Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

— There was the jaundice. We helped her get over that. Our tiny daughter developed a tan, she looked brown and healthy but really it was jaundice, they said it was ‘common in the first days of life’ but I couldn’t let my baby have jaundice. She needed liquids. The nurses in the hospital wanted me to give her water in a bottle, but I didn’t want her to get used to a bottle, I let her live on my breast instead, I let her sleep there, wake there, hang there, I made sure my breasts were hardly ever covered and she was hardly ever in the clear plastic cot in which all the other babies lay in a row. One midwife disapproved, the stupid cow. ‘You’ll make yourself sore,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes each side is all she needs. And remember to write it on your chart.’

Once upon a time I would have done what she said. Once upon a time I did whatever people told me, but I’ve grown up, in the last five years, I’ve learned that what I think is worth something. And my body’s worth something, and the love I have to give. So maybe Phil’s lucky to have me — maybe Becky’s lucky to have me as her Mum — I try and tell myself that sometimes, since I nearly always feel I’m the lucky one.

The jaundice got better. We took her home, and lay her basket in the basement window where the February sun poured in from the garden. Becky was made better by sunlight and milk. When the jaundice was quite gone I felt enormous pride. And she put on half a pound, then a pound, then another, after the scarey two-pound dip straight after she was born. The midwife came each day and weighed her and each time it went up a little bit more, and it was milk from my tits that was making her grow.

Then there was the drama of the little stub of cord where her belly was once joined to mine. It didn’t heal. I thought it must hurt her. When we bathed her it looked red and raw. The wound was so sort of — primal. It had to heal for her to be a person, not just a torn-off part of me. I’d been sent home from the hospital with some sterile wipes in those little individual sachets, but I felt they were hopeless, they were so dry and hard…

I rang up Mary. Mary Brown. My light in the dark, my comfort. Mother of two healthy grown-up babies, Mary who came and visited Becky only three hours after she was born. Mary recommended surgical spirit, swabbed on the wound with cotton-wool. Within twenty-four hours it looked less angry. Within three days it was drying up fast, and the little tag of cord fell off when I bathed her, and suddenly my Becky had a belly-button, the neat little navel she’ll have all her life, and she’d taken her first step towards growing up. Not that I want her to grow up, not yet, I want these baby days to last for ever, I want to use up all the kisses and strokes and hugs I’ve been saving for a baby… but I want her to be herself, a person. Becky Court-Sparrow, not chained to me.

I’ve just gone back to work part-time. The old nursery-school couldn’t take me back, so I’m supposed to be teaching eight-years-olds English, in a mediocre school ten minutes away. I dreaded it. I thought I’d be hopeless; I was never that brilliant at English myself, and I don’t read much, after all who does?

But as soon as I got there things started to go well. I manage to make them laugh a lot. And books are great once you get into them. I always did like fairy-stories; so do the kids. We read them together, we read poems aloud, I’ve got them to write some stuff for themselves and read it out, they seem to trust me. I arrive out of breath at the last minute, because leaving home’s harder than it ever used to be, with a heap of things to remember to do, and thousands of things to tell the babysitter — but in such a good mood, because of having Becky, the wonderful secret I have to go back to, that I want to hug them all. I smile at them instead like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland which we’re just reading, and it seems to make them smile too. I know it’s sentimental, I know it’s my hormones — at any rate that’s what Madonna says — but all the same I feel I have a right to love them. Because I’m a mother. (Extraordinary. Susy Court is a mother!) Because I love my own daughter. I’m drunk with motherhood, drunk with my baby.

In a funny way, it’s as if she’s been my mother too — and God knows I needed one. I’ve had a new life since Becky was born. I feel as though I’ve been given a new body, despite the little scars from having a baby, the floppy muscles, the stitches, the numbness. Because now at last I like my body. I’m proud of it. See what it can do! Thirty-nine years old, and it made a baby! I’m still breast-feeding. I never want to stop. But until I had Becky, I didn’t know I could, I didn’t know these huge bloody tits were useful. They were just there, they went around with me, they drove men mad, they would never lie down. It was nice when a man I wanted liked them, but the trouble was that all men liked them, they turned men into demented morons who never looked me in the eye. Now I’m not embarrassed by them any more. I was swimming with milk right from the start, I had no more problems once the milk came in, and I couldn’t help feeling a little bit smug when I heard the other mothers worrying, had they got enough, was the baby hungry, should they be giving him supplementary feeds, should they be stepping up his solids… I’m so proud of myself for keeping Becky happy.

Becky really is a contented baby. She loves the breast. She loves me. When she’s just been fed, and lies in my arms, or on my lap on her tummy while I stroke and pat her little back and marvel at her heavy head, you can see the shape so clearly under the soft hair as she lifts it up and looks out at the world — she sings; there’s no other word to describe it. She sings, in a clear sweet milky arpeggio, a high-pitched gentle croon of contentment that Phil and I call her ‘milk song’.

You see, I make my baby sing. I must be a good mother; songs flow from me.

And the world seems to be changing as well. I remember thinking, when I was pregnant, and Becky was already very much there, I knew her name and sex, I loved her — What if she can never spend time in the sun? What if that ozone hole gets worse? What if she can never play in a field, or sit by the sea in her swimsuit? She was still inside my belly, and I wondered if it would ever be safe to come out.

But the news seems to be a little better. The ozone whatsit seems to have slowed. The hole isn’t mended, but it isn’t spreading. Perhaps the old fridges and perfume sprays have done their worst and released all their poison… But it’s sooner than anyone thought that would happen. Perhaps it’s the earth, finding some new pattern of healing itself.

— Or perhaps the results are being faked by someone who wants to sell fridges and perfumes…

No, I want to believe the worst is over. For the last two years the temperature’s stayed nearly the same, though they say it could keep rising for forty years; but hope is free. You can’t live without hope, can you? Not with a baby. I have to be hopeful.

As long as the world isn’t completely ruined. We’ll never be able to stay outside all day in August again without a sun-hat and suncream and shade to cool down in, but we aren’t yet doomed to live in burrows, looking at films of grass and flowers. Becky will have real grass and real flowers. I’m ever so grateful. Life is good.

Of course, I get tired and furious sometimes when she won’t go to sleep and I don’t know what’s wrong, or when she wakes an hour earlier than I can bear, at half-past five when I’m deep asleep and have to drag myself up from a blissful warm daze into a cold early morning that’s all scratchy with crying. I hated her when she bit my breast, with her first sharp tooth, two painful bites. How could she bite the thing she loved? How could she hurt her mum who loved her? I get irritable when we want to take her out and have to stop and change everything again because she’s dirtied a brand new nappy. But Phil does more nappies than me, when he’s here. He can’t breast-feed, so he does the nappies.