When my daughter was first placed on my chest, gasping and blood-smeared, my immediate feeling was pity as she stared at me with flat, black eyes. Neither of us had asked for this frightening birth.

Then she was whipped away from me.

 

 

1

 

The previous morning – my due date – I’d stepped out of the shower to find some water on the floor. Had I splashed it out of the shower? It was a tiny amount – nothing like the torrent that signifies the dramatic beginnings of labour in movies. I dried myself off and waited. Nothing happened – no leaking, no contractions. I got dressed and went downstairs, where I made myself a cheese sandwich and sat on the sofa with my phone. I had been told first babies never arrive on their due date. All the mothers I’d met at pregnancy yoga had dark tales of two-week waits and inductions. Inductions were what you wanted to avoid. They were painful, unnatural, traumatic.

I didn’t ask why, because I didn’t want to know.

My relatives had had trouble with childbirth. I was unclear on the medical details, but there seemed to be an issue with big babies vs. small cervixes. One second cousin was left with a permanently damaged arm because of a botched forceps birth.

Coming up to my due date, I’d had weekly visits with the midwives in the hospital for blood tests. I have a low platelet count, which can lead to uncontrolled bleeding. Thinking about the subject made me picture Lionel Barrymore as wild-eyed Rasputin in the 1932 film Rasputin and the Emperor coaxing the hypnotized, haemophiliac Prince Alexei from his bed: a scene that had filled me with dread when I’d seen it as a child. I didn’t ask for details about uncontrolled bleeding, but as my bump got bigger and my visits to the hospital more regular, I sometimes asked one of the revolving circle of friendly midwives: Is this baby too big? Is there any way we can check? Do I need to be prepared for a C section?

The response: ‘Do you want a C section?’

‘No, I’d just like to avoid an emergency one.’

A tape measure would be whipped out, one end applied to my clavicle and the other to my groin. The midwife would smile. ‘The baby is a perfectly healthy size.’

The weeks before the due date were a strange time. Living close to my workplace in Dublin’s north inner city, I walked everywhere. My frustration at having become a slow-moving galleon was intense. As the weeks went by, and my walking pace got slower and slower, a different streetscape emerged. I found myself existing in the time-stream of the elderly and the vulnerable. Drug addicts nodding on the edge of the kerb, swaying in a non-existent breeze, or scuffling themselves along with their feet in hospital-issue wheelchairs. Old ladies pushing their trolleys doggedly in the direction of FX Buckley’s, where they’d suck their dentures while waiting for their small weekly pickings: a few sausages, some orange-seasoned chicken if they were feeling exotic. The tripe that my granny used to boil for my granddad in milk, leaving an abattoir stench in their house.

On a bright clear day in September a strange man stopped me as I was passing FX Buckley’s on my way to the Rotunda for a check-up. I assumed he was asking directions, but before I could react, he had placed his hand on my lower back. ‘When you go into labour, the pain will be here,’ he said. His face had a strange zealous gleam, Rasputin’s staring eyes. I stood rooted in horror and indignation at this touching.

I moved away. ‘OK. Thank you.’

He subtly shifted his position on the pavement so he was standing in my path. ‘They all think the pain will be in the front, but looking at you, it’ll be in the back. But you’ll be fine,’ he said, ‘you won’t need drugs. It’s a pain you’re prepared for. It’s a pain all women are prepared for.’

‘OK. I have to go.’

He tried to grasp my hand and, when I flinched back, settled for a strange little priesteen-bow, palms together. I tried to accelerate around him, but my heft wouldn’t let me build up speed. The skin on my back crawled until I’d rounded the corner. I couldn’t wait to leave this strange, slow world where I was unable to sprint away from danger, this world that seems reserved for those about to cross the Styx.

I wanted my body back.

 

 

2

 

Often during the pregnancy I was seized by the worry that I had made a mistake. I had never been broody: other people’s children were pleasant but fundamentally uninteresting to me. The idea of breastfeeding made me squeamish. I never wanted to hold other people’s babies, partly out of a fear of doing it wrong, but also because I felt no connection to them. People would present them to you, and watch for the wave of hormonal bliss that was supposed to wash over you. I would scrunch my face and make a high-pitched sound that seemed socially acceptable, then hand the baby back as quickly as possible. I felt nothing towards these infants. I was delighted for their parents, their joy filled me with warmth, but a maternal reaction to their children was entirely absent. And as I progressed through my twenties into my thirties, that absence began to worry me. My partner and I shared a broad understanding that we wanted children. I don’t remember when we first discussed this, but we both knew it was something that was on our agenda for our lives together, even if for much of our broke, stressed twenties it seemed a distant prospect. During those years, I waited for the broodiness to hit. ‘It’ll come,’ said my mother, who started wanting children when she was in her late teens. But it never did come.

Other women close to me did not seem to share my conflicted view; they either wanted babies or they didn’t. And so it was difficult to articulate my worries, which, if misunderstood, would place me in one of two camps that are so often cast in opposition to one another: the selfish women who want children, and the selfish women who don’t want children.

One of my worries was that if I was deficient in the hormones that caused broodiness, I might also lack the chemistry to bond with my child. Perhaps the baby would fail to respond to me, and we’d end up saddled with each other forever in mutual cold tolerance. That day in the hospital waiting room, after my escape from Rasputin, I texted a friend who had kids. ‘What if the baby hates me?’

‘Why would the baby hate you?’ he responded. ‘Babies don’t hate their parents. That comes later.’

I thought often about the birth, the mysterious destination everything in my life had pivoted towards. I tried to identify exactly what I was looking forward to. When my partner and I talked about our life with the child, our conversations focused on recreating happy memories from our own childhoods. We would read the child the Narnia books, then The Hobbit, then when they got older we would advise them to just skip Tom Fucking Bombadil in The Fellowship of the Ring. Library trips, Halloween, Christmas – traditions reconstructed, improved upon. We are both the children of divorced parents. It didn’t strike me at the time, but I understand now that we were thinking of the birth of this child as a journeying back, rather than a journeying forwards.

 

 

3

 

The puddle that dripped onto the hallway floor as I carried my plate back to the kitchen was another clue that something was amiss, but I didn’t do anything about it. It was such a tiny amount of fluid, and the internet assured me that small amounts of fluid loss are relatively normal in the later weeks of pregnancy. I didn’t want to be one of those panicky women, forever in and out of the hospital in their final weeks of pregnancy. It had been drilled into us in antenatal classes not to go to hospital until the contractions were five minutes apart. When I thought about labour itself, what frightened me was the thought that at some point I would panic to the extent that I would lose control. Staying home seemed the best way to avoid confronting this prospect. I decided to cut the grass in the back garden.

My partner was at a work event in Malahide Castle, a thirty-minute drive away. After I emptied the grass collector into the brown bin and checked my underwear again, I gave him a call.

‘I think I might be in labour. But there might be something a bit wrong – no contractions, but I think my water could be breaking. I think that’s not the right way round?’

‘Jesus. OK, I’m getting in the car now.’

‘Well I’m not sure, so if you’re in a meeting or something, maybe wait –’

‘Jess! I’m getting in the car now!’

We drove through the mellow afternoon, down Parnell Street towards the Rotunda. The street ahead was a clear, wide vista strewn with blown rubbish, the blackened curve of the old Ambassador theatre sheltering a couple of men drinking cans. As we were stopped in traffic outside Fibber’s, a director I know spotted me and ambled across to the open car window. ‘I’ve just heard you’re pregnant! Congrats!’

‘Yes!’ I said. ‘I actually think I might be in labour now. We’re just headed to the Rotunda.’

He looked stricken.

‘Oh I’m grand!’ I said. ‘Probably a false alarm.’

In the Rotunda they didn’t seem to think I was grand. I’d started to feel some light cramping on the way to the hospital. They whisked me into a side room, and hooked me up to a monitor. They stripped me from the waist down. My waters were definitely breaking now, and there was so much of it; it started to get all over the floor and I kept dabbing at it with a roll of tissue. The midwife who was with me said there was meconium in the water. This was not a good sign: it usually meant the baby was in some distress. But the baby’s heart rate was normal.

I told her my partner’s name and she went to get him. A few minutes later, a strange man burst into the room and looked me right between the legs. ‘Is this not your husband?’ asked the nurse. It turned out my partner had heard his name called, but had sat down again when this other man had stood up.

We were moved to a ward and given some food before the inevitable induction; even though my contractions had started, meconium in the water meant we needed to deliver the baby as soon as possible. I ate some lamb stew, a decision I would regret for the next twelve hours. ‘King Kunta’ by Kendrick Lamar was stuck in my head, the hook going round and round. To pass the time, and work through the early contractions, we invented a game called Undergraduate Interpretative Essay, whereby we translated the lyrics of Lamar’s (almost unbearably funky) track into earnest academic jargon.

 

In the birthing room, the lights were low. My right hand was resisting cannulae, and the grotesque sight of it swelling up with blood under the skin was a welcome distraction from the discomfort of the accelerated contractions. I’d been brainwashed by my yoga class into thinking epidurals were for people who don’t know how to breathe, so I sucked on the gas tube offered, which made me feel nauseated: another welcome distraction from the pain. Every couple of hours, a doctor came in to do an ‘examination’ – like what vets on TV do to cows. The pain of this was the most unbearable: the only pain throughout which brought with it the blinding white panic I feared most, and the powerful urge to roll off the bed and escape. The hours spent in the strange treacle-light of the birthing room have all run together in my mind, but at some point the midwife on duty had to go home. She was very apologetic and said she hoped she would see me and the baby when her next shift started. As dawn light began to gather behind the room’s drawn blinds, an obstetrician came in again for an examination. I was dilated enough to begin pushing. But the midwife drew her attention to the monitor, to the contraction readings being scratched onto the paper. I wasn’t paying much attention. Tiredness had come over me, a resignation that felt dangerous, like the warmth that hypothermia brings. Is this death? I wondered as a number of new concerned faces drifted in and out of the room. The contractions were lessening, despite the oxytocin being fed into a drip in my arm.

As morning broke I was wheeled out of the low-lit delivery room into a surgical suite. The lights swam and jolted above me, and a masked and gowned man arrived and made an official-sounding announcement as to what was happening, repeating himself until he was sure I understood and could consent: the baby’s heart rate was dropping, so they’d have to intervene. They were going to administer an epidural, then try a ventouse delivery. This would involve attaching a kind of suction cup to the baby’s head and pulling, while I pushed. If this didn’t work, they would immediately begin an emergency C section. The football team of people on one side of the room were identified as the surgeons who would carry out the operation if the ventouse failed.

After the examinations and the hours of contractions, the epidural was a relief. Once it took effect, the doctor told me to push, and I did, although with my body numb from the waist down I might just have been yelling. There was no pain, but the feeling of a root deep within me being pulled, accompanied by a sense of panic and the urge to ask, politely but urgently, if the doctor was sure he wasn’t accidentally removing my pelvis? Just as the words formed, my daughter emerged, and was placed on my chest. Her eyes were strangely black. Her face was beautiful, but not human. The sense that there was nothing I could do to comfort her, no gesture or word she could understand, hit me like a dumbbell to the chest. She looked at me with the resignation of an animal about to be put to sleep.

Then panic erupted. My daughter was taken away and her lungs vacuumed. I didn’t look, but her screams were terrible. Then she was given antibiotic injections. I was told I wouldn’t see her for a few hours. I had heard so much about the importance of skin-to-skin bonding, of not removing the vernix too soon. But there was no room for any of that to be expressed; we still seemed to be in the midst of an emergency. The room emptied very quickly, leaving just two masked and gowned women, tidying and wiping away the blood.

‘I’m sorry,’ I asked, ‘but could you tell me if they had to cut me?’

‘Of course they did,’ one of the women said. They went back to chatting to each other then, and left.

 

 

4

 

In the blurred hours after the birth, alone in the hospital bed, a strange dissatisfaction took hold of me. The morphine gave the light a brittle, glass-like edge. I was exhausted, but wide awake. ‘King Kunta’ was still stuck in my head. The dissatisfaction I felt was not connected, in my mind, to the circumstances of the birth, or the fact that my baby had not yet been returned to me. It was around a continuation of consciousness: the fact of the rest of the day and the next stretching ahead of me.

When my daughter was brought back, asleep, I took photos of her face. I lifted her carefully when she finally woke, and tried to feed her. She lolled away from my breast, too exhausted to latch. A nurse grasped my breast and levered it towards my daughter’s mouth, with no results. She brought me a tiny syringe and I tried to hand express some colostrum. No one mentioned the availability of a pump or a lactation consultant. After half an hour, I managed to express a tiny amount by hand. The nurse came back, congratulated me, then told me I needed to work until I had around ten times the amount. Instead I fell asleep, waking later when my partner was allowed back in to visit. He brought me a bunch of books that he’d bought in Chapters on his way in. For some reason I found the sight of them distressing: it was such a nice gesture, but when would I have the time to read them? A few hours later he had to go again, and I was left alone for the night.

When I woke later that night, my daughter was screaming. I tried to get her to latch again, but couldn’t. Eventually a nurse came in to find me crying hysterically – the baby had not fed properly since birth that morning. She brought in some formula, and the baby fed and fell back asleep. The nurse looked at me strangely. Something in my reaction was clearly unsettling her, but I couldn’t tell what. They took the baby away for a while, to the nurses’ station, so I could sleep. An hour later I heard her screaming again and they brought her back. Finally she latched, but the pain was immediate and intense and soon my nipples were bleeding. After she finished feeding, I lay in the bed, stunned. The sound of babies crying echoed throughout the wards, each new cry unleashing a new surge of adrenaline into my exhausted system.

The immediate future stretched out ahead of me like a desert. I was connected to a catheter bag that was overflowing, and bleeding now from both groin and nipples. My legs were still sluggish from the epidural. I was terrified and clearly failing, already, at being a mother. There was, I perceived, a vast gulf of time to be survived before the tiny vulnerable baby in the cot beside me became the blurry child-shaped presence I’d imagined. I hadn’t thought how I would fill those years of vulnerability, of need. I’d neglected to set aside enough of myself to give. And in this strange panicked state between sleeping and wakefulness, my mind suggested a solution that spun around my drowsy brain – the idea that the easiest thing now would be for my consciousness to inhabit my daughter: that I could swap my thirty-three-year-old body for a new body and start life all over again. Then someone could take care of us both, someone better equipped than I was. I lay half asleep in the tangle of hospital sheets, urine dripping slowly into a bag, and waited for my consciousness to shift into that of the sleeping baby by my side.

When I woke the next morning, this idea lingered in the back of my brain. I understood the oddness of it, its lack of rationality, and yet it persisted, like an off-key phrase of music stuck on repeat. A woman arrived with a form for me to fill out, a questionnaire about reactions to the birth experience. I dutifully completed it, and in response to the question ‘Have you felt overwhelmed since the birth?’ I ticked ‘Y’ for ‘Yes’. What I didn’t write in the ‘other comments’ section was: There has been some mistake. With this birth, I was meant to start my life again from infancy, but now I appear to be the owner of a torn and battered body and a tiny baby.

The woman read the form and looked at me with concern. ‘We’ll have to put you on the watch list for post-natal depression,’ she said, ‘because you say here you’ve felt overwhelmed.’

Then the doctor who had delivered my daughter came in. I didn’t recognize him at first, without his mask and gown and halo of surgical lights. He picked up my chart and flicked through it. ‘The problem with your delivery was shoulder dystocia,’ he said. ‘This means the shoulders were too big and the baby got stuck. Why was this baby so big? Is there a weight issue here?’ He gestured at me when he said the word ‘here’. ‘Is there a diabetes issue?’

‘I think you’ll see from my chart that there isn’t,’ I said. ‘I did ask if the baby was too big.’

‘Well, if you have another, it can’t get so big,’ he said. ‘The next time, you will have to be induced two weeks early.’ He left.

The next day, after finishing the course of antibiotics I’d been put on as a precaution, I was allowed to go home. It was the day of the All-Ireland football final, and as we drove towards our house, the Ballybough Road was overrun. We inched the car forward through herds of men, women and children shouting and waving flags, pressing against the car’s side windows.

At home, I waited for my milk to let down and tried to feed my daughter. Her latch impulse was poor, and my nipples were so excruciatingly sore that even my clothing brushing against them sent daggers of pain shooting through me.

My parents called round to help, but I didn’t have the energy to communicate what help I might need. My mother assured me that the milk would arrive, everything would be fine. This seemed to be my breaking point. I screamed at her: ‘But right now, there is no fucking milk. Do you understand? There is NO FUCKING MILK.’

She flinched in a way that struck me as being just like my daughter’s startle reflex. And I took some pleasure in the brief illusion of control her alarm gave me.

The next morning, the public health nurse arrived to show us how to bathe the baby. After washing her gently, she swirled my daughter’s dark, curly hair into a little puff on top of her head. We wrapped her in a beautiful stripy blanket and took photos of her with her poor squished head poking out to send to friends. Afterwards, I wanted the public health nurse to check my stitches, which was something I’d been told she was supposed to do.

‘I’m sure they’re fine,’ she said.

‘I’d like you to check.’

We went upstairs and I pulled down my leggings and lay down sideways on my bed. She looked from a distance and said the stitches were, indeed, fine. It was intensely humiliating. For the rest of the visit, hoping to prove I was normal and not a hypochondriac and not insane and not giving up on breastfeeding, I gabbled my plans for the future at her with a mania that probably bumped me from ‘watch-list’ to ‘code red’. That night, I woke with a fever and swollen breasts – my milk had finally arrived, but my next attempt at feeding resulted again in profusely bleeding nipples. I resigned myself to a mixture of breastmilk (pumped via a cheap machine we’d bought online) and formula. The fact that I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, push through the pain of breastfeeding filled me with a heavy guilt.

 

 

5

 

The rest of our lives began. My daughter and I got by just fine. By which I mean that for those first months we existed, together, moving through time in an undeniably chronological fashion. Come 4.30 in the afternoon, I would sit on the sofa, staring out the window, waiting for my partner’s car so I could hand my daughter to him and go lie down in my bedroom, alone. He would come in, able to give to her the joy and generosity the hours had stripped from me.

My mother called to the house often with offers of help I didn’t know how to accept. The delusion of rebirth had spread to my thinking about her too. I’d become seized by the anxiety that somehow I had stolen time from her life to give to the baby; that this introduction of new life to our family tree had sapped strength from its roots. I pictured my mother thinning, losing her corporeality. Somewhere in my lizard brain lurked the concept that a bargain had been struck: in exchange for the baby and me surviving our labour, something had to be taken. Again my rational brain worked hard to dismiss this Faustian notion, but the anxiety continued to lurk, exhausting me.

In those early months I tried to tease out the strands of my cognitive dissonance. I found myself in an unexpected state of mourning which seemed to be sparked by the realization that in becoming a parent, my own childhood was finally, irrevocably behind me. Perhaps that was where the odd desire to take my daughter’s place as the infant in our lives had come from? I found myself flooded with memories of childhood tinged with a strange finality, a sense that it was time to close a door on them forever: the concrete schoolyard with its cotoneaster hedges warped out of shape by hundreds of children, the half-remembered piano lessons, disappointing school trips to the zoo and grey afternoons spent at home reading. Memories of the house I grew up in that was lost in the divorce. And my earliest memory: my legs poking out from beneath the buggy’s waterproof bubble, a soft rain soaking through my socks and my irritation at my mother’s stupidity in forgetting to tuck my feet in.

I was mourning a childhood I hadn’t really enjoyed. I adored my parents, and had a particularly close connection with my mother: the sort of connection I hoped to have with my daughter. But I was an only child and never understood the rules of interaction. I veered between wanting to be involved in everything and wanting to be left alone. These mixed impulses made me easy to exclude.

One of my earliest memories is of walking alongside the park across the road from my house. I must have been going to or from a friend’s house. But my friends were not in their houses; they were hiding behind the hedge that ran along the park railings, and laughing at me. They were ghosting my footsteps with their own, their giggles floating above the overgrown lilac and hawthorn. This was a game one local girl would periodically co-opt us all into, in order to exclude one member of the group. Because I would not play, I was the one alone on the other side of the hedge, chest hurting with the unfairness of it all. When I think back on childhood friendships, most memories are of difficulty, and hurt, the sense of looking for something that the other children couldn’t give me: the complete companionship of a sibling.

In those late autumn months, as my daughter and I settled into a routine, I would wander the neighbourhood with her strapped against me in a harness, where she would bawl and struggle until the warmth of my body sent her to sleep. Or I’d push her for hours in her buggy through Fairview Park, or all the way into town on some pointless errand. Autumn fell around us in drifts of gold that slowly mouldered into the shitty dregs of November, but still I walked, around and around, with nothing to do except talk to a sleeping baby. A measles outbreak on the north side of the city made me afraid to take public transport with her and so we stayed on foot, through rain and cold, walking and walking and getting nowhere.

Sometimes I would sit on a bench and watch her sleeping in her buggy. She was fascinating, but unknowable. This is fine, I’d think. But she could be frightening at times. She didn’t particularly like to be picked up or handled. People would visit, around the time she was starting to smile and goo, and I would warn them that she didn’t want to be held. She liked being talked to, and bounced in her bouncy chair, and read to, but she didn’t necessarily want to be in anybody’s arms. They would look at me like I was insane, pick her up, and then look at me with even more concern when a bloodcurdling wail would erupt from her.

Friends and relatives visited in those first days and all remarked she was an easy baby – no colic, no reflux – but sometimes she would cry and nothing would stop her. All babies cry, of course. But my daughter had a cry so loud that people in cafés dropped their cups in alarm. I would pick her up, then put her down again, as though I was placing a pin back in a grenade. You can’t reason with an infant. Perhaps I was a little jealous of this, her licence to be unreasonable. Or I was afraid that the anger in her was something I had given her. And maybe I wanted to go back, carrying with me all my reason, all the knowledge I have picked up on how to manage the things and people that would hurt her, and implant this knowledge in her life, while simultaneously fixing my own.

I checked the internet constantly for developmental milestones – to capture some sense of the passage of time, of achievement, some sense that these doldrum days would not last forever and that eventually I would not be tethered to a tiny baby. On my phone in the kitchen, my daughter sleeping on my shoulder, I’d scroll; moving from room to room in the small house, the chill of time spent indoors settling in my bones. With winter stealing light outside the window, a little more each day, I’d read updates on child development, fixes for flat-head syndrome, tummy time, tummy time, tummy time, as the baby screamed, face down, on the tummy-time mat. I haunted bizarre parenting forums, places of suppressed violence that often simmered over into threads festering with blame. Nothing in them allayed my anxiety, my sense that some important step in the process leading from birth to bonding to best existence had been missed.

Websites on post-natal depression were less insidious, but still frustrating. I’d read them sneakily in the evenings on my phone screen while pretending to watch TV. The symptoms they listed were so banal, so quotidian – sadness, anger, anxiety, tiredness – that on reading them I began to suspect I had been suffering with post-natal depression all my life. Perhaps, having been born with post-natal depression, and giving birth in turn, I had compounded my sadness, anger, anxiety, tiredness to unbearable levels. Why did I have this fantasy of starting anew? Why this sense of devastation at having to live in my own body? I thought back to that time during labour when the warmth of exhaustion had flooded me, taking all choice and agency out of my hands.

Often when I am distressed, I try to calm myself through the process of logically probing my emotional responses – the mental equivalent of breathing into a paper bag. The constant rational voice in my head, the dispassionate observer who’s never left me even in my worst moments, can be a curse. This voice is judgemental, hard, inflexible. It’s like a third parent with no patience, and it’s this voice I fear most when I come close to losing control. But it’s also the voice that speaks to me, low and quiet, during moments of panic, and never quite becomes lost in the white noise. I cleaved to it during these months of emotional and hormonal turbulence, and used its logic to explore the meaning of what I was experiencing.

Another breakthrough was my discovery of a further symptom on the post-natal depression websites. ‘Intrusive thoughts’ are not listed on every website, but they seemed to me a clever and simple way to define what I’d been experiencing; the tug of war between the primal, hormonal fears around death and rebirth and the flat monotone of the voice that told me my anxieties were all nonsense. ‘Intrusive thoughts’ is a good way of describing the kind of anxiety that forces you to imagine all of the terrible things that might happen to the people you love in minute detail. It’s the voice that counsels violence in reaction to frustration. It may be posited as an ‘intrusion’ to make you feel better – to suggest that somehow this voice has nothing to do with you. But in truth it is the nasty aspect of you, the part of you of which you are ashamed. It is the voice in your head you remember that called your mother stupid as she pushed you in your buggy and sang adoring songs to you. Like a broken bone that’s healed wrong, it’s ugly, fused. But unlike a broken bone, it can’t be reset.

I think I had imagined my life, post-partum, as being indistinguishable from my child’s: that we would somehow inhabit the same consciousness, but remain separate. I would see the world through her eyes, interpret it for her, warn her of danger, and along the way right any of the wrongs that had befallen me. Perhaps this delusion is a particularly only-child way of completely misunderstanding the simple act of reproduction. But I realized this, at the very least, was what I had expected childbirth to offer me: this closeness. I had expected there to be an immediate bond of sweet, pure love that would tie us together, that would unite us in an understanding of the world.

Of course, this closeness is denied us, as it should be. The only inalienable right in this world, the only privacy we have not managed to obliterate for each other, is that of individual consciousness. The websites tell you that this sense of aloneness in consciousness is ‘numbness’, and that this numbness will melt away once the child is older, and more interesting, and the parent gets to know it. The terrible shallowness of this is difficult to accept.

And yet. It becomes hard to remain caught up in this circuit-course of misery when your baby is clapping her hands and hooting. When she has her father’s inherent likeability to balance the flare-ups from the maternal line. When her hair is so mystifyingly copper-coloured, like no one else’s in the family, and her face is so of her own making. When there is no journeying back, only forward.

Now, when my daughter and I are alone, she folds into me, because she needs to. And I will continue to age, my body will continue to be injured, and recover more slowly, and for some golden years my daughter’s orbit and my own will intersect in a closeness that is special, because it is fleeting. I picture this process as spheres shifting slowly towards each other in the night sky far above us, and as I do so I feel my daughter’s head droop onto my shoulder, see her grey eyes unfocus. She is with me, and also a thousand miles away: mind in flight over some far shore. The privacy that exists even in our most intimate moments allows me to sing my songs to her, flush with love, while she may well be forming pre-language criticisms in that unknowable mind of hers. I am relieved that I will never, can never, intrude upon those thoughts. And I am relieved that, along with whatever flaws I may unwillingly gift her, she will take from me what she needs, as I took what I needed from my mother, and she from hers.

 

To read the rest of Dublin Review 82, you may purchase the issue here.