Read by Jennifer Aries
CONTENT NOTE Contains themes some readers may find distressing.
We don't talk about the baby in our house. We are not in denial. We don’t neglect the baby. We don't pretend that the baby doesn't exist. It's just that my husband and I agreed early on that the baby would not rule our lives.
We don't completely ignore the baby, and now and then we say things like "Do you think the baby will like this?", "Do you think that'll be right for the baby's bedroom?", "Will the baby be OK to go on holiday with us? Don’t you think the flight is too long?"
We try not to buy too much for the baby. It's not easy because baby things – especially baby clothes and baby toys, like little bear suits and knitted bunnies and elephants with black button eyes – are so exceptionally cute.
We don't talk about the baby with friends and family. My parents try at times but I cut them short. I remind them of the rule "This is not the time to talk about the baby." So we talk instead about grown up things, like laminate floors, parking fines, blocked drains, rubbish collection (which was late again this week), petrol prices (that went up again this year), the useless government (that’s my dad) and Isn’t Paul Hollywood lovvvely? (that’s my mum). With friends, we talk about theatre, holidays, latest movies, books, red wines over £15.99 a bottle, house prices and only sometimes and strictly subject to the make-up of the dinner party about isn’t the climate change terrible and what do you think will happen to Syria?
Sometimes, people see me with the baby and they ask. These are strangers – people at supermarket checkouts, at bus stops, in queues to the loos at train stations. They are people who generally don't mean bad, who are bored or think they are being nice by engaging in a conversation. When it happens and when someone smiles at me, when they ask about the baby's age and state of development, I say dryly "Six months" and then I turn my back to them.
In the beginning, I used to answer "What baby?" but that upset people. It unavoidably caused offence as if it was me who was rude by starting an unwanted conversation with a stranger. So instead, I now state the baby's biological age and turn my back to them. And when they pursue – if they pursue – I pretend that I don't hear them. And if they persist, I simply say "I'm sorry, I do not feel like talking." I don’t care if it hurts their feelings – it's my baby and my choice if I want to talk about her or not.
She is my fifth baby, you see. I stopped caring about what other people may think after my fourth one.
With the first baby it was all happiness and being dizzy with excitement from the moment we found out. We couldn't contain ourselves, couldn't wait for whole three months to tell the world. We were thinking baby names and talking nursery furniture when I was only 5 weeks pregnant. We were buying parenting books at 6 weeks. We were picking curtains and lightshades for the nursery at 8. We were deciding on the prep school at 10 (of course our baby would be an early developer). Then, at 12 weeks, we went for the dating scan and we saw the baby but did not hear the heartbeat. It turned out our baby had been dead inside me for a while: its little heart stopped at approximately 9 weeks – about the same time as I was wondering if I could manage without an epidural, if I should consider a natural birth, maybe a water birth ...
Baby Two didn't last that long – the bleeding started at the end of week 7, only a week and a half after we found out that I was pregnant. But it didn’t make it any easier. I was at work when the bleeding started. I didn’t know what to do, so I called 111 from the bathroom cubicle while sitting on the toilet with my baby flushing out of me into the drains…
Baby Three came with a lot of tension. I was knocking on the doctor's door every week “Shouldn't we do another scan, just to make sure everything is ok?” The doctor would frown and tell me to “try and relax”, that stress wasn’t good for me or the baby, that I needed to be positive, “maybe try mindfulness or deep breathing”. I couldn't relax but somehow we got past the dating scan and there was hope again. And then at five months, everything turned red once more and my world collapsed. The ambulance came and they rushed me to hospital but it was too late. All they could do was take the samples from the baby, from me and from my husband “for investigation” to find out if there was any specific reason why things had failed again. But they couldn't find anything concrete so instead they just said “keep trying”. We couldn’t think of trying, we could only cry ... They wouldn’t even give us a birth certificate – nothing by which to tell the world that our baby had existed. Our baby simply didn’t count because it hadn’t reached the right number of weeks before leaving me ... So, we begged and we cried and cried some more, but, in the end, we wiped out tears and tried again …
Baby Four was the hardest. Baby Four lasted the longest. He arrived a month before the due date in a C-section but he didn't cry. I remember the doctor's running, the machines beeping, the midwife, the nurses – all talking fast, all making shuffling noises. I remember my husband's face the colour of white chalk. I remember myself screaming “Why isn't the baby crying?” This was before the cold cots, before all this talk about letting you say goodbye to your baby. We didn't have much of a "goodbye"... or of a "hello". We didn't have much chance to hold the baby, to get to know him, to learn the outline of his face, the curves of his cheeks, the creases of his premature little fingers.
Baby Four was the hardest. It took us a while to get over him, to dare to start dreaming again. I couldn't look at my husband for a while. I couldn't take a shower – couldn't look at my body that had betrayed me, that kept reminding me of what had happened ... I didn't leave the house for two months – I couldn't face hearing the questions and giving the answers. Couldn't watch the friendly smiles change into expressions of awkward horror. Couldn't hear the congratulations change into sorrys ... The counsellor said it was ok to be angry, it was ok to grieve. I didn’t need permission; I needed to know how to carry on with life again.
That's why we don't talk about the baby in our house: we are trying to lessen the pain that may come by letting her into our lives too much, by making her too real before the time is right. We are afraid to hope and we are scared not to hope enough. As if by hoping too much, we are tempting fate. As if by not hoping at all, we are making fate happen.
But now and then, we do let our guard down. It mainly happens at night, when sitting on the edge of the bed, my husband kisses my six-months pregnant stomach and together we stroke my belly, communicating with our baby girl through a series of secret hand movements, tracing her outlines with the tips of our fingers, sending our love to her through the layers of skin. We don’t need to talk about the baby in our house.
(c) Irina Zahl, 2020
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