Anger.
Chapter 8
Erica
May, 2017
Monday, 2pm
She’s calm now, nestled to my chest, her tiny body comforted by the warmth of mine, the gentle rocking motion of my arms. Her skin is as soft as the petals of the roses I tend to in my garden, her fine hair barely covering the pink skin of her small, perfectly round head. She smells so sweet and new; a scent I will never tire of.
‘Your silly mother is sleeping when she should be feeding you,’ I whisper to her, watching as she suckles greedily. I stroke her cheek, encouraging her, but nothing is coming. She’s starting to grow frustrated; she grizzles and beats her tiny hands against my chest, searching with her infant instincts for the sustenance she craves.
There’s a shriek from down the hall, and I look up to see the silly girl in her dressing gown, hair in an unwashed cloud, milk stains on the front of her night-dress. So she’s finally woken up then, I think, turning my back to the girl as she rushes at me at such a speed you’d think I was murdering the baby.
‘What are you doing!’ she shouts, her mouth agape, eyes blazing. She looks down at the infant sucking at my breast. ‘What the hell are you doing to my baby?’
Chapter 9
Dee
February, 2017
Tuesday, 5:09pm
Ruby’s dark lashes rest against her soft, round cheeks as she sleeps. She’s so fragile. Not as delicate as she was at birth – she was such a scrawny, twitchy thing, all skin and bone, a side effect of the placenta depleting early due to my gestational diabetes. But she is soft in all the ways a person can be soft. Her duckling-down fuzz of ginger hair, her tender ivory skin, her dewy eyes like a blue galaxy.
Despite it all, she’s healthy. I’ve fed her well, my supply plentiful in spite of my vices, and she’s filling out in all the right places. She’s a round, wriggly pudding, the picture of health when things could have – should have – gone so wrong. I’ve tempted fate, yet Ruby wasn’t punished. I couldn’t have forgiven myself if she was. It’s me who must pay the price.
You hear these names – gestational diabetes, mastitis, colic, croup – but no one can ever prepare you for what they actually are, the fact that they are not just innocuous words floating around in the ether but actual and, frankly, bloody horrible things that humans are occasionally forced to endure. I have new respect for people who have diabetes (it is relentless, and I can’t tell you how many times I nearly passed out from a hypo) and am pretty impressed whenever someone whose child has colic hasn’t killed them – or themselves – yet.
I can’t stop thinking of all the roads that led to here, which path I could have chosen to end up somewhere different. Somewhere far from here, an alternate reality where Rob and Ruby and I could be happy. How far back does it go? Which moment in time would I have to go back to in order to change things, make things right?
I’m worried, restless. I’ve got myself into a mess bigger than anyone else knows – well, anyone other than Samir – and now I have this beautiful creature I’m responsible for and she’s going to be dragged into it too.
Nobody listened when I told them I didn’t want a baby. Nobody believed me when I said I’d be a bad mother. And now it’s too late. There’s no going back.
‘Don’t you worry,’ they told me. ‘You’ll want kids by the time you’re thirty.’ And they’d laugh as though the thought of anything different was impossible. But thirty came and went and my biological clock seemed to have missed the memo.
They told me when I found the right man I’d start craving a family. But Robert came along, showed me the right kind of love, the sort that’s supposed to change you, and still …
They didn’t believe me – didn’t hear me – when I suggested that motherhood might just not be for me. ‘When will you be making a little friend for Johnny?’ my friends would ask, as though it was as simple as that, no question of it. As though I were a machine designed to produce playmates for their bratty kids.
Rob thinks the reason I didn’t want children is because of what happened with Mum’s boyfriend when I was younger. He wants to talk about it even though I beg him to leave it alone. He thinks it’s the source of all my problems, that everything will miraculously resolve itself if I can make my peace with it. What’s to make peace with? It happened. Talking about it isn’t going to change that.
Besides, does there have to be something wrong with me? Why does not wanting children require justification, whereas wanting them is natural … even admirable? It didn’t seem enough that I simply would have preferred to do other things than to take care of a screaming infant who would quickly become a tantrum-throwing toddler, who would all too soon become a sullen teenager. No, my decision had to mean something. Something bad.
They meant well, I know that. But they just didn’t get it. It’s not that I looked down on mothers – though, honestly, there was some of that. The whole idea of instantly becoming this sort of slave has just never appealed to me. I simply couldn’t understand the desire for children. It seemed I was a biological anomaly – a woman who didn’t have the urge to push out kids. It was lonely, shameful. I was tired of fighting what the world seemed to think was my duty.
When I fell pregnant, I cried for a week. I knew that the deep, burning terror wouldn’t go away until I did something about it. So I called a clinic and made an appointment, my cheeks hot with shame. But when it came to the day, I couldn’t go through with it. The look on Rob’s face when I’d told him he was going to be a father … How could I bear to take that away from him?
That was the second of many stupid decisions I made. I doomed myself to learn the hard way that you shouldn’t have a child for any reason other than the desire to do so.
And yet, biology took over, the pregnancy progressed, and I lived in denial of what was coming. People were full of helpful advice, shamelessly lying about how brilliant it was all going to be. How much love and joy motherhood would bring. And yes, it does, but that’s not fucking all it brings, is it? When I couldn’t generate the appropriate amount of enthusiasm, they were so helpful and positive. The first ultrasound will change things, they said. You’ll ‘feel it’ then. And when I couldn’t connect to the fuzzy black and white image on the screen, those twitching, wriggling parts they told me were arms and legs, those black holes where the eyes were meant to be, it was, ‘Oh, it will happen when you feel the baby moving.’
But I felt those tiny flutters like butterfly wings, the ‘quickening’ as they call it, and was sickened. There was this thing inside me, stretching my womb, nudging at my organs, sucking the blood and nourishment from my body like a parasite. A being who would come out screaming and needy, utterly dependent, wanting things from me I didn’t want – or know how – to give.
It was like watching it happen to someone else; it never quite felt real. And because it never felt real, I suppose I never truly thought anything would come of it. Totally stupid, I know. I’m not sure what I thought would happen – an accident, a miscarriage, something. Everyone knows plenty can go wrong during pregnancy. But somehow it all spiralled away from me until it was too late. Even when I thought something was wrong during the labour, and there was – the cord was wrapped around her little neck and I needed an emergency C-section to get her out safely – it still all turned out ‘just fine’.