It charts the sheer loneliness of an experience the narrator’s husband cannot share and the stress on the marriage; her mad bid in the very early days to escape through suicide, thwarted by the overriding bond with her baby; the relief (and temptation) of a chance encounter with an old male university friend, custodian of her former identity; and finally, as the child reaches toddlerhood and is no longer so utterly dependent, an adjustment to something more like normality, but also to a knowledge of being deeply changed, bonded to her child forever.
Clare and I both found it captured exactly our own experience of new (and lasting) motherhood, but Doug who has obviously not had the experience, said he too found it entirely convincing, engrossing and moving. Less enthusiastic about the book were John and Ann. John said he had found it boringly repetitive, which seemed staggering to us. It is true that the author portrays with huge honesty the repetitive tedium of looking after a baby, but for us she does it so wittily and with such stylish panache that the reading of it is anything but tedious. She is especially wry about the constant superior and casual advice she receives from her husband who cannot possibly know of her subjective experience, or even of the practicalities, referring to him with savage irony at one point as ‘the Child Development Specialist’, and at another as ‘the Professor of Paediatrics’. When she worries that her toddler isn't eating, her husband tells her: 'You need to calm down. He won't eat because you're stressing him out.' She thinks:
It was so easy for him behind his desk. He hadn't lain on his side that morning extending bits of toast under the table while you were playing. You had chewed the first buttered soldier and inserted the second into the cabin of your fire engine.
As they prepare to leave to go out she asks her husband to pack the nappy bag:
‘With what?’
‘The stuff he needs.’
‘What does he need?’
‘His stuff,’ I had repeated… ‘The stuff. You know, all the stuff.’ But my husband didn’t know all the stuff. How would he? Stuff was for the little people. The soother, the spare soother, the nappies, the wipes, the barrier cream, change of clothes, Calpol, a snack, a spare snack for when the first snack was rejected. I’d tried to say the words but there were so many of them it’d be quicker to pack the bag myself.
As her experience goes on, the narrator becomes more and more aware, and angry, and ironic, about the continuing power imbalance between men and women exposed by the basic fact of childbirth. Out with the pram on a country lane she is confronted by a middle-aged man who refuses to move for her, and when she stands her ground, calls her stupid. She rages:
…although the dicks themselves blur, the nature of their dickdom is coming into sharper focus. That man saw fit to chastise me because he had never pushed a pram. He had made no contribution to the enormous effort required to raise a child and regarded me as an obstacle in his path, an obstruction to his business, which, unlike mine, was important. So he pranced around like a country squire reinforcing as best he could the ideologies of patriarchy, Empire … all along I had believed I was equal, when all along I was not, because all along I had been treading towards this great crevasse called motherhood, and now that I was looking up at the world through my brain fog, I could see that to have presumed Empire and patriarchy were dead was naïve at best. Not only were they alive and well: they had won. Trump and Putin were in office…
Ann said perhaps it was because she hadn’t had children herself, but she kept feeling a bit annoyed with the narrator, wondering why she didn’t get help, by which she meant practical help. The book doesn’t spell this out, but Clare and I pointed out that as a professional woman the protagonist was clearly very much alone with new motherhood, as we had both been, far from any family who could help out. Ann did then muse that it was of course traditionally different, when people lived in communities with all the women rallying round to help out new mothers. But it is perhaps the psychological and physical effects of childbirth and new motherhood that are the biggest burden and which can’t be shared, and are the biggest thing for those outside of the experience to appreciate: the phenomenon commonly called postnatal depression, which is a combination of hormonal flux, physical trauma and exhaustion, and the unprecedented shock of the overwhelming responsibility for another helpless human being with whom, for the first time ever, you utterly identify. When her husband suggests she take the baby to the Baby and Toddler Group, she muses: ‘It was difficult to explain the obstacles to my husband, because they weren’t obstacles he recognised. They weren’t obstacles I’d recognised before having you…’ At another point she comments that people think looking after a baby is simple: ‘I know because I once thought so myself.’
When her teething child wakes in the night and begins screaming, before she remembers the health insurance doctor line the narrator panics:
I didn’t know what to do and turned one way then the other. Had the abscess burst? Would that poison the blood? Is that what this fever was? Sepsis? ‘I’m trying to sleep!’ your father yelled from the bedroom.
It was the powerlessness that was so frightening. The middle of the night and my child was in crisis. There was no one I could run it past to check it was okay, it was normal, there was nothing to worry about.
There was some lack of sympathy over this – after all, it was said, the child soon recovers – but both Clare and I had had the same experience and found it entirely emotionally truthful.
A really great book, in the opinion of some of us: emotionally truthful and moving, stylish, funny and exceptionally intelligent.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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