The woman in the next bed. Did she have a name? I no longer remember it, yet I can see her face so clearly, still. One of those everyday faces, until you really look and see something beautiful. Or maybe I’ve made that up. Maybe I need to.
We kept in touch for a few months, cards and stuff, until we didn’t. We each had new babies after all, that is how we met – in St Thomas’s Hospital, where I had timed my contractions by Big Ben, where my first child was born.
She had been in labour at the same time and said she had heard me “making a fuss”. My mum had warned me that one of the things I must not do during childbirth was make any noise, as this was “unnecessary”. Yeah right.
My mum had told me all about my own birth. In those days, we were all born at home. She was sitting on the sofa next to my grandma, who nudged her to tell her it was “time to go upstairs,” so she did and out I popped! What was I doing reading all those Our Bodies, Ourselves books?
To be honest, I had no idea. I’d had a lot of experience of kids but none at all of babies. I wanted a natural childbirth, and I got one. I have never really been able to explain the kind of insanity that persuaded me that taking drugs recreationally was fine but doing so during childbirth was very wrong.
Perhaps I was so focused on being in control of everything that thinking about how I would deal with an actual baby had not really figured. The antenatal classes I had belatedly attended had consisted of one where we had to bathe a doll – FFS, a doll??! – and another where an elderly midwife (I was young; in retrospect she was probably only in her 40s) illustrated childbirth by shoving a tennis ball through the cervix she had knitted out of navy blue wool as she didn’t have any pink at hand. As she pushed the ball through this sock-like thing, its passage got more difficult where she had done ribbing. I gathered that this bit, the ribbed bit of my insides, would be the hard part. Oh, and then there was the unexpected French midwife we had one week, who answered the question: “How much can I drink during pregnancy?” with, “Drinking is not so good – only the wine with dinner and brandy afterwards.”
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