Confessions of a Bad Mother by Stephanie Calman Read Free Book Online Page B

parts’.
    ‘I know it sounds silly, but I hate taking my pants off. Can I
keep them on?’
    ‘Of course, darling,’ says the nurse.
    Julia has told me, ‘ You’ll feel a sort of
rummaging ’, but I don’t feel even that. Suddenly two hands are
holding a baby high in the air. It really was in there! Peter puts his hand to
his mouth, tears in his eyes, and gasps: ‘It’s a boy!’
    ‘It’s Lawrence!’
    ‘Dignity?! You won’t have any of that,’ crowed a male
friend, whose wife had a long, horrific labour.
    Well, Blah to you.
    I’ve got away with it! A whole little boy has come out of me, and
despite all my imperfections, he is absolutely fine. Well, almost.
    Lawrence’s breathing doesn’t sound quite right. The
paediatrician says he is ‘grunting’. He looks fine, or as fine as a
newborn baby can look, resembling the usual red prune. His weight is fine. But
his blood isn’t picking up enough oxygen.
    Peter takes him to meet my mother and my sister. Someone pushes a
Polaroid into my hand: a picture of a baby. A chill goes through me as I
realize it’s Lawrence. I shove it back at them; it makes it seem as
though he is dead.
    Peter takes a proper picture of us together, then Lawrence goes off to
the Neonatal Unit, and he and I go back to the fifth floor. Thankfully,
Lawrence isn’t in the Intensive Care bit, which would be really scary,
just the moderately scary Special Care Unit.
    Eventually Peter goes away. too, and I spend the night sitting amongst
all the other mothers – with their babies – in the Postnatal ward.
It isn’t at all traumatic, if you count listening to six babies crying as
not traumatic. It’s intriguing, watching all these mothers looking after
their babies, feeding and changing them, cuddling them and holding little,
murmured conversations. Will I be able to do all this? Although I’ve had
my baby, I’m still on a provisional licence.
    Not having my baby with me seems quite normal; it is, after all, my
default mode. I don’t feel that we’ve been wrenched apart;
I’m not used to the condition of motherhood, so it’ll give me time
to break myself in. After all, he’s not in danger. It’s all part of
the adventure. Besides, when you’re as nervous as I am, the full battery
of medicine’s finest is a comfort. Being sent home in charge of a
helpless infant: that’s scary.
    I’m looking at a week of staying with these nice people who
won’t make me wash up or get my own tea. I have a bed up on the fifth
floor, at the end by the windows, with a view over the rooftops. Peter, Claire
and my mother bring in Danish pastries and coffee, the odd sandwich and other
essentials such as chocolate and, later on, Indian takeaways and beer. I can
receive friends arriving with treats and flowers then, like a Victorian mother,
pop down to Neonatal twice a day for a spot of Heritage Parenting. I sit
amongst my bouquets and cards and feel good. One fine afternoon, a friend and I
go out on the balcony with tea and biscuits, and sit in the warm air like two
colonial ladies on their veranda. It is, all in all, quite a holiday.
    My heart sinks, though, when I try to express milk. A grey, metal pump
is wheeled in on a trolley, like an exhibit from the metereological display at
the Science Museum: one of those early devices for measuring precipitation in
the section that nobody looks at.
    I clamp on the glass trumpet and listen to the growling sound of the
machine. After half an hour’s concerted pumping I have about ten
millilitres, enough to fill the syringe at the top of Lawrence’s tiny
feeding tube only once. They ask if I will allow him to be given formula. What
if I say: ‘ No, I’d rather he starved to death on ten
    millilitres, so long as it’s my own ’? Will they go ahead and
give it to him anyway? I appreciate their attempt to include me in the
decision-making process. Every hour, I drop friends, tea and present-opening,
and run down