The Girl Who Couldn't Say No: Memoir of a teenage mom

by Tracy Engelbrecht

  All the way through, I found myself doing a fabulous Obnoxious Moody Teenager impression. Panic and misery set in as I saw myself relinquishing responsibility for my child. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to be doing all this stuff, warming hearts with my natural flair for motherhood. Had we been home, of course, this would all have been different. Instead of reacting defensively to my mother’s help, I would have welcomed it, I imagine. But there, out of my depth and surrounded by what I imagined to be a hostile audience, I thought I’d lost him. Given him up. So soon, without even having tried properly. I felt like an utter failure. And since I was damned if I were going to cry in front of everybody, it came across as sulking.

  Alarm bells must have been ringing in everybody’s heads: “Look at that. It had to happen. Her mother’s doing everything. She can’t be bothered to look after her child herself. And that attitude…”

  Worst-case scenario – sad but inevitable – Irresponsible Teenage Mother Lets Child Down, And Long-Suffering Granny Takes Charge. My dear mother was only trying to help, to take the pressure, the scrutiny, off me, and somewhere under the turmoil of mothturmoily freak-out I knew that.

  Still, I badly wanted to wrest Steven away from her, to screech: “Let me see to my own child, goddammit! Do I look like an idiot?” Or, “If one more person touches that baby, I’m going to fucking chop their hands off!”

  I held it together and didn’t swear at any old ladies, but it was a close thing. My bitchy sighs and eye-rolling were noted by all and the rest of the visit was tense and awful. All the fun had gone out of it. I’d hurt my mother’s feelings. She thought I didn’t appreciate her help, and her own instinctive reaction kicked in – the one that goes, “Fine! I’ll never help you again! I’ll just keep away from you, that’s obviously what you want!”

  I felt clueless, selfish and lazy. And on top of that, I’d hardly had any time with Steven at all. I needed to take him home, to lie with him on my bed, to talk to him, to hold him, learn about him and love him. At our own pace and in our own place. Home. Yet, there we sat. Drinking weak tea out of flowery porcelain cups, while struggling to keep our heads in line with those damn antimacassars. (That is what they’re called, right? Those crocheted jobs made fashionable in the 1950s and placed over the backs of chairs and couches to absorb the Brilliantine off the heads of the menfolk? Question: What the heck is a macassar and why do we have to be anti them? What has the poor macassar ever done to us? Where are the promacassars?)

  I watched the smug, hateful grandfather clock all afternoon. Every time I looked, it seemed to have stopped ticking. It was always just five minutes after the last time I’d checked. Tick… tick… tick…

  An eternity passed before the clock struck the magical hour of five o’clock, when all good visitors must go, when they begin to indicate their intention by fidgeting and making tentative, polite noises of, We Should Think About Making A Move… I barely restrained myself from whooping with relief, racing around to gather up Steven’s paraphernalia. I was half-way down the garden path, baby and bag in tow, while Mom was still graciously refusing one last cup of tea and fending off foil-wrapped slices of fruitcake and onion bread proffered on such occasions.

  Just take the fricking fruitcake, for God’s sake! (Why always fruitcake, by the way?) Graciously accept the baked goods and do a runner before they remember the tea again! Takeaway confectionery is a bonus in any household. And stale confectionary could be used as building material or blunt-force trauma murder weapon, should the need arise.

  After what seemed like weeks, we were home. Ever so carefully, I carried my boy down the front steps and into the house. It was a special moment. Finally, all the drama and pain seemed to be at an end. We were together at last, all of us, and it was right. I cried. Yet again.

  But as wonderful as it was to be home, the first night waimerst nigs hell. Much production was made of bath time, the fiendish occult horror that is night feeds still waiting in the wings.

  “Do you really think we should bath him now?” asked my mother, timidly. I was puzzled by the question.

  Yes yes, of course! I’ve got all these lovely bath-time gadgets and equipment and smellies… of course we bath him. Why ever not? That’s what good mothers do, isn’t it? Bath their babies? Right? Am I missing something? I must have missed something. Dammit. Is there some rule I’m not aware of?

  Obviously I didn’t say any of this to her. The mere fact that she’d asked the question in that nervous I-don’t-think-it’s-a-good-idea-but-don’t-dare-suggest-it tone indicated that she had something on her mind. Hmm… try as I might, I couldn’t figure it out, so I was forced to reveal my ignorance. I hate that.

  “Um, you don’t think we should bath him, Ma? Why not?” I asked, equally timidly.

  And there it was. The defining moment. The beginning of our astounding, record-breaking feats of Walking on Eggshells. We did it then, we do it now. We’re really good at it. Call it tact or diplomacy, call it beating about the bush or choosing our words carefully to minimise damage, we’re the champions. We have, on occasion, slipped up and accidentally let rip with what we really think and feel, but not often. I recall a particularly nasty fight during which I lost it and threw a soggy, disposable nappy across the room, narrowly missing my dear mother’s head. Good times…

  “Um … you know, it’s quite late already. Don’t you think it’s a bit cold to bath him now?” Ma cringed as she said it. She must have had premonitions of projectile nappies.

  Oh dear. I had missed something. Six hours into this motherhood lark and I’m already about to give my child hypothermia. Nice.

  I bristled. (Yeah, that’s such a good word. Describes the sensation perfectly: the little hairs on my arms rising, leg and jaw muscles tensing as irritation seethed within.) I bristled mostly because she was right and I was stupid – but also because of those three words she uses every time she tries to sound casual and nonchalant. Don’t you think…? That little phrase so pisses me off, for no rational reason at all. I seems to say, “Why the hell didn’t you think of this?”

  Ah – but then, oh joy and hallelujah – I was saved. I remembered the chapter on bath time in one of my many second-hand baby books. I think it was the one whose pages are populated entirely by women with long, straight hair parted down the middle, or else permed beyond recognition, wearing brown polyester sundresses and false eyelashes. The words “Your husband” are used a lot in that one. Lots of soft-focus shots of mother holding baby, and zero pirds and zectures of breastfeeding. Which is crazy, because that’s what you really need, right? Actual photographs of actual women breastfeeding actual babies, so that you can see exactly what you’re supposed to do. When you come right down to it, what does a properly latched baby look like, dammit? We need to know these things. Apparently, in 1975, vague descriptions were good enough. Probably explains why an entire generation of children was bottle fed. You don’t need to use the word “nipple” to explain bottle feeding, much less flash any real ones. Oh, the horror!

  According to the Sacred Illustrated Text of Smug Seventies Motherhood, it is apparently occasionally permissible not to bath your baby. On such occasions, a technical procedure known as topping and tailing would suffice. Topping and tailing? Who comes up with these names? And no, it has nothing to do with carrots or oral sex at all.

  I was nervous at first, dithering a bit, constantly wanting to check the book to make sure I was doing it right, but I was immensely proud that I remembered how to do it: the bowl of cooled, boiled water for the eyes, the surgical spirits for the umbilical cord, all of it.

  As I washed his tiny face (a fresh piece of cotton-wool for each eye), his pudgy little starfish hands, I found myself relaxing. It happened gradually, as I blew kisses on his tummy, snuggled my face into his sweet Elizabeth Anne’s scented neck. I could see his big, serious eyes trying to focus on me and I was fascinated by this little boy, this tiny person who needed me so much, and whom I needed even more. I dre
ssed him in his cuddly sleep suit (using them for real, at last!), then wrapped him in more blankets than were strictly necessary, and realised that it was done. I’d done it, all by myself, without mother or nurse or book, and he was still alive.

  Oh, wonderful feeling! What an amazing sense of achievement, of competence, and totally unfamiliar, too. The tugging, stretching sensation of incredible, scary love growing stronger. It’s like having a bubble inside your chest, a bubble that expands a little every day, catching you off guard sometimes, making you feel it might burst – like you might burst from happiness and love and contentment. As if you could ever have too much of those things. There is no better state of being in the world than this. I sat holding him in my arms for hours, talking, cuddling and just watching his face until he fell asleep. Yes, yes, I know you’re not supposed to do this, but fuck it – wouldn’t you?

  I eventually relented and, with great ceremony, put my sleeping little angel to bed in his pram. Swaddled up cozily, lying on his side, blanket tucked behind him so he wouldn’t roll onto his stomach or back and die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I made a note of which side I’d put him down on, so that I could alternate sides to avoid the grossly misshapen flat head scenario. All as per spec. I was expecting him to wake up for a feed about three hours or so later, dreading the decision of whether or not to wake him, if he didn’t stir of his own accord.

  But three hours was a lifetime away. Right now, my concern was whether or not he was breathing. I checked and >Bucheckedrechecked about a dozen times in the next couple of hours. I should have tried to sleep then, while I had the chance, but I was too wound up, almost hyperactive. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could sleep at a time like this. To sleep would be to waste valuable baby-gazing time. I didn’t want to let him out of my sight for a second, in case he stopped breathing, but mostly in case he disappeared while I was sleeping. In case some evil, reverse version of the baby-bringing stork dropped by to take him back where he really belonged. Metaphorically speaking, obviously. I knew perfectly well that storks didn’t really bring babies. I was there, remember? I knew how he got out (and how he got in, not to put too fine a point on it).

  But damn, was I ignorant. I want to laugh like a braying ass now, when I think of that silly girl who would give up precious, magical, beautiful sleep. That was the last time in my life I can remember feeling like that. From that night on, to this day, I’d give my left kidney for just twenty minutes of uninterrupted sleep. Jeez, I’d take ten minutes and throw in a chunk of my liver for free as well. Let me have a pillow and I swear you could take my corneas and I wouldn’t even notice.

  That night was endless. The Night of the Living Dead. He didn’t wake up when he should have and I agonised for ages over whether to wake him or not. Eventually, I decided I had to – what if he starved to death in the night? Tried to wake him; he wasn’t pleased. He wouldn’t take the bottle. He didn’t cry or make a fuss, he just refused to drink. Tried everything – warm milk, room temperature milk, different teats. Nothing. He just became increasingly annoyed. And I became increasingly panicked. My mother tried (maybe he feels you’re getting tense? Grrrr). I tried again. He was having none of it. Gave up on the bottle and tried a medicine dropper, then a teaspoon. Drip, drool, wipe, grizzle. One millilitre at a time. Do you know how much a millilitre actually is? It’s a vast, absurd volume of liquid. Do you know how long it takes to get one measly 50ml feed down the throat of an angry newborn? It takes a very long time, let me tell you. About two hours and four cups of coffee, to be precise.

  The procedure was repeated twice during the night, and once again in the early morning. Poor child. I should have left him to sleep. Trust me to try and do things by the book – the really ancient, out-of-date Old-Wiveish book, too. The nurses at the hospital had told me 50ml every three hours and, by God, there’d be no deviating from instructions.

  It’s all about Routine, you see. You gotta establish a routine, or else you’re screwed. Or so they’d have us believe. If anybody had told me then that babies know when they’re hungry and will not let themselves starve – I would have laughed in their faces. I know this now – I have a deliciously healthy, demand-fed second child to prove it. But this knowledge was still years away. I struggled through the night, my mother sitting up with me, both of us taking turns with the dropper, me crying, pleading with him to please just swallow a little. It was awful. Would it always be like this? I felt sick at the thought.

  It did get better. As soon as my mother and I returned from a teat-buying spree. We were convinced he didn’t>It he did like the ones we had and would drink better if only we could find the perfect nipple-replacement. And we did. That afternoon Steven gulped his feeds down like a baby starved. We were excited, but felt guilty, too, at how stupid we’d been, using those cheap-shit teats and depriving him of nourishment.

  At last he was taking milk – I wasn’t a dismal failure of a mother, he wouldn’t die, I wouldn’t go to jail for child neglect. Oh happy day.

  Just a pity we didn’t pay more attention to the small print on the teat packaging. The tiny print that read, “Cereal Teat”. It was only a few days later that we discovered the giant, x-shaped holes the size of ten-cent pieces in these teats, designed to feed runny cereal through a bottle (who the hell would do that?). Steven wasn’t guzzling down his milk because he was starving hungry – he was just trying not to drown!

  The first weeks passed in a blur of sleep deprivation, Steri-Nappi and marathon sessions of gooey-eyed baby-gazing. I wasn’t one of those mothers who’d put baby down in his bouncy chair and get on with fabulous yummy-mummy things like pedicures and lunch with the girls, as in, “the baby is going to fit into my lifestyle… Bloody ha ha, by the way. That’s just something Marie Claire invented to make us dowdy mothers feel bad about ourselves and thus prompt us to buy more magazines that would tell us which lipstick would solve all our problems.

  Besides, I didn’t have a lifestyle before Steven came along. Now I did, but it didn’t involve much lipstick. My new lifestyle was one of unwashed hair and pyjamas at two in the afternoon. But I loved it. I loved every minute of it, even the hard days when he seemed grumpy and I couldn’t understand what he wanted. Even on the days I was so tired I couldn’t see straight by lunchtime. I held him ninety percent of the time in those first weeks, even when he was sleeping. Shooting myself in the foot completely when, later on, he wouldn’t go to sleep by himself. But it made me happy.

  Poor little Maria didn’t get the same treatment when she was a newborn. I was cured of my OCD baby-holding by then, and was even capable of going to the toilet without taking her with me, an unthinkable lapse in Steven’s baby days. Thinking back now, I’m sad to realise that some of the details have faded in my memory over the years. Back then, I was so sure I’d remember every second forever. But then you wake up one day and realise you can’t remember the name of your first real boyfriend, but you do know all the words to every song Barney ever sang. Stuff like that could depress a girl.

  What does stick in my mind about those first months is yoghurt. Lots and lots of yoghurt. It was the only thing I could eat. I couldn’t face the thought of any other food. Suppertime was especially hard, with its awful smells of frying onions and grilled chicken. It was almost as bad as morning sickness, though caused by something entirely different – adrenalin and nerves. I became wonderfully skinny, but I was way too busy, tired and consumed by motherly devotion to notice or care. (The skinny thing didn’t last, by the way, which ti way, wis not really surprising. The phase passed only too quickly and I was soon back to my normal macaroni-cheese-scoffing, chunky self.)

  There is no end to the ways in which parents can get things horribly wrong. And you don’t have to try very hard. Even when you think you’re doing it right, you probably aren’t.

  Like the day I gave Steven his first proper bath – an incident we still laugh about (well, I don’t find it that funny, personally). The poor baby started yelling and squirming in
the bath and I couldn’t figure out why. I checked the water temperature (for the fifth time, with both elbows, wrists and probably my tongue as well), I checked for nappy rash (no chance of that, his nappy was changed roughly every fifteen minutes, whether or not he thought of weeing in it), I searched for pin pricks (even though I used one of those Snappi things and not a safety pin). Then I noticed the colour of his arm. And not a moment too soon – it was probably about to fall off. That corpsy shade of bluish-purple scared me so much I very nearly did drop him in the water. In my zeal, I’d held his arm too tightly. Then, in my fluster, I managed to get soap on his hands which he rubbed into his eyes. Goddammit. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to soap baby’s hands? Didn’t you read the books? They’re very clear on this point. Next thing you’ll be feeding him Sto-pain intravenously – and then you’re one step away from those mothers who let their children run with scissors. Call yourself a mother? Sheesh.

  This was a new voice in my head, a new incarnation of Sensible Tracy, but more like Sensible-Tracy-On-Crack, perhaps. Sensible-Gone-Psycho. Sensible Tracy from the Seventh Circle of Hell. I think she came standard with my brand new guilt gland. Sensible-Gone-Psycho’s job is to make me doubt myself. She’s the evil little demon sitting on my shoulder, whispering how pathetic I am – 24/7.

  She knows all the tricks, and she’s sneaky. She disguises herself as the Voice of Good Motherliness, but she lies. She convinces me I can’t have the things I want, she shouts at me when I get things wrong, she tells me I don’t deserve to be happy. I’ve taken to calling her Sister Tracy, because she has the shrill nails-on-a-blackboard voice of a nun I once knew. She’s settled in very comfortably over the years, and these days it seems she’s pretty much in charge. Not so healthy. I need to kill her off, but I don’t know how. I’m thinking arsenic. Or a stake through the heart. Seriously, that bitch must die.