I had been supposed to file two more columns in this series in advance, before taking some leave, but five weeks ago my waters broke in spectacular fashion – the way they do in films, the way the NCT woman said you really didn’t want them to break. “It’s too early,” I kept saying, again like some cinema cliche. During the rush to the hospital, our Uber got stuck behind a hearse travelling at a suitably funereal pace. The catastrophist in me assumed an omen. The writer in me rolled her eyes and thought: nice touch.
And so the boy is here (bairn is not a word I ever used before, but for some reason I cannot stop, as though my northern ancestors have risen up in me, conjured by all the drama). I am still adjusting to the fact that he is no longer inside me, that I thought I had five more weeks of kicks and punches, how I never got to see the reverse imprint of his hand on my skin. Anxieties about Covid notwithstanding, I loved being pregnant with him, and we’ve been catapulted into the fourth trimester without quite being done with the third. He is here and hardly anything is ready, and, despite needing some help from some magnificent doctors, he is all right, and my life is transformed.
My colleague Eva Wiseman was right about the love feeling two centimetres from grief. I have been skinned alive. I weep at the merest trifle, as if I’m the baby. On the night we came home from hospital, I cried and cried. I want a bumper between my new family and the world. I could have done without Billy Bragg’s Tank Park Salute coming on the radio in the kitchen: another microwave meal salted with tears. The love feels like terror too: of all the ways in which he could be taken from me (it’s the women who are blasé thatwhom we worry about, said the discharging midwife).
But most of all, it feels like gratitude. For him: my dream come true. For his father. For the medical care, the costs of which in another place would have run, possibly, into the millions. For our safety. The day after I had him, the Russians bombed a Ukrainian maternity hospital. Before my son’s arrival, I had been reading of the women giving birth underground. “Don’t look at the news,” a friend texted, as I lay in a bay without my baby, who had been rushed to neonatal intensive care, listening to the sounds of labouring women, and she was right. I could not bear it.
How to articulate the transfiguration from not-mother to mother? I am the same person, and yet everything I wrote before feels naive and misinformed. It is as though I have been made party to some great secret. As though, when I stepped out of that taxi and into the old, looming Victorian building, with its ghost sign saying “women’s receiving ward”, just as my own mother and thousands of other women had before me, I was initiated. Though that could, of course, be the drugs.
I didn’t have a birth plan. I was due to have a scan, to meet the obstetrician to discuss the best way forward. The hypnobirthing book I bought secondhand in an attempt to calm my fears regarding childbirth was clear in its views of the sort of delivery I should have. I am not so impressionable, and, when I skipped forward to read about the aftermath, the page proclaiming: “You’ve birthed a baby and you’re a goddamn goddess” in a register I have come to dislike was decorated with – I kid you not – a smear of what looked like blood. Disgusting, but you could say it was the most honest thing in the entire book. There was, indeed, blood.
During my week in the hospital, I kept seeing glimpses through windows of the most beautiful spring skies, promising a world outside for the both of us, if he would only breathe and feed on his own. After a few days I realised that I was not a prisoner; I could go out for a walk. In the lift I joked with a man about a discarded hat and how gross it would be if one of us put it on, and I was grateful that I could still hold a conversation that was not about my baby.
At the same time, he is everything, just as I am to him. My boy who could not wait, but whose eyes are scarcely open. Love, in the words of Sylvia Plath, set him going like a “fat gold watch”, but it has taken far more treatment than a “slap on the soles” from a midwife to give him a healthy start in life.
In the small hours, in the bluish darkness of the ward, I sat next to his incubator and tried to remember lullabies, but amid the fear and the love and the painkiller fog the words had all vanished. Instead, as the machines beeped reassuringly and I stroked his skin through the small porthole, no longer able to be the ship that carried him, he got Here Comes the Sun.
What’s working: My husband has been reading a book called Don’t Panic! All the Stuff The Expectant Dad Needs to Know, by George Lewis. Unlike most parenting books, it features contributions from comedians including Elis James, Romesh Ranganathan and Josh Widdecombe, and it is very funny – not that he got to finish it in time.
What isn’t: Without wanting to sound like the observational standup bits in Seinfeld, the rumours about hospital food are indeed, true. I was overjoyed, however, to discover the south Asian menu on the reverse of the page. Nevertheless, even microwave daal gets old eventually.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
