Making Babies

by Anne Enright

  Or is it just mothers? See that man walking down the street? He’s a New Man. He has his child in a sling. Every woman he passes smiles at him. Every woman he passes wants to have him and the baby, now – the complete package, no hassle, no nine months. Does he talk to the child? Does he gaa and goo? Certainly not. He has an image to maintain. He’ll talk into his mobile walking down the street, he’ll even talk into a hands-free mobile that makes him look as though he’s talking into thin air, but he’ll wait until he’s in the door, until the door is safely closed, until the door is locked, before he does the tickle ickle wid de baba, yeah.

  I know a guy who says they can’t understand sarcasm until the age of eight. So he goes, Oh you are so wonderful! in a voice that is very close to horrible. But maybe baby-talk is, by its nature, very close to horrible, very close to completely insincere.

  They have studied baby-talk and pulled it apart and called it parentese, and apparently it’s all about vowel sounds. The three vowels, Ah, Eeh and Oh, are like the prime colours of speech – all other vowel sounds are a mixture of these three basic ones, and these are the ones we elongate when we are talking to our babies. Repetition, which is one of the main components of parentese, makes it more easy-weasy for the baby to hear the vowels, with its sweet ickle eary ears. Consonants, meanwhile, become softer and thicker. We lose the L, and turn Th into D. I’m not sure why that is. I should, I suppose, look up my Chomsky-Womsky, or some other experty-werty, but I am afraid they will tell me that long vowels are all very well, but I am a Bad Mama! for distorting consonants and, even worse, replacing the pronouns with silly-billy nouny-wouns.

  But of course some other expert would say that silly-billy nouny-wouns are absolutely essential for your baby’s development, and all those old duffers, who hate the sound of baby-talk, are just . . . embarrassed. As some people are. Embarrassed by joy. Excluded. Jealous.

  Actually the best thing about baby-talk is the way people use it to talk about the other people in the room. They say, ‘Did your Mammy put you down on that dirty old ruggy-wug?’ They say, ‘Who’s that big nasty man with the tight old botty-wot, doesn’t like the way we talk. Isn’t he a silly-billy? Isn’t he a silly old moo?’

  The Killing Cup

  I am eight and a half months’ pregnant, and in a taxi. The driver is a woman. She isn’t a great talker but suddenly, in a rush, she tells me about the cup of tea that killed the baby. She just has to warn me. The mother spilt it, apparently.

  ‘It wasn’t even that hot.’

  My own mother knows of many children killed in freak accidents – some as recently as 1953. Every time she starts with one, I tell her about the granny who pushed the buggy off the kerb while on holiday, not realising that they drove on the other side of the road in France. And besides, it only happened in 1998.

  I may mock.

  Each of us has our baby tragedy. I like the one about the toddler who walked out of her mother’s bed in the middle of the winter in Canada and fell asleep in the snow, wearing nothing but a nappy. She was revived some hours later, or so the news report went, with no appreciable damage to her brain. It was a kind of cryogenics, apparently. It only works if you are small. The mother, who contributed in this significant way to the sum of scientific knowledge, was ‘too shocked to comment’.

  Martin remembers the man whose wife rang him from the nursery, to ask where the child had been all day. The man leapt from his desk and ran down to the car park, where he found the baby still in the back seat of the car. Unfortunately it had overheated and died. This story was in the newspaper.

  There is no worse trap than a car. Children play with the cigarette lighter and burn the whole tin box down. People are always stealing the things without looking around to check if there is a baby in the back. This is because parents leave the keys in the ignition to keep the heating or the air-conditioner going, while they, for example, nip into the shop. In Dublin last week, a drug addict was sent to jail for stealing a car that contained two small children and a baby. He let the children out in a hospital car park and, when a woman came over to see why they were crying, he ordered them all back in. Then he drove away again.

  This means that, either you have to take the keys out of the car when you go up to pay in the petrol station, or you have to take one, two, or more children out of the back of the car and into the shop, whether they are asleep or not. Or you can just fling your money down on the forecourt and leave.

  Now, people may think it bonkers that a parent cannot leave his or her child in the back of a car in order to go and pay for petrol. What they don’t realise is that, no matter how outlandish the accident, it is about to happen to your child, now. There is an entire American literary tradition built on just this fact.

  I used to think that people are more relaxed in the third world where, apart from starving, they have less on their mind. But this idea was given the lie by a friend who came back from working in a Filipino village, and said that the place was full of fretful hypochondriacs, prone to impatience and panic, just like anywhere else. In fact, he said, being poor makes you more stressed and certainly more fearful for your children, even though they have more children to, as it were, play with.

  I find this terrifying. The idea that if you have nine children you end up nine times as worried – it can’t be possible. You would explode. Surely you have more children partly in order to allay your anxieties about the first. You should be nine times less worried about each individual child. (Ah, but what if you all died in the same train crash?) The sad fact seems to be that there is no maths to it. The family is not a bucket you can fill up to a certain point, and then carry around without slopping the water out. Or something.

  Actually, I suspect there is no metaphor to describe the family – what it is, and how it works. The family is the origin of metaphor, not its end point. But whatever way you fail to describe what a family is, there is no doubt that parents are (delightfully) crippled by it. This is why allowances must be made: we are not human beings who can walk around and do as we please, we are human beings with strange, sometimes quite large, extra bits of flesh attached, and each extra bit has desires of its own.

  Parents should be treated with every possible consideration. There should be someone at the petrol pump to take their money. There should be a supermarket without sweets. There should be pigs flying around for free, to take us all for a ride on their backs.

  Where was I?

  Now that I have two children, I am particularly drawn to the story of the toddler who put his new sibling into the tumble-drier, because its nappy was wet. The mother was asleep upstairs at the time. The baby died.

  I can taste that sleep. I can fall into it. I can imagine how tired she was, how gorgeous it was to close her eyes – this woman who will never sleep again.

  Kissing

  I am not kissing my baby, I am checking its temperature.

  How to Panic

  The baby patters in with an open bottle of children’s paracetamol in her hand, stretched out for me to see. It is first thing in the morning. Her father has changed her nappy and gone to work and I am still lying there like a stone – so I deserve this. This is my fault.

  ‘Give the bottle to Mama.’

  It looks full enough. There is maybe a quarter gone. Maybe less. At eighteen months she is still teething and running a temperature, so she had two, perhaps three, spoonfuls. I look at the label. I hold the bottle up to the light. There could not be more than 25 ml gone. Which means she could not have taken more than 5 ml and that’s all right, isn’t it?

  It is at this moment that my mind shuts down.

  My thoughts are, for the most part, banal and perversely social (what will the neighbours think if her liver fails?) but they are not sane. I can hear the story in my head: Someone must have left the cap off. The bottle was still beside the cot. So I tell myself – and it is a very clear form of instruction, this; I am standing by the window staring at the bottle and addressing myself, st
ernly but kindly, as you might a child – I tell myself that there is no danger, there is no need to panic. Then I tell myself that this is exactly the sort of situation in which you are supposed to panic, even if there is no danger you must also panic, you are A Mother now, these substances are Dangerous, you must not be afraid to Seek Help, you MUST PANIC.

  I ring my sister, partly because she is a doctor but mostly because she is the only person in Dubhn who will answer her mobile phone. My sister’s mobile phone saves lives. Unfortunately she is in the middle of saving someone’s life when I ring, so she says 25 ml sounds fine, but she doesn’t know the dose for weight (or something) for childhood paracetamol and tells me to ring the poison helpline. She says she doesn’t know the number, and then she gives me a number anyway, which I ring. A woman answers and I say, ‘My daughter has taken some paracetamol, at least I think she might have taken some paracetamol, it is the children’s stuff, Calpol, she’s a year and a half, she’s 29 pounds, she’s taken maximum 20 or 25 ml but I don’t really know.’ I am being very specific. I am only giving the information that might, medically, be required. I cannot understand why the woman at the other end of the phone has started to laugh. I start to falter and she says, ‘I’m only the exchange.’ I say, ‘Could you put me through to someone in the poisons unit, then?’ and she says, ‘No! No, I can’t!’ She is still laughing. She thinks this is hilarious. I put the phone down.

  Through all this the child looks at me with quiet interest. And indeed she does look fine, I am not so much worried about her as about this phantom other – the girl who, by tragic accident, by neglect, by the fact that her mother sleeps late, is already in an advanced state of liver failure (and none of this matters either, you know, the sleeping late – the details and coincidences, the whole story and who is to blame. If the child is harmed, if anything happened to the child, then there could be no cause to explain this too-large result.).

  I put the baby into the car, without her breakfast, and we go down to the clinic. The receptionist goes into the doctor’s room holding the bottle of paracetamol high, like a urine sample, in front of her. Then she comes out of the doctor’s room and gives it back to me. The doctor has said something wry or dismissive. The receptionist is swallowing her amusement anyway and, quite kindly, she tells me to go away now, everything is fine.

  The thing is, I knew it was fine all along. My sister rings later and I tell her about the woman who laughed at me on the phone. She says the number she gave me was for Directory Enquiries. She, too, nearly laughs at me, but then she doesn’t. We all know what it is like to be that stupid – we all know what it is to shut down, to stop existing for one moment, standing by a window, for example, with a bottle of Calpol in your hand. And then, an hour, or a week later, when someone has shouted long and loud enough that everything is all right, we say, ‘Oh,’ and walk on.

  Romance

  The baby falls in love with her father.

  Her father is over there. Her mother, on the other hand, is simply here. She crawls over me like some well-loved cushion, she meets my gaze and holds it for the longest time: she looks into me, but she looks at her father. He is a wonderful object, and watching at him makes her radiant with pleasure.

  Mind you, he is usually doing something very watchable; he might be throwing a toy into the air, for example, to catch it behind his back.

  ‘Silly Dada,’ I say.

  The Lip of the Rug

  It is often something small – the thing you will never forget. A woman looks down, as she is running from child-minder to child-minder, and sees bhsters on her hands from pushing the buggy. Another woman remembers the lip of the rug – nights of pushing the child over and back, over and back, and there is something so keen and total in the tiny thump and lift of the wheels: how did her life, with all its particular importance, shrink to this quarter-inch? To the line between a rug and the parquet. How can your life be reduced to a raw sac of skin on the mound of your thumb? Twenty years later this woman lifts her hand to show me exactly where the calluses formed; like a man shot in a war that no one wants to remember any more.

  By the Time You Read This, It Will be True

  A Hollywood celebrity has hired a lactation expert to incorporate her breast milk into her diet. ‘She spends 570 calories a day producing milk, if she then consumes those calories back again, she has knocked 1,000 calories off her total, right there. Theoretically it is possible to live on negative calories, which is to say, less than nothing – you can starve the system while still consuming 500 calories a day, which is sort of interesting to think about, but we don’t really recommend it.’ Asked how the breast milk was consumed, the Beverly Hills $1,000-a-day consultant said, ‘We do a range of products. A lot of it ends up in the salad dressing. You’d be surprised.’

  Staring, Part 2

  A friend of mine, who is a mother, says, ‘I will never forget the day that he looked right through me.’ She indicates where he was sitting, twelve years ago, in his nappy, on the floor. She points it out on the tiles. What did he see, when he looked right through her? She cannot really say. Transparency. A chill wind.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Another woman says, ‘I wasn’t feeding him fast enough and he knocked the spoon out of my hand, and the look he gave me was absolutely evil.’ This woman has postnatal depression – but still, what was that look? I want to know. I want to know what message passed between the baby and his depressed mother. Sometimes I think we are only mirrors of each other, that you give birth to a flesh-and-blood mirror, one that can turn to you, or away from you. A mirror that bites. A mirror that grows.

  And this is nonsense too, because we read more into babies than they (perhaps) give out. There should be another language for babies. Adult words carry too much baggage, they are too social and burdened with intent. How could a baby be ‘evil’ or even just ‘smug’. And later, how can we say that they ‘flirt’, or ‘manipulate’ or even ‘know’ you? They are not in charge. To a large extent, a baby just ‘is’.

  So when you look into a baby’s eyes, you look into something for which there are no words. This is love. This is what love always feels like. To look into someone’s eyes and find words failing.

  Still, you need to be in the full of your mental health to suffer a baby’s stare.

  What’s Wrong with Velcro?

  You will spend ten minutes every day on socks. Finding socks, matching socks, putting socks on the baby, returning down the supermarket aisle to pick up fallen socks, putting socks back on the baby’s foot. Washing socks. Fishing socks out of the drier. Matching socks. All this for something that lasts five minutes on the actual baby’s actual foot. Babies’ feet are not designed for independent footwear.

  So I decided against socks. Ten minutes a day is over an hour a week. That’s more than fifty-two hours in the first year. You could spend a full working week on socks. I can’t afford a week’s extra, unpaid, sock holiday. Never mind the money – emotionally I can’t afford to spend a week of my life on socks. So I put the baby in babygros, because babygros made sense. After a while, though, as she got bigger and then very big indeed, they made her look like a paradoxically slow developer and I realised that it was time to enter the world. It was time to buy trousers and dungarees that open all down the legs, and tights (have you ever tried to get a wriggling baby into a pair of tights?) and socks. It was time to fiddle with fasteners and curse over funny-shaped buttons, match pink with purple and purple with blue, and still have the child’s arse hanging out after half an hour, when all the poppers have popped and the tights drooped, and her dinner is splashed all down her front.

  You see that cute baby in a buggy, with a little stretchy hair band and embroidered sandals and an ironed dress that really does not appear to have shit on it, no matter which way you turn it round? That baby represents, in terms of shopping, washing, ironing – I don’t know, half a day? No, a whole day’s work.

  My mother attacks the baby with a wet hanky.


  ‘Did you spit on that?’ I say and she is quite shocked.

  ‘I’d never spit on a hanky.’

  ‘Oh, how quickly we forget,’ I say, and we are arguing the toss while the baby squirms away from the scrubbing finger that I remember so well.

  My father watches for a while, and then he says, ‘Why do women always have to be polishing them?’

  Being a man, he would rather a baby go mucky. He would rather walk down the street with a baby whose face is smeared in porridge, Jaffa Cake and snot, than make a baby cry. He has no shame.

  Then again, there is nothing so beautiful as a clean child. All that fresh skin. They do scrub up wonderfully well.

  ‘Its very low-grade work,’ I say to one woman, who asks after the baby and how I am finding it all. She turns on me, horrified.

  ‘Rearing children is one of the most emotionally and intellectually taxing jobs there is,’ she says (or something like). Well no, actually. Or maybe rearing them is, but keeping them clean and cleaning up after them is not, and much of your time is spent doing just that. And yes, I have tried letting the baby hold the dustpan, while I ply the brush. As far as I am concerned, rearing a baby means holding, smiling, feeding, shushing and waving a rattle around. This can be lovely, but it is sometimes quite dull, and the rest is pure drudgery. The only intellectual challenge, in the midst of such ecstatic inanity, is how to keep yourself sane. (Rearing a toddler – now for that you need brains.)