Making Babies

by Anne Enright

  2. Share the territory.

  Never ever, ever, tell a man to ‘get away’ from the sink, even if he is doing it all wrong. Never, ever do that. It is his sink too.

  3. Demarcate.

  There is no point asking a man to clean something when he cannot see that it is dirty. Girls have been trained in the art of housework from the age of two, when they followed their mothers around asking why the chamois makes that funny noise when you clean the windows. Boys, if we are to believe the stereotype, are running around at the same age going, ‘Dar dar dar.’ A man may not, for example, realise that a wash-hand basin has an underside. He may not be able to tell which half of a room has been recently vacuumed. If so, there is no point handing over the Dyson.

  Play to your individual strengths. If he is interested in food, he might take over the kitchen. If he likes clothes, then he can do the laundry. The point about demarcation is that it requires total separation of tasks, even rooms, and nerves of steel. You must, on no account, wade in. You must let the washing rot in the drum. You must read a newspaper while he runs two plates under the tap before dinner. You must not nag. You must never, ever, ever do it yourself. You must not break the dirty dishes while weeping and ranting about how your life ended up. Keep silent. Smile. Let him sort it out.

  I was fortunate enough to develop a very bad dishwashing neurosis, some years ago. Dishes meant everything: the suds, the grease, the plug hole. I had only to look at dishwater to cry into it. It got so I couldn’t touch the things. Oh, happy fall.

  4. Get lucky.

  After a few years of watching men in an office environment, I realised that bastards don’t sweat the small stuff. They let other people make the phone calls, they can’t figure out the photocopier and if someone spills a cup of coffee, they just look at it. They wouldn’t know where to find a cloth, they are so useless.

  Watch this behaviour closely if you think incompetence isn’t about power. It is the weak who are busy and efficient. If you think men don’t clean because they are more absent-minded, or just not focused enough – then watch a man who you don’t love, so you know what to say to the one you do.

  Alternatively, you too can become a lucky bastard. I wouldn’t know what a tax form looks like, for example. This saves me many tedious hours, year after year. Which leads me to:

  5. Get down off your cross.

  If he can learn how to get a blackcurrant stain out at 40 degrees then you can learn how to use a drill. My acquaintance is littered with women whose lives would be changed if they could do this one thing. Actually . . . me. My life would be changed if I learnt how to use a drill. I can design the shelf and measure the shelf, I can source the wood and buy the wood, and get the right bracket and mark the wall and finally, after weeks of this, I can wring my hands, and after a few months of hand-wringing, I can shout a bit and, suddenly, a year later, I can stomp off for an unscheduled walk with no keys in my pocket and the children left unfed, and why? Because I am afraid of the drill. I am, more specifically, afraid, while pregnant, that the drill will puncture my stomach and amniotic fluid gush out.

  Really, I do not deserve to be happy.

  Other Mothers, Other Fathers

  Other mothers are always far too worried about their children, and then far too casual in spooky, possibly dangerous ways. Other mothers ignore their children when they pull at them; then smother them with attention just when you get to the point of the conversation. Other mothers give their children outrageous foods – things you wouldn’t even be able to find in the supermarket. Other fathers are too indifferent or too loud and they always get a child excited just before bedtime.

  Their children, on the other hand, are fantastic. It is a commonplace to say that OPCs are dull compared to your own, but I really like them. I like looking at them and testing their personalities, at an early age. I look forward to seeing them grow up. I love seeing her father’s eyes looking out of a little girl’s face. There is nothing so interesting, I find, as what comes out of two people, and how it turns out, this time round.

  How to Get Trolleyed While Breast-feeding

  Go out. Get trolleyed. Sober up. Feed the baby the next day.

  Sounds simple, doesn’t it? First, though, you must wait until your milk supply is established, until you can say the word ‘breast-pump’ without wincing (this may never happen), and until your baby has been offered, and has accepted, a bottle. Alternatively, you must wait until you no longer get dizzy spells while sitting quietly in a chair – which is to say, until the baby has started sleeping for six hours or more at night. This may never happen either. The bottom line is, you must wait until you can stand it no longer – the smiles, the wriggles, the squawks, the purdah of poo and baby bliss; you must press the ejector button just before the plane crashes, which, in the case of motherhood, is just before you run screaming down the street in your nightie yelling, ‘Taxi!’

  Three months is a good rule of thumb. It may take longer, but three months makes a nice number, as you budget your sobriety, to add to pregnancy and make an even year – no harm in that, it is a cheaper way to live. Meanwhile, you must forgo the professional advantages your colleagues enjoy from falling over in front of each other and laughing it off the next day. You will become an outsider, for a while. Perhaps for ever. Motherhood can interfere with your drinking for up to fifteen years; firstly because you don’t want to drop them, and subsequently because you don’t want to make them cry. If you live in a binge culture, like journalism, or advertising, or publishing, or Ireland, a foray every six months or so will be needed to reassure the wider world that you have not gone all holy on them. One drink will not do this. To go out properly, you need to lose count.

  But (shriek!) will it harm the baby?

  The American Academy of Pediatrics chimes with the general feeling that ‘a couple of drinks won’t hurt’, mostly because they want to approve of something, and allowing a drink might keep you off the cocaine. Drinking while nursing is traditional; mothers used to take a glass of ale or porter to help their milk supply – and also, perhaps, in the secret hope that it would make the baby sleep. In fact, a small amount of alcohol taken before a feed makes the baby take 20 per cent less milk. It also makes them sleep not well, but badly, in the three and a half hours after a feed; so that’s that myth knocked on the head.

  I’ve done my research, as you can see. I take my maternal guilt very seriously. I dissect it. I put it into boxes. I throw it in the bin. Then I come down at three in the morning and find that my old guilt has been spawning, and there is new guilt all over the kichen floor. So I stuff it back in again and say to myself, Think, you fool! Keep thinking!

  Alcohol. Breast milk. Not a very melodious combination. But the key concept here is timing – drink after feeding, not before. Many mothers will find it hard to believe that alcohol does not accumulate in their milk. In fact, the alcohol content of your milk is the same as the alcohol content in the rest of your body – it is reabsorbed back into the bloodstream as you sober up. Two hours after a glass of wine, you might as well have been drinking water. There is also no truth to the idea that feeding a child after a drink is like feeding them the drink itself.

  Before you panic about the post-partum champagne that made the room spin after two sips, it is worth calculating how much alcohol there actually is in your bloodstream at any given time. If you get blind drunk, leer into your baby’s cot, extract it while falling backwards on to your bed and pass out with its mouth roughly positioned at your breast, your milk will contain a massive 0.3 per cent alcohol. If you are actually in a coma and the baby is applied to your breast by a third party, then your milk will contain 0.4 per cent alcohol, or thereabouts. At 0.45 per cent you are dead, so attempts at feeding will fail after five minutes or so. But mostly, as a euphoric (0.03 per cent) or even excited (o.i per cent) drunk, your blood, and therefore milk, contains about one-thousandth the amount of alcohol contained in a dry Martini. In 1982, Woodwards Gripe Water contained as
much as straight beer, i.e. 4.69 per cent.

  There are good reasons not to feed a baby while drunk, not all of them aesthetic. The children of women who drink daily show no difference in cognitive development at one year, but they do show a small but significant delay in motor development. There is also the question of the smell. There is also the question of whether they will grow to like it.

  Every mother is worried about addiction – whether she breast-feeds or not. It is not just a question of alcohol – every parent is worried about sweets, biscuits, crisps, picky eaters, overeaters, their child will be fat, or anorectic, their child does not love them enough at the dinner table to eat the right food. It starts early – every couple you meet worries about when ‘the bottle’ should be taken away from a baby, what should be allowed in ‘the bottle’, whether a baby should have a soother, and for how long. In my experience, it is usually the father who wants to control all that sucking, on the unspoken assumption that a bit of honey on a plastic teat will lead the child straight to rehab – you might as well write the cheque now. Sometimes, but more rarely, it is the woman who throws all the bottles in the bin, and comes in, beaming, with a plastic cup. It seems that sucking and the satisfactions of sucking are seen as dangerous in our society: it also seems that the mother doesn’t find them as dangerous as the father does. So, while the parents row, sotto voce, the child hangs on to the bottle for dear life – quite literally: a baby’s grasp on a bottle is so strong that you might think you could lift them up by it.

  Of course, the anxious, puritanical parent is right – or at least correct – if you leave the bottle / dodie / blankie in the child’s control, it will not be relinquished without an enormous, grinding fight. But will it make them some sort of suck-slave for the rest of their lives: a gobbler, a muncher, a glugger, a fat boy, a junkie, an alcoholic? Well . . . probably not.

  There are only two small studies that I can find about all this, both of which find a strong correlation between being weaned off the breast at two weeks or under and subsequent alcoholism: this by way of testing the Trotter hypothesis – a Victorian naval surgeon’s suggestion that there might be a connection between early weaning and later drinking.

  Of course, as I regale my pals with this piece of information over a bottle or two of Chenin Blanc (we do our drinking on the phone, these days), the cry is unanimous – what happens if you were never offered the breast at all? Who will speak for the poor bottle-fed? But of course, science never tells you the most important thing.

  And so, I take heart. There are thousands of contaminants in human milk, including the residue of every bottle you ever slathered on to you of Ambre Solaire; but it seems that dodgy, fallible, perhaps even 0.03 per cent proof, as it is, human milk is always better than the other stuff. More gratifying though is the idea that, according to the Trotter hypothesis, harm is done to a baby, not by giving pleasure, but by taking pleasure away. This is why mothers jump and startle and dash to their babies. This is why telling a mother not to pick up her crying child is like telling her not to staunch a wound. This is why we must be as nice to children as we possibly can be – which is to say, fantastically nice until the third Tuesday in May, when we have to jump out the window and run off to get trolleyed.

  Because the joy of alcohol is that, if your baby sleeps for twelve hours, then you can drink your head off for the first three of them and, when morning comes, you might feel poisoned, but you will not be poisonous. You don’t have to get rid of the milk you make in the course of the evening, or ‘pump and dump’ as the women on the Internet so charmingly put it. You don’t have to do anything except have a good time.

  It took me two babies to figure all this out.

  Two babies later, I am out buying the electric breast-pump (wince), and running the curtains through the sewing machine to throw on a little something to wear. Two babies later, I tiptoe out of the room as the bottle is applied by sentimental husband to tiny maw. I click open the front door and sneak down the garden path, open the gate with a creak, and realise that I have no friends left to get drunk with. No, that was just a joke. I go to a book launch, of course. I have eleventy-one gins. I bray and whoop and regale. I meet people in the loo and talk to them in a silly voice while having a pee, only to find the place empty when I open the cubicle door. Ooops. This isn’t drunk, it is demented. I’ve had a baby! Get me a gin!

  I wave across the room, and hulloo and tell everyone they are looking great – though they all look one year older, and for some it is the year that made the difference. I do not look at my own reflection, ever. I scout around, looking for badness, but I find none. All the great drinkers are dry or dead or horribly stained. No one smokes any more; there is no romance in the air. The lighting is bad and the acoustics are worse and the men look dull. I say men, but I mean anyone – it was never just about sex, the great Drinking Project; it was about serendipity and the poetry of 3 a.m., locked into someone, eyeball to eyeball, talking complete bollocks.

  Sometime around 10.30 the damaged little fucker who has been tracking you all night comes up with the same sneer as the last time you were out, and you realise, with the predictable, drunken slump, that you have changed while the wide world has remained the same. I’ve had a baby! I’m not! really! interested! any more!

  Drinking is a group thing and you don’t have a group, now – you have a family (damn). It is time to wander out and lose your handbag in a taxi. It is time to scrabble in the flower-bed for your dropped keys and open the door – ‘It’s only me!’ It is time to regale your man with who said what to whom, until the baby wakes up, and he shushes you and gets another bottle while you sidle away, lowing and leaking like a cow past milking time – the farmer passed out in the front parlour, a bottle spinning lazily on the floor.

  Entertaining

  It is the end of the meal. Two sets of parents turn their children quietly upside down, or pull them backwards by the lip of their pants, and discreetly sniff their bums. Then we look to the Camembert.

  On Giving Birth to a Genius

  The baby lies on her back and kicks. Thump, thump, thump. Her feet drum the floor. I knock out a rhythm on the floorboards and she imitates me, seven in a row. Then I knock out four, and she does four.

  I pick her up quickly and do something else, trying to distract her from the fact that she can count already, at the age of eight months. I say nothing. Fortunately, in front of her father, in front of her granny, various relatives and friends, she doesn’t bother showing off. In fact she deliberately gets it wrong. So, it is a secret between us, this mathematical streak. We won’t tell anyone else. I will take it for my own burden, and in the meantime, keep things light.

  Dreams

  The baby is supposed to be asleep in her room, but she is sitting halfway down the stairs, bereft.

  ‘My cardigan,’ she says.

  Well, she doesn’t quite say ‘cardigan’, she says the sound that we both understand, at this stage, to mean ‘cardigan’. I put it out on the line to dry yesterday, and we both looked at it for a while. It looked so nice hanging there.

  Then she says, ‘Caw caw,’ which is the sound the crows make down the chimney from time to time.

  She has had a dream. She has dreamt about a crow and her cardigan that was hanging on the line.

  So I get the cardigan, and show her that it is safe. We walk out under the clothes line and look at the sky for crows.

  ‘It was a dream,’ I say. But she seems to know that it was not real. She has figured that much out, already. She is fifteen, maybe sixteen months old.

  Speech

  No one else can hear the baby speak, but I can. I can hear her say ‘up’ and ‘clap’, I hear ‘stairs’. I hear ‘string’. No one believes my baby says ‘string’, but I know she does, because she loves the bit of string that is tied to the door of the car, and she says ‘shing’. You have to listen hard, I admit that.

  For months we have been on call and answer. ‘Ah da da dah,’ says the
child. ‘Ah dah dee doo dah,’ I say back. This conversation is surprisingly complex, and gives me a new respect for birds, whales and chimpanzees. With three or four syllables, in all their variations, we can say, the two of us, all that we need, for now, to say.

  Still, I dream of the baby turning around, and opening her mouth to say something wonderful and long and syntactically amazing like, ‘Can I go to the shops?’ I know it is in there somewhere – before her first word was ever uttered, there were full sentences playing across her face. The trick is getting them out of there – like pulling down the weather.

  There is nothing so exciting as speech. A baby looks at your face as you say a word, and whatever passes between you as you hear the word back, is love and love returned. It is the gaze made manifest. Teaching a child to speak is giving them the world. It the better than feeding them, I realise, as I stand beside the kitchen counter, dropping scraps of words to my daughter’s up-tilted face. And I think that all words are sublimated nurture, or a request for nurture, or its provision. All words happen in the space between you and your dear old Ma.

  I develop a theory that all writers have Major Mothers, Serious Mothers, sometimes Demanding Mothers – the kind of women you always know when they are in the room. I test this theory any time I am at a reading or conference, I float it across the dinner table. The last time I did this, one of the writers did not answer. He had started to cry.

  On Being Loved

  If you want to look old, hold your baby up to the mirror. Put your cheek beside its cheek. This is what skin is. It is something that gets loose the more you wear it, like a pair of linen trousers that fit fine, but only for the first half-hour.

  I have lived without a mirror for years at a time and quite like it, but a baby needs to see its reflection, so I hold the baby in front of the mirror and we admire the baby in the mirror, then I turn to admire the baby in the room. It’s you! It’s you! We turn and turn about. We lean in to scrabble at the glass. We touch the mirror with our foreheads.