From Here to Maternity by Sinéad Moriarty Read Free Book Online Page A

asleep… Tracey said that the touchy baby needed to be snuggled and you had to make a sound like sh-sh-sh so he thought it was the splashing of fluid in the womb. Hang on, I thought. Yuri’s been out of the womb for nearly eleven months. He won’t remember what it was like, and all he’s heard since we brought him home is sh-sh, but not because I was trying to re-create swooshy womb noises – because I was trying to get him to stop crying.
    Mmmm. I flicked ahead in the book. Oooh, I like this bit. Tracey says that us new mums shouldn’t be hard on ourselves. She says we’re shocked, exhausted and frightened – too right I am, Tracey – and loving our babies takes time. Hurrah, I’m not alone.
    I was feeling marginally better, when the phone rang. ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ asked Jess.
    ‘Actually, I’m finding it all a bit hard.’
    ‘Welcome to my world,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, it gets easier. Listen, I wanted to see if you’d be keen to join my mother-and-baby group. It’s just a few of the girls, and the babies range from three months to two years old, so Yuri will fit right in.’
    I had met some of Jess’s baby-group friends before – Sonia and Maura. They were incredibly smug, and when I had told them I was in the process of adopting they had more or less implied that adoption would be like wearing someone else’s cast-off clothes and they could think of nothing worse than bringing up another person’s child. They kept telling me I was very brave. Did I really want to spend time with witches like them? Then again, maybe I’d found them so awful because I was sensitive at the time, and it’d be nice for Yuri to meet other kids: he probably missed his mates from the children’s home. Besides, they couldn’t all be like Maura and Sonia: the other mothers must be normal, or Jess wouldn’t still be going, would she? Also, maybe I’d pick up a few tips on how to bathe your child without social services calling round because they could hear him howling three miles away.
    ‘Um, yeah, OK. That sounds nice.’
    ‘Great By the way, did you read those books I left you?’
    ‘I’m actually in the middle of The Baby Whisperer now.’
    ‘No, Sally you can’t watch Shrek, it’s nap time,’ said Jess, to her little daughter. It had always driven me mad when I called her and she spent half the time talking to me and the other half to her children. I never felt she was concentrating on the conversation.
    ‘Sorry, Emma. The Baby Whisperer is good, but if you want to get Yuri into a proper routine you need to follow Gina Ford’s Contented Baby book.’
    ‘OK, I’ll try to get to that later – Stop, Yuri,’ I squealed, as my little boy stuffed my lipstick up his nose. ‘Sorry, Jess, gotta go,’ I said, beginning to understand Jess’s distracted phone behaviour a little more each day.
    I plonked Yuri and the ten million toys we had bought him into his playpen – I know some people don’t approve of them, but it was the only way I could get anything done and make sure he didn’t crawl into the fire or electrocute himself or something. After putting on the third wash of the day – how on earth could one child create so much laundry? No wonder poor old Mrs Walton looked so tired up there on Walton’s Mountain with no washing-machine and a brood of kids – I opened The Baby Whisperer and tried to find something about bathing your child.
    I found it: a ten-step guide to bathtime. I’d been doing it all wrong. Tracey said you need a warm room and some nice music. Fill the bath two thirds full, only slightly warmer than body temperature, and then there was a complicated bit describing the correct way to hold and lower the baby… It was clear that I needed help for this, so I read on and waited for James to come home. He had gone out three hours previously, saying he was just popping down to the club to sort out some paperwork. He had sprung this on me while I was changing Yuri’s nappy and