Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

God knows, I can’t talk. I went back to work too soon after Emily. I didn’t know — how can you? — that this new life will be almost as strange to you as it is to them. Mother and baby: newborns both. Before Children — a woman’s existence is divided into BC and AC — when I still had time to go to the National Gallery on Sunday afternoons, I used to like to sit in front of that Bellini Madonna, the one where she’s in the foreground of a kind of farm, baked by the sun, gazing down at the lovely infant in her lap. I’d always thought it was serenity in her eyes. Now I see only exhaustion and mild puzzlement. “Christ, what have I done?” Mary asks the son of God. But he’s sleeping, full of milk, one plump arm flung in abandon over his mother’s blue dress.

I was the first woman on the investment floor at Edwin Morgan Forster to get pregnant: six months gone when James Entwhistle, Rod Task’s predecessor, called me into his office and said he couldn’t guarantee there would be a job for me when I got back from maternity leave. “You know how fast things move on with clients, Kate. It’s nothing personal.”

Civilized, decent, erudite James. I suppose I could have quoted the legislation at him, but there’s nothing they hate more than being reminded of their family-friendly policy. (EMF’s family-friendly policy exists so they can say they have a policy, not so people with families can invoke it. No man would ever use it anyway, so neither can any woman who wants to be taken seriously.) “Of course, the baby won’t make any difference, James,” I heard myself saying. He made a note on the jotter with his gold Cartier pen. Commitment? he wrote and underlined it twice.

“Would I be wanting to scale back my foreign clients?” Of course not.

I didn’t know.

At thirty-two weeks, I went to see the consultant at University College Hospital. Routine appointment. I’d missed the last one (Geneva, conference, fog). The consultant steepled his long white fingers like a cardinal and told me he was signing me off work because I was under too much pressure during the crucial weeks of fetal brain development. I said that was out of the question; I planned to work up to my due date so I could have some time at home with the baby afterwards.

“I’m not really worried about you, Mrs. Shattock,” he said coolly. “I worry about the child you’re carrying and the damage you could cause it.” I was crying so hard that when I stepped out onto Gower Street I was nearly run over by a milk cart.

So I took it easy. I took it easier. Technically, I had to stop flying at seven months, but a taupe shift dress saw me through till eight. Bump got so damned big by the end I had to do a three-point turn to get out of the lift. When jokes were made in meetings about needing to reinforce the office floor to support Kate’s weight, I laughed louder than anyone. Every time I walked past the dealing desk, Chris Bunce used to sing the Elephant March from Jungle Book under his breath—“Hup two three four, Keep-it-up two three four!” Bastard.

Sitting at the computer one afternoon, stomach so stretched my skin felt it was crawling with ants, I felt a few Braxton-Hickses, those practice contractions that sound like a retired colonel living in Nether Wallop. By the end, I used to dream of Colonel Hicks coming to my aid. He would carry my briefcase and, when I was standing at the bus stop on City Road nearly keeling over with exhaustion, he would hold out a hand and say, “Will you step aboard, madam?”

I did enroll in a prenatal class but could never make it there for the 7:30 start. Ended up going to a birthing weekend in Stoke Newington run by Beth: oat biscuits, whale music, a pelvis made out of a coat hanger and a baby from a stocking pulled over a tennis ball. Beth invited us to have a conversation with our vaginas. I said I wasn’t on speaking terms with mine and she thought I was joking. Laugh like a moose down a well.

Richard loathed the class. He couldn’t believe he had to take his shoes off, but he liked the bit with the stopwatch. You could swear he was going to be officiating at the Monaco Grand Prix.

“Knowing you, Kate,” he said, “you’ll have the fastest contractions in history.”

Beth said if you did those panting little breaths she taught us it was a way of mastering the pain. So I practiced them religiously. I practiced them secularly — at checkouts, in the bath, before bed. I didn’t know.

My waters broke on the escalator at Bank, splashing the Burberry of a Japanese futures analyst who apologized profusely. I canceled my client lunch on the mobile and took a cab straight to the hospital. They offered me an epidural, but I didn’t take it. I was the bitch who had endangered her baby’s brain development; not having drugs was my way of showing how sorry I was, showing the baby there was something its mother would bear for it. There was an ocean of pain and I dived into it again and again. The water was as hard as wood. It smacked you like a wave hitting a deck, and each time you got to your feet it smacked you again.

After twenty-five hours of labor, Rich put the stopwatch down and asked the midwife if we could see a consultant. Now. Down in the operating theater, during my emergency cesarean, I heard the surgeon say, “Nothing to worry about, this will feel a bit like I’m doing the washing-up in your tummy.” It didn’t. It felt like the baby was an oak being pulled up by the roots from claggy November earth: tug and wrench and tug again. Finally, one of the junior doctors climbed onto the operating table, straddled me and yanked her out by the heels. Held her up like a catch, a thing from the sea, a mermaid marbled with blood. A girl.

Over the next few days a number of bouquets arrived, but the biggest came from Edwin Morgan Forster. It was the kind of baroque arrangement that can only be commanded by war memorials or a City expense account. There were priapic thistles, five feet high, and giant lilies that filled the air with their pepper and made the baby sneeze. A card was attached with a message written by a florist who couldn’t spell: One down, free to go!

God, I hated those flowers: the way they stole our air, hers and mine. I gave them to the day midwife, who slung them over her shoulder and took them home to Harlesden on her scooter.

After thirty-six hours, the night midwife — Irish, softer, more musical than her daylight counterpart — asked if she could take baby from me so I could get some rest. When I protested, she said, “Part of being a good mum, Katharine, is having enough energy to cope.” And she wheeled away my daughter, who furled and unfurled those frondlike hands in her little Perspex aquarium.

Headlong, I fell down a mine shaft of exhaustion. It could have been hours later — it felt like seconds — that I heard her crying. Up till that moment, I didn’t know I knew my baby’s cry, but when I heard it I knew I would always know it, would be able to pick it out from any other cry in the world. From somewhere down a brown corridor, she summoned me. Hitching the catheter over one arm and guarding my stitches with the other, I started to hobble towards her, guided by that sonar which had come as a free gift with motherhood. By the time I got to the nursery, she had stopped yelling and was staring, enthralled, at a paper ceiling lantern. I have never experienced joy and fear in such a combination before: impossible to tell where the pain stopped and the love began.

“You’ll have to name her,” the smiling midwife chided. “We can’t keep calling her baby, it’s not right.”

I’d thought about Genevieve but it suddenly seemed too big for the intended owner. “Emily was my grandmother’s name. She always made me feel safe.”