My friend’s partner is struggling to sell his flat in Muswell Hill because one of the neighbours is mentally unwell and screams all the time. Last time my friend and I talked about this, she referred to it as the ‘ongoing noise complaint’ and I thought about the woman who was screaming all the time and the people who were complaining about the noise and thought, oh my god.
My mother in law asks me whether, when I can’t sleep in the early hours, whether there is a ‘happy place’ that I can go to in my head. I think this is a naive question but I answer her that sometimes yes, if I have the wherewithal, that there is sometimes a happy place that I can go to in my head. I don’t actually know the happy place to which I am referring in this conversation. I am simply playing along.
David and I went to St Lucia when I was newly pregnant. We sat in a hot spring. It was the last thing that we did before we went home. We bathed, and it rained, and the rain bounced off all the green abundance of the jungle, the ridiculous leaves that hung above us like costume jewellery. I thought I might go to this happy place, or some other version of it, if I felt scared during birth. But now it is inconceivable to me that there exists a type of birth that is so insufficiently frightening that it allows one to leave that moment, even for a second, and to imagine a different one.
Below I’ve copied and pasted my recollections of birth and early motherhood from my notes app with no edits. CW for hospital/birth stuff.
In the beginning I wasn’t there. I put the baby on my breast and changed his nappy and said shhhh when he cried which was always. And I cried in the night when I was the only one awake and the pain of his little jaws working on my nipple was so excruciating and I remembered the pain of him coming into this world, not one pain but many pains and none of them familiar, stabbing and cutting, thick needles in the back of my hand, repeatedly, veins blowing and billowing blood of night shades beneath the skin and all the time the sound of the alarm filling the room, filling my head so that there was no room for any thoughts, no room for me, because the baby’s heart had stopped and the baby was inside me, my body was in the way and they needed to get to him. Hunched over in a gown in a very cold room with someone shouting at me to stay very still and to keep my eyes focussed on the image on the wall and I felt like a little girl who was in big trouble. Everyone using my full name which I never use and which I barely recognise as belonging to me, using it repeatedly. A needle in my spine, the feeling of something crawling inside me, in a place where I feel everything. A pain I can’t articulate, I’m sorry: it felt bad. The warm water of the anaesthetic climbing from my toes to my armpits as if being dipped in it. The cold spray on my stomach, rib cage. Can you feel this. Can you feel it now. Yes. Ok. And then the feeling of hands inside me, behind the curtain, pulling and tugging, removing things that were rightfully mine, that I should have been able to get out by myself, my baby, a placenta that I grew and that I never got to see, probably thrown in a bucket and then burned. His first cries. Unbearably real. My body wrecked. And I didn’t love him at first. I lay in the hospital bed and listened to my boyfriend speaking to him and saying ‘I love you’ and thinking, oh? But we just met him, we don’t know yet. And I cried at night and I wondered what I had done and what was happening to me and what would happen and whether I would ever recover, and I thought that I wouldn’t. And I lowered myself slowly onto the toilet breathing through my teeth and I bled into it and heaved myself up with the hand rail and with the muscles of my legs and feeling as if I had been - because I had been - cleavered in two. I couldn’t walk back to my bay without being bent double and even then thought that I wouldn’t make it. And the midwife saying she wouldn’t get me a wheelchair because I should be able to do it but I swear that I couldn’t, swear I was trying. And I promised D that I was in as much pain as I said I was in and he said he believed me. There was a baby to look after at the end of the bed. All the time crying, crying. Me, the baby, the other babies, the other women, men too, I suppose. The room so warm, stifling, and all the sounds so confusing. Is that my son? Still, trying to make milk and to offer it to a baby too small to know what he was doing. And I didn’t know what I was doing because there wasn’t any milk and on the third day he lay limply beneath a heat lamp and they told me we couldn’t go home. They took the clothes off his little body and put him in an incubator and fed him for me and told me that I hadn’t done anything wrong and I disagreed with them. You see he was searching for something that wasn’t there. I hadn’t washed since he was born and I begged them to use their shower which was broken but was the best thing that had ever happened to me, that warm trickle, barely enough water to wet my hair but enough to help me get through the night, to sit and look at him for hours, attached to a pump that sighed and hissed endlessly but produced nothing. And next to me a woman with enormous breasts who lay her premature twins on her lap and tried to put their tiny mouths on her nipples which were the size of apples and I stared at her and we smiled at one another and it was so quiet, all the babies there too sick to cry. D got sandwiches from Subway and we ate them at 1am on a sofa that was so low I needed help to get in and out of it. Next to it was a basket of tiny knitted clothes that you could take for your baby if they had been born too soon and very small. And I suppose then my breasts were full and they saw that he was doing well and we said that we wanted to go home. And at home I couldn’t get out of bed without hurting and I couldn’t get into bed without hurting and there was a baby and no time to think at all. But at night I cried when I was the only one awake and my boyfriend slept and my dog slept and the baby slept while I held him and cried and thought of all the ways that I had been hurt. Of course I started to fall in love with him and my body started to heal and I started to forget. How it felt when I was lying there the most frightened I’ve ever been in my life and they put the pink crying body on my chest, the little skinned rabbit that was my son and he weighed nothing and I could feel his soft, soft skin and his tender bones as if he had been lifted from a pot of boiling water. And I couldn’t hold him because I was still cut open so I lay there and he cried and I cried. And someone, a woman, leaned over me and grabbed my breast and squeezed it and colostrum, thick yellow cream, came out of my nipple and I exclaimed because I wasn’t expecting it and nobody warned me. And she was one of the people who touched me without permission.
This was not okay, you should not have been treated like that. Powerful writing, hope you can recover and start to feel better soon.