Joanna Kavenna - The Birth of Love

*

‘Oh no,’ said her mother. ‘I think he’s fine here, with his mummy. Aren’t you, Calumn?’ Calumn nodded back, and so Brigid’s mother settled in, watching Brigid and Stephanie as if they were enacting a bad play, which she had bought her ticket for and might as well see to the end. And Brigid was too polite and didn’t insist. Useless, she thought to herself. You are useless.

‘How’s Patrick?’ asked Stephanie.

‘Oh, fine. Busy at work. Wants to change his job.’

‘It’s a good job, he’s very lucky,’ said her mother.

‘Of course, Mum,’ said Brigid. ‘We’re all very lucky. But he still feels like a change.’

‘I always thought Patrick’s life was rather glamorous,’ said her mother. ‘Always forging contacts, making deals or whatever it is he does.’

‘I think that’s fine for a few years, and then it palls a bit,’ said Brigid.

‘It’s a perfectly good job,’ said her mother.

Now Brigid looked down and saw that Calumn was curled at her feet, playing half-heartedly with a stuffed toy. He looked listless and she felt a surge of love and pity for him. Poor Calumn, conjured into existence only to be ignored, that was how she felt when she saw him at her feet, uncertain and somehow sad. ‘Calumn, sweetie, how are you?’ she said. ‘Do you want to play a game?’ It was still raining outside, or she would have suggested they all went into the garden. ‘Do you want to play with tins?’ He lifted his head and smiled at her a little. Always he forgave her. He smiled and stood up, bashed her knee in an affectionate way. ‘Let me,’ said her mother, and took some tins from the cupboard. Now, at least, she went to work immediately. A pile of tins appeared on the floor. Calumn sat down by it. Even though he had done this a thousand times, perhaps even more, he applied himself to the business of knocking down and reassembling the tins.

‘Good boy,’ said Brigid, kissing him on the top of his head. ‘What a very good little boy you are.’ She imagined him feeling ambivalence, but she was sure no such emotion had ever troubled her as a child. She had felt joy then sadness, bold and certain states, fleeting in their effects. She didn’t feel diffident, or troubled by something she couldn’t quite express, or any of these confusing relative states of the adult brain. In childhood she regarded her mother with awe and dependent love, with desperate need. ‘You were always crying for me, all day, all night,’ her mother later told her. ‘You were such a furious little baby, always fuming about something or other.’ Brigid had accepted this for years, had told her friends what a difficult baby she was, how her mother had perhaps never entirely forgiven her. She joked about it, though she felt it, too, as a rebuke, something she could never atone for. Having a child had made her reassess the story, or aspects of it now resonated differently. After a few months, she began to think that babies raged not because they were inherently furious, or inherently anything at all; they cried because they wanted to tell you something, and when you didn’t hear them, didn’t respond or comprehend, they simply cried more loudly. She wondered if her mother really meant something else, if really she was saying that she had been overwhelmed. That she had felt her baby was displeased with her, because she was so uncertain of herself. ‘In the end I gave up,’ her mother said. ‘I couldn’t stop your shrieking, so at night I put you in a cot at the end of a corridor, and shut the door. At least then I could sleep.’ This had once shocked Brigid, but now she thought there might be something else her mother wanted to tell her — something about losing your grip on things, becoming detached from events you could no longer control. Calumn had never slept through a night, and this had made her more tired than she had ever been before. Yet she understood that his needs were simple; he only wanted her, or Patrick. He was lonely in the darkness. She had always loathed sleeping alone, and if Patrick went away she found it hard to sleep. So how could she blame her son for being lonely at night? For the first year, he slept in a cot by the side of the bed. If he cried she simply lifted him out and took him into bed with her. She stroked his hair and kissed his soft face. Even when she could barely open her eyes, when she moved as if drugged, she felt compelled to kiss him, to hold him as he fell asleep again. She wasn’t sure she could have done things differently, and anyway it was too late. Now she had become so huge, they had moved him into his own room. He still cried in the night, but now it was Patrick who consoled him. If it had still been her — if, like her mother, she had never asked her husband to help, or he had never offered — what would she have done?

*

Whatever she thought, however her thoughts swirled and would not settle, her mother was here. She was here and she was trying to help. This was worth noting, thought Brigid. Perhaps she had always worried that her mother didn’t love her much. She had certainly been an unpredictable woman. But now, here was the evidence. She loved Brigid and she loved her grandson, Calumn. She was brimming over with love, some of it revealed clumsily, in these forays and in her determination to advise her daughter, but it was love all the same … Now Calumn was grumbling, so she handed him a carrot, said, ‘Would you like this, Calumn?’

‘Gub,’ he said, as he took it.

‘A carrot! How lovely,’ said her mother. ‘A delicious carrot!’

‘Awott,’ said Calumn.

‘Very good,’ said Brigid and her mother, together.

*

‘I suppose I’d better go in a minute,’ Stephanie was saying, though she had only just arrived. ‘I suppose I’d better go before Aurora wakes and we have to embark on the terrible business of breastfeeding once more. You don’t want to witness it, I’m afraid. At the moment I have about forty-five minutes from one breastfeed to another. Blissful breast-free minutes, and then it’s back to work again. Basically I might as well just put her on my breast and lie in bed all day. It would probably be less hassle.’

‘It’ll get better,’ said Brigid. ‘It’ll get much much easier.’

Stephanie smiled as if she didn’t believe her. ‘That’s what they say. They say that about everything, really, don’t they? The first six weeks are hell, they say. Well, that’s certainly true. The breastfeeding is hell at first but it gets better. The first five years are hell but they get better. The whole thing is hell but it gets better. Well, I sure hope it does.’ She laughed again, her big round laugh, though it sounded hollow this time.

‘Are you enjoying it a bit?’ said Brigid. She looked at her more carefully. Stephanie seemed so indestructible, you assumed she would always be OK. But looking more closely, well perhaps after all she looked chastened, as if she hadn’t been prepared for this. It was hard to be certain. Her eyes were puffy, but that was just fatigue. She was holding herself carefully, as if she was very delicate, but that was the Caesarean and all her post-natal pain. Then she was bleeding, of course, and she had her heavy breasts, and her nipples all cracked and sore and she was only slowly understanding what had happened to her. The body understood but somehow the brain took a while to catch up.

‘I love her very much,’ said Stephanie, looking down at her baby, smiling at the sleeping little form. ‘I do love her. I just wish these weeks would rush on by. They seem to go so slowly. I wish we could all wake up in a few months’ time, with everything established and running more smoothly.’

‘The ironic thing is, later you’ll feel really nostalgic about these early days, when she was so small and completely dependent on you, and all she wanted was to be with you,’ said Brigid. ‘You really will feel nostalgic when she gets more and more autonomous.’