From Here to Maternity

by Sinéad Moriarty

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi, how are you? How’s my favourite grandson?’

  ‘Good, thanks. Actually, Mum, I’m phoning to ask a huge favour.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said, sounding suspicious.

  ‘Amanda has asked me to come back to work – well, she begged me, actually – and has offered me a raise, which is great. But I think it’s a bit too soon for Yuri to go to a crèche so I was wondering if you’d mind him between twelve and half three for me. It’d just be for the first few weeks and I’d pay you.’

  ‘How much?’

  I hadn’t thought she’d accept payment. I had presumed she’d be delighted to spend time with Yuri. I’d only offered because I thought it sounded good.

  ‘Oh, um, how about twenty euro a day?’

  ‘Those poor children in the factories in Thailand earn more than that.’

  ‘Twenty-five?’

  ‘Thirty.’

  What had happened to the doting granny? Suddenly I was dealing with a hard-nosed negotiator and was 150 euro a week poorer, which negated the pay rise and left me with less money than I was originally paid. Still, I didn’t have a choice.

  ‘OK, thirty, then,’ I grumbled, ‘but it seems a lot.’

  ‘Believe it or not, I have a life, Emma. I don’t just sit around here waiting to look after Yuri. I’ll have to rearrange my Tuesday bridge meetings and my book club, so don’t assume I’m a twenty-four-hour nanny service. If you want me to change my life round, you have to make it worth my while. I won’t be taken for granted. I’ve raised my three children already, thank you very much. I’m doing you a favour here so don’t begrudge me a few euro to help you out.’

  I decided to jump in before I got the nobody-appreciates-me speech, which was an old favourite. ‘OK, fine. I appreciate your help and I’m not taking you for granted and I don’t mind paying you. I’m delighted you’ll be looking after Yuri. He adores you and you’re brilliant with him.’

  ‘Yes, well, I was always good with children. I never had any help with you three, I raised you alone while your father was working and studying. It’s important for a child to have its mother around for the first few years.’

  ‘I know, Mum, but I’m only leaving Yuri for a few hours a day and the extra money will come in handy, especially after the adoption costing twenty thousand euro,’ I said, playing my ace. Mum had been appalled: she thought it was disgraceful – as did I – that people who wanted to give orphaned children from other countries a good home should be charged any money, never mind an astronomical sum. I also thought it might make her back down on her daily rate.

  ‘It’s despicable that they charge to much. When I told my bridge-club girls they couldn’t believe it. Shocked they were. You’d think the Russians would be paying you to give their little babies good homes. Anyway, when do I start my new job?’

  ‘Monday, if that’s OK.’

  ‘That’s fine. It gives me a few days to sort things out. And I’d like to be paid weekly, in cash.’

  The next day Jess called to say that her mother-and-baby group was meeting at Sonia’s house the following morning, and did I want to come? I decided to go along. I thought they might give me good tips on childcare options and what was best for young babies – crèches or one-on-one child-minders? I couldn’t rely on Mum to look after Yuri long-term: it wasn’t fair on her and, considering her rate, it was no bargain for me either. It’d be helpful to get some information from other mothers.

  Sonia lived in a mansion with electric gates that swished back to reveal a long, pebbled driveway full of silver jeeps – I had never seen such a variety before. You’d have thought we lived in the Kalahari desert, not the capital city of Ireland. Rangers living in safari parks would have considered those monstrous lumps of steel too big for their needs. I parked my small second-hand car in the corner of the driveway and took a deep breath. ‘OK, Yuri, I’m not sure that this is such a great idea but, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And it’ll be nice for you to hang out with people your own size for an hour or two.’

  Yuri’s serious little face stared up at me as he listened intently to me rambling on. He looked good enough to eat in his little denim dungarees and stripy blue top. I picked him up and hugged him. ‘If we don’t like it, we can always leave,’ I whispered, as I kissed his cheek.

  We climbed up the big stone steps to the front door and rang the enormous bell. A Filipina woman ushered us into a large, sunny living room that was softly decorated in cream and beige. Sitting on the cream sofas and chairs were five women, all dressed as if they were going out for a night on the town. Sonia, in a pair of brown leather trousers and beige halter-neck top – it was January, for God’s sake – waved at me to sit down. Jess shuffled up on the couch and I plonked myself down beside her, wishing I hadn’t worn jeans and a jumper. Jess was in her best wraparound dress and high heels. ‘I thought you said casual coffee morning,’ I muttered, under my breath.

  ‘The others always dress up so I feel I have to.’ She shrugged.

  ‘Welcome, Emma. You know Jess, obviously, and we’ve met,’ drawled Sonia. ‘You’ve met Maura too, so it’s just Juliette and Tamara you don’t know.’

  I smiled at the two svelte, overdressed women sitting opposite me. It was then that I realized Yuri was the only child in the room.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, Pam looks after them downstairs,’ said Sonia.

  ‘I see. Well, I’d better bring Yuri down.’ I got up and went downstairs to find a bunch of children ranging in age from four years to three months. Pam was doing a great job of keeping them entertained. Some were painting, others played with Lego and one baby was fast asleep in his carry-cot.

  Jess’s little daughter Sally rushed over. ‘Hi, Emma. My mummy told me you were coming today. Is this your baby?’

  ‘Yes, it is. His name is Yuri. Will you look after him while I’m upstairs? I know I can trust you to make sure he’s OK. Can you do that for me? And if he cries, come and get me.’

  Sally nodded. ‘I’ll be his mummy.’

  ‘Good girl, that would be great,’ I said, smiling, as she bent down to pat Yuri’s head. Yuri seemed delighted to be with little people again. His eyes were as big as saucers and he was smiling.

  I went over to talk to Pam. ‘Hi, I’m Emma and that’s Yuri. He’s recently been adopted so he might make strange with the other kids. If you have any problems, just give me a shout. You seem to be doing a great job here.’

  Pam smiled. ‘Well, I have five children at home in Manila, so I’m used to them.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked, shocked that the poor woman had had to leave her five children in the Philippines to come and work for a cow like Sonia. I hoped she was being paid my mother’s rates.

  ‘Almost two years. In another year I’ll have saved enough to go back and send my children to proper schools and university.’

  ‘God, you’re amazing. Do you get to go back on holidays?’ I said, unable to imagine leaving Yuri for two days not to mind two years. What a sacrifice this woman was making for her family.

  ‘I go home once a year usually, but this year I’m going to work straight through so I can move back sooner.’

  ‘You must miss them dreadfully.’

  Pam shrugged, ‘Of course, but it’s worth it. They’ll have opportunities that I could never have given them if I hadn’t come here.’

  Before I could think of anything else to say, Sonia’s shrill voice was ordering me upstairs for coffee. I went back reluctantly and sat down.

  ‘Pam’s doing a great job with all the children,’ I said, as Sonia handed me coffee in a tiny gilt-edged cup.

  ‘She’s not bad with the kids, but she’s a nightmare at laundry. She shrank my favourite white shirt the other day. I was fuming.’

  ‘Not the Gucci one you got in Milan?’ said Maura, looking as if she might just pass out if it was in fact the very same shirt.

  ‘No, the D&
G one from New York,’ moaned Sonia, as the colour returned to Maura’s cheeks. Thank God it wasn’t the Gucci one. I looked at Jess, who was concentrating very hard on her coffee cup. I knew she was trying not to laugh.

  ‘So, Emma, how’s it going?’ asked Sonia. She turned to the rest of the group and reminded them that I had just adopted a little boy from Romania.

  ‘Russia,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Yuri’s Russian, not Romanian.’

  ‘How brave of you,’ said Maura. ‘What a good person you are to adopt an orphan. He’s a lucky boy.’

  The other ladies nodded and looked at me as if I was half cracked. It reminded me of the way we all looked at my auntie Doreen when she told us she’d seen a statue of Our Lady swaying in a field down in the west of Ireland. We had nodded and smiled but we all thought she was barking mad.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, bristling, ‘James and I are the lucky ones to have found Yuri. He’s the best thing to happen to us. We adore him.’

  ‘What about his real parents?’ asked Juliette.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, determined to make her spit it out.

  ‘Do you know anything about them? What type of people are they?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. For all we know the father could be a rapist or murderer and the mother a prostitute,’ I answered, laying it on thick.

  You could have heard a pin drop.

  Jess decided to break the ice. ‘But they might also have been lovely people who just couldn’t cope with a baby,’ she said, squeezing my hand in an effort to get me to calm down. ‘Anyway, how’s the breastfeeding going, Tamara?’

  ‘I’ve given up,’ said Tamara, looking guilty. ‘My boobs were killing me, and when I went to the doctor, I found out I had mastitis, so I told Nigel I was stopping and I didn’t want to be made feel bad about it. He really wanted me to do it for six months, but I couldn’t. It was making me miserable.’

  ‘Oh, no, Tamara,’ said Juliette, looking genuinely upset. ‘Don’t stop. Go back to it. Honestly, the mastitis will clear up and it’s so much better for babies to be breastfed.’

  ‘Why is it so much better?’ I asked, clearly the novice in the room.

  ‘Because,’ said Juliette, ‘breast-fed babies have much lower rates of ear infections, diarrhoea, rashes, allergies and other medical problems than bottle-fed babies. On top of which it’s brilliant for bonding with your baby.’

  ‘It also helps you lose weight, quicker,’ added Sonia, placing a hand on her washboard stomach.

  ‘Tamara’s right to stop if it was making her miserable,’ said Jess. ‘They’re her boobs. Tony was always at me to breastfeed. His mother breastfed him, so I had to follow suit. After four weeks of excruciating pain and cracked nipples I told him he could milk his own nipples if he felt that strongly about it.’

  ‘It sounds awful,’ I said, beginning to wonder if I’d be up for it. My pain threshold was fairly low.

  ‘Well, it’s not something you have to worry about with an adopted child,’ drawled Sonia.

  ‘She will soon enough,’ said Jess, smiling at me. ‘Emma’s pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ said Tamara, apparently genuinely delighted for me. ‘Was it a complete surprise?’

  ‘A total shock, to be honest,’ I admitted.

  ‘They always say that once you stop fretting about getting pregnant, it happens immediately,’ said Sonia. I wanted to ask her who ‘they’ were. I also wanted to tell her that there was nothing more annoying when you were trying to get pregnant than some stupid fertile cow telling you to relax.

  ‘Natural or Caesarian?’ asked Maura.

  ‘What?’ I looked at her blankly.

  ‘Are you going to have a natural birth or go for an elective Caesarian?’

  ‘I’d advise Caesarian. It’s much more civilized. The sun roof is the only way to go,’ said Sonia, finding herself most entertaining.

  ‘I don’t know about that. I liked my natural births,’ said Jess, sticking up for Mother Nature.

  ‘But what about all those stitches you had?’ Sonia reminded Jess.

  ‘I healed quickly.’

  ‘I agree with Jess,’ said Tamara. ‘It’s not as bad as everyone makes out,’ she added, smiling at me.

  ‘I’m still trying to get my head around being pregnant, so it’s not something I’ve given much thought to.’ I wanted them all to shut up about their birth choices. I wasn’t interested in talking about stitches.

  ‘Won’t being pregnant make things difficult for your adopted boy?’ Maura asked.

  ‘No,’ I said sharply. The last thing I was about to do was get into a conversation about Yuri’s well-being with these wenches.

  ‘But the new baby is bound to look like you or your husband, and your little boy will always look like someone else. How are you going to explain it?’

  ‘What difference does it make who looks like who?’ said Jess. ‘Roy looks nothing like either me or Tony. It’s not an issue.’

  ‘But Roy is your natural child. It’s different,’ persisted Maura.

  ‘No, Maura, it isn’t,’ I snapped. ‘If you had any idea of true love you’d understand that when you love a child – adopted or not – it becomes part of who you are. Yuri couldn’t be more a part of me or James than if I had given birth to him – natural or Caesarian – myself. He won’t have issues with the new baby because it’ll just be his sister or brother. End of story. No big drama. He’s our son and the fact that he may or may not look like us is completely and utterly irrelevant and an extremely shallow way of looking at things,’ I said, standing up and grabbing my bag. ‘On that note, I’m going to love you and leave you. Thanks for the coffee, but I’m going to spend some time with my son now, instead of sitting here listening to your shirt-shrinking dramas, fascinating though they have been.’

  I ran downstairs, grabbed Yuri, said goodbye to Pam and rushed out of the door. By the time I got to the car I was shaking with rage. I held Yuri close to me, kissed his pale little face and told him over and over again how much I loved him. He held his hand up to my cheek and gazed at me with his big brown eyes, melting my heart for the millionth time.

  Chapter 13

  The night before I was due back in work, Yuri woke up every hour on the hour. It was as if he sensed that he was going to be abandoned the next day and was determined to make me suffer. At four a.m., when I had soothed him for half an hour – rubbing his back and singing to him – he finally fell asleep again. I collapsed into bed and went into a coma.

  ‘Waaaaaaah,’ I heard in my dream. ‘Waaaaaah.’ I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. Exactly five a.m. We had moved him into his own room a few days earlier and until now it had been working quite well – he woke up once or twice but had gone back go sleep almost straight away. James was sound asleep beside me, oblivious to his son’s crying through the baby monitor, which was conveniently placed on my bedside table.

  I dragged myself out of bed and shuffled into Yuri’s room. He was standing up in his cot, gripping the bars and crying. At this stage I was really fed up, sleep-deprived and angry. ‘Will you hush?’ I begged Yuri. ‘We’ve done this already four times. I’ve got work tomorrow. Give me a break. I’m going to get fired if I arrive in with no sleep and do a bad job. Come on, stop acting up.’

  He stared at me and wailed.

  I snapped. ‘Shut up or I’ll send you back to Russia,’ I hissed.

  ‘Emma!’ said James, choosing this exact moment to finally wake up and check on his son. ‘How could you say something like that to him? Come to Daddy, Yuri, Mummy didn’t mean that,’ he said, leaning down to pick him up. ‘Really, Emma, you should know better.’

  ‘No! Don’t pick him up,’ I said, yanking James back from the cot.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ James glared at me.

  I felt guilty about snapping at Yuri, but I was not happy with James rolling up at five a.m., after six hours of uninterrupted sleep, to tell me how to behav
e. Besides, it was vital – according to all the books I’d read – not to pick up a crying baby when you were trying to get them used to sleeping alone. Obviously if they were in distress you did, but not if they were just kind of whinge-crying and looking for attention, which was exactly what Yuri was doing. If we gave in now, he’d never settle into his new room.

  ‘We can’t pick him up. If we do he’ll never get used to sleeping on his own and he’ll associate crying with us rushing in to comfort him. He has to learn that crying doesn’t always work. He’ll be fine in a few minutes. He’ll settle himself back to sleep. The book says to stay with him so he knows you’re there, but not pick him up.’

  ‘Which Fascist book told you that gem?’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember, I’ve read so many of them. But they all pretty much said not to give in to your baby’s every whim or you’ll become a slave to them.’

  ‘Rubbish. If a child cries, it needs to be reassured. It’s common sense,’ said James and bent down to pick Yuri up.

  ‘James,’ I said, in a Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry type voice, ‘if you pick him up I will kill you. I’ve spent four nights trying to get him used to this room, and if you break the routine now, he’ll never stay here.’

  James ignored me and picked up Yuri, who immediately stopped crying. ‘It would appear that those books, in which you place so much faith, are wrong.’

  I was so angry that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but frustration got the better of me and I cried. ‘I’ve been up with him all bloody night. While you’ve been snoring merrily I’ve been soothing him back to sleep. I’m bloody exhausted. You’re not the only one who has work in the morning. Don’t come in here and tell me how to behave.’

  ‘He’s a baby. They wake up sometimes. Big deal.’

  ‘Sometimes – fine. Five times in one night, not fine at all. In fact, total bloody nightmare.’

  ‘Will you please stop ranting and cursing in front of him? You’re only making him more agitated. He’s probably hungry or needs his nappy changed,’ said Superdad.