Making Babies

by Anne Enright

  Even so, there are things that are much more intellectually taxing, like Scrabble. And there are things that you will never be able to learn. Like patience. I would swap several college degrees for a degree of patience. And much more important than a good brain is a good washing machine. If your washing machine broke down you would never be found again; they would have to send out a search party; they would have to dig out your body from under a drift of dirty clothes.

  Tip: On the weekend, one partner can stay by the door of the washing machine while the other dresses and redresses children and adults, as they become spattered and respattered with one or other digestive product. The first partner will then load, unload and reload them into various washers and driers, also into the disinfecting buckets for pee and poo, then unload them finally and fold them. No one will ever put them away. On Sunday, you can swap places.

  Clean, dirty, wet, dry, ironed or wrinkled, and always insidiously stained; you will drown in clothes. Between presents, hand-me-downs and impulse buys, a nonsense of clothes. Every colour you would never wear yourself; you have to put on sunglasses just to find the zipper. They will all be the wrong size. Or they will be the right size but the wrong season. For the three hot days of any given summer, you will have seven dresses – two are too small, two are too big, two are too tarty and the lovely one costs too much to actually wear.

  Or maybe not. Maybe you will do all this bit much better than me.

  Newborn babies’ clothes should be as disposable as nappies. Babies grow like pumpkins – they can skip a whole size overnight. Some of their clothes will never get worn twice and many will never be worn at all. The wisest thing is not to bother washing them, just throw them out as you go, without a backward glance. Yes, all the pretty embroidered cotton dresses, and the cutie-pie hats, the dungarees with ‘Woof’ written on the front – into the bin with them. The ordinary bin. The one that goes to the dump.

  Otherwise you will spend the next many years moving them from one cardboard box to another cardboard box. You will build heaps of clothes for local charities, heaps for foreign charities, heaps that are too good for poor people, that you want to save for the children of friends. Then you will move them from one pile to another. Why should poor children not wear designer clothes? Why should Africans not need jumpers – does it not get cold in the mountains of Rwanda?

  Then you will pause and rub your face in some tiny dress or trousers, and lay it gently down, realising as you do so that you can never give away this shred and remnant of your happiness, your baby’s first weeks, or first year, or decade. You can never give it away because you still don’t believe it – any of it – you need proof that they were once so small.

  And so it goes. Your children will have, at any given time, three times as many clothes as you do. If you have a daughter, most of these clothes will be pink, even if, like me, you wear black all the time. (When the sun is shining, I might lighten up to brown, but hey, that’s the kind of glamour puss I am.) I quite like dark colours on children, but to dress a girl in black would, these days, be considered almost criminal. It must glow. It must dazzle. You must participate in the pink thing, the frilly thing, the floral thing, the pretty-pretty thing or you will endanger their mental health. You must consume. So I say, Go the whole hog and just throw the damn things in the bin, after they’ve been worn twice. Or do it before you take it out of the wrapping, to save time. Why don’t they have bins right there in the shop? Society operates at the level of the three-year-old, because there is no greater consumer than a three-year-old, but I resent the idea that buying endless, useless things for your children is good for them. I resent the way that small girls are complimented on their clothes by everyone, all the time, unceasingly, when there are so many other things that people could praise. Despite which, of course, I buy things all the time. Bring on the endless, meaningless, sweatshop, frilly bits, that’s what I say; we must have them, the bad-karma runners and the pink welling-tons made in some country that never sees rain. Dress them up and dress them down.

  When the baby went down to the crèche after her first birthday, they looked at her bare feet and enquired about socks and shoes.

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t wear shoes,’ I said. ‘She just doesn’t like them.’ Poor child. When she finally got a pair on her feet she took off like Arkle, over grass and gravel.

  Unforgiven

  These are the things for which children (eventually) forgive their fathers:

  Going out.

  Coming home late.

  Smelling of drink.

  Reading the newspaper.

  Watching the television.

  Looking at people on the television with a vague sexual interest.

  Not being bothered, much.

  Having other important things to do.

  These are the things for which children never, ever, ever forgive their mothers:

  Going out.

  Coming home late.

  Smelling of drink.

  Reading the newspaper.

  Watching the television.

  Looking at people on the television with a vague sexual interest.

  Not being bothered, much.

  Having other important things to do.

  When I was in my teens and twenties, it was fashionable among girls to complain about your mother – despite the fact that these women had given their lives over to rear us. It was never fashionable to complain about your father, unless they were very drunk, all the time. At worst, fathers provoked a shrugging silence – presumably because this was what they gave.

  So what about New Men? Will we need a new psychology in twenty years for children, now grown up, whose fathers were there half the time, who changed the nappies and sang the lullabies, half the time, or more? Is it possible that in twenty years or so we will find it is the caring father, and not the caring mother, who is ultimately to blame?

  I doubt it.

  I have met some of these maligned mothers since and it is great fun having a look at them. Some of them, to my surprise, really do seem wretchedly ungiving. But most of them are quite nice. Or ordinary. Or even dull.

  A dull mother? There is no such thing. It is odd that, as a group, mothers are seen as a lardy wodge of nothing much; of worry and love and fret and banality. As individuals we are everything. Between these two extremes, where does the person lie?

  In my thirties and forties, many of the daughters who gave out about their mothers started going shopping with them, talking about kitchen units, doing all the things that friends might do and more, while the mothers – I don’t know what the mothers did, exactly, but they shifted too. They let their children be. The battle was over. As though each side had fought its way into the light of day and looked at each other to find . . .

  Now that I have become a mother myself, it is a great comfort to me to see how most of us come to an accommodation between the ‘MOTHER!’ in our heads and the woman who reared us. The whole process reaches a sort of glorious conclusion if and when the daughter has children herself. ‘Now you understand,’ says the (grand)mother. ‘Now you see.’ This is what they yearn for – as much as any adolescent, they need to be understood. They need an end to blame.

  I take the baby home, and watch my parents with different eyes. My father likes looking at small children – just that. He hates disturbing them, or telling them to do anything, or scaring them in any way; he does not seem to believe in it. My mother loves babies – some women don’t but she does – even when they are very new; all raw and whimpering and scarcely yet human. Her love is more passionate than his; I think, she can be almost hurt by it. At any rate I know that this is where my current happiness comes from, that the better part of my mothering is compounded of my mother’s passion and of my father’s benign attention.

  A woman asks me, ‘Are you going to have a typical mother–daughter relationship?’ You can tell that she thinks this would be a nice comeuppance. The world loves to remind parents that soon it will all go awry
.

  I think about this when the baby is eighteen months and every hug contains the idea of squirming away. She will stay on my lap if I sing to her, and she will stroke my face, but if all this loving becomes too damn lovely, she will push or pinch or kick her way out of it, and I think, with some trepidation, of the day she turns fourteen.

  She also has a neat line in accident-on-purpose elbow jabs, and great aim.

  What about sons. Are they the same?

  Fair

  It comes on you in a rush with the first baby – the unfairness of it. You become blind with a fury that is not quite your own – thousands of years of rage have been waiting until just this moment to say Hello. Why should your time, as a woman, be so little valued? Why should you be the one to give, and to bend? There will be one argument or a hundred around this time that are white hot. You may reach an accommodation about Tuesday, or even about the whole week until 4.00 on Saturday afternoon. The month of April may be one of relative equity, but that still leaves everything to be played for in May.

  You are furious because you know that the weight of it is against you; you have to fight for every half-hour that a man will just assume. Who are you fighting? First of all yourself, and after that the wide world, that considers your time to be of no importance. The actual man may be on your side in all this, or he may not – either way he will absorb a considerable amount of the blame.

  By the time the second baby comes around it doesn’t matter – you will both be working at this all day and all night: lifting holding comforting cleaning minding chatting playing, lurching into sleep in the middle of it all. Sometimes, even the most enthusiastic father pulls away when there are two: it is just too much and he is just too lonely, or he never asked for all this and who is going to put bread on the table, and why should both of you be bonkers, and what about sex, remember that? This, if it happens, is a tough moment, but who has the time to haul him back in? Besides, there is no point demanding your life back from him – you have, by then, no life left to regain.

  Women come back from childbearing like Arctic explorers. You see them in the foyer of the theatre, perhaps: they have lost weight, or dyed their hair. Their faces glow. They expect people to notice them and the amazing fact that they have come through.

  Men, on the other hand, try to hold on to the thread of their lives more often, and fumble it through a maze of sleepless nights, thwarted socialising, and oddly soured ambition. They end up tired out and happy enough, or they end up exhausted and bitter; while beside them, the wife you haven’t seen for seven years waves across the room, ‘I’m back!’ and you say, ‘Christ, she looks better than she ever did.’

  This is not a statement about men and women, you understand. It is just a shallow social observation.

  Second Pregnancies

  No one gives a toss about your second pregnancy. Get on with it.

  Siblings

  I was the youngest child. I was very much petted and spoilt and, sometimes, experimented upon. One of my older siblings would strangle me to see what colour I would go. ‘Oh, you are turning red now. Oh, now you are blue,’ he / she1 would say. I still wake up choking.

  When you bring home a second baby you must listen out for The Funny Remark. This is the thing your first child says, with which you can regale your friends and family. Here are some real-life examples:

  ‘I am just sharpening my pencils to go up to the baby.’

  ‘If I dropped her, would she die?’

  ‘He’s not waking up. I think he’s dead. How do you spell “dead”?’

  Then, after a while, it is fine.

  Toys

  Tea sets are good. Also blocks. It’s up to you, really – what do you want to spend the rest of your life picking up?

  Dirt

  Dirt is good for children: it builds their immune system. But perhaps there are limits. My child is so healthy; when she gets a runny nose, the rest of the crèche run a temperature of 105. She can empty the place with a sneeze. I bring her in, all mortified because they must know how low our standards are at home. Still, I try to hold my head high, because dirt, in reasonable doses, keeps a child ticking nicely along. I know all this. I know that I know it. And yet, and yet . . .

  Why does a smelly dishcloth make you feel insane? I have always wondered about it – the surge you can get around such objects, the feeling that your life is suddenly crawling with contamination, that you are failing in a most fundamental fashion, you are not fit to be part of decent society, and will become, quite rightly, an object of mockery and disgust. A smelly dishcloth is a thing beyond shame: it reeks of poverty, squalor and a loss of boundaries, financial, moral and, in some infantile way, sexual. It infects language, curdling quite ordinary words like ‘smear’ and ‘wet’. The rot on the draining-board is the rot in the body. Death, darling, death: the smell of the dishcloth is the smell of people dying while the rest of the world says that it serves them right for letting their dishcloths get smelly, in a world that is coming down with bleach.

  If you think this is mad, consider your Auntie May, or any other woman with a house-cleaning habit – the raw fury as they wipe and disinfect and gouge and squirt. Who is this fury directed against? Invisible enemies – that’s who. There is a strong connection between a clean house and a tendency towards paranoia, which is quite annoying for someone like me, who gets the paranoid tendencies without the bonus of a gleaming kitchen sink. If you are a woman and you clean, society thinks that you are fantastically well balanced and sane, even you think that you are well balanced and sane, which is sort of unfair for the people who have to live with you and are not allowed to wipe a spill off the floor with the cloth that is used to wipe the counter, even if it is going straight into the washing machine. It is the sudden screaming, I imagine, that gets such families down.

  Look at that lovely woman in the school playground with her lovely children, all scrubbed; the girl in florals, the boy with a baseball hat turned cutely back to front. Normal – ostentatiously so, a pillar of propriety, a devoted mother, the very linchpin of society. While chatting about this and that, she says, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t let them into the garden . . .’ and you have a choice of asking why, or backing slowly away. She is, you realise, completely, fragrantly, bonkers. And not only bonkers, but justified. She could talk about the state of your living-room for a week.

  Theories about domestic labour always talk about the Victorians, the rise of the middle classes and the discovery of bacteria. So we get the religious connection between cleanliness and godliness – and also the sexual, where a laxity with the scrubbing brush meant a pregnant housemaid before you could say the word ‘slattern’. But cleanliness is also linked to tribalism, and tribal slanders – as anyone who has seen the Catholics of Northern Ireland outclean the Protestants will know – and through generations of ‘dirty Polacks’, ‘dirty Irish’ and ‘dirty Jews’ America has endlessly renewed itself in carpet freshener and personal hygiene products. This thing goes deep: to talk about dirt or advocate more of it is like advocating poverty; it is to disgust and unsettle people, and break fundamental, sometimes also religious, taboos.

  Not that I like dirt. It is always nice to be clean; nice to be nice. Many spiritual disciplines include tidying up as part of religious practice, though this has nothing to do with gender. If only it were fair, I sometimes think, or even calm, then I would never put the Hoover away, I would build a shrine to the Hoover, I would have the Hoover out, all the time.

  But it is seldom fair and never calm. I have not a lot of patience for the madness that is cleaning and have spent many years trying to talk myself out of it. I practise cognitive therapy techniques on the mess in the hall – ‘That discarded wellington is not accusing you of anything, in any way, Anne.’

  But it all made a horrible sense to me when I had babies. They are so small, you see. It seems impossible that you might keep them alive, and so we labour hugely to keep them free from harm. We boil, sterilise, boil again, we wash
, we sweep things out of their way, and when they start to crawl, we tidy the floor endlessly. There is also the fact that babies wear nappies and so four or more times a day we are up against the real enemy in all this, the Ding an sich, which is to say, shit itself. Baby housework is urgent stuff and unrelenting for the first eighteen months or so. This means that women who have many babies are saving lives with their dustpan and bleach for ten years at a time. No wonder we get into the habit.

  Still, some women clean so much, with so many products, that it’s not so much housework as solvent abuse. Housework makes women more miserable than anything else: because it never ends, because they do the bulk of it, and also because whatever provokes us to clean and tidy has its roots in rage and disgust. Some women are cheerful around the house, of course, and many men are not just clean but tidy, but the statistics seem to bear out the idea that men do not feel themselves endlessly obliged in the domestic sphere the way that women do, and that women do not enjoy doing the housework, despite the fact that they just keep doing it. We are slaves to our own heads.

  If you want equity in the home, or an attempt at equity, these are the rules. I have honed them over years of sitting down at a keyboard for months at a time and then leaping up to shout that we live in a tenement, and why does no one ever clean the skirting boards. These rules do not apply to households which already contain tidy men.

  1. Get dirty.

  If you insist that a man raise his standards, then it is only fair that you lower yours. They are probably too high anyway. If a dusty window-sill plunges you into depression, you need to consider the depression as much, or more than, the dust. Dirt doesn’t kill people. Wash your hands, not the house. Be careful with food. That’s it really.