010. A Long, Beautiful Sentence
And now here he was, a little person on a windy beach in Cornwall, eating handfuls of sand and pointing at birds while I changed into my swimsuit.
Do you remember last May? I don’t know about where you were, but here it was hot. It was so hot, and so beautiful, the sky was clear every day, and we were afraid.
I was afraid to leave the house, afraid on my nervous little shuffles around the neighbourhood that other people would get too close; I was afraid I would get sick, or my husband would, that my parents would, or his parents would. I was afraid to touch the gate in the park where we walked each day, afraid to go to the supermarket, or the corner shop, or to handle the post when it arrived. I was afraid that life would just be like this now, each day closed off from those that came before and those that would come after, like living in the parentheses of a long, beautiful sentence that you could not quite recall the rhythm of.
I was afraid I would give birth alone.
In our online NCT class the instructor had talked to us about the possibility of induction, and about how hospitals were not allowing birth partners in until active labour, an unhelpfully ambiguous phrase, especially if you have ever experienced labour and so understand, as I didn’t then, how active every moment of it is, in one sense or another.
What I did understand then was this: that you – by which I mean I – might be induced and then have to endure the early phases of labour by yourself, in the hospital, for hours, for the better part of a day, or longer.
Don’t come late, don’t come late, I thought.
Two weeks later, too early, my waters broke and I was admitted to hospital. I kissed my husband goodbye at the entrance and then I languished there alone for three days, under observation. They were right to keep me in, I did not begrudge anyone that, but it was hard not to feel as if I had surrendered something – some freedom, some essential element of myself – at the door, and that in fact I would never get that thing back, no matter what happened. I had to sign out to go downstairs and walk through the park, had to write the time I left the building and the purpose of my expedition (‘fag break’, someone had written above my ‘walk’, perhaps a joke, perhaps not). Three times a day I was brought a tray of food meant to constitute a meal: dry sandwiches and tiny cups of juice for lunch and dinner, for breakfast rice krispies, overflowing with milk, and instant coffee. My body, for now a vessel only, was being kept in a holding pattern.
It was hot in the hospital, and stuffy. The sun hit the windows of my room on the sixth floor and warmed it to an almost unbearable degree. In the corridors it was a little cooler, because the sunlight wasn’t so direct, but not much, and after a while I got tired of haunting the hallways, overhearing snippets of other people’s phone conversations as I passed their rooms, or catching a midwife’s crisp, patient voice cutting into a moan of discomfort – Would you like to try the birthing ball? Would you like some paracetamol? I’d return to the little oven of my room, watch an episode of Normal People on my phone, read a bit of my book, Ordinary People, I guess I was just desperate for normalcy, desperate for something to feel ordinary again.
Mostly I just lay on the bed sweating and leaking, biding my time.
On the morning of the fourth day, my son was born by C-section, at thirty-six weeks exactly. It was four in the morning, a Sunday, and there was a small army assembled in the operating theatre. No one had been able to find any overshoes and so on each foot my husband, who had only been allowed to join me at the last possible moment, long after ‘active labour’ had begun but before they had actually cut me open, was wearing a surgical cap. When they took our son to be weighed the nurse could not find a pencil and asked my husband to take a photo of the scales: 2.68 kilos.
For weeks before I had been agonising about what to wear while giving birth. I had ordered a nightdress, a dressing gown, some strappy tops, none of which had yet arrived. In the end I was wearing an old T-shirt that belonged to my husband; it was too big, the fabric too heavy, it was completely sweat-soaked. Someone lifted it up so that our son could be placed on my chest while on the other side of a sheet, out of my line of sight, the doctor and her assistants set to work stitching me up again, a sensation of pushing and pulling, far more violent than the birth itself, or perhaps I only remember it that way. An opening and a closing, an irreversible alteration.
I sometimes see people describe birth using superlatives that I don’t quite recognise: it was horrific, it was sublime. For me it was so much about getting from one minute to the next that it seems, in retrospect, quite mundane; in memory of course I have collapsed the hours, the holding-pattern days. To be honest the physical sensation has more or less gone from my memory; I remember the abstract notion of pain, for example, but not the urgency or degree of it. Was it horrific? In some ways, I suppose. Sublime? Well, the outcome was, certainly, but the process? For me, no. I guess if I had to describe it in a word I would say it was interesting, an interesting experience, as if I was slightly separate from it, an observer, which in a way, now at least, I am.
Anyhow the upshot of it all was, there he was: a tiny thing with dark hair and an indignant shout.
A strange thing about having endured so much of the process of labour and birth alone is that for most of the experience I have no witnesses, no one to correct me about details I’ve misremembered, no one to corroborate my story, either. At times I’ve felt resentful about this, as if the birth was somehow less real for not having been observed by someone else in its entirety, but there’s something freeing in it, too. I can tell the story in whatever way I wish. It can mean whatever I want it to mean.
The truth is I had no expectations about birth, going in. I had no birth plan, and not only because I hadn’t had time yet to make one. My plan was just to get through it. To get us both through it.
And once we were through it?
I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
Once we were through it, once they were done stitching me up, I found myself in a recovery bay, disembodied, my son in a Perspex cot beside me. I could not feel my legs, was floating away in the sea of morphine they had given me as they pushed my insides back in, that violent feeling, not pain exactly but something I wanted to deaden, to feel less of. The sheer physicality of it alarmed me. The mechanics of birth by caesarean, I suppose, mean that this physicality is felt as something done to you rather than something you yourself do, but no matter how you deliver a baby, your body is the primary instrument of delivery, and in one way or another, you’ll feel it.
In the recovery bay everyone was giddy. We were praised, our son was praised. For a while, at least, no one bothered us with worries, or with logistics, there was only milk, and toast, and tea, and soft voices saying soft things. Eventually, though, we had to confront the logistics. My husband had to leave, his allotted visiting hour, which they had stretched as far as they reasonably could, long up; there was a minimum stay of twenty-four hours following a caesarean, and I had to be moved upstairs, to a ward; checks would need to be carried out, my catheter would need to be removed, there was the business of looking after the baby, there was lunch to be eaten (a sandwich), and dinner (another sandwich).
My son and I were there for a week, in the end. Every day someone would arrive to dash my hopes of leaving – a midwife bearing the results of a jaundice test that showed the baby’s bilirubin levels had risen again, he needed to be placed under treatment lights; a lactation consultant who wanted to get me pumping milk, to protect my supply of it while the baby was still so tentative on the breast. No one seemed to want us there, but neither did they want us anywhere else. No plan emerged for our eventual discharge, no one was allowed to visit us, no one seemed to think any of this was anything to worry about, but on the other hand everything seemed to be something to worry about. I busied myself by setting up a sort of temporary camp, hunting down an extension cable so that I could plug in my phone and the breast pump at the same time, arranging my belongings, such as they were, on the windowsill – headphones, hand gel, a stick of deodorant, a box of granola bars, two novels (untouched since the night I went into labour, of course), a notebook, a blue biro I had stolen from a doctor. I did my best to hide the blood on my sheets and built up a collection of pillows to support my back while I sat holding my son, willing or begging him to take some milk at odd hours that I recorded in my notebook with my stolen pen, 2.54, 5.17, 19.36, 22.03.
The hospital was still too hot, and though it was full of people it felt empty. There I was, separated from three other women by nothing more than a thin sheet of blue plastic. I could hear their calls, their cries, the muffled secret words they spoke to their newborn babies, but we were each in our own closed-off country, oblivious to each other, or not so much oblivious as immune, immune to each other’s pain.
But whenever I turned my head, there he was: my son, an anchor through the driftless days.
My son, to whom I am home, I thought; he felt like home to me too, even though my own body, and the world around it, felt alien.
*
That was a year ago, give or take. I’ll never know what it’s like to have your first baby in non-pandemic circumstances, whether the territory of new parenthood is any easier to navigate without the isolation of a lockdown, or whether there’s a universality to the strangeness. I suspect it’s merely different, though I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes envy parents who were able to take their babies to cafes and playgroups, who could call a friend over to watch their sleeping newborn while they had a shower and a cup of coffee and brushed their hair. Still, we’ve had other things: time together, for example, a luxury that would not have been possible in the same way under other circumstances.
At the risk of sounding mawkish, though if you can’t be mawkish on your child’s first birthday, when can you: the last year has been something like a long beautiful sentence, which is both the end of one story and the start of another. I think about that opening and closing, the irreversible alteration. The thing is that I’ve forgotten the miracle of it now, it’s mostly just normal, ordinary, I’m myself again, though I suppose I did surrender something of myself at the door, as sure as I gained something.
Last week, we took our son on holiday for the first time. Apart from at the hospital he’d never spent a night away from our house, and he’d never been more than an hour or two from our neighbourhood, but now here he was, a little person on a windy beach in Cornwall, eating handfuls of sand and pointing at birds while I changed into my swimsuit.
On the beach, after I’d swum, we met a woman with an eleven-month-old. We chatted for a while, bent over our babies while they splashed in pools of water and thick sludgy sand. She too, she said, had been kept in hospital for a period of time after the birth; she too had found it difficult, and lonely; she too was happy to meet someone else with a baby of a roughly similar age, to see how in spite of their differences they were so clearly the same species.
We had to say very little to achieve an understanding, and it felt fortuitous to meet on the sand like that, but it also magnified the distance between then and now. Then felt like another country, now inaccessible to me: I did not quite recognise myself, I was relieved to finally feel as if I was reinhabiting my body, and the world, but in my relief I was at risk of forgetting or erasing something important, not only about the birth itself but the circumstances in which it took place. I was grateful to speak for a moment, then, to someone else who had been in that country, someone else who could, implicitly, corroborate my story, who could remind me of it, in fact.
*
ADRIFT, my memoir about uncertainty, discovering the wilderness of your body, and swimming laps, is out now. Daunt Books in Oxford, the Bell Bookshop in Henley-on-Thames and No Alibis in Belfast all have signed copies. You can also order here:
Blackwell’s | bookshop.org | Waterstones | Amazon
Finally, if you’ve read it and enjoyed it, I’d be hugely grateful if you could leave a review on Amazon – these things make a difference. Thank you! x