018. A pandemic birth, five years on

We were all there, together, alone, with our new babies, gazing out the windows at the same trees

It’s May, the finest month of the year, when spring begins to open its arms to summer, and the light is at its most perfect. The birds sing their little opera in the trees each morning and every evening at the setting of the sun it feels as if anything might be possible the next day.

May is the month I think of when I think about what I love about living in England: hawthorn blossom and birdsong and the sound of voices spilling out from pub gardens at night, the slap of oars on the river early in the morning, the greening of the trees and the gilding of the edges of fields at golden hour. May is the month in which I met my husband, eighteen years ago. It is the month in which I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, just last year. And it is the month in which my son was born, five years ago today.

He was born at half past four in the morning, at the height of a global pandemic; outside the dawn chorus would have been starting up but we were cocooned inside the hospital, insulated from both the joys and the sorrows of the outside world. I had already been resident at the Women’s Centre for three days, a sufficiently long time for me to have begun to detach from any sort of external reality, especially since no visitors were permitted because England was still in lockdown.

He started school in September, my son, and I thought a lot then about what it felt like to have a school-age child, but in particular what it meant to see him trot off to class, in person, in a completely normal way. I thought about the thing I used to wonder, late in my pregnancy with him and well into his first year of life, tracing the same loop around the nature reserve near our house over and over again: would the world he grew up in ever again resemble the world in which he’d been dreamed of and conceived? Would he ever know the touch of strangers, the brush of someone’s arm on a crowded bus, a spontaneous hug from a friend, the smell of his Californian grandparents? Would he take a train, a plane, would he visit the place where I had grown up, would he see London, or Paris, or the inside of an IKEA? Would he go to school and make friends and laugh with them and share snacks, lick each other’s ice lollies to see which flavour is better, think nothing of any of it?

He would, he would, he would, he would: but I could not have known that with any certainty at the beginning of his life. None of us could, none of us did. Perhaps this is the thing I find hardest to access, now, the weight of an uncertainty that seems almost impossible, in retrospect, to bear. The further away we move from that moment in history, the more dreamlike it feels, the more remote, like a speck on the horizon, a ship disappearing into the mist.

The story I’ve told myself about my son’s birth has evolved over the years; perhaps this is inevitable, perhaps it happens with every birth story, but the fact of the matter is that there’s no one to contradict me when I make statements about how he was born, when I reframe the attitudes I held or claim certain details – the colour of a blanket, say, or the words spoken to me by a doctor. The fact of the matter is that I was alone for most of his birth, and for the week in hospital that followed. Alone in the sense that I had no friends or family with me: I was tended to with great care by a litany of doctors, midwives, nurses, porters and others, but twice a day every day the shift would change and so would the faces at my bedside. This detail is important, because it is one of the only objective facts I have from all those hours spent labouring by myself in a hot cramped room, and from the days after. My son and I are the only consistent witnesses, the only ones who were there for the whole thing, who saw it play out, beginning to end.

(What a thing for us to share! And what a thing to go unwitnessed.)

Here’s what I know to be true about his birth: the time he was born (4.26 a.m.), his weight (2.68 kilos), his gestation (36 weeks exactly). I know that he was breech, and delivered by caesarean after a period of labour: how long is unclear. I know – I think – that towards the end his heart rate began to decelerate with each contraction, and that the doctor who examined me shortly before delivery exclaimed, ‘I can see his feet!’ and things moved very quickly after that – a mark of the urgency of the task is the fact that no one bothered to put me in a hospital gown until after the birth.

My husband was not entirely absent, but he was not allowed in any meaningful sense to be a birth partner except for a brief period. He was present in the theatre, he saw his son being born, he held him in the recovery bay, and then it was time to go home.

The baby and I, meanwhile, lingered in the hospital for seven days. My son was not unwell but his levels of bilirubin were unsatisfactory and he was periodically placed under strange blue lights wearing a mask over his eyes that made him look like a tiny superhero. My bed was by a window that overlooked the hospital entrance and I could see partners arriving with bags to hand to midwives in masks and gloves and plastic gowns. My husband sent me things this way: clean babygros and nappies, bars of chocolate, fresh fruit, once an avocado, at which I wept, having consumed nothing but packet sandwiches and crisps for days because the hospital was not able or allowed to provide us with hot meals.

I think often, these days, of the other women on the ward, the new mothers, raw and unaccompanied. The one I heard sobbing behind the curtain as she was told by a pediatrician, again, that she couldn’t be discharged yet, would have to spend another night alone with her baby. The one who spoke loudly to her husband over the phone mounted next to her bed, cheerful at first, increasingly despondent as the days marched on. The one who the lactation consultant praised lavishly for the amount of milk she managed to pump, with whom I constructed an entirely one-sided rivalry; I was never able, in spite of my best efforts, to garner the same praise. The one who helped me retrieve my call button when I dropped it a few hours after delivering my son and was too sore, post surgery, to bend down and retrieve it myself; she seemed so self-assured but later I heard her on the phone to her son, putting on a brave voice that kept cracking; he must have been, from the way she spoke to him, about the age my son is now.

I remember the names of some of their babies, these women, names I heard repeated over and over again, like an incantation. But I know nothing about the mothers themselves, their lives then, their lives now. I heard every one of them cry at some point, but I don’t even know what they look like – I had only glimpses of dressing gowns and messy hair, slippered feet shuffling below paper curtains. Perhaps I passed one of them on the street today, perhaps one of them served me a coffee yesterday morning, perhaps one of them is my dentist, who knows. But we were all there, together, at that particular moment in time; we were all there, together, alone, with our new babies, gazing out the windows at the same trees, the same car park, feeling the warmth of the same May sun, the golden light casting its glow over everything.

I should also say this: at the time I was absolutely desperate to leave, to get home with my son, to be with my husband in our house, which he had cleaned meticulously, almost manically, in preparation for our arrival. He sent me photographs of gleaming floors and polished mirrors, the California poppies blooming in our garden, gifts that had arrived, a small stuffed rabbit, a bouquet of lilies. Trapped on the ward with the other mothers I was a caged animal, a beast riding a hormonal tidal wave, crazed with adrenaline; I wore bloodstained stockings for three days before I realised I could ask for new ones, though I had to have help pulling them up over my calves, pressed the call bell at all hours to summon midwives to examine the contents of my son’s nappies, ate like a wolf, hunched over my food, stuffing it into my mouth as quickly as I could, my appetite never sated. I refused to sleep, busying myself with expressing milk and washing and drying the pump equipment and watching the tiny boy in the cot next to my bed, his skin yellow and flakey, objectively the most beautiful baby ever to grace the earth, I was certain of it. And yet five years have also erased a lot of the difficulty of that time. Five years have turned that hospital stay which I resented so fiercely at the time into something sacred, something deeply comforting in my memory, a place and time that feels of home. I felt it in the ward after I delivered my daughter this January, the eerie doubling of myself, and I feel it now, can call it up in an instant: a deep homesickness – that word again – for the light of that particular May and the way it fell through the windows onto the blue blanket on my hospital bed, illuminated the bottle of antibacterial gel on the windowsill. Nothing will ever feel that way again, not only because that moment in history, that moment in my own life, has passed, but because I will never again have a baby for the first time, will never again meet my son for the first time.

Here is the story I tell myself, then, about my pandemic birth, five years on: that it was a good birth, a positive birth, all things considered. I do not remind myself about the fear, the uncertainty, or that outside the hospital the world as we knew it was dissolving, with no promise that it would ever come to resemble itself again. We were lucky. We were safe. But not everyone was. And maybe not everyone has written and rewritten the narrative in the way that I have, and maybe it is not entirely constructive for me to have done so: whenever I think of my son’s pandemic birth I also think of all the people who miscarried alone, or who were dealt horrific news alone, who navigated complicated or high-risk situations by themselves, and I think of the way in which enduring all these things alone felt like a necessity, but also an impossibility, even as you were doing it. I think, too, of the parentheses that sits around everything related to my son’s birth and infancy — (but it was in the pandemic) – and how much that has coloured my sense of what it is to become, and then to be, a parent. Inside those parentheses is an invisible and almost inexhaustible list of didn’ts: didn’t go to baby groups, didn’t go to cafes or the cinema or postnatal pilates, didn’t go anywhere at all, really; didn’t see a health visitor in person for over a year, didn’t get weighed regularly, didn’t meet family for many months, or years; didn’t casually pop to the supermarket or the charity shop or to a friend’s house to sit on her floor with our babies and talk about how tired we were, didn’t even see other babies, except at a distance, for quite some time.

Sometimes I look at my son, entirely physically independent of me now, and hardly recognise the person that he is, or is becoming: his own person, someone I’ll never be able to fully know, with a passion for Lego, the capacity to outrun me, an uncanny ability to mimic animals. Sometimes, though, I look at him and see the only other person who was there with me, the only other witness to his own becoming. The point of this, then, is just to mark it: my son’s birth, and the strange circumstances in which it occurred, so that I don’t forget just how strange they were, especially as this bit of his story is increasingly eclipsed by other parts.

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What I’m reading

I read Breasts by Jean Hannah Edelstein, whose writing I’ve long loved, over the course of a day of breastfeeding my daughter. Like all of Jean’s writing it’s both very funny and very poignant. It’s also a very approachable length; if I’m honest I’m having trouble focusing on longer books at the moment and I’m craving what you might call ‘slim volumes’. Speaking of short books, I’m still thinking about Orbital months after I read it.

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My memoir Adrift: Fieldnotes from Almost-Motherhood is out now. You can buy it from your favourite independent bookshop, or via any of the links below:

Bookshop.org | Blackwell’s | Waterstones | Amazon