,” she went on, quieter.
“So did I!” Maggie exclaimed.
“Me too!” Laura added.
By the time the front pews of the church had filled up, the girls were smiling again, and handing around tissues, and promising to phone each other up, day or night, whenever they felt like chucking their babies out the window and opening a bottle of vodka.
“Not that I’d ever do it, not really,” Maggie anxiously clarified, looking around the church as though she expected a district nurse to be eavesdropping, ready to root out dissident mothers.
“Oh, me neither,” Dee agreed very quickly. “And I didn’t mean that thing I said about slipping her Valium.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
That peculiar tension, the awkwardness, had disappeared, and Emily felt herself relax for the first time all day. She looked at Maggie and Dee and Laura as they fussed over each other’s babies and she loved them all over again.
She put back on Robert’s christening hat and the shawl. He gazed up at her intensely, unwaveringly. For all her inadequacies, he seemed to find her irresistible. When she picked him up, he would instinctively cuddle into her. His eyes had started to follow her around the room, and when she spoke, he would look in the direction of her voice.
Nobody had ever loved Emily like that. Not Conor, or Emily’s own mother, or anybody else in the world. It made her feel very humble.
It also aroused a fierce feeling of protectiveness in her. Murderous feelings, even.
If anyone even told Robert to feck off, she was scared that she would pounce on them and strangle the life out of them with her bare hands. It was as if she had turned into one of those primitive creatures in a David Attenborough nature documentary, fighting tooth and nail for the survival of her cub. With minor differences of course; she did her foraging for food at the baby fruit-juice section of the supermarket, and Robert’s most predatory enemies would probably be found at the local crèche.
Robert did a little posset now, and Emily admired it before wiping it away.
On the altar, the priest looked at his watch and went off to round up the lone altar boy. The service would be starting soon.
“Listen, I’d better go on up. I’ll see you afterwards,” she whispered to the girls now.
“And we should have some news later on this afternoon. You know, about Martha’s.”
Maggie, Laura and Dee barely looked up from their babies.
“Oh, yes,” said Maggie, vaguely. Maggie, who had marched up and down in her slippers in the rain; Maggie who had mooted the idea of a hunger strike! Now she was acting as though the battle to save the hospital had been someone else’s entirely!
But perhaps Emily felt the same, if she were honest with herself. It all seemed so long ago. They were different people now, with different battles. They were mothers.
Behind her, the church door swung open and she turned around expectantly. But it was only her mother, decked out in a florid two-piece and a hat. Her rosary beads were already wrapped around her knuckles in anticipation of a good praying session. Some things never changed, although Pauline had cut back on the number of Masses she attended a week from five t
o two. She was still addicted to funerals, though, and rarely missed one.
“A great day, a great day,” she said, delirious at the prospect of welcoming another innocent soul into the Catholic fold. Conor had told her last week that they were considering an ecumenical service just to rile her up.
“I just saw Conor drive up,” she said, looking at Emily with that familiar disappointment.
“Good,” Emily said, wondering if Pauline would be able to contain herself, at least for today.
She wasn’t. “I just don’t know what you’re thinking of!” she said, shaking her head so violently that her hat slipped down over one ear.
“Yes, thank you, Mammy –”
“Isn’t it enough that you have him living in a separate house? Do you have to drive him away to Belgrade too?”
“Belgium. And I’m not driving him anywhere. He wants to go.”
Expecting Emily Page 38