by Simon Carr
Therefore, we fathers start at a disadvantage, two if we’re unlucky.
First, we lack a mother’s visceral relationship with a newborn child. It is impossible to have been closer to a baby than she’s been – and the two of them have been developing their exclusive relationship for the last nine months. They have suffered together, they have fortified each other. This pale, translucent creature in its amniotic sac has had more effect on the mother’s hormonal system than anyone since she conceived a passion for her husband. For nine months she has been receiving signals from her most profound depths – some of these signals have provided her with the secret of life, others have made her throw up. She has watched with wonder as her baby turned over inside her, she has felt it grow and felt it grow proportionately more than it ever will again (‘It’ – you notice, that ‘it’?) – so of course they’re a unit; they have an intimate playing relationship before we fathers even join the game, before we even know the game has started.
And then, of course, there’s all that mother stuff that nature has equipped her with. Naturally she can identify her baby’s cry in a ward of crying babies; naturally she will wake up from the deepest sleep when her baby murmurs in the night. When she breastfeeds she has these endorphins flowing – happy hormones that reward her for feeding and caressing her baby. Evolution has set up the incentives very precisely. An old girlfriend tells me that her husband not only failed to wake up when the baby cried, he failed to wake up when she puked all over his head. (The baby, that is.)
So we fathers greet our firstborn child with a certain diffidence. We address the little miracle respectfully, carefully, politely – or heartily, or tenderly, or awkwardly, or fearfully or even joyfully – but as often as not with a certain sense of distance. I mean, who is he? This face like a Chinese walnut, these funny wrinkled fingers; that mess in his middle (couldn’t that have been better organised?). We are very uncertain of the answer to important questions like: ‘Will it like me? Will it start crying if I pick it up and won’t people think I’m useless? If I try to soothe it and it starts crying even more loudly, will my wife tell me to put the baby down because I’m upsetting it? Yes, and if I don’t like it, will everyone be able to tell? And what if I drop it? And those jokes I used to laugh at about nurses carrying babies five at a time, are they funny any more?’
And there’s been the birth itself. Yes, the birth. The birth of Alexander was the most powerful physical experience I’d ever had and it didn’t even happen to me.
As we were admitted into Queen Charlotte’s, a little pixie took Susie by the elbow: ‘Helloooo?’ he said with an almost sinister intensity. ‘I’m going to look after you.’ We would have laughed if it hadn’t been for his badge saying Chief Midwife. We followed the four foot eleven of him into a large, empty ward; he sat her fussily on a metal bed. He lifted her shirt to put his stethoscope on her tummy and bent his head devoutly. After a moment he made a noise of surprise. He moved the stethoscope and made another noise – surprise mixed with curiosity. Then he said, quite lightly, just before he left the room: ‘Oo, dear, I can’t find a heartbeat. That’s odd. Just wait there for me, will you?’
Yes, that must have been odd. No heartbeat at this stage, eh? That would certainly be odd to a midwife. We sat on the bed, not daring to look at each other. The unbearable silence went on, actually, for minutes. Susie breathed. I remember her breathing. We sat there waiting for a contraction, but we both knew that contractions were no useful indicator. When babies die in the womb the gruesome process goes on until its useless conclusion, shedding the mortal weight. We were both thinking these things together. Of course, we didn’t speak. It’s not the sort of thing you talk about. If you ignore it, it’ll go away.
Eventually the busy little elf came back with a larger machine and put a rubber cup back on to her tummy. ‘Oh! There we are!’ he said.
Susie’s neck arched as her head fell forward. I said: ‘Thank goodness for that!’
‘What?’ he exclaimed. ‘You didn’t think –’ and he looked at us, his eyebrows up like a child’s drawing of a seagull: – ‘you didn’t think …?’ and as we remained silent he bunched his lips up like an indignant kiss and said, ‘Now you’ve made me feel awful. You have, you’ve made me feel really awful!’
I sit in front of my view down the garden this spring day and look back to that white room and the bed, with the medical officials standing under the clock.
You’re at the top of a roller-coaster and all you can do is hang on.
Alexander came late. After a good start he got stuck. Susie’s cervix stopped dilating at nine and a half centimetres and he couldn’t get through. She asked the time every so often. There was a note of bewilderment in her voice as she asked, ‘What time is it?’ The next day she told me that the delivery room clock above the obstetrician’s head had stopped, the hands hadn’t moved for an hour. Through her pain, Susie felt her baby wasn’t coming and time had stopped as well, like it does in nightmares.
The last time she asked her question the doctor said crossly: ‘Stop asking what the time is, it’s not going to help the baby come.’ She didn’t ask again.
And then, before the ultimate punishment was produced, he gave her one last chance. Wearily, he said, ‘Look. You must push. We can’t do this by ourselves you know.’
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. And in the absence of a suitable response he opened a metal drawer and withdrew the shiny stainless-steel forceps.
They hadn’t told us fathers how to handle any of this in antenatal. The doctor was saying things that, in other circumstances, would cause us to sock him. Susie was strong, she had all the country virtues – energy, courage, politeness. But the weary specialist is saying, ‘We can’t do this by ourselves, you know.’ But you can’t have a row with him. You can’t even take him to one side and remonstrate with him. ‘Listen: treat my wife with more respect or I’ll sock you, you overqualified creep.’ You can’t sock him. You can’t sock everyone. You have no standing here.
We’ve heard the medics say they can’t at this point administer any pain relief that actually relieves pain. We’ve had to accept it. Impotently we think: ‘Is this the first time you’ve done this for fuck’s sake? Why didn’t you say there would shortly be a time when you couldn’t do anything useful with painkillers?’ And when a touring specialist asked whether anyone minded him bringing in a troupe of medical students, what did we say? ‘Bite me!’? I don’t think we did. No, I don’t think we said that, did we?
The truth is we fathers don’t really fit in here. We’re surrounded by people who do this every day; it’s all so normal for them they’re having tea breaks. We have walked into a room, having to go through a life-threatening experience in order to come out again, and the staff are looking at their watches to check whether it’s time for their tea breaks.
They say mothers benefit from a special hormone which is released after the baby is born. It’s a rare example of evolution’s kindness; the hormone creates amnesia; it covers the pain, the fear, the distress in a cloud of forgetfulness and it lasts precisely until the labour for the next child begins. But men don’t have that benefit (and why would evolution have offered it to us?).
But, if we’ve been there, we’ve seen our wives in greater pain than we could actually imagine. And if we’ve been lured down the active end, we’ve seen a truck driving through our love life. The playground suddenly got zoned for heavy industry. Your wife pushes and it’s like the ground heaving, it’s like some disturbance so deeply strange that you can’t imagine what will come out.
Susie didn’t say much about the forceps later. She just closed her eyes and shuddered; she blew her cheeks sadly and a spasm ran over her face. She was a farmer’s daughter. She coped with things. She came from a tradition of iron men, those back-country farmers who could break a leg on the farm and walk home. That was her inheritance. She’d never had an anaesthetic when having her teeth drilled. When she was young she created a place at
the top of her mind, up there in the attic, where she could hide from pain. While Alexander was being born she lost this refuge; it wasn’t built for this gale force of pain and it got blown away in the storm. She was invaded, she was inhabited by pain, it was everywhere and she had nowhere to hide.
When Alexander finally appeared, I fell forward on to Susie’s breast saying the things that mean so much at the time. But I felt I was occupying a place that belonged to someone else, whoever he was.
Should we fathers be there at all? Do we belong there? If it feels like what it looks like it doesn’t bear thinking about. Maybe there really are some things it’s better not to witness.
If your wife really wanted you there, you’d go, if it were you she wanted. Of course you’d go. But if she feels this is woman’s work, how can she tell you not to come without looking eccentric? A woman alone with her pixie midwife would become aware of all sorts of questions: ‘What’s the matter, don’t you love him? Doesn’t he love you? Or don’t you do things together, are you not that sort of couple? Or are you a couple at all? Haven’t you got a partner? Do you even know who the father is? You couldn’t get your mother to come? Or a neighbour? Are you a solo mother whom nobody loves?’
Anyway, those were Alexander’s last minutes before coming into the world. He was my second son and was born five years after my Hugo, to a different mother – a very different mother.
Hugo had come into the world more easily. His mother, Angela, retained all her self-possession in her brisk three-hour labour, even to the point of telling me to shut up when I urged her to push. ‘Oh, shut up,’ she said tartly. ‘You push!’ Her obstetrician rewarded her in her post-natal state with what counts as a compliment from a specialist: ‘You could have had that baby under a bush.’
So the two boys arrived in different ways but their welcome was essentially the same.
Hugo was wrapped in swaddling clothes and his mother, his aunt, his grandmother all took him into their arms one by one and spun around him the good-fairy magic that only women can. His Aunt Francie cuddled him and, as she put her face close to his, her expression deepened and she cooed: ‘You little parcel of naughtiness!’ As his maternal grandmother (and she was one of the original tiger women) held him her face softened, perhaps she was looking through him at her own immortality.
What do women see so quickly in these babies, when they talk about noses and eye colour and the shape of the chin? Men say all babies either look like Winston Churchill or Gandhi and women smile politely; they don’t even argue the point. They have a different view because they’ve really looked at the infants. They have seen the subtleties and secrecies and intimacies in their faces right from the start. They’ve already prepared a place for them in their hearts.
Me, I was sending excited but not exactly heartfelt telegrams to friends overseas saying ‘THE EAGLE HAS LANDED’. It was news, this, it was an unexpected event. ‘He’s heeere!’
Five years later, on the other side of the world, in very different circumstances, the same ancient narrative was playing.
Susie’s motherliness was later coming in. Perhaps the forceps had taken their toll and forced her out of herself for a while; maybe I’d hogged that special moment when the baby is supposed to be laid on her breast. But here we were. The first time she held her baby. The sleeping pills had worn off. Alexander had been given to her and she was holding him sceptically against her knees and looking at him as though he were a stranger. He was grizzling weakly. His eyes were shut. His hands waved ineffectually. Then she turned to me with that naughty expression she’d got from a gay editor we knew – clenching her teeth and stretching the ends of her mouth downwards. She must have looked at Alexander and felt like I did: who is this? What does he want? That would have been frightening for any mother.
As he cried, a vast Caribbean nurse came in and picked him up; she wrapped him very tightly in his baby blanket and boomed, ‘Now, you little baby, you stop crying or I’ll smack your bottom!’ So he stopped crying at once. Susie looked at him with eyebrows raised and a doubtful mouth.
I went away to write a column for the Independent called ‘The Autobiography of a Baby’. I got back from the office with a page proof of my cleverness (assonance, consonance, brilliant effects). I was just in time to see Susie holding her baby in a different way. Something had happened while I’d been gone. Walking through the door, I was able to witness the by now familiar magic actually happening. Her expression was in the process of deepening and softening. It was like another birth, but this time gentle and deeply pleasurable. Her feelings came coiling out of her and swaddled him in love. I was losing them both at the same time.
A shattered new father from the next room put his head round the door to ask how it had gone for us. ‘They’re just little machines for turning food into shit, aren’t they?’ he said. I flinched, but I knew what he meant; he didn’t have a baby-shaped hole inside him to be filled by the new addition to his family. Far from it. He had already resigned his place in the household. He had seen, as we all see, the madonna and child locked in their millennia-old embrace and he knew that for years he’d only be able to prowl round the perimeter of this powerful new relationship.
We fathers have a second disadvantage and it stems from the first. Because we lack this early connection, our access to the child is regulated by the mother. We aren’t desert patriarchs any more, we don’t seize babies and lift them over our heads for the tribe to see. Fathers have far less confidence than this in today’s Western society.
And it’s not surprising we have less confidence after what we’ve witnessed. We have been required to watch the brutal, violent results of our amorous impulses. You have to wonder whether there’s something vindictive in our wives’ concern that we should be there with them in those dark hours (‘See?’). It certainly prepares the ground for what is to follow.
Mothering is naturally the earliest emotional experience that we boys remember and it’s still enormously impressive. The voice that our wives suddenly spring on us when they become mothers – that resonates at a very deep level. Not only are we outnumbered and outgunned, we’re also in the grip of the most powerful propaganda machine in the world.
Many of us fathers – most of us, perhaps – don’t have a direct relationship with our babies in the early days. Our relationship with the newcomer is mediated by its sponsor, its inventor, its owner, its mother.
It must be the natural way of it – and why wouldn’t it be so? She has produced this miracle, she gets to say how we are to manage it. So we pick up our new baby under her supervision, in the way she approves. When we get him up we dress him in the clothes she’d like him to wear. We handle him in the way she wants. When we drop the infant we are denounced as a dangerous stranger might be. When she doesn’t want us to play, for whatever reason, she can interrupt at any time with: ‘It’s time for his bath.’ Or, ‘He’s tired.’ Or, ‘Don’t let him crawl on the dirty part of the carpet.’ Or, ‘Don’t let him climb up the stairs!’ Or, ‘For God’s sake! You’ll put his eye out with that!’ We lay him down in his cradle in the way she likes; there is cot death information out there so maybe we lay him on his front, or on his back, or on his side, whichever way she wants it done.
It isn’t even surprising our new life should be like this, because their relationship is the most powerful biological drive there is. And it’s normal that the father would be edged out of the centre: his wife is only related to him by marriage – her baby is blood. Her blood. Millions of years of sexual reproduction are operating on this relationship now. That’s a lot of history, that’s a lot of patterned behaviour – we find we are not quite as free to create and re-create ourselves as we’d thought.
Therefore, how it is between mother and father can determine how it will be between father and baby. Maybe mother will allow complete access – maybe she’ll allow limited access, maybe she’ll only allow access under supervision. If she wants to she can block the relationship altogether, o
r she can foster it – it’s her decision.
Sometimes the marriage is such that babies are shared by gender – momma gets the boys and poppa gets the girls. Sometimes parents take them alternately, like a family with two religions. Every other baby gets the same faith. The deal isn’t always made explicit, but very often there’s a run for territory shortly after the birth.
Some mothers are only too glad to plait their husband into the new relationship. Others, for reasons of their own, may not want their partners getting too familiar. But whichever way it goes, mothers are more likely to say in company ‘my son’ and the father is more likely to say ‘our son’. There’s research to back up this ridiculous point, but it’s been lost.
So it’s not surprising, with this new power base, that some mothers fall prey to a form of domestic megalomania. It may be benign or malignant; it can be an expression of all-embracing love, or of the urge to dominate and oppress. In either event it can be diagnosed quite easily when they start referring to themselves in the third person. This symptom is fatally revealing – not just for mothers, but for politicians, heavy-weight boxers, rap stars, generals and general-purpose maniacs (‘Here’s Johnny!’). Maybe it should be called Caesar’s disease because he was the one who started it. His account of the Gallic Wars was punctuated with the phrase ‘Caesar progressas est’ meaning ‘I went’. And that’s exactly what happens to mothers. That’s what they start to say. ‘Let Mummy do that for you, darling,’ and ‘Be nice to Mummy!’ and ‘Don’t hit Mummy,’ and ‘Mummy is going downstairs now.’
It’s sinister, isn’t it, when Mummy starts talking about herself in the way of the supreme commander of the imperial forces? Mater progressus est downstairs? It happens all the time.
Obviously, it’s not just mothers who behave like this. One of our neighbours suffered from a more obvious mental illness which tranquillisers failed to contain. He and his wife had twin sons whom he had managed to twist into a sad misogyny. ‘Girls have dirty kisses,’ he told them, so they started to shy away from her when she tried to embrace them. ‘Girls smell nasty,’ he said. ‘If they try and touch you, kick them.’ So they kicked their mother. ‘Who do we like? We like Daddy,’ he taught them. ‘We like Daddy!’