Mummy Needs Help

The communal bathroom was at the end of the corridor. I pushed open the heavy door and sidled in, still moving as if I was carrying a baby bump in front of me. The stalls were all empty.

***

I pulled out my phone as I entered the shower cubicle at the far end of the room, a sectioned-off space with a swinging half-door to shield it from the rest of the room. It was as if whoever designed it had decided that, having been laid out on the bed like a roast chicken mere minutes earlier, you’d be willing to give up most privacy from then on.

I pulled up the mothers’ group online. Only a day or two before, there had been a message from someone about the pain of the first post-birth wee. What was I meant to do? I scanned through posts. Something about a car seat. A weird rash. There it was. ‘Do it in the shower and try to lean forward a bit as you do,’ Helen had advised. I wasn’t totally sure but I had a feeling she was a doctor or a nurse. She seemed to have all the information any time anyone asked anything vaguely medical.

I stripped off my hospital gown and threw it in the metal-topped laundry bag in the corner, hanging my nightie on the hook on the back of the door. There were no mirrors in the room, which was probably fortunate.

I coaxed the tap on and slid under the lukewarm jet of water, trying to position myself according to Helen’s instructions. I turned and let the water run over my face. The rhythm of the shower pressure melded with the pulse in the hospital air conditioning into a sort of hypnotic thump-thump. I crossed my arms in front of my chest.

I poked at my stomach. I didn’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. It looked as if I’d eaten a big dinner every day for the last six months. Where had my taut basketball of baby gone? Maybe I’d thought the bump would slowly descend until my body was ready to suck it all back in again. By the end of my nine months of pregnancy (which is actually ten if you think about it but who’s counting?) I couldn’t lie on my stomach, walk up steps, or fit in the car. But now I kind of missed that bump.

I turned the water off when the door to the bathroom opened and someone else traipsed into the room.

Pulling my nightie down over my hips, I shuffled out of the shower cubicle. The nightie was too tight – whoever had bought it for me had obviously not realised either that I wouldn’t immediately be a size small again. The newcomer was brushing her hair, a toothbrush jammed between her teeth. She turned and grinned at me. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

I waved it away. ‘You didn’t. I should be getting back to the baby, anyway.’

The other woman was a few years older than me but not many, perhaps in her late thirties, with a sensible bob haircut and kind eyes. ‘How’s baby doing?’

I opened my mouth and shut it again. Was leaving her behind the wrong thing to do? I gestured vaguely to the other end of the hospital. ‘Good, I think. She’s with her dad.’

The woman caught my eye in the mirror as she spread toothpaste on her brush. ‘Mine too. Gotta take a break while you can. Who knows when there’ll be another?’ She smiled, brush in her mouth. ‘You okay? First time?’

I nodded. I hadn’t announced my pregnancy until fourteen weeks, reluctant to believe that the pregnancy was real. I’d been taking the pill but a course of antibiotics must have rendered it ineffective. Nick had almost fallen over when I had showed him the stick with its two lines. He’d open and shut his mouth like a fish before settling on: ‘What do you want to do?’

What I’d really wanted was to push everything back a couple of years. To give myself time to build up a bit more of a career and for us to be a little bit more sorted – there were still months when there wasn’t a lot of money left over for Nick and Sam to pay themselves once they’d paid their staff and their rent. But I knew there was no way I was going to do anything other than keep the baby. ‘There’s never the perfect time for a baby, right?’

His face had lit up. ‘My mother is going to be over the moon.’

The pregnancy had been uneventful, although after the novelty wore off at about twelve weeks, I just wanted to get it over with. Nick’s brother, Elliott, and his wife, Samantha, passed on half a house-load of baby gear. I’d quietly donated the onesie that declared ‘supermodel in training’.

As predicted, Nick’s mother, Ellen, had been intensely attentive, keeping track of my appointments and updates on Holly’s growth. My own mother, however, disappeared at about the second month, after telling me she was certain that I would be mother of the year. ‘You’ve been mothering me your whole life, you’re a natural.’

I realised the woman with the toothbrush was still waiting for a response. ‘Yes, first baby.’ I forced a laugh. ‘Don’t know what I’m in for, right?’

‘I’m sure you’ll be great. They just need someone to love them, don’t they? All the rest is just a bonus.’

She swished the water around in the sink, clearing out the smears of toothpaste, then retrieved a lip gloss tube from her pocket. ‘Is your man any good?’

I paused. ‘At what?’

‘Does he help out around the house and stuff?’

He’d become a lot better over the course of my pregnancy. Beforehand, he left things until they physically became a problem for him before he dealt with them. His laundry pile would grow like a colour feature on our beige sofa until he ran out of work shirts and put it all away. He would leave a plastic container of leftovers on the kitchen bench until the contents were almost walking away before he’d deal with it. (I discovered this in an unfortunate battle of will he was unaware he was locked in with me while I tried to work out what his limit really was.)

But since one weekend when I’d tripped and nearly fallen on workout gear strewn all over the lounge floor, unable to see my feet due to my growing stomach, he’d snapped to attention.

‘He’s improving, I guess.’

She moved to hold the door open so we could both leave the room. A trolley rattled down the hallway somewhere in the distance.

She patted me on the shoulder as we prepared to set off in opposite directions across the ward. ‘Hope it lasts. You married?’

I shrugged. ‘He doesn’t believe in it. Too many happy families in his life to see the appeal, I guess.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever you do, don’t break up in the first year. You’re both basically officially crazy for the first twelve months.’

Waving back over her shoulder, she laughed. ‘You think I’m being melodramatic, but you wait. You’ll want to wring his neck in a month. But then somehow in a year’s time it’ll all be sort of okay again.’

I watched her wander off down the hallway, limping slightly. It had better not take a year to be ‘sort of okay’.

***

Nick

Age: One day

Renee was propped up in bed, poking with one hand at a plate of food an orderly had placed in front of her. In the crook of her other arm she had balanced Holly, who had drifted off to sleep again. From the card on top of the meal, it seemed that she had received whatever the previous occupant of the bed had selected that morning. There was a lump of rice in one corner, a saucer of floppy cabbage, and some sort of meat with orange sauce.

She caught my eye. ‘I’m not sure I’m that hungry.’

A nurse was leaning across her, making a note on a clipboard. She regarded the tray. ‘I don’t blame you.’

I caught her eye. ‘She’s been vegetarian for fifteen years.’

The nurse cringed and rummaged around in the pocket of her scrubs, producing a white swipe card. She lowered her voice and leant towards me. ‘The cafeteria’s closed but if you duck down the lift and pop out the staff entrance, just across the street is a good kebab place. This card will get you back in to the maternity ward. We’re not meant to let visitors in at this time of night.’

‘That would be amazing.’ Renee’s eyes seemed to go misty with the thought. ‘Can you grab me—’

‘A falafel, no problem,’ I said, finishing her sentence.

‘And maybe—’

‘Chips?’

‘Please.’

I winked at her and backed out through the curtain. ‘Back in a bit.’

***

The man behind the counter in the kebab shop shot me a grin as he handed the bag of food over a quarter of an hour later. ‘Rough day?’

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I must have looked shocking. I’d been at the hospital for roughly eighteen hours straight. ‘Actually a fantastic day, just a tiring one. I’ve got to take this back to my partner and daughter.’

The d-word felt odd in my mouth. He seemed to tally up the order in front of him. ‘Got enough for two of them?’

I grinned. ‘Oh yep. Only my girlfriend eats at the moment.’

He raised an eyebrow as I backed out of the shop.

***

Back on the ward, the nurse was still at Renee’s bedside. Renee seemed to be firing questions at her. I smiled – Renee’s determination had been part of what hooked me in the first place. Once she decided something was going to happen, there was no other way about it. This kid would want for nothing.

Very-dull Natalie might have been her half-sister but she had grown up about as different from Renee as you could imagine. Natalie and Jonathan lived in their huge house in the country, where we used to have rugby practice on the front lawn at the weekends. But when Renee’s mum, Marjorie, worked out that she wasn’t going to get the live-in boyfriend out of Renee’s dad that she expected, she packed the two of them up and they travelled around the country, with her taking work where she could. If it were now, she’d probably be an Instagram influencer or a digital nomad or something. Renee always told me I took far too romantic a view of it but it sounded pretty cool to me, as someone who holidayed once a year in the same place every year until I was fourteen.

The nurse tapped me on the arm. ‘Now you’re back you’ll need to pass over your delivery and go. Visiting hours have ended.’

Renee struggled to sit up on the hospital bed, where she had positioned Holly across her chest, clutching her breast in one hand and the baby’s head in the other. ‘Even for fathers? You’re sending him away?’

The nurse made an expansive gesture towards the other empty beds in the room. ‘It’s not fair on the other mothers to have people around all hours.’

‘There’s no one here.’ Renee looked as if she might be going to cry.

‘We could get a new one in at any minute. Sorry.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s the rules.’

Renee watched her leave then turned to me, her eyes watery. ‘I knew we should have paid the extra to have a private room. I can’t believe they’re sending you away.’

I squeezed her hand, shifting my weight on the single plastic chair placed next to the bed. I should want to stay. But after the night of labour then a day of visitors – my parents, a couple of Renee’s friends – and a bit of wandering around with the baby while Renee tried to rest, the prospect of collapsing on my own bed at home was dancing in front of my eyes like a mirage. I couldn’t even sit comfortably, let alone sleep, where I was.

‘I’ll come back first thing. Sam’s taking all my clients for the next little while.’ I brushed hair out of her eyes and landed a firm kiss on her forehead. I could hear her swallowing hard.

‘What if something happens overnight? How am I meant to know what to do? How do I get her to feed when she’s meant to?’ Renee’s voice was strangled. She gestured around the empty room.

I stroked her hair. ‘The nurses said to call if you need them. They’ll help you. Karen said she’d call you in the morning.’

Trust us to have a baby on the one weekend of the year the midwife gets called away.

I gestured to her phone, on which messages were pinging through. ‘And you’ve got your mad group to chat to if you get bored. They’re more use to you than I am, anyway.’

Renee turned her face away, focusing on the dark outside the window. ‘You’ll come back as soon as you’re allowed in?’

I kissed her again. ‘I will.’

The silence dragged out between us. She was waiting for me to say something meaningful, but my brain had checked out for the evening. What was I meant to say? ‘Well done for expelling my baby from your body?’ ‘Thanks for suffering a third-degree tear for my kid?’

I leant over Holly, aiming to land a kiss on her cheek. Trying not to be too rough, I didn’t put enough effort into the movement and came up short, executing an empty air kiss like the women Renee worked with would, while they looked over my shoulder at parties for someone more interesting to chat to.

I stuffed my phone and wallet into my pocket and, not breaking eye contact with Renee, walked backwards out of the room. She wasn’t a big person, anyway, but she looked tiny in that hospital bed, shadows collecting under her wide eyes, her dark brown hair tied into a messy bun on the top of her head. As I made for the lift at the end of the ward, I flicked glances around the other rooms, looking for any of the nurses I recognised. Two were standing at their station, laughing over something on a piece of paper in front of them. They turned as I cleared my throat. ‘I’m off. Will you keep an eye on her?’

The younger one gave me a withering look. ‘That’s what we’re paid to do. They’ll be fine. Go and get some sleep so you can be useful when she comes home.’

I stabbed at the lift button for the first of the car park levels. I had only the vaguest memory of where I had left the car. On the trip in, Renee had curled up into a ball every couple of minutes, shouting at me that she was going to lose control of her bladder all over the fabric car seats. Between contractions, she’d demanded to know why we had ever sold her car, with the leather seats that would have been easier to clean. It felt a lot longer than a day ago.

The car was parked halfway across two parking spots, near the lift door. I slid into the driver’s seat and placed my hands on the steering wheel. Flashes of images of the night danced in front of my eyes. The midwives muttering about dropping heartbeats, me Googling for the right thing to say when Renee was struggling to push the baby out, the obstetrician’s fixed smile. She’d got her wish of no major drugs, to my astonishment. When I broke my arm kickboxing it felt like I had morphine on tap. But they had given her roughly what you might get before you got around to the proper pain relief for a filling.

Then as soon as we’d started to recover from that, Renee and Holly had had to tackle breastfeeding. I was a useless third wheel for that, too, stroking her back while she tried to twist into the right position to get everything aligned. The tension in Renee’s jaw and the way she tightly curled her toes when Holly tried to latch told me about as much as I could handle about the process.

I eased the car out of the parking spot and towards the main road, catching a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. Everyone had been at pains to point out how much Holly looked like me, like some sort of weird reassurance that I was definitely the father.

Nosing the car out of the car park building and into the flow of evening traffic on the street, I watched the other drivers. They were all heading home, or out on a Saturday night date, or running to do some errand or other. Was I the only one whose life had changed completely over the last twenty-four hours? Maybe that was why people got those weird stick-figure stickers on their cars. If you didn’t make a bit of noise about it, all the hard work you put into bringing a small person into the world might go unnoticed. Not that I’d done much yet, it had to be said.

At least at home I could chuck some clean sheets on the bed, sort out the heating so it was warm for Holly’s arrival. It was late spring but the nights were still getting chilly.

I could still smell her babyness. People had talked about the smell of a newborn before but now I got it – there was a distinctive aroma that made you want to bury your nose in her fine downy hair, which weirdly was kind of all over her body. Although I had seen where that little head had been, mind you. When my mum kissed her cheek I’d wanted to say: Do you know where that’s come from? She hasn’t even had a bath yet. I didn’t – even unwashed she still smelt more like a sweet biscuit than someone who had until recently been percolating in the bodily fluids of another person.

At last another driver indicated for me to merge into the right lane ahead of him so I could make my exit. I waved, still running through a checklist in my head of all the things that I needed to get sorted for their arrival.

Three years earlier, I’d been a single person, going through the motions at a crappy IT job for a broadband provider that couldn’t provide a continuous connection under threat of death, living alone in my little flat. I’d assumed then that the closest I’d get to a family would be sitting at the table for my mother’s overly elaborate Christmas dinners with my brother, Elliott, his wife and their horde of incredibly noisy children. Occasionally, my sister, Kat, would fly in from wherever in the world she happened to be.

Now, Renee and I had a mortgage on a marginally bigger flat, I had switched my job for a gym I owned where I had to keep other people employed, and I was somehow expected to keep a helpless infant alive for the next eighteen years, too. Some people seem to leave school all grown up, don’t they? Others get it together at thirty. For me, growing up didn’t happen until about 8.30pm in the evening of the March before my thirty-fifth birthday.

If only I’d known then what I was really in for, I might have tried to hasten the process a little.

***

Renee

Age: One day

Hey, have you heard the one about new mums and sleep? Apparently, we never get any of it, or something. Ha bloody ha. It’s a pity I’m too tired to remember the punchline. Of course, everyone had told me we were going to be exhausted and look back wistfully on the days when we managed thirty minutes’ sleep in twenty hours. I thought I’d understood. Babies aren’t born with their circadian rhythms aligned. They wake randomly all day and all night, and you just have to go with that. Live your best life. Enjoy every minute because they grow so fast. Cherish the moments. #blessed

But I didn’t really get it.

By the time Nick walked out the door to head home from the hospital that first day, I had been awake – apart from the odd five-minute snatch of sleep – for nearly thirty-seven hours. The labour had kept me up for one night of that, obviously. Then we’d had visitors to chat to and our baby to keep the energy fizzing. I slithered down in the bed as he shut the door behind him, tucking Holly in beside me. A nurse appeared in what felt like fifteen seconds. ‘You can’t have your baby in the bed with you.’ She peered over us.

I cracked an eyelid open at her. ‘What?’

‘It’s against hospital regulations. She needs to be in her bassinette.’ She gestured to the weird Perspex container next to the bed that looked more like something you might keep your lunch in.

I let my head rest more heavily on the unyielding pillow and looked down at Holly. ‘I can’t get her to move once she’s asleep. She just wakes up.’

The nurse slid a hand under Holly and transferred her across. She screwed up her little nose as her face touched the cold sheet of the bassinette, but her eyes remained closed. The nurse gave me an ‘I told you so’ look and pulled the curtain shut behind her.

I closed my eyes. The room was spinning as if I’d just got off some sort of amusement park ride. My heartbeat was thumping in my eyelids. But just as the warm rush of sleep slid up my body, I was jolted back into the hospital room by a snuffling from the bassinette. I kept my eyes closed, willing her to stop. The noise became more insistent, with a grunt every other second. I rolled over and reached for the bassinette, patting Holly’s back, my eyes still closed.

The grunting continued. I hauled myself up off the bed and over the bassinette, from which I retrieved her and propped her against my chest, swaying. She raised her little fists to her mouth. The universal baby signal for hunger. I groaned. My nipples were still smarting from our previous attempt. ‘Are you sure?’

She started to push her hands further into her mouth. I wriggled back on the bed and unclipped my maternity top, trying to hold her head with one hand, position my breast with the other, and guide the two together. She snorted and contorted as she tried to make the connection. Just as she latched, her eyelids started to drift closed again. I stroked her cheek. Of all the personality traits she could pick up from her father, falling asleep mid-meal was not one I would have chosen.

‘Don’t fall asleep yet, little one,’ I whispered. ‘I cannot do this all again in another half-hour.’

My eyelids were so heavy. I could just shut them for a minute while Holly worked out what she was going to do.

‘I have told you that you can’t sleep with her in the bed with you.’ The nurse was beside me, tapping my shoulder.

I squeezed my eyes shut before trying to open them. ‘I’m not asleep.’

She clicked her tongue. ‘Sure. Just snoring. Look, I know you’re tired. But what if you dropped her off the bed or rolled on her in your sleep … you’d never forgive yourself.’

Chastened, I wriggled to unlatch her. Her eyelids snapped open. I bit my lip. ‘I just want to go to sleep.’ I was so tired that the air around me felt like water, but I did not have the strength in my muscles to swim against it. ‘What time is it?’

The nurse looked at her watch. ‘Almost one. You’ll probably find she sleeps a lot better tomorrow. They go through a bit of a phase at first, wanting to feed lots. It gets the milk going. All that colostrum’s brilliant for her.’

Tomorrow? First, I had to get through tonight.

When Holly’s eyes floated shut again, I spotted my chance. I pushed myself off the bed with my free hand, carefully supporting Holly’s head with the other arm. Her lips were twitching.

Using only the muscles in my thighs – which until that minute I had suspected had disappeared some time around the third month of pregnancy – I rose to my feet, keeping Holly perfectly horizontal. I stretched out over the bassinette and lowered, half a millimetre at a time, towards the tightly stretched white sheet spread across the thin mattress.

As Holly’s back slid closer and closer, I moved my grip so that she was at last lying flat on her back in the bassinette. I extricated my fingers one by one, my gaze fixed on Holly’s face. As my last little finger pulled out from under Holly’s back, I stood up. ‘Please sleep well,’ I whispered.

I crept back on to the bed, wincing as it complained at my weight. Perhaps it was going to be okay.

One step at a time, wasn’t that what they said? I consciously relaxed the muscles in my legs, then my abdomen, chest, and arms. As I felt myself sink back into the respite of overdue sleep, Holly’s arm hit the side of the bassinette. I held my breath. It took about two-and-a-half seconds before she cried.

I reached out to gather her up again and, cradling her against me, stumbled back to the bed and swiped open the screen of my phone. ‘Keep me awake,’ I posted to the mums’ group. ‘The hospital won’t let me have Holly in bed with me and she won’t sleep alone. I’m so tired.’ I finished with a GIF of a sleeping child toppling off a chair.

I stared at my screen. Usually replies would flood in right away. But then, I didn’t usually post in the middle of the night. Finally, one from someone called Mei Warburton. I didn’t recognise her name. ‘Maybe try playing some games on your phone or something,’ she posted. ‘They’re right, to tell you not to bed share. So dangerous. You could fall asleep and smother her.’

I stared at the words. ‘Thanks for the incredible insight. I hadn’t thought of that,’ I typed before deleting it.

Another message pinged up. Frankie. I wasn’t even sure she had electricity in the yurt at night. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she tagged Mei in the post. That was a power move. ‘She’s literally been inside you for the last nine months. Of course she wants to be close to you. Just try to co-sleep safely, okay?’