In the hospital, they gave me drugs to try to prevent my going into labour prematurely. I knew that babies born at four months couldn’t survive, and it was clear that they didn’t really hold out much hope. But, by some miracle, the contractions gradually became less frequent and finally stopped, and the following day I was allowed to go home.
Everything seemed to settle down after that. The rest of my pregnancy was relatively uneventful and I went into labour two weeks after my due date.
The labour itself was horrible. Tom held my hand, wiped away the sweat that was streaming out of every pore in my body, and counted ‘In – two – three; out – two – three – four,’ as I tried to breathe away the pain and suppress the panic. But it soon became clear that no amount of controlled breathing was going to push the baby out of my body, and I was given a spinal block so that it could be literally dragged out of me with forceps. And, ironically, it was at that point that Tom forgot to follow the breathing technique he’d been counting out so carefully for me, and he fainted and had to be half-carried out of the room. Which meant that, sadly, he wasn’t there to see our child emerge into the world or to hear its first feeble cry.
Immediately the baby was born, it was whisked away to a corner of the delivery room, and I lay back, exhausted, on the bed, listening and waiting for the more vigorous wailing I knew would begin as soon its tiny lungs had filled with air.
The seconds and then the minutes ticked by, and still the only sounds I could hear were the hushed, urgent voices of the doctor and one of the nurses. Eventually, I lifted my head to try to see what they were doing, and – because, for some reason, no one had thought to tell me – asked, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’
For a moment, no one answered. Then a nurse walked towards me, placed a tightly wrapped bundle on my chest and said, ‘It’s a boy,’ and I looked down for the first time into the huge blue eyes and wrinkled, blue-tinged face of my son.
The doctor came and stood beside the bed. ‘He’s having some problems breathing,’ he told me. ‘We need to get him into intensive care.’ He leaned towards me and reached out to lift the baby from my arms, and I just had time to touch the skin of my son’s cheek and whisper ‘Hello’ before he was rushed out of the room.
Because of the spinal anaesthetic I’d been given, I had to lie flat on my back for the next 24 hours, which meant that I couldn’t get out of bed to have a shower, and when my mother came in to see me, she took one look at my tangled, matted hair, said, ‘Look at the state of you!’ and burst into tears. It wasn’t the greeting I’d expected, but I think she’d been more worried about me and about the baby than I’d realised.
For the next few minutes, she concentrated on getting me tidied up and ‘presentable’, which was probably her way of dealing with the sudden rush of relief and emotion she was feeling.
As soon as I was able to get out of bed, I had a wash and waited for my son to be brought in to me so that I could feed him. When the nurse handed him to me, I felt nervous and excited. I pulled back the edge of the blanket the baby was wrapped in and looked down into a huge, moon-like face framed by a shock of bright red hair.
‘This isn’t my child!’ I told the nurse.
‘Of course he’s your child,’ she said. Her tone was briskly coaxing, as though she was speaking to a small child or a very stupid adult. Then she gave a quick, nervous laugh and patted my shoulder as she added, ‘Who else’s child would he be? Isn’t he just the spitting image of his father?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He may well look exactly like his father.’ I spoke slowly, trying to control the hysteria and panic that were rising up inside me. ‘But I’ve never seen his father, because this isn’t my child. My child doesn’t have red hair and he’s less than half the size of this baby.’
‘There, there.’ The nurse’s tone was so patronisingly patient that I had a strong, but mercifully fleeting, desire to throw the baby at her. She looked at me warily, patted my shoulder again and assured me, ‘He is your baby. There’s no question about that.’
Suddenly, all the pain, worry and exhaustion of the last few hours hit me with full force and I burst into tears. I didn’t have the strength to argue with her, but I knew that if I didn’t, I was going to go home with someone else’s baby – and, even more importantly, someone else was going to go home with mine.
At that moment, another nurse strode purposefully down the ward towards us, holding another, slightly smaller, white bundle in her arms.
‘Well, here we are, Mummy!’ she said, in a no-nonsense, nursery-teacher’s voice. ‘Here’s your little one all ready for his first feed.’
As she spoke, she reached across and almost snatched the red-haired monster of a baby from my arms, deftly replacing him with my son. Then both nurses turned and scuttled away, and I looked down for the second time at my baby and couldn’t believe how beautiful he was.
When Tom came into the hospital later that day, he was like the cat that got the cream. I was touched by his obvious and immediate love for his son, and by his gratitude to me for having given him the child he could only now admit to having wanted.
Over the next couple of days, we tried to decide on a name. While I was pregnant, we’d already narrowed down our choices of boys’ names to either Daniel or Richard. But the more we looked at our baby, the less the names seemed to suit him, and eventually we agreed on Sam. I wasn’t sure whether he really looked like a Sam, but everyone else seemed to think he did, and as it was a name I liked, and one that had no negative associations for either of us, I was happy to agree to it.
Strangely, it seemed that as soon as he had a name, Sam had his own identity. It was a thought that, for some reason, sent a bolt of pain through my heart. And then I realised that what I was feeling wasn’t pain but fear: I was afraid of the enormity of being responsible for a life that was already far more precious to me than anyone else’s, including my own.
At visiting time the next day, the double doors at the end of the maternity ward crashed open and I looked up to see my father striding towards me. He was almost completely hidden behind a huge bouquet of flowers and his girlfriend, Gillian, was scurrying along behind him, looking tentative and hesitant.
I glanced anxiously at my mother, silently cursing my father for flaunting Gillian in front of her in a clearly deliberate act of spite that was completely out of place at what should have been a family time. My mother took a step away from my bed and started fussing with her handbag, as though to indicate that she had no intention of trying to fight for her rightful place in the pecking order.
‘So, what are you calling it?’ my father bellowed, leaning down towards me and offering his cheek for me to kiss. The whole ward had fallen silent. Even the sucking sounds made by the newborn babies when they were feeding and their gentle murmuring when they weren’t seemed momentarily to have stopped. Everyone’s eyes were on my father. Some people were regarding him with open admiration, and some were watching him with expressions of hostile disapproval at the loudness of his self-assurance. But it was clear that all of them were impressed, despite themselves.
‘We’ve decided to call him Sam,’ I told my father, reaching out to place a subconsciously protective hand on the cot beside the bed.
‘Sam!’ My father almost spat out the word in disgust. ‘What sort of a name is Sam for Christ’s sake? It’s a fucking dog’s name. I thought you’d call him Harold, after me and after my father. You’re fucking useless.’
Then,