This was written in 2006 and first appeared in ‘Who Brought the Biscuits?’ a collection of the Naas Harbour Writer’s works. A lot has changed since then, I now have my two little girls and my first book ‘Between You and Me’ is to be published by Poolbeg in February 2013.Little did I know…
I woke with a start, and listened, expecting to hear the boom-diddy-boom of the heart monitor upstairs again. It had been the cause of several nightmares over the past few nights, permeating my dreams, taunting me that this time when it stopped, they wouldn’t get her out on time. But the ward was quiet.
Then BOOM, there it was again – and again. It wasn’t the regular rhythm of the heart monitor, so what then? Good God was it a bomb? And not just one bomb – it sounded like bloody Beirut out there.
The curtains around the bed opposite twitched and Sharon, a fellow Caesarean Section inmate, stuck her head around. “Bloody bangers,” she cursed in a savage whisper. “If they bleedin’ wake him, I’ll find them and batter them.”
‘Him’ was her two-day-old son, and she was right, if he woke we were all for it — he could go from fast asleep to screeching ball of fury in 13 seconds – and I knew – I’d timed him. I hid a smile as it occurred to me that maybe his speed came from his namesake; the earlier conversation about his name, Dylan Thomas, still made me laugh.
“Ah, after the poet,” I’d said automatically when she told me what she’d called her baby boy.
She looked at me blankly.
“Do not go gentle…” I quoted trying to be helpful, but again she looked at me as if I was raving.
“The Derby winner?” It was her turn now to be helpful, her nose wrinkling at my stupidity.
“Oh sorry. That Dylan Thomas – my mistake.’
Like, duh…
I psyched myself up to get out of bed. Now I was awake, I might as well get ready for the upcoming 12.30 a.m. feed. What felt like a thousand razor blades creased my midriff as I attempted to roll sideways out of the bed. Looking down at my feet, I decided against slippers. Anyway they wouldn’t fit. The French polished toenails that were mocking me, catching the moonlight like tiny pearls were attached to the feet of a hobbit. I was bloated, swollen and sore.
I blinked back the always present tears, a mixture of hormones and self-pity. How innocent I’d been: fake tan, painted toenails and those bloody hair straightener that lay undisturbed in the bottom of my hospital bag.
I remembered again to get Him to put away the books on natural childbirth before I got home. I’d been humiliated enough. Of course, He would just laugh and repeat: ‘Of all people, they had to give the extra two litres of hormones to you…’
I padded out of the ward, the soft slow shuffle that is regulation in the Coombe. The bathrooms were only across the corridor, but that was as far as I had walked in three days and it still amounted to Shackleton proportions for my poor limbs. The corridor was quiet, but even at that hour, there she was, that other poor girl, walking the same slow shuffle as me, only she still had five weeks to go. She had been hospitalized with high blood pressure and told to keep moving as much as possible.
We nodded at each other, both knowing that exchanging pleasantries was futile and tiresome. She was to be pitied with such a long time left to go, but I, selfishly, could only feel pity for myself. The whole thing was over, but I still felt disappointed and disillusioned.
Filling my little bowl with warm water I made my way back to the ward, automatically listening for ‘my one’.
She was snuffling, an early sign of waking – not like Dylan Thomas, who when waking emitted a slow hissing warning, like a pterodactyl, that quickly snowballed into the full screech of a tyrannosaurus rex. I lifted her before she could wake him, and walked to the window. She curled into my neck and snuffled again softly, her tiny mouth making soft sucking noises to remind me of her impending bottle, and I drank in her newborn baby smell.
The bangers started again outside, but I was okay now, my self-pity abated for the moment, my eyes dry as I looked out at the car park below. An ambulance swung in silently, lights flashing, and I suddenly felt a wave of sympathy for the poor woman who would shortly be whisked up to the delivery ward. At least we were finished, and in fairness – my baby was just so perfect that I imagined the time might come when I would willingly go through it all again.
Sharon stuck her head around the curtain again. “Happy New Year,” she hissed in the same cigarette-ravished whisper she’d used earlier.
New Year? Jesus, I’d forgotten it was bloody New Year’s Eve. That explained the bangers. I nearly laughed out loud remembering the party I should have been at, and how the others would be well trashed on champagne by now. I’d normally be too, no better woman – oh God, how the mighty had fallen.
I returned the greetings to Sharon and turned again to the window, smiling now.
“Happy New Year, baby,” I whispered in her tiny ear.
And as I stood at the window looking out over the dark city below, it hit me how everything had changed. I wasn’t me anymore, well definitely not the same me. It felt as if a camera had panned back from my tired, pale, scared face at the window, and I could almost hear the ‘dum dum dums’ of the Eastender’s theme tune as yet another episode of my life came to an end…