For my daughter, who's 1 today

If I close my eyes, I’m still there.   Late March 2011, a million years ago and yesterday all at the same time.    I’ve been washed up on the sofa and beached like a bloated Whale, wondering how much longer the final stages of my pregnancy will drag on for.  For months I’ve been obsessed with childbirth in all its many forms, watching endless You Tube videos of babies popping out in various, but always painful ways, words like epidural and (the most dreaded of all) episiotomy running through my head on a loop.   From hippies having their kids in flower strewn birth pools to scary, hairy Germans perched on hard hospital beds, I’ve seen everything, and everything in between, yet I still can’t imagine what it’s going to be like for me.  It’s Sunday night.   I’m half heartedly watching Come Dine with Me, but my mind’s wandering constantly to the eventual emergence of the baby inside me that’s running out of room, too big even to kick.  As it slowly twists and shifts like a ship bobbing on the sea, as impatient for release  as I am,  I’m jolted out of my daydreams by a popping noise and a sudden gush of warm water between my legs.   Immediately I think I’ve wet myself, just another indignity in long line of beautiful gifts from pregnancy that’s ranged from piles to puking in public.  My brain alerts me to another possibility, spoken of at my NCT classes, and I sit bolt upright in disbelief and shock.  Could my waters have broken, a week before my due date?  Total paralysis and then panic.  This can’t be happening, I thought I had weeks yet to wait.  First babies are always overdue aren’t they?   That’s what  the old ladies at the bus stop say each morning as I waddle by them.  I sit as bolt upright as my giant bump will allow and rip off my sodden underwear,  uncaring of propriety.  My pants are soaked through, and a second burst of water shoots out onto the leather couch.    I trundle into the kitchen where John is cooking tea, trumpeting like a startled Elephant.
It’s happening’
I screech, whilst wringing out my knickers. 
‘Oh Shit’
says John, poised over a bag of frozen peas and looking less like a father-to-be  in manly charge of a much practised birth plan, more like a 12 year old boy caught with his fingers in Mummy’s purse.    Frozen to the spot, we stare at each other.  A moment passes.   After 9 months of thinking, talking, dreaming and planning, we never actually expected this moment to arrive, and the responsibility of getting it right rushes over us in an overwhelming wave.    Surely our baby isn’t coming on a Sunday night, in the middle of cooking an elaborate Sunday dinner, with Yorkshire Puddings and everything? I’ve just hunkered down for an evening of moaning about my various aches, pains and anxieties, do I have to get back up and actually give birth?  I have a flash back to the lazy Summer night outside a pub in Camden when we excitedly  agreed we were ready and most certainly up for trying for a baby after I miscarried our first and unplanned pregnancy.  Now all bets were on and we were most definitely not ready.   Sure we’d painted the nursery.  We’d  bought all the kit.  We’d thought of possible names and I’d gone on maternity leave, but now it appeared an actual baby wanted  to come out of my body – I was enjoying having a little friend who very much wanted to eat cream donuts and Pringles at random times of the day.  Nobody told me it wanted all that food so it could grow big enough to come out.  We were suddenly scared shitless, why hadn’t we been before?   ‘We’re completely clueless.’ I yelped.  ‘We’ve only been together 18 months and I’m not good with pain and I don’t want my fanny to split open and I quite like having sex thank you and I very much want to go out on an evening and party and I’m still 16 inside my head and we don’t like the area we live in and my dog is incontinent and mental and you don’t have a job and the living room ceiling is falling down and I haven’t written a novel yet like my English teacher said I should and my Mum’s not up for being a grandma and there’s that little bit under the radiator we haven’t painted and we don’t have a girls’ name and I’m not sure I can commit the next 18 years of my life to a child or indeed to you since we’re not married oh God why aren’t we married we’re living in sin and now that baby’s coming and I haven’t rubbed vegetable  oil into my perineum to help it stretch and I don’t want an episiotomy and I was going to get a few books to read and I think we might have mice and we haven’t saved very much….’  Gah.     Yep, we were about to be parents.

If I close my eyes, I’m still there, two days later.   I’m flat on my back, bum glued to a guerney, paralysed with a pain that I’ve never found words to describe, perhaps because none exist.   An imagined and indeed assumed natural birth has been prised out of my clenched fists by the medical science needed to deliver my baby safely.  The fat needle rammed crudely into a vein on my hand has dripped tiny beads of Pitocin into my bloodstream, tricking my body into a labour it has neither expected, wanted or now welcomes.  I’m a failure as a mother before I’ve even held my baby in my arms, my body’s had to be tricked into giving birth.  The soft lighting, the caress of warm water to appease the agony and the gentle, loving touch of my partners hands, guiding me through the maze of pain are not possible.  Whenever I cry out, John tries  to touch me, but I push his hands away in anger as if they were coated with hot coals.  Any contact, physical or emotional,  would increase the trauma I’m feeling.  I’m an island of agony, lost on a sea of loneliness.    My body wants, with its every fibre  to move, to escape the searing knives that are stabbing it by twisting and turning, changing positions in order to appease the screaming of my red hot, knotting and pulsing muscles.  I can’t.  It’s forbidden.  I must lie here prostrate and watch my baby’s heartbeat fluctuate as it’s constantly monitored on a computer screen – every  moment hot, heated panic as it shifts and dips.  There’s a needle rammed into the base of my spine too, another failure, I’m drugged up to the eyeballs and have been since the Pitocin penetrated my system.  Ten minutes into active labour I was screaming the place down for the drugs I’d been sure I wouldn’t want or need.

If I close my eyes, I’m still there.  There’s a midwife holding each knee, bracing them into my chest as I push with every inch of effort I have left after 18 hours in labour, a surprising amount as it turns out.  So far it’s been the birth I dared to imagine only in my worst nightmares, and I’m determined to put this right, to get this right, to sweat and toil my baby into the world through effort not impotence.   The adrenalin floods through my system, rising up like a tidal wave.  Every way in which I’ve failed, during 29 years on this planet, I intend rectify in this moment.  Every person that’s ever put me down.  The love of my life that I almost married, but who didn’t quite care about me enough to fight for me when it mattered.  The girl that was supposed to be my best friend but bitched about me endlessly behind my back and knocked my confidence down to rock bottom for years.  The mother who has ignored my pregnancy and failed to prepare me for being a mother myself through her selfishness.  They can all go to hell as I give my all to deliver my precious child safely into a world where it will be loved and cherished above everything else.  My life before recedes and disappears, unmourned and unimportant.  I snatch my breath and my muscles grip as I pant then push, pant then push.  I’m being given instructions by the midwives but I don’t  hear or need them.  My body blissfully takes over as my mind gives in, overwhelmed with the magnitude of this moment.  I feel the rightness of nudging my baby’s head out of me, bit by bit, gripping and then letting go.  Nobody else is in the room.  I pray to a god I don’t believe in.  Let my baby come out now, whole and healthy.  ‘I can see the head’
someone says.
 ‘It’s got lots of hair’

says someone else, as if we’re in a film, reading from a well rehearsed script.  I reach down to make what they’re saying a reality, and as my fingertips make contact with wet, soft, hairy skull, I give a final massive push and a tiny person slip slides into reality.  There’s a gorgeous sound, a blissful sound, the most welcome sound my ears have ever heard.  A baby is screaming and as I come round, I realise that baby is mine.  It’s being held up for me to see like a prized catch on a fishing trip and it’s really a real-life being, purple and covered in a white coating of vernix, swollen and bloated, beautiful like every butterfly and sunset I’ve ever seen, every dream I’ve ever had is pinpointed onto its startled, screaming new- born face.  Its cries are piercing and prehistoric, it’s outraged and shocked and its arms are flailing, fingers spread.  It looks like it’s reaching out for something, or someone, and it takes me only a second to realise it what it needs.  Me.    I’m a Mother, it happens in a millisecond, and an instinct I’ve never felt before, if I’ve ever felt an instinct at all, prompts me to grab it out of the midwife’s hands.    In one thought and movement, fuelled by adrenalin and the first rush of maternal love,  I rip off my top and press bloody baby  against my naked breast.   In doing so, I pull out the Canula in my hand.  Blood spurts outrageously and dramatically across me, the baby and the bed.  As John and the midwives rush to attend to this tiny drama, I have a second alone to register that the baby is a girl.  Its sex is something that hasn’t yet mattered in this 18 hour struggle to give it life.  Though we never found out whether it was a boy or a girl at our scans (and we were so excited for the big reveal at birth) it’s not the huge revelation I thought it would be.  Time seems to stand still as, while everyone else deals with the blood spattering excitement, I gaze at my daughter.   She’s found my index finger and wrapped her whole fist around it in a gesture of such ownership that I already know I’ll be hers for life.    Her eyes are huge, dominating her face.  They’re  a strange grey, almost colourless in their lack of real pigment, and they swivel around like periscopes, taking in this strange new world.  If I was her I’d be terrified, but she’s already braver than me, and far more beautiful.   She looks ancient, like she’s been here many times before and could teach us all a thing or too, yet she’s somehow ageless, a total blank canvas upon which a life will be painted, day by day.  She’s not like any new born I’ve ever seen, in my complete innocence.  They’ve all been a few days old, pink and clean, wrapped in soft blankets and sleeping like angels.  This little creature is sticky and swollen, nose squished from being pressed up against my insides.  She has whorls of black hair that are fast drying into crispy noodles all over her shapeless skull.  She feels like she’s coated in Vaseline and, as I try to clasp her ever more tightly to me,  she slips through my fingers.  She’s  continued to do every day since I met her, taking more of an interest in the world with each second, sliding out of my maternal grasp as I try to hold tighter and tighter and she wriggles free to take her rightful place in the world.   Her umbilical cord is like a thick, soapy snake.   While I’ve been lost in my daughter, the midwife has wrapped towels tightly around her and is preparing to cut the cord (John wimping out of the job at the last minute for fear of hurting the baby by cutting into it.)  As the scissors snip through it, meeting surprising resistance, I feel a deep sadness that we’re no longer one entity.  She and I are now individuals, alone as we never have been before, two people where we once were one.  I feel my heart break a little as hers begins to beat without my assistance.  She’s been breaking my heart ever since.  I’m the mother of a daughter, what did I expect?   I could weep for the innocence I lose in the moment of her birth, but I gain her innocence, such a prize, I will treasure it for as long as is humanly possible.

If I close my eyes, I’m still there.   In the hospital overnight.  If I ever have another baby, I’ll take it home and we’ll spend out first night together in the family bed; clean, quiet, warm and snug.   I’d bundle it up and get the hell out of Leeds General Infirmary as fast as I could, better yet I’d give birth at home.  As a first time Mum, when  they told me I needed to stay on the maternity ward due to the possible risk of infection after my waters broke prematurely, I instantly agreed – they knew best.  The process after the birth was surprisingly brisk and efficient, making me feel like a cog in a wheel.  They weighed and checked our baby over, and I watched her confidently scoping out the situation as they placed her on the scales, relatives current and long gone flashing across the features on her newborn face, so tranquil and patient – my daughter already surprising me in how unlike me she is – and how  better prepared for this turbulent world she seems to be – perhaps trains inherited from her Daddy.   They gave her back to me, and I ask John if he’d like to hold his daughter for the first time.  He looksinstantly panicked, and begins to back away, not knowing how to take her in his arms as he’s done a thousand times since then.   The midwife needs to patch me up, so after some prompting he takes her from me and the look on his face as he gazes at her is so new that I feel a strange envy envelop me – the man who had once only had eyes for me has a new girl in his life, one that he now croons to, whispering that she is beautiful and precious and entirely his, and that he will love her forever – I believe her will love her forever, though I  have never been able to believe the same about his love for me .  As they wheel us down to the maternity ward, our baby begins  to feed for the first time, seeking out my nipple without any kind of direction, instantly appeasing my fears about breast feeding.  I try to remember the holds we’d been taught in our antenatal classes, but she has inbuilt instincts that override my clumsiness.   Ensconced on the ward, it feels like only 5 minutes before the nurses are telling John he has to leave for the night.  Still flooded with adrenalin, I’ve only been able to sip a cup of tea and toy with sandwich, and after 48 sleepless hours I spend another 12 wide awake, holding my daughter instead of putting her in the plastic box next to the bed I’m supposed to (it turns out that I never put her down for the next 12 month either, despite the prompting of my Mother who tells me it’s spoiling her – funny,  I don’t ever feel like she’s spoilt,  spoilt is milk gone off or a plan ruined.)  The other babies in their individual cubicles seem to wail all night, but Iris, as she’s been newly named, is totally silent.  The hospital porters  kindly position me out of reach of the call button, so when she is copiously sick in the middle of the night,  I can’t ask for help.  Listening to the chattering of the nurses at their station, and trying (though failing) to block out the screeches of the Chinese baby opposite us, I manage to reach into my overnight bag and pull out a clean babygrow and vest.  Grappling Iris out of her soiled clothes, I shovedher into new ones, wincing as my attempts at gentleness  jolt her little body about.  Though I am 29 years old, I have no younger siblings nor close friends or family members with babies.   I’ve held newborns for a few minutes, but given them back at the merest hint of screaming, sickness or the need for a nappy change.  Though my NCT classes have involved dressing, bathing and breast feeding a doll, they have in no way prepared me for doing the same to a real life breathing, moving infant, not least one that is my own flesh and blood, and more precious to me than I’ve ever imagined.  She is infinitely fragile and breakable,  though at the same time her eyes seem to trust me.  ‘Love me’ they said, ‘and I’ll forgive your unpractised fumblings.   I believe in you.’  A strange and unworldly smell begins to pervade our cubicle, and as I peek into her tiny nappy I encounter an ungodly, jellyfish like substance.  Fearing her insides have fallen out, I start to scream the place down, only to be told by a nonchalant nurse, pissed off at actually having to talk to a patient, that a baby’s first poos resemble little sausages of black tar, the padding that’s been in their intestines during gestation making their way out into the world.  I’m not going to get on my soapbox here, because I’m remembering my daughter’s first hours on Earth, but a return to the good old days of women being taught how to administer to their infants over a few days on a kindly, clean maternity ward would not go amiss.  We don’t come from big families so much in modern times,  and first time Mums often  only  read about motherhood in celebrity magazines before doing it themselves, which paint an entirely unrealistic picture – those women have help that us mortals can only dream of.  All manner of mad things pop out of you and your baby in the first few days (as well as in and out of your head,) and it’s hard to even pick up your newborn when you’re in agony from passing its head out of  an orifice that seems maliciously designed to be too small for the task.  You’re reeling, bleeding, adjusting to screaming floods of hormones, your partner’s been sent home and you’re expected to become mother earth in a nanosecond.  Iris put her trust in me that night, and I vowed I’d never let her down.  To my knowledge I haven’t yet, but it’s been through sheer, grim determination more than anything else.  A few kind words, another cup of tea during that sleepless night where everyone’s baby cried blue murder, a friendly face and someone to change my blood and wee stained sheets…would that be too much for the nhs to take?  Would it have helped prevent my post-natal depression from developing I wonder ?  I cared a lot about my baby in those hours, and I care so much more now, but other mothers whose  maternal instincts didn’t kick in and get them through, who weren’t educated enough to recognize the depression like I did, and seek help ? Where are they now ?  How are their babies faring?

If I close my eyes, it all happened yesterday, I’m back there in those weird and wonderful first few days of parenthood at home, those first few weeks when you fall through the hours, and your house is littered with nappies, muslins, gifts, cards, strange paraphernalia and remnants of your former life like high heels, handbags, bottles of wine and clothing that fits you.  It didn’t happen yesterday though, someone played a trick on me and a whole year has passed since Iris made her way into the world.  Today is my daughter’s first birthday.  We’ve survived 12 months together, and though I’ve got to grips with many elements of parenting, I know that there will be many challenges to come. 

This post isn’t my attempt to tell you about the last year as a Mother.  It’s my chance to relive those few amazing, terrifying days when my daughter came into being.  Iris Eliza Hornsby is one today, and I couldn’t love her more, but it’s been a struggle, and one I hope to be strong enough to describe if you keep reading my blog.

I leave you with these:

You bring up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments and then complain of their frivolity.         
John Ruskin.

The mother should teach her daughter above all things to know herself.
C E Sargent.

Watching Clementine grow is one of the great satisfactions of my life.  The centre of my universe shifting from myself to another person is a great relief.  It gives me the chance to give to another person.  I’m not so concerned about my own life as I was before.
Cybil Shepherd.

The amicable loosening of bonds between daughter and mother is one of the most difficult tasks of education.
Alice Balint.

He that would the daughter win, must with the mother first begin.
English 17^th century proverb

Thou art thy mother’s glass
and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
William Shakespeare.

She was a beautiful baby.  She blew shining bubbles of sound.  She loved motion , loved light, loved colour and music  and textures…She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all.
Tillie Olsen.

O young thing, your mother’s lovely armful.  How sweet the fragrance of your body.
Euripides.

A perplexing and ticklish thing is a daughter.
Thomas Hardy.

I’d rather see you poor men’s wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace.
Louisa M Alcott – It was a big deal at the time not to marry ones daughter off.)

A daughter living out a mother’s thwarted ambition is a cause of fulfilment and envy to the mother, has a sense of the ‘mission’ of her heritage and a terrible feeling of pressure.  Such daughters have never felt free to fail.
Louise Bernikow.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.  No man does. That is his.
Oscar Wilde.

Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t’ worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure
unless it comes through you own fault.

F Scott Fitzgerald, to his daughter.