Lauren
Woody’s been crying for ten minutes now. Ten whole minutes. I’ve got the monitor sound off so I can’t hear it, but I can see his increasing distress. Nobody can hear him above the party. Phoebe hopped up a short while ago – offering to take Nicki out for some air, so I’m alone to stare at the monitor and feel like the worst mother since Norman Bates. Seeing Woody cry, even in silence, is like having the whole world’s fingernails scrape along my nerves. It feels abhorrent and unnatural. I want to rush up and cradle him, and yet the sleep lady told me he needs to learn how to ‘self-settle’.
‘ Don ’ t be too quick to go in there and interfere, ’ she’d said, each word she uttered costing about one precious maternity- leave pound. ‘ You ’ ve got to give him a chance to get himself back down. ’
It seems highly unlikely that Woody’s going to go ‘back down’ considering he’s literally standing up in the travel cot now, howling like a wolf at the moon. I try to remember how long you’re supposed to leave them to cry if you’re doing the Ferber method. Was it thirteen minutes, or three? I’ll wait five more minutes, I decide. That will hopefully not be so long that Woody turns into a psychopath when he’s older, kills women and wears their skin, and tells everyone on the stand it’s my fault. I sit back in the sofa and look around the bustle of the party to try to enjoy this ‘me time’. If I’m permanently damaging my child, I may as well have fun, right? But the rest of the Little Women have vanished and everyone seems to be clumping together in their relative friendship groups. I want another glass of punch. I want five. I want to drink until I’m floppy, and uninhibited, and I think going dancing until 4am is a brilliant idea. I want to move my body to music I don’t like, feel the smears of sweat from strangers against my skin as I queue at a four-person-deep bar. I want to squat over a gross toilet with no seat so I don’t catch HPV from the rim, and later stagger into a 24-hour McDonald’s, blinking into the neon screen, ordering fries I’ll sick up within half an hour. Then I want to fall onto an unmade bed and lose consciousness immediately – waking thirsty and sick, with vomit on the carpet next to me, and then spend the next day tucked up in bed, watching shit TV on my laptop and messaging people to ask how embarrassing I’d been. I had no idea how free I was before having a child. And I’d wasted it. I was lonely even, lonely. I used to dread Sunday nights before I met Tristan, when I was living in that crap house-share with a bunch of junior doctors who were never in. I’d make desperate plans to have dinner with people I didn’t like just to avoid a few hours before bed of my own company. I would sell a kidney to be alone now. Properly alone. Not just paying-for-childcare alone. Because that won’t be the same, I know it already. Even those times Tristan takes Woody for a few hours between feeds, I’m not alone because all I think about is Woody. Is he OK? Safe? Having a good time? Missing me? Following his schedule? How much has he eaten? The alone time will now always come with a cost. Either – literally – when he starts nursery. Or, as part of a bargain with Tristan. Both of us in a back-and-forth trade of who gets to do something nice while the other one is stuck solo parenting. Forever in a tit-for-tat land grab for freedom. Nothing will ever be the same again . Everyone always tells you that going in, but you can’t understand the heavy significance of that, until it’s too late to go back and change your mind, or at the very least enjoy how fucking free you were.
I push tears back into my eyes and stand up. I’m not having enough fun to do this to Woody. I can try again tomorrow. I can pay the sleep consultant for another consultation, and then google everything she’s told me to do, and read how it will damage my baby’s attachment, and then not follow any of her instructions, and wonder why nothing is getting better. It’s a plan at least, if a suitably doomed one. I step past a group of women returning from the kitchen with fresh glasses of punch and glance down at the monitor again.
Just in time to see a pair of hands, that aren’t mine, appear on screen and take my baby out of his cot.