“You’re doing really well, sweetheart. Come on.” It was a moment of perfect
intimacy – one that characterised our relationship. Jamie and I had been
together five years, and probably sickened friends with our obvious
happiness: the way we held hands in public; the way we listened to each
other, instead of bickering like other couples. It was a marriage – nine
months old exactly on this cold winter’s night – seemingly made in heaven.
Then the warm hand left my back. He was no longer at my side. I heard a baby
crying ... and that was it. That was the night we lost each other. I have
been in mourning for our marriage ever since.
The baby, a boy, was hefty and healthy. We called him Oscar. He seemed, and
still does, an utter miracle – he was conceived on honeymoon, after three
years of NHS doctors, acupuncturists and Harley Street gynaecologists.
“Spontaneous conception,” my pregnancy notes read; it was the last
spontaneous thing to happen to me.
I do now vaguely remember friends moaning about the mundane details of their
lot and me (apparently infertile) thinking, “Oh, for God’s sake, you’ve got
a gorgeous child and a husband. Just shut up about how tired you are/how
droopy your boobs are/how you spend all day scraping dried food off the
floor.” However, once I joined the club, what shocked me far more were the
other things – things that couldn’t, perhaps, be shared with friends without
the teller feeling shame, failure or fear.
Having a baby is supposed to bring you closer together as a couple, isn’t it?
From night one, in the labour ward, we began to unravel. I was given a
private room in the NHS hospital, and then my husband and I went our
separate ways. I gazed into the baby’s unfathomable black eyes and felt the
centre of my world shift. Jamie lay on his own at home, marvelling at what
had happened: a physical experience he would never be able to own; a little
boy he couldn’t, yet, nurture.
“I’LL DO IT” BECAME MY MANTRA
As soon as Jamie arrived the next morning, it began. “No, don’t hold him like
that. Now you’ve made him cry.” And: “ You haven’t
slept all night? What about me?” As the hours crept by, I began to feel so
unequal to the task that lay ahead (for the next two decades) that I pleaded
to be able to stay in the room for another night, and then another. Oscar
was our son – but Jamie was, in effect, out of the picture. Without
realising what I was doing, I began edging him out of the triangle.
Three weeks later, Jamie went back to work, and suddenly I was the only one
who knew how to change the nappy properly, where the muslins were kept, how
to do up the infernal poppers on Oscar’s sleep suits (24 poppers, each one
etched on my psyche). I was slightly freaked out by my new role as domestic
drudge – and yet I owned it absolutely.
“I’ll do it” became my mantra. The more I did it, the less Jamie offered. Or,
when he did try to get involved, I would be behind him, hissing like a
harpy, eyes blazing: “You let the door bang. You’ll wake him up!” or,
neutrally: “The nappy is on back to front. What happened?” Everything I said
was either an instruction or a criticism. I couldn’t remember what on earth
we used to talk about, let alone laugh about.
A few days into motherhood, I sent a semi-humorous e-mail to a childless
friend entitled: “Why didn’t we get a dog?” This pinged back and forth
between us for some weeks into Oscar’s life, filling me with increasing
guilt and hollow fear every time I saw the subject field. What had Jamie and
I done? I felt we had wrecked not only a perfectly good relationship, but a
perfect relationship. We now had this extraordinary, irrevocable little
creature whom we clung to and photographed obsessively – but no warmth or
empathy between us. Instead there was something like anger, even hatred. How
had it got to this so fast?
I NEVER EXPECTED TO FEEL SO LONELY
Moments come back to me from those first, bleak weeks: sitting on the sofa,
baby plugged to a raw breast, desperate for a cup of tea. Call Jamie. Call
louder. Thirst now raging. Start to feel claustrophobic and desperate. Shout
at top of voice for husband, who rushes into the room as if the sofa has
just caught fire. Meekly: “Could I have some tea?” Jamie, who never, ever
shouts, bellows at me until the veins in his neck pop up.
I never expected to feel so lonely when I was married with a baby. I had
friends who had dropped me because my new life seemed so whole compared with
theirs. Tears rolled down my cheeks as Oscar’s hand clutched at my breast,
his face puckered in concentration. Had he heard us? Did he understand that
something was dreadfully wrong?
Of course, we wouldn’t divorce, I told myself, but the marriage was clearly
over. If I articulated this extraordinary fact to myself often enough, it
made me feel better. That’s it, the worst acknowledged. Better that than
trying to ignore the sick, sneaking fear that we no longer loved each other.
We would stay together for the sake of Oscar. I would probably have an
affair in time; Jamie would keep paying the mortgage. We would become one of
those couples who sit silently in restaurants.
THE PHYSICAL ACT OF LOVE? IT DIDN’T HAPPEN
Having a baby made me suddenly understand, with acid-sharp clarity, why the
divorce rate is so high. I had always blamed poor staying power and
selfishness. Now I understood. Having children drives an enormous, invisible
wedge between the sexes.
What it does – unless you have a full-time nanny, cleaner and personal shopper
– is propel you backwards into the gender stereotypes of the 1950s. Jamie
and I went from absolute equality to living on different planets. He went to
work: he schmoozed important people, he ate out, he bought new suits. I
stayed at home: I cleaned, I washed, I cooked, I shopped, I washed again and
I thought about our Oxford degrees a lot. I was profoundly shocked to
discover that this was the deal; that there was no other way of continuing
the human race. I mean, I wanted to be a full-time mother, but I hadn’t
reckoned on falling out of love with my husband as a result.
Little chores that used to be acts of love (pairing his socks, preparing him a
nice supper) became venom-loaded. As for the physical act of love, it just
didn’t happen. Aside from the exhaustion, neither of us felt loving enough.
All the kissing was for chunky-thighed, gap-toothed Oscar.
I remember a friend telling me that she and her husband didn’t make love for a
year after having their first baby. I was incredulous at the time and
thought she was hinting that their marriage was on the rocks. But now, there
they are, robustly happy, having just had their third (another year of no
sex is looming, poor Andy). Another friend tells me that she loves her
husband, Mark, but hasn’t been able to “show him love” since she had their
two children. She feels too angry – and yet I believe she is also profoundly
happy as a mother. “I kept thinking about murdering him in the first three
months,” said another friend, of her other half. “I couldn’t stand his
presence in the house.” They went on to get married and have baby number two.
What happens to a relationship once a baby comes along? Do people just give up
on the past? Resign themselves to the present? Does the present get better?
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
When Oscar was six months old, an aunt came to stay for the weekend. “I want
you two to go out,” she said. “I’m going to baby-sit.” Go out? But I was
breast-feeding, Oscar was still waking up and screaming, it was a Saturday
night and we hadn’t booked anywhere, and ... I realised my greatest fear was
that we wouldn’t have anything to say to each other, that we would have to
confront the elephant in the room and acknowledge that we didn’t love each
other any more and stare bleakly at the future.
In a pizza-chain restaurant full of out-of-towners, we faced each other over a
withered pink carnation. We giggled as the second Croatian waiter in five
minutes asked if everything was all right. “Hello,” said Jamie. He touched
my hand. We drank a bottle of wine and walked back like teenage lovers. I
felt very raw, very vulnerable, as if I had just cried for three hours. It
was going to be okay. We were still the same people.
I would say that the period of mourning for my marriage lasted about a year.
But as the months went by, it seemed less tragic and less relevant somehow.
Our old, self-absorbed, navel-gazing selves were like insect skins that we
gradually shed. We had always lain in bed and talked in the mornings: now we
played in bed with Oscar. We gradually endeared ourselves to each other as
parents as opposed to lovers, and found, among all the blame and exhaustion,
the kernel of what we once had to build on again.
“What about me? What about me?” I cry, when Jamie kisses Oscar all over his
tummy. I’m joking, but sometimes it cuts me up. And Jamie might well say the
same to me, when I pull my gorgeous little boy to me and bury my nose in his
spun-gold hair. He is the love of my life.
The author wishes to remain anonymous
