“Mind you, I think it’s a good thing,” she added. “Cow’s milk is for calves, mother’s milk is for babies, but then they don’t see it like that.” At least my mothering met with some initial approval.
Two
Early Days
As if in revenge for her enforced silence during those desperate days in the womb, the state of the art baby didn’t stop crying for three months. Because we were penniless, Shimon and I were living with my family in my parents’ two-bedroomed flat. My brother had one bedroom, we had the other and my parents slept in the living room. My brother and father had to get up early for work and Shimon was suffering from a recurrence of the hepatitis he had contracted in the Israeli army. (The night I was giving birth, the doctor had been more concerned about him than about me, he looked so ill.) Rest was crucial to his recovery. I was under constant pressure to keep Ronit from crying and disturbing everyone’s sleep. All through the night I rocked her in her crib or in my arms, pacing back and forth in the narrow space between the bed and wall. Worried she would cry, I fed her every time she opened her mouth. It was difficult to sit because of my burning stitches (cutting and stitching were standard medical procedures at the time), and nursing was painful.
The nights were a never-ending agony. During the day, when my mother, brother or father took over the pacing, I tended Shimon who was bedridden and very ill, boiled piles of nappies, sheets, blankets, baby clothes and maternity bras, because my mother said that boiling prevented skin rash.
Ronit didn’t need sleep. Her days in the womb had trained her to do without it, but I, without her advantages, craved it, falling asleep in the bath, on the loo, once with my head pressed in the rungs of her crib.
Aside from sleep deprivation, I was deprived of fresh air and social contact. I was unable to leave the house, not being permitted to take an infant outdoors. She was born at the end of November, winter in Montreal. It was considered dangerous to expose babies to the severe cold before they were six weeks old.
After three weeks the situation was unbearable. My eyes were puffy from lack of sleep; my stitches ached and itched at the same time; Ronit wailed incessantly no matter what I did; I was unable to visit friends because she couldn’t be left with anyone, not even my mother, as she seemed constantly hungry and in need of feeding. I felt the walls pressing against me and the ceiling descending to flatten me, squeezing the juices from my soul. Motherhood was a desperate affair. I did not go gently into maternity, I was dragged into it kicking and screaming.
One day when Shimon was at the doctor’s, and my mother was out shopping, I indulged in a deluge of tears, crying with frustration, with rage, with bewilderment, railing against my fate. I was trapped in a nightmare from which there was no possibility of waking. Ronit was in the living room finally asleep in a rickety old pram, loaned to us by a friend. All at once I heard that piercing relentless wail I had come to dread. It filled my head, pounding in my blood, each mindless “wha…” stoking a volcano waiting inside me. Suddenly I exploded. I knew only one thing. I had to stop that sound. I ran from the bedroom, rushed into the living room and flung the source of the howling into space. The pram impacted against the wall, teetered and fell over. Ronit rolled on to the floor. I turned my back, stalked into the bedroom and locked the door.
My first reaction was a burst of exquisite joy, a wonderful sense of being young and free, and alive, a relief so overwhelming it was as though I had survived some terrible death and found myself with another chance at life. Then, just as suddenly, I was drained of life, emotionally dumb, feeling nothing, knowing nothing, hearing and seeing nothing. Limp and wilted, bereft of will or desire, I collapsed on to the bed, shattered like a windscreen after a head-on collision.
About an hour later I woke abruptly with a sense of panic and rushed into the living room. Ronit was on the floor, still crying.
Carefully I picked her up, like a broken doll. Her face was crimson with howling and her small fists clenched blue, but she seemed unhurt. I gave her my breast and cradling her in my arms, sang her a song Shimon often sang to her, Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry. My mother found us both asleep on the sofa.
Despite a severe case of colic, Ronit thrived, but I was withering. At her one-month check up, the doctor prescribed sleeping medicine. When I balked at giving such a small baby sleeping medicine, he said, “it’s not for her, it’s for you. She’ll be fine, I’m not worried about her, it’s you I’m worried about … you need sleep and you need to get out of the house, you look like a ghost.” I knew he was right.
When Ronit was less than six weeks old, Shimon and I were invited to a new year’s party, at a musician friend’s house. Life was trickling back into my veins, Shimon was on the mend, and with the doctor’s orders fresh in mind, I decided we would take Ronit and go. My mother protested wildly, raising the objections of cold, of noise, of smoke, of drink, of the late hour, of the inappropriateness of the occasion, “you don’t take an infant to a party with crazy musicians. The music alone will make her deaf.” As a last resort she tried, “but you don’t have a carrier cot … you have nothing to take the baby in and nothing to put her in when you get there.” Undeterred, I wrapped Ronit in blankets, placed her in a cardboard carton with holes in the lid for air, and Shimon carried the carton to the party. My mother was in a state of shock.
Once there I put the carton in the corner of an unused room, out of harm’s way. But soon afterwards when I went to check on Ronit, I couldn’t find the carton. I searched the other rooms frantically, but it was nowhere to be seen. Petrified, I rushed to tell Shimon. Strangely, the thing I feared most was my mother’s reproach, she would be terrible.
Not suspecting the contents, someone had removed the carton to the cloakroom. Shimon found it under a pile of coats. Terrified that Ronit had suffocated under the heavy garments, I panicked. Unable to breathe in symbiotic empathy, I leapt at the carton and pulled Ronit out gasping to fill my lungs, fighting a thick barrier like a plastic wedge jammed into my mouth, preventing air reaching my lungs. Ronit was fast asleep and breathing quietly. Rocking her in my arms and slowly regaining my breath and composure, I made a silent vow to be a more careful mother in future. After all, if I hadn’t asked for her to be born, neither had she. But being born gave her rights and I had to respect those rights. Only Shimon ever knew of the near calamity. He shared the blame and spared me the full guilt. But, in defending the charge of irresponsible mother, I can’t help remembering the cardboard carton.
In retrospect, it seems to me incomprehensible that motherhood requires no special qualification or training — no course, no degree, no certificate, no screening, no short list, not even a form to fill in, or a whisper of advice. Anyone can do it, no questions asked, no skill necessary. Parenthood must be the only job in this category. Even the most menial occupation requires some interview to determine potential and suitability. Yet parenthood is the only job one can’t quit. It’s a permanent occupation. I soon discovered that motherhood would never go away. Ronit was there forever. I found this relentless permanence especially hard to accept. At times I longed to say, “well that was nice, I did it, I had this child, but now it’s time the job was finished, it’s time for her to go.” But she never went, the job was never finished, there was never an end in sight, not even a break.
Motherhood was not only a full-time job, it was a lifetime commitment. No one had ever mentioned this to me before. It came as an unwelcome revelation, and learning to cope with it was a long and lonely process. I had no peer group to help or console me. My closest friends were involved with love, romance, careers and university; babies were an irrelevance, even a bore. The few new mothers I met basked in motherhood. It was an eternal sun bestowing life upon them. At every opportunity they would dwell upon its joys. No detail was too small to fascinate, to savour — disposable nappies, formulas, burping, teething — the involvement was total, connecting them with grand purposes, cosmic designs. They were part of the universal, timeless unfolding. My pathetic attempts to confide my conflict and distress were seen as injections of discord into the harmony of creation. My unhappy confessions were greeted with shock and aversion.