It was fathers’ day. We were at my parents’ for a family lunch and my aunt was there with her baby niece who was in her care. My aunt is with babies the way most women are with handbags: so naturally drawn to them she tends to tuck them under her arm without another thought. I was with babies the way most men are with handbags: disinterested and slightly uncomfortable holding one. The niece was a genial little thing and was passed around to pretty much everyone except myself and my grandfather (who I appeared to have inherited my attitude toward babies from). When my husband held her the usual jokes about how good he looked with a baby went around. But I didn’t laugh, instead finding myself distracted and slightly disturbed by the way a sour feeling in my stomach was putting me off dessert. I never refuse dessert.The next day I found myself sitting on the bathroom floor in tears, holding a pregnancy test: a little white stick with more pink lines on it than I was prepared for. The moment I discovered I was pregnant I was not filled with joy, I was filled with fear.
I was having what my father commonly refers to as an ‘Oh Sh*t’ moment. He coined the term during his career as a university academic, when he would commonly come across students cowering in the realisation that a semester of beer drinking at the student bar didn’t equate with a pass. Similarly, as I was sitting on the bathroom floor I was realising that saying ‘but a baby might come’ whilst removing my husband’s clothing didn’t equate to contraception. I was not prepared for a baby.
But how do you prepare?
Do you ‘borrow a baby’ as one baby manual I read suggested?
Do you attend the babes-in-arms sessions at the local cinema and observe mums whilst they simultaneously wrangle their maternity bra, deal with a baby who is not shy about making their displeasure with the situation known and attempt to follow a complex narrative as it unfolds on screen?
Do you ask a friend with a baby for an honest assessment?
I didn’t. I didn’t want to know.
Surely there are people out there who are far more prepared for dealing with the chaos and unpredictability a baby brings than I was. People with younger siblings, or lots of cousins, or degrees in early childhood. I had held a baby twice before my son was born. But would my experience of first-time motherhood be any different if I was the eldest of eight? Would it make a difference if I had a clearer picture of what life with a baby is like before I jumped in? (Okay, maybe jumped isn’t the right word.) Would it have helped when I stood paralysed with uncertainty and anxiety over the change table while my baby screamed? Maybe. Maybe the screaming wouldn’t have bothered me so much.
I spent most of the first six months of my son’s life with a baby manual in hand, reading and re-reading in the hope that I would find some clear instruction on what to do with the baby. People kept saying I should follow my instincts. My instinct was to run.
The time that I wasn’t spending reading the baby manual I spent mourning the life that I had lost. I don’t mean things like late nights out with friends or doing with my weekends whatever I wanted. I mean taking a shower regularly or brushing my teeth at least once a day. Then I felt horribly guilty and ungrateful; I had a healthy baby, I hadn’t had a single miscarriage before his conception. So I kept quiet.
Of all the advice, information and instruction that I sought, the most useful came from a social worker at the acute mental-health crisis team after it was well and truly confirmed that I had postnatal depression. ‘This is the hardest thing you will ever do,’ she said to me. ‘It’s going to get better.’
She was right.
Claire Zorn.
