3
2010
Randwick Community Centre, Sydney
Liss
Strip lighting and padded walls and the faint smell of bleach covering a pungent hint of infant shit.
Liss was discovering that parenthood forced you back into public spaces in a way you’d avoided since school.
She’d had the obstetrician with the most letters after their name and a waiting room complete with Italian Vogue and kombucha on tap.
She’d had the birth suite with the fairy lights and piped-in rainforest sounds to drown out the screams, but it now seemed inevitable that at some point she was always going to find herself here, in a room decorated with laminated orders not to smoke around babies and that feeding them anything other than breastmilk was murder.
And she was perched on the slightly sticky Formica chair that formed part of a sharing circle in which at least half the women looked like they hadn’t brushed their hair since their placentas plopped out.
She was questioning her decision to come here as she looked down at baby Tia, who was swaddled in a geometrically patterned knitted wrap that had been ethically sourced from a female-centred co-op in Central America.
Liss’s sister-in-law had bought it for her, possibly to compensate for the complete lack of support she’d shown during pregnancy and birth because, you know, she was dealing with her own stuff and she was sort of at capacity and surely Liss didn’t want to be crowded, etc.
Liss saw that Tia had a strange blooming rash peeking out from under the collar of her 100 per cent cotton limited-edition Bonds onesie and her mind filled with one clear thought, I have no idea what I’m doing.
Here or anywhere else.
Clearly my baby is allergic to me.
And then she was saying that thought, out loud.
‘I think my baby is allergic to me,’ and all the heads in the circle, the blow-dries and the birds’ nests, turned towards her.
‘When my husband holds her, she goes to sleep,’ Liss kept talking.
‘But when I’m home with her she never sleeps, and most of the babies I know like to be held but she’s more likely to be quiet when I put her down than when I cuddle her, and when I hold her, she snuffles and coughs and cries and kicks her legs and now she’s got a rash that I think only comes when she touches my skin . . .’
The facilitator of this session was a woman called Anne.
It was printed on her name badge in full-caps Comic Sans.
ANNE, Early Childhood Centre Community Lead.
Anne had a cheery pink clipboard, and Liss knew that her own name was on it, along with baby Tia’s, and that likely what was being written next to it right now was the word anxious.
Liss also knew, in what was left of her right mind, that this woman saw a new group of mothers every six weeks: the latest batch of women in the postcode who’d given birth.
They sat, they talked, they shared.
Then they graduated and were quickly replaced by the next wave.
It was clear that Anne had seen everything, was unimpressed by histrionics and could pick a troublemaker a mile away.
Liss suspected she was the troublemaker, because it didn’t feel like the things she was worrying about were the things the other women were worrying about, not by the way they were responding to her babbling, with raised eyebrows and tongue-clicks and head-tilts and little sighs of shock.
Anne, though, merely looked irritated.
‘Your baby is not allergic to you,’ she said.
‘You’re tired.’
Well, that’s obvious, thought Liss. I haven’t slept much at all in the past four weeks. Or the three months before that, because everything about pregnancy gave me reasons to stay awake. The constant need to pee, the constant need to worry, the constant need to tell Lachy every thought that was plaguing me.
‘You never used to be such a worrier,’ Lachy had said to her somewhere around month seven, when he’d come home from tennis to find her crying on the lounge, her well-meaning baby book open at the ‘When to Panic’ chapter. ‘Try to go with the flow.’
Well no, she hadn’t been such a worrier before.
Because before, she wasn’t growing a human inside her.
And before, she hadn’t been aware of just how much could go wrong.
She hadn’t considered how high the fuck-up factor was for pregnancy until she was in it and suddenly, all around her, there were seemingly casual references to miscarriage and stillbirth and birth defects.
And bleeding and pre-eclampsia and perineal laceration.
And she’d been so bloody focused on getting past all those terrifying ideas that she hadn’t allowed herself to think past the pregnancy, to the bit where she would have a human to take care of and keep alive, and it had actually never occurred to her that being a mum wouldn’t be the easy part.
‘I thought I’d know how to do it,’ Liss said to the circle of strangers.
‘Everyone said my mother was a natural.
I thought this would be the easy bit.
And Tia’s so perfect and she looks so pretty and my house is full of perfect little tiny things and I’ve got the right pram, you know, the Wasp, with the wheels that rotate in every direction and the cover that clips on but has just the right amount of ventilation .
.
.’ She could see she was losing some of the women now, their eyes sliding down to the floor, their attention pulled away to their giant nappy bags.
‘And I’ve got that Danish cot with the rounded edges and that red wooden highchair from Sweden.
But Tia doesn’t seem to need a highchair or a cot.
And that seamless flat bear with the wipeable weave? No? Anyway, I thought I’d got it all right. She just doesn’t seem to like me very much.’
On cue, Tia shouted and then let out a loud, wet fart.
A couple of the women giggled.
Most did not.
Tears blurred Liss’s eyes.
Anne just looked down at her clipboard, then looked up and across the circle.
‘Does anyone have any questions about the six-week check-up?’
Liss’s face burned. Why had she said all that? What exactly had she said? Did she sound absolutely crazy? The rash on Tia’s neck seemed to be reaching a finger-width higher every time Liss looked at her.
‘I don’t think that can be true,’ a voice said, from somewhere on the other side of the circle of chairs. Liss was blinking hard and she’d stopped looking at the women’s faces because their expressions were making her stomach flutter.
‘Pardon?’ asked Anne.
‘I don’t think your baby could dislike you,’ this woman said, and when Liss looked up and focused on her face, it belonged to a small, slight woman with tired eyes that mirrored her own, but with enough mascara to signal that she’d tried hard today. ‘Because that’s not how babies think. You’re just . . . her home.’
‘Yes,’ another voice said, this one clipped, sharp. ‘She doesn’t know you’re even separate from her yet. She thinks you’re all one and the same thing. So, really, if she doesn’t like you it probably just means –’
‘She’s having a bad day,’ said another voice. There were a few of them. A chorus, who’d stepped in to fill Anne’s awkward silence.
‘And I think we’ve all had a lot of those lately, right?’ A nervous giggle rippled through the circle; heads nodded. ‘Maybe you’re having one today. I had a shocker yesterday but today I seemed to be able to put my shoes on the right feet.’
‘Anne?’ the second woman’s voice called out. ‘Doesn’t that sound right?’
‘Sadie,’ Anne said, in the tone of a sigh. ‘Where’s your baby?’
Liss looked at the woman who’d offered up her inability to get her shoes on the right feet. Oh. She was the only woman in the room who didn’t have a tightly wrapped bundle in her arms, or one eye on a pram parked, as per instructions, around the edges of the room.
‘I left him at home with Charlie.’
‘This is a mothers’ and babies’ group, Sadie,’ Anne said, with a heavy dose of resignation in her voice. ‘I’ve told you that before. You were only allowed to re-enrol on the condition that, this time, you brought the baby with you.’
‘It doesn’t work for his sleep schedule,’ the woman said. She looked up, making eye contact with Liss. ‘I’m a Routine Mum.’
A little gasp from the crowd. In the eastern suburbs of Sydney in 2010, Routine Mums were as frowned upon as formula feeding and crack cocaine.
Anne lowered her tasteful white bob to the clipboard and ran a pen through something on it. ‘Sadie, please leave.’
A ripple of discomfort looped the room. Silent babies were bounced, heads went down, nappy bags were re-rummaged.
Through her own strange haze, Liss tried to understand what was happening. Could you throw someone out of a mother and baby group? It seemed heavy-handed. It also seemed like the most exciting thing that had happened outside her own head for months. Someone crazier than her, out in the wild. Liss felt a fast flush of energy.
‘Do you even have a baby?’ one of the other women asked, her voice spiky with indignation, too loud for the small, silent room.
‘This is a bit much.’ It was the voice of the first woman who’d spoken to Liss, the one who had told her she was Tia’s home. It might be the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her. ‘Maybe Sadie – it’s Sadie, right? – just needed a break. Don’t we advocate for that?’
Advocate? Liss couldn’t quite place the woman’s accent. It was Australian, but there was an edge to her vowels that sounded a little transatlantic.
Anne ignored this comment. ‘Sadie. You’re welcome to come back next week. If you bring baby.’
This was the excitement of being in the real world, Liss thought. You never knew who you might rub up against when you couldn’t curate the crowd.
She harnessed the nerve to look around the circle. Fourteen women, all trying to unpick the shock of a sudden, awesome responsibility.
‘I just have a question about sleep,’ called out a new voice. ‘Because I don’t care if this woman has a baby or a puppy in the Moses basket by her bed. I bet I’m not the only one here who wants to know when my baby is going to start to sleep, like, for more than thirty minutes?’
A validating murmur of confirmation from the crowd. Liss was surprised. She was confused about a lot of things, but she had never expected her baby to sleep. If a fourteen-year-old wrote a list of things they knew about babies, wouldn’t that be at the top?
Anne shook her head. ‘You women always want to know that. For now, your babies need feeding every three hours, twenty-four seven. None of those books you’re reading are going to change that fact. If a full night’s sleep was high on your priority list, you shouldn’t have had a baby.’
There was a collective gasp under the strip lighting.
‘What?’ It was the woman who had told her she was Tia’s home. Liss focused on her. Small, dark, beautiful. The bundle in her arms was neatly burritoed in a tasteful navy-blue waffle-woven wrap, a dummy (a dummy!) dangled from a clear-manicured finger. A clean white sneaker tapped up and down on the faux-wooden floorboards. ‘You women? Are you even allowed to talk to vulnerable new mothers like that?’
‘Vulnerable?’ Comic Sans Anne’s voice had raised an octave and had a tremor in it that wasn’t there before.
Oh, Liss thought. We are not the only ones having a bad day.
‘You women are not vulnerable. You are entitled princesses. I sit here, week after week, listening to you being eternally surprised that babies don’t run on a schedule convenient for your other priorities. Guess what? Your priorities have changed, and right now, they’re shitting in your laps.’
And into the shocked silence of the circle, Anne tossed her name badge onto the floor, carefully rested her clipboard on her blue chair and walked, only a little unsteadily, to the door.
There was a moment of stunned silence before Sadie, the woman without a baby, said, ‘Best. Mothers’ group. Ever,’ and the women erupted.
Liss stared after Anne’s back. ‘But she was meant to help me,’ she said.
Sadie stood and picked up her tiny handbag, the only one in the room that wouldn’t fit a cat. ‘This has really been fun. And you,’ she pointed at Liss, ‘you need to see a mental health professional. And that’s not an insult. It’s chemical, what you’re feeling, and there’s nothing these bitches can say that’s going to help you. There’s nothing wrong with you some meds won’t fix.’
No-one – bar Sadie, who was striding towards the door, swinging her bag – could decide what to do.
Thirteen babies were stirring, cries floating up to the greying ceiling panels and dusty air-conditioning vents.
Liss felt Tia flinch in her arms. This had not been what she was expecting.
‘Come with me.’ It was the little woman, the first one who’d spoken up after Liss’s messy rant. ‘Coffee. Anne’s not coming back. I’m Dani.’
She would always struggle to explain why, but when her eyes met Dani’s, Liss felt something like calm settle across her shoulders, her chest. Breathing seemed easier.
Liss looked down at Tia, so tiny in her tasteful blanket. The rash looked like it might be fading.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d love a coffee.’