I absolutely don’t tell this story to demonize my parents. That they loved my brother and I, I am 100% certain.
I’ve heard many people my age over the years share the ‘Samboy chips and a pink lemonade in the back of the car story’ – this was the socially acceptable practice of the day, you see… leaving your kids in the back of the car (with a window down, of course), in the carpark of the pub, with something (nutritious? Yeah, sugar and additives!) to keep them occupied while Mum and Dad hit the boozer till they were three times over the legal limit, and then drive home with no one wearing seatbelts.
And we all survived, right? Mostly.
Helpless. Hopeless. Useless.
Three words that perfectly sum up how I felt at 7 and 8 years of age, when I was left to look after my baby brother while Mum and Dad headed down to the pub.
I’d been given instructions on how to warm up the milk, so I could feed him. And I could cuddle him. But beyond that, I was ill-equipped to be caring for an infant (being barely more than an infant myself). When the tears and the crying started, I didn’t know what to do to soothe him. I was completely out of my depth.
Pre-Huggies and Pampers, the only nappies available were the old terry towelling cotton variety, and they were no match for the amount of poo that babies seem to be able to produce.
One episode that remains seared into my memory is of my brother standing in his cot, crying and smearing poo all over the cot and himself. Every time I tried to approach him, he would grab a handful and fling it at me. I think back to it – and maybe he was laughing, too. Maybe it was just me crying!
I eventually managed to lift him out of his cot, covered in poo, and put him on the floor while I tried to clean up the mess, only to turn around and find him rubbing more poo into the seagrass matting that covered the floor.
I was totally overwhelmed, and although I didn’t know it at the time, completely traumatised.
No wonder I was turned off from ever having children. Motherhood to me was all about poo and crying, and me not being able to cope, not able to do it right.
(The good news is that my brother and I grew up having a great relationship and are very close – miraculous, given what he put me through!)
I don’t recall precisely how many times this situation occurred. I recall three specific occasions, but beyond that, the details fail me and I’m just reminded of those times by a feeling. A feeling of those three words I mentioned earlier.
Helpless, hopeless, useless.
And then, thirty-one years later….
It was the visceral sensation of these three words that hunted me down and found me, alone with Leo, 48 hours after he was born. It was the first time we had been left truly alone together. Andy had gone home, the visitors had departed, the nurses and midwives were attending other duties, and I was, for the first time, alone with my son. This tiny little miracle of DNA, chromosomes, biology, love, and magic.
He was in the hospital-issued bassinet – a clear Perspex box on a trolley, so that he could be seen clearly from any angle. (I tell you, being on a maternity ward is a bit like late-night shopping at the local Woolies… aisles full of exhausted women aimlessly pushing trolleys up and down, with no apparent purpose or destination in mind.)
I was sitting in the chair in the corner. He was sleeping peacefully parked a couple of metres away at the foot of the bed. I had given birth to this little piece of magnificence. My greatest creative venture yet, to be sure. He was perfect. I, on the other hand, was far from it. Pushing 40 (I was 38 when Leo was born), I was already in the realm of ‘older mothers’. After a 30-hour labour and an ‘assisted delivery’ involving a suction cup being attached to Leo’s head by hand (yup, no further imagery required), I was beaten and exhausted. My milk had not yet come in and I was struggling to feed him, so he was being ‘supped’ (supplemented) with formula.
Not 48 hours in, and already (in the eyes of all of the perfectparenting media expectant mothers are exposed to), I was failing at this seemingly most natural of female duties. One of the midwives took pity on me, and secretly went down to the pharmacy in the foyer of the hospital and bought me a dummy. Even as I watched him sleeping contentedly – the round blue disc of the dummy moving imperceptibly as he suckled in his sleep – it did little more than serve as a reminder of how inept I already was as a mother.
I moved his trolley closer to me, so I could watch him through the Perspex. His little face lay just inches away from me, blissfully unaware of my pain. I leant my forehead against the bassinette and the tears I’d been holding back started to spill. They rolled down my face and splashed onto my hands like fat raindrops – the type that, when they fall, you know the drought has broken. Silent at first, and then they start to smatter. My own personal downpour. As the tears tumbled from my eyes, a crescendo of emotion followed, coursing up through my body.
“I’m so sorry!” I sob.
His tiny eyelids quiver, but he sleeps on. “I don’t know what to do.”
Helpless. Hopeless. Useless.
“I’ll do my best, I promise you, but I really don’t know what to do.”
I was 7 again. A baby in charge of a baby.
I was responsible for this most precious of beings, and I had no clue what to do. The fear that I would fail Leo as a mother, as I had failed my brother, reached out to me from over 30 years in my past, rising up and choking me from the inside – threatening to derail me before I had even had a chance to recover from the birth of my baby and experience the joy of the life I had just created.
That I was exhausted both physically and emotionally after the labour and birth, there is no doubt, even after nearly a week in the hospital (I had refused to leave until my milk came in). I was terrified of even taking him home.
Andy was terrified, too, I’m sure. If I knew almost nothing, I’m pretty sure he felt he knew less. I’m not sure we were the best support for each other, either. We tried and we got better at it, but it was hard. I don’t mean for this to sound like we were gormless idiots, but only to express that there wasn’t much confidence in either of us, and that made an already massively life-changing situation even more challenging.
The day we brought him home from the hospital, a girlfriend of mine from the U.S. was in town. She comes from a big, messy, multigenerational family and was desperate to meet Leo. She arrived in full swing, complete with the exquisite baby gift of a Tiffany rattle. Normally, anything that comes in that signature blue box would thrill me; however, that was not the real gift she left me with that day.
Colleen had no sooner walked in the door and hugged me than she swooped in on Leo and picked him up with the confidence of a professional football player scooping a ball up off the ground in the heat of play. I watched her seamlessly and effortlessly hold him, walk around with him, look at him, and inspect his little hands and feet – with no fear whatsoever. I marvelled at her ease and comfort with this tiny, fragile thing. When he squeaked and whimpered and cried, she moved and rocked and patted and cooed like it was the most natural thing in the world – as indeed, for her, it was.
I watched like a hawk whenever anyone who was ‘better at babies’ than me picked him up. People are normally so polite with newborns.
“Oooh, do you mind if I hold him?”
“Here! Hold him, feed him, change him, bathe him, rock him.
Show me how to do it!” I would think.
The fear of ‘getting it wrong’ still gripped me.
I’d