A Life's Work (10 page)

Do you want to try putting her to the breast? the midwife enquires as I am wheeled from the operating theatre. I look at her as if she has just asked me to make her a cup of tea, or tidy up the room a bit. I still inhabit that other world in which, after operations, people are pitied and looked after and left to recuperate. My daughter's small body, bundled in blankets, is handed to me, and as I take her I experience a moment of utter, almost visionary, clarity. In this moment I realise that a person now exists who is me, but who is not confined to my body. She appears to be some sort of colony. What she needs and wants will vie with, and often take priority over, what I need and want for the foreseeable future. I put her to the breast. The word ‘natural' appears in a sort of cartoon bubble in my head. I do not, it is true, feel entirely natural. I feel as though somebody is sucking my breast in public.

The midwife compliments my daughter on her sucking. She is territorial and confident. She knows how to suck better than I know how to be sucked. Bizarrely, I imagine this fact to be the result of some prenatal conspiracy, in which my body was named as the pick-up point.
The milk will be in the breast. The midwife will give the signal. You must take the milk every three hours otherwise the supply will dry up. Our agents will be in touch shortly. They will come to the woman's house calling themselves ‘health visitors'.
After perhaps a quarter of an hour of sucking a vestige of my assertiveness rises to the surface like something from a shipwreck. I need a cup of tea, to wash, to rest. I realise that while the baby is feeding I can do none of these things. I wonder when she will stop. Eventually I drift into a half-sleep and when I awake I see that detachment has occurred. My daughter lies in my arms with her mouth open and her eyes shut, giving nothing away. The next time we do it I find that I have acquired an awareness of the matter of stopping. I sit there for what seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time, and then I wait. I watch her pink pursed lips, her jaw moving up and down, trying to detect in them some hint of finality. I shift about meaningfully. I look around the room hoping that by the time I look back stopping will somehow have been achieved. Another fifteen minutes pass, then half an hour. Finally, for no apparent reason, her mouth releases the nipple with a self-possessed pop. This pop seems to me to punctuate a decision in which I played no part. Just put your little finger in her mouth and force her gums open, says the midwife cheerfully when I tell her the next day that I have been feeding the baby for an hour and believe that my legs have gone into deep paralysis. I am delighted with this advice, which I receive like a mandate for my own continuance. I am allowed to live, it seems. My daughter's eyes are shut. I put my finger into the corner of her mouth and silently wrench it open, like a prisoner attempting a jailbreak.

Back at home, the slow-moving bulk of motherbaby wanders the fragile rooms, as brainless and clumsy as a dinosaur. Milk drips unbidden from my breasts, soaking my clothes. Small daggers of pain prick my body. I cohabit uneasily with myself, with the person I was before. I look at this person's clothes, her things. I go through her memories, like an imposter, prurient and faintly scandalised. Her self-involvement, her emotional vulnerability alarm me. I inhabit her loves, her concerns, with the detachment of a descendant piecing together family history, with the difference that these concerns still live: I am importuned by them; they require my involvement. Love, expectation, anger and resentments flow in their accustomed channels towards me and though they fill me with a strange aversion I struggle to contain them, to avert disaster. I am like a spy, bent upon the maintenance of an outward appearance while my existence revolves covertly around the secret of my daughter. I long to talk to other spies, to unburden myself to them. When I meet women who have children the truth spills indiscreetly from my mouth. I don't care about myself, I say. I have no subjectivity. They could do anything to me and I wouldn't care.

Threads of association hang from me, as if I were unravelling, entangling themselves in the world's weakness. I see elderly people, people in wheelchairs, people begging for money or crying in the street, and they tug at my fibres: I feel I should provide for them, should gather them up, should put them to the breast.
Breastfeeding mothers must remember to take good care of themselves
, a hospital leaflet informs me,
and should drink an extra liter of fluid each day, at least some of which should be milk.
I cannot drink. The story of my need is over. I believe myself to be immune, with the immunity of a dead thing, to everything I once felt so deeply. Instead I have become a responsive unit, a transmitter. I read that my daughter is receiving my antibodies, my resistance, through my milk and sometimes I imagine I can feel it flow out of me like a river of light. I imagine it lining the little hollow of her body, strengthening her walls. I imagine my solidity transferring itself to her, leaving me unbodied, a mere force, a miasma of nurture that surrounds her like a halo.

The feeding goes on for hours. In the old days, I am informed, women breastfed their babies for strictly twenty minutes every four hours. They weren't ‘allowed', they say, to do anything else. Those who adhered to it were, I imagine, delighted with this imaginary prohibition. It has a sort of Marxist appeal, and hence has since been discredited. The modern regime is all supply and demand. It recommends feeding the baby whenever she is hungry, by which means the breasts will produce the amount of milk she wants. You may be surprised by how hungry she is; you may find yourself feeding her twenty or thirty times in twenty-four hours, but don't worry!
It is impossible to over feed a breastfed baby.
This last claim suggests to me that feeding is entirely meaningless. I leaf through books on the subject looking for some mention of myself, some hint of concern for me as I sit pinioned twenty to thirty times a day in my armchair, but there is none. I begin to feel like a stretch of unprotected wilderness, ringing with the shriek of chainsaws, the drill of oil wells. Even the glimmer of hope offered me in the hospital is snatched away. In spite of the midwife's assurance the practice of timing or limiting feeds is, I learn, frowned upon. If you end the feed yourself, how will you know whether she's had enough? The customer, it seems, is always right. Something in the science of all this disturbs me. How often should I feed her, I ask another midwife when she comes to the house. Whenever she's hungry, replies the midwife. How do I know when she's hungry? You'll soon be able to tell, she replies with a glint that I think is meant to be conspiratorial. But in the meantime, I persist, how do I know? The midwife looks worried. It is clear that I have a problem. She gives me the details of a breastfeeding clinic run by the hospital. Her handwriting is round and cheerful as a child's.

The clinic is in a large room on the top floor of the hospital. When I open the door I am hit by a wave of noise. The room is packed. Women are sitting on the floor, on tables, two to a chair. Above the ferment of their conversation the sound of crying babies rises like a dissonant chorus of sirens. The air is hot and clammy with waiting, with noise. A woman with a clipboard fights her way through the crowd to take my details. Don't feed the baby until you've seen one of the midwives, she says. Alarmed, I ask her how long this will be. She laughs benignly and says that as I can see they are quite busy today. She does not appear concerned that the exigencies of her clinic are expected to unseat the volatile rule of motherbaby. I find a space on the floor and sit down on it with my daughter in my lap.

The other women talk and laugh loudly. Their faces are flushed with the room's heat. They manhandle their babies distractedly, turning them this way and that, putting fingers or dummies in their mouths. They flail and grizzle, their red little faces peevish as the faces of old men. Bonnets and booties and mittens on strings fly from agitated limbs. The babies boil like a row of angry kettles. When they cry, the mothers talk louder. One woman shouts into her mobile phone. Now and again a door on the far side of the room opens and a name is called. My daughter stares with round, startled eyes. She appears disarmed by this gathering of her kind. I wonder why we are all here, and then remember that it is because we are having problems breastfeeding. I find this difficult to believe: the happy, hub-like atmosphere of the room has drained feeding of its significance. The babies cry and complain, but the women have lashed themselves together to form a raft of comradeship and they sail merrily over that which separately would have drowned them. I begin to see my problems as those of isolation, of estrangement from the world. By the time my name is called I can no longer picture these problems clearly enough to describe them.

The consulting room is small and quiet. Five or six women sit in a neat row, their feet raised on piles of telephone directories, breastfeeding their babies. The babies lie regally on white pillows on their mothers' laps. Two women in white coats walk up and down the row, adjusting pillows, removing or adding a telephone directory. Occasionally they speak to one of the mothers in a low voice, and the other mothers look up, their faces as innocent and uncomprehending as moons. I am asked quietly whether I would like a cup of coffee. One of the white-coated women comes and sits down beside me. She has long grey hair and round spectacles. Beneath her white coat I glimpse the flamboyant, multicoloured fabric of her dress. Suddenly I am filled with hope, at the curableness of my situation, at the existence of this concrete expression of that which I had thought inexpressible. I am sick, and this woman is going to heal me. She asks me to tell her what's wrong.
Everything
, I want to say but don't. I find that I can fix on nothing specific to tell her. Presently I say that the baby seems to feed for an inordinate length of time. She nods her head vaguely. I sense that she is not listening. She gives me the pillow and the telephone directories and tells me to start feeding. Meanwhile she wanders off to inspect her row of motherbabies. When she comes back she adjusts my daughter's head and tells me to hold the lower half of her body higher so that she is sloping backwards. Her colleague catches sight of this manoeuvre. That's new, she cries, laughing delightedly. Why not, my woman gaily replies, gesturing extravagantly with her hands. Passing each other as they cross the room they twirl girlishly about. I begin to realise that I am not going to be cured, other than by the small possibility that these women are witches and the pillows and telephone directories the impedimenta of their sorcery. My daughter has gone to sleep. When nobody is looking I wrench her mouth open with my little finger. Feel free to come back again, the women say, waving and mouthing like hostesses, as I leave, and I walk quickly through the crowded waiting room, through the memory of the hospital's eerie corridors and down flights of echoing stairs, shrugging them off like stifling layers, desperate for the air of the outside world.

The days pass slowly. Their accustomed structure, the architecture of the past, has gone. Feeds mark them like stakes driven into virgin soil. By the time my daughter is three weeks old I have discerned in them a pattern. She cries with mysterious punctuality every three hours. I realise that where I was counting hours from the end of one feed to the beginning of the next, she, with her aversion to the notion of stopping, has been counting from beginning to beginning. I discover that this is true even if I stop the feed myself, and for a while feeding retreats like something tamed, like something dangerous sitting muzzled in the corner of my life. Time flows again through its dried-up tributaries. Although I still cannot believe that what comes out of my breasts is in any way legitimate, is qualified to sustain her through the intervals, neither the law nor the medical profession arrives at the house to intervene. Sometimes, when she has been two or more hours from the source of my body, I begin to feel a sort of elemental anxiety for her, as if she were walking a tightrope and had gone too far out, as if she could not exist for so long in time, in gravity, away from me. One day, she starts to cry an hour after I last fed her, and this evidence of her need converges with my disbelief in her self-sufficiency. I feed her. Over the next few days there is more crying, and then more. The cries seem to splinter off from themselves, like cracks from a central fissure, forging their jagged paths through silence until the whole surface of our routine is covered with them. I pour milk into these cracks as if to fill them: I feed her again and again in the hope of returning us to wholeness, to the state of not feeding. Once I feed her for almost two hours. That should do it, I think. Five minutes later she is crying again and I stare into the insatiable red cave of her mouth.

I think she's hungry, other people say when she cries, handing her back to me. I sit gloomy as a cow in the corners of rooms, on park benches, in restaurants or the back seats of cars, my shirt unbuttoned. Nowhere, it seems, am I safe from the accusation of hunger. Sometimes the baby cries even
while
she is feeding and I feel the triumphal urge to call a symposium. There! I would say to everyone. What do you say to THAT?

A woman comes to the house one day. She is researching a university study into the experiences of new mothers and wants to ask me some questions. The baby is crying and I am not feeding her only because I have got up to answer the door. Oh dear, says the woman. I wait for her to tell me that the baby is hungry but she does not. She asks me if I am exhausted. I say that I am. I recount, uncertainly, the rambling dream of feeding and crying that my life has become. She listens sympathetically. Look, she says presently, nodding at the baby, who I had momentarily forgotten was lying in my arms; she's gone to sleep. We both stare at the sleeping baby and eventually I get up and put her in her stroller, feeling certain that some magic has occurred, that this stranger whose colourless permed hair and pleasant, indeterminate face I have hardly noticed is in fact a being from another world, an apparition who has effortlessly rolled away the stone from the entrance to my life. The baby sleeps for three hours. The woman and I talk. As she leaves, she tells me that whenever the baby cries to remember to do something for myself before I do anything for her. I nod and thank her and close the door.