by Anni Taylor
Then, all of a sudden, he was out. He was set free of the machines, and we were going to be trusted to take him home. Slight hearing issues in his left ear. Possible ongoing respiratory problems. But in general, healthy. Still, it felt wrong to leave the job of monitoring him to a pair of fallible humans.
At home, I exhausted myself just watching him breathe. I insisted on having a breathing monitor attached to him, in case I fell asleep.
Around this time, he turned into a little snapping turtle. In the hospital, I’d had to express milk into bottles. Now, I was expected to plug him directly into the source: my boobs. My nipples cracked and bled and pained. I dreaded each breastfeed. I couldn’t look at those soft-lens pastel-coloured, gloating breastfeeding photos in magazines anymore.
We engaged the services of a breastfeeding expert who guilted me into soldiering on for another month. When Tommy was two and a half months old, I snuck down to the grocery store and bought a can of formula. And fed it to him. I felt like a drug dealer, feeding crack to a helpless infant.
The formula healed my nipples, but it didn’t help Tommy sleep any better at night—or during the day. It wasn’t the golden elixir that would stop him from crying. Luke tried to help, but he’d manage to fall asleep even with a screaming baby in his arms. I didn’t know how that was possible. Crying babies were as loud as 115 decibels (louder than a jackhammer).
The books about babies talked about a mystical babymoon—like a honeymoon, except with a baby and without sex. A holiday in which you and the baby shut the world out and got to know each other.
Why did I feel so ragged? Why didn’t I know how to separate out Tommy’s cries and know what he wanted? Where was my mother’s intuition?
I was a phony. And Tommy knew it. And he cried all the harder because of it.
I had dreams. Dreams that exploded through my mind during the snatched hours of sleep in between Tommy waking and screaming. I dreamed of Tommy being in pieces all around the house. A leg here. An arm there. Like a broken doll. I’d try to collect the pieces and put him back together before Luke found out. But Luke always found out. In other dreams, I’d leave Tommy on a picnic rug in a park and I’d drive away, feeling desperate but free.
Around the four-month mark, things slowly started to get better. In some ways. In most ways, I was still lost.
Before my pregnancy with Tommy, my days had structure. I had casting calls and stage shows and parties and (languid) dinners in restaurants.
Now, after Tommy, my days were jelly. No firm ground anywhere. How had my life changed so dramatically? Luke was still doing the same things he’d been doing before Tommy. Tommy had barely altered his world.
At first, I managed my new life like an acting role. The housewife, out shopping for matching household appliances, together with her latest accessory—the baby—safely being paraded about in a sporty thousand-dollar baby pram.
I acted like the young wife loyal to her husband and his career. I acted contented to be the one with the mixed smell of baby poo and lavender soap emanating from her skin. Those other women walking their babies in prams were surely doing the same as me—pretending to be deep in mystical babymoon bliss.
I told myself that once Luke and I got Tommy past the wake-all-night-long stage, we could travel. Babies could travel, couldn’t they? They surely weighed less than a backpack. So we could just pack our stuff and pack the baby and go.
But Luke no longer wanted to travel. Nothing interested him except the push to gain footholds into the higher end of the Sydney property market. The higher end meant more expensive real estate and bigger commissions.
By the time Tommy was five months old, we were having Saturday lunch with his parents and Sunday walks in the park and visits with Nan on weekday afternoons. We had dinners with Rob and Ellie and clients of Luke’s.
That had become our life.
Visits.
Family lunches.
Client dinners.
Walks in the park.
The best times for me with Tommy were his baths. Untethered from baby clothes and wraps and accessories. Human. Soft, warm, accessible. I’d imagine escaping with him to an island in the South Pacific. Just him and me. We’d swim in the wide blue water. We’d rock to sleep in a hammock overlooking the ocean. When he was old enough, I’d feed him mashed bananas and avocadoes straight from the trees. We’d have no need of the dozens of toys and accessories that parents bought their babies.
I mentioned the jelly days and the South Pacific fantasy to my baby health clinic nurse and was promptly handed a questionnaire. The are-you-depressed? quiz. I scored high on the quiz, but there were no prizes. I didn’t win a South Pacific holiday.
The first plan of attack by the nurse to manage my depression was a mothers’ group—an organised group of mothers (and less often, fathers) who got together to share and support each other. The babies were all at a similar stage of development—four to six months old.
I started driving weekly to the group in my local area.
Swiftly, I learned there were ranks within the group.
First came the rank of wealthy mothers who swapped names of party organisers and house cleaners. They discussed the merits of private schools that their fat-faced babies would one day attend. Some had already put their little Evas and Edwards on the waiting lists for schools.
Next came the rank of achievers. Their focus was firmly on the achievements of their progeny. Baby signing, musical and mathematical ability were at the forefront of the charge. Baby milestones were old hat.
Next came the naturals—the baby-wearing attachment-parenting earth mothers who spoke a language I didn’t understand. They could pronounce all the names of substances and chemicals in baby lotions and foods. They grew their own vegetables and pureed them and froze them in tiny individual glass containers (with BPA-free plastic lids). They sewed their own clever baby slings and spent a lot of time talking about the materials and designs. They were nice to a fault, but I found no connection.
I hung with the strays, the unranked, the ones who turned up with hasty hairstyles, bereft of homemade things. We’d cling together in the hall. Our prams would be turned inward in a circle, the babies propped up and facing each other—alternately glaring and giggling at each other like small maniacs.
I liked the strays. They said inappropriate things, and they overshared, and they carried mother guilt. I didn’t feel conscious about my fifteen kilos of extra weight I was carrying or my stomach rolls when I was with them. They didn’t care, and they weren’t judging me.
Marta would tell us about her parents’-in-law shady business dealings and the nitty gritty of her prolapse surgery. She described her attempts at anal sex with her husband and the difficulties involved—she was tall and extremely large. Her husband was much shorter than herself: Russell has to prop himself up with pillows under his knees! It takes a bit of adjusting to get the angle right. She and Russell were also swingers. She’d casually popped that snippet of information into the conversation like a discarded cherry seed.
“Oh goodness,” Gina the ex-librarian had exclaimed. “How do you manage it? It’s not for me. Mick and I invited another man into our bedroom eighteen months ago. Before I was pregnant with Cora. It was something we both wanted to do, but it turned out to be a complete disaster!”
I’d listened with the fervour of an acolyte.
A swinger at a mothers’ group! And anal sex! And an extra man in the bedroom! These people were real and exposed. Nothing was hidden or shameful. None of them subscribed to any program.
They were nothing like me. I loved them all because they weren’t. Through them was an escape from my visits-and-lunches life. The conversation had brought back an image of a man I used to know. Flynn O’Callaghan. A gorgeous, eclectic Irish actor who’d broken my heart with his open relationship suggestion. But was I wrong and he right? Did he know something that I didn’t?
Nissa, a dark-skinned lady who’d recently emigrated from India
, had shaken her head at Marta and Gina. “My husband would never do any of that. But he wants to do me every day. I’ve lost all interest in sexy times since the baby. It is a desert wasteland in my privates now. His mother tells me I must give him sex or he’ll leave me.”
Marta had batted her chubby hand in the air. “Tell him and his mother to give you some time to get back on the horse. In the meantime, he can get himself a hobby.”
Nissa had clapped a hand over her mouth and giggled like a little girl.
“I had an affair once.” Those words had randomly come from the most unlikely source. The quietest one of us—Adele—a woman with a tiny waist and the most childbearingest hips I’d ever seen. “Your husband is nothing like mine, Nissa. He only wants sex a couple of times a month. He tells me that’s normal. Maybe it is, but it’s not what I want. He has an easy job—working for his father and he gets lots of time off. But he just wants to play console games or potter around when he’s at home. I have to wait for him to get in the mood. If I ask for sex, he gets all defensive. I mean, men have a serious design flaw—why can’t their penises just be hard all the time? Then we could have sex with them when we choose, the way they do with us. Anyway, I couldn’t cope anymore. I signed up to a dating site. I didn’t really mean for anything to happen. It was just meant to be a release valve. But something did happen. I met someone, and we did it.”
“Just the once?” I had to know.
“No. It went on for seven months,” Adele told me. “The guy kept trying to move things forward. He’d invite me out on the weekends, but I’d always make excuses. I finally admitted to him that I was married. It was awful. I felt like a bad, bad person.”
Marta had dabbed at her baby daughter’s dribble with a tissue. “See, that wouldn’t happen in the swingers’ community. Everyone knows the score. You go in with your eyes—and legs—open.”
I’d thought about Luke and me then. I knew I didn’t want to share him, even though the passion between us had already fizzled out like stale soda. Maybe I was territorial. I wasn’t about to parcel out my land. I didn’t want to bring someone else into the bedroom or join a swingers’ club or have an affair. But my little sub-group within the mothers’ group gave me the bravery to imagine walking away from this life if I had to. I could drop the program and get off the married-life grid.
My mother would have been horrified.
The conversation had swapped then to Marta’s husband’s haemorrhoids that he swore he’d developed in sympathy for his wife’s pregnancy.
Mothers’ group had become the unexpected bright spot in my week. For six months, it became my refuge.
But the day that Luke came home with the news that he’d just bought a house for us was the day that it all changed.
He didn’t tell me where the house was—just told me that we were picking up my grandmother on the way to go and see it. I didn’t suspect anything when we kept driving up Southern Sails Street after getting Nan. I had no idea that the house was going to be on the same street, just up on the hill.
The last thing I’d wanted was to come back here to this street. But I didn’t know how to begin to have that conversation with Luke. He was so proud he was beaming. The townhouse was new, it was beautiful, and it was in an incredible position. How could I say anything negative? We could barely afford it, but Luke said that if we didn’t buy into the market now, we’d miss out.
My mothers’ group was now on the other side of the city. I could have continued to go there. But I let it slide. It was true that Tommy’s sleep times made it hard to undertake a two-hour round trip to the mothers’ group. It was true that Tommy fussed on long car trips. In truth, though, I was mostly just lazy.
So, I settled into my new house with its new furniture and new appliances. Luke liked things brand new. I think one of the things that Luke especially liked about Tommy was that he was new—our own freshly created being.
When Tommy was a year old, Luke’s mother began minding him often enough that I could start looking for acting roles again. And plus, we now lived on the same street, so it was convenient. Nan wasn’t able to look after a baby and her house was anything but babyproof.
But the dream of gaining substantial movie roles was just about over. Due to Tommy, I couldn’t turn up for casting calls on the spur of the moment anymore. I wasn’t free to just walk out the door. I appeared in a couple of commercials and scored a bit part in a made-for-TV movie. I must have looked tired around the edges because my sexy young girl roles in commercials soon became sexless-young-mother roles.
I grew tired of the commercials and of the movie casting calls that either didn’t want me or required me to be on set in another location for weeks for a small part that didn’t pay well. I could no longer do that. Neither Luke nor his mother treated my acting seriously. It was a hobby, something that should never get in the way of Luke’s business.
Just like mothers’ group, I let my acting career slide. It seemed silly, vain even, to keep trying. People had this notion about aspiring actors, that they were chasing a foolish dream and not a real career. It was a dream held together by stardust and face powder and boob glue.
By the time Tommy was eighteen months old, I’d walked away from acting.
I concentrated on Tommy from that point on. My world drew in tight and small. I spent Luke’s money buying Tommy everything a little boy could possibly wish for. Actually, that wasn’t true. Tommy wished for very little. Blocks and cardboard boxes and dirt were his favourites. And boats. He’d scream in excitement when he saw the ferries and yachts cutting across the harbour.
Being with Tommy was like being in another world. Everything slowed down to a snail’s pace. A world where ladybugs and butterflies and slugs were exciting and paper boats sailed off for adventures in puddles. For a while, I was content living in Tommy’s world.
But then the boredom and resentment would crawl over me like a smothering blanket. Sometimes, I hated Tommy. I wanted him to disappear.
Every day was the same thing. Every day the struggle to get him to eat healthy things instead of him screaming for ice-cream and biscuits (or cookies on the days he’d watched the Cookie Monster). Every day the endless what’s that, Mumma? (Even though he knew perfectly well what the thing was that he was pointing to.) Every day the sticky fingers and the poo and the dressing and undressing and the miniature missing socks and the eating of dirt.
On more days than not, I found myself drinking the bottles of alcohol that Luke’s clients had given him for getting a good price for their house.
No bottles of hiphiphurray for me. No one gave me prizes or rewards for my job, which was the job of looking after house and home and the kid. All I had were Tommy’s sippy cups dribbling juice onto the carpet.
Sometimes I woke up on the sofa after I’d had a couple of drinks, not knowing where Tommy was. And I’d have to go look for him. Sometimes, he’d make a game of it and hide from me, and I’d get angry and start yelling his name.
Luke, on the other hand, went from strength to strength, winning industry awards and gaining bigger and bigger clients. The commissions got more impressive. The overseas trips got flashier—not that we ever went away for long.
Along with that, Luke started pointing out things that weren’t getting done around the house. Subtly at first. Then not so subtly. He was used to seeing perfect homes that were styled for sale, and he didn’t understand baskets of washing sitting on our bedroom floor or tangles of paper boats and blocks and playdough in the family room.
In Luke’s view, my role was to clean the house he provided, make meals with the food that he paid for, and care for the child he’d given me (via his sperm).
I didn’t remember any contract with my name on it where I’d agreed to scrub the toilet in return for a roof over my head. I didn’t need Luke’s roof before I had Tommy. I had my own roof, paid for with my own money. As far as I was concerned, Tommy was my day job. Luke could scrub his own damned toilet when he got home f
rom his day job.
Somewhere along that road, even sex started to be on Luke’s terms. He wanted it when and how he wanted it. Somehow, I’d joined the service industry. My job was servicing Luke. Servicing his house, servicing his kid, servicing his stomach, servicing his dick. Because he was paying for it all. He supplied the money, I supplied the service.
His semen became a poison thing. Poisoning my body. A potion given by an evil tyrant. Day by day making me a prisoner of the house. Because his semen had given me Tommy and made all of this happen. And he was starting to make noises about a second child. A brother or a sister for Tommy.
Resentment made of bile lined my gut. I started making excuses whenever Luke touched me: Tommy had worn me out. It was a bad time of the month. The sciatica I’d had ever since Tommy’s pregnancy was playing up. Sometimes it was true. Mostly it wasn’t.
He made comments about the wives and girlfriends of his colleagues. “Lucy Harrington really bounced back after that second baby. Rob and I couldn’t believe it when we saw her in those jeans last night.”
Luke flirted in front of me. Even with Sass. I didn’t blame Sass. Flirting was like breathing to her. It was Luke I blamed.
I was still flabby a whole year after having Tommy. Luke never mentioned it outright. It would have been better if he had. Each subtle dig dug me deeper into the hole. It was only after Tommy went missing that I dropped the baby weight—within weeks.
Silently, I made plans for tomorrow.
25.
PHOEBE
Sunday morning
NAN STIRRED HER TEA AROUND AND around, clinking the spoon against the inside of the cup until my bones felt raw and exposed.
Clink, clink of the spoon on my spine.
Clink, clink on my shoulder bones.