Mama Mia Read online

  The midwife had assured me that most babies slept very soundly in the hours after they were born. ‘Birth is exhausting,’ she’d explained. ‘He’ll need to sleep just to recover his strength.’ Strength for what was unclear. Crying and eating, it would turn out.

  Also, much strength was required to produce the giant dark green poo that appeared in his nappy early the next morning. That wasn’t in the books…or had I missed it? Small problem: I’d never changed a nappy. Ever in my life.

  And since I was starting with hospital-provided cloth ones, this was probably a good thing because I had nothing to compare it to. No easy disposable nappy benchmark.

  It never occurred to me to ask if I could bring in my own nappies or clothes for Luca to wear. I was happy—delighted in fact—to be a compliant and obedient sheep and do exactly what I was told. I simply hopped on the hospital treadmill and let it carry me where everyone else was going. With no clue what I was doing, I had little choice.

  Jason arrived early the next morning and our family reunion was magic. I took the opportunity to shower and wash my hair and use my travel blow-dryer. Lucky my vanity was still AWOL because this was about as effective as having a small dog pant on my head.

  My milk still hadn’t come in but my breasts were certainly growing and I was instructed to put Luca on to feed every two hours. He had other ideas for ways to spend his time, though.

  ‘He keeps falling asleep while he’s feeding,’ I told one of the procession of midwives who came into my room, along with all manner of hospital staff and visitors. It was a bit like living in a nightclub toilet.

  ‘Oh, that won’t do; we have to wake him up,’ she said briskly. ‘He needs to eat.’ She showed me how to stroke his cheek or lightly pinch his toes to interrupt his snooze and focus him on the task at hand (or boob), but it made little difference. He was zonked.

  She decided we needed to be more proactive. ‘It’s very important for him to feed. We’ll try to express some colostrum and feed him with a dropper. Sometimes that’s easier for them than sucking from a nipple.’

  So began the fascinating experience of being milked by a robust German midwife called Veronika. How fortunate I had checked my inhibitions at the door, oh, probably when I was begging for an enema. Because this was up there with my least dignified moments.

  I was unsure as to the protocol in such a situation. Should we chat while she tugged, tweaked and squeezed my giant nipple? What should we chat about, exactly? I gave it my best shot, asking all manner of questions about breastfeeding and Germany and trying through the fog of my post-birth brain to take in the odd grain of instruction.

  It wasn’t a huge success. ‘Baby’s mouths are better at this than hands,’ she noted in her Germanic, no-nonsense way, holding up a plastic cup with about a centimetre of yellow colostrum sitting pitifully in the bottom.

  I wasn’t too bothered thanks to those happy hormones that made me love everyone I saw, even the slightly dodgy man who brought my breakfast and walked into my room while I had my top off.

  There was always someone coming in to ask me a question or offer me something. A pad. New sheets. Some lunch. Advice. Panadol.

  A lady who may have been a physiotherapist (I wasn’t listening when she introduced herself) popped in at one point and gave me a very scary lecture about incontinence. ‘Have you been doing your pelvic floor exercises?’ she demanded. ‘Did you know the majority of old people in nursing homes are admitted due to incontinence? It’s vital you do those pelvic-floor squeezes as early and often as possible throughout your life!’ Um, sure, yes, Okay. Are we really talking about me being old and incontinent when my stitches are still fresh? Just give me a moment to catch up…

  Jason spent most of his time with me at the hospital and went home at night to sleep. On the second night, reality began to dawn. Jason was about to leave, it was 9 pm and Luca was almost twenty-four hours old. We were getting ready for bed and the midwife on duty was instructing me about what I must do during the night. ‘You’ve just fed him so he’ll need his next feed in no more than four hours,’ she explained.

  But wait, I thought, blinking. That can’t be right. Four hours is…1 am. And that’s the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! Ohhhhhh. This is really it. And it was. I always smile when new parents brag in those first couple of days ‘…and she’s already such a good sleeper!’ Sure she is. Until she wakes up from her post-birth snooze-a-thon and starts demanding all manner of things you don’t understand at a volume you can’t ignore.

  Luca never did quite manage the four-hourly thing. He opted for every two hours instead, although in his first few months, every time he opened his mouth to squawk, I stuck a nipple in it so he may not have technically been hungry on each occasion. ‘It will be better when your milk comes in, love,’ a midwife assured me at 3 a.m. when I couldn’t get him to stop screaming. ‘He’s just a bit hungry.’

  Sure enough, on day three, I woke up with one hundred bricks on my chest. Ahhh, milk’s here. I could not believe how huge and hard my already enormous breasts had become overnight.

  Along with the milk came the tears. I’d been warned about day three and the associated hormone-related weepiness but it still managed to ambush me. Jason was at a meeting and I couldn’t calm Luca or myself for what seemed like hours. When eventually Luca fell asleep, I realised, just like the cliché of a new mother, that I hadn’t even managed to have a shower yet. I had a desperate, primal need for Jason but I didn’t want to be needy. I’ve never been terrific at saying, ‘Help me, I’m not coping,’ even to those I love most in the world.

  So I stood in the shower and cried for a bit until I started getting wrinkly. When I walked back into the room, there was Jason, like a vision, sitting on the bed holding Luca. Magic.

  TRAINING WHEELS

  Voicemail to me from my PA:

  ‘Hi Mia. Listen, I have a message here from a journalist who wants to know about Luca and if you’d agree to a photograph for the paper. Call me back and tell me what you want me to say.’

  It turns out I needn’t have stressed quite so much about my mothering inadequacies. Lord knows there were enough of them—and they’d become glaringly apparent in the next few months—but there were a couple of things that worked in my favour.

  First of all, when I told my mum how much I was freaked out by not knowing what to do, she wisely pointed out that Luca hadn’t done this before either. ‘He has no one to compare you to,’ she said. Ah. This was instantly comforting.

  Second, I used my time in hospital to take lessons. Actual, practical lessons. On the first morning, one of the seven hundred people passing through my room gave me a timetable of baby classes for new parents. I was thrilled to see all the basics covered—from breastfeeding to settling and sleeping. An hour a day, just down the hall. ‘You just wheel your baby along with you in the bassinet,’ advised a midwife.

  Surrounded by other slightly dazed and confused new mums in slippers and dressing gowns, all of us looking at least six months pregnant still (they don’t tell you that in the books, do they?), I was able to absorb some practical tips about caring for a newborn—all the stuff I couldn’t get my head around when said newborn was just a bulge in my stomach and a bunch of kicks.

  Clearly, I wasn’t the only clueless new mother who had ever given birth and miraculously, with pregnancy and birth behind me, a rather large space opened up for new knowledge.

  The brain is a wonderful thing. Realising it no longer needed to access the ridiculous amount of information I’d acquired about pregnancy and birth, it hired a storage facility in the far back corner and dumped all that info in there, freeing up the front part for new tricks.

  On my last day in hospital, I decided to venture out of my womb-room and across the road to the newsagent to buy a newspaper and begin reconnecting with the world. I nervously left Luca with the midwives and waddled downstairs, feeling a lot like Dorothy when she arrives in Oz. Except it was dirty and raining and there were no Oompa Loompas. An
d my shoes were ugg boots, not sparkly ruby slippers.

  As I stood in front of the news-stand, the front page of the paper assaulted me with a huge headline: ‘A NATION OF BASTARDS!’ The accompanying photo showed a row of newborns in a hospital. Some study had just been published showing that more Australian couples in the nineties were unmarried when they had children than in the seventies. Gee, what groundbreaking news.

  The phone call I’d had several days ago from my PA suddenly made sense. The same newspaper had called my office right after hearing I’d had a baby. They’d wanted to do a quick interview and take a photo of me with Luca in the hospital. This had seemed slightly over-the-top given that my level of celebrity was decidedly C-list. If that. I was just a newish editor of a magazine with a pretty low profile.

  My answer had been ‘forget it’. This was a no-brainer because I was fiercely private about being pregnant and having a baby and frankly could think of nothing worse than having a camera shoved in my face at this moment. There was nothing to be gained from it.

  But now that I’d seen the front page, I understood. New baby. Not married. They’d wanted to use my family as a real-life example of the ‘nation of bastards’. I started to cry just thinking about it. Imagine if I’d naïvely agreed, expecting some fluffy item on the gossip page, only to find my beautiful baby boy branded a bastard. Those bastards!

  A decade later, I opened the paper to see a big picture of a tired but happy-looking mother photographed in the hospital with her newborn twins. The headline screamed ‘BABIES MORE LIKELY TO DIE AFTER CAESAREANS’. The caption stated: Emma Brown with her twins who were born by caesarean section. My mind flashed back to my own experience and I immediately knew how she’d been sucked into posing proudly with her beautiful babies for what she’d thought would be a harmless medical story.

  Back in my room, I chugged down some Rescue Remedy and prepared to go home. Later that day, Jason arrived and we dressed Luca in a little going-home outfit. It was a lot like trying to dress a small, uncooperative octopus and it took us the best part of an hour. I was going to have to get better at this. Wasn’t I?

  HOME ALONE

  Voicemail to Jo from me:

  ‘Hi, it’s me. You are so gorgeous to drop over those flowers yesterday. I can’t believe it was my birthday. With all the flowers I got after Luca, I already feel totally spoilt and that was only…wait, how long ago was he born? What day is it? Two weeks or something? I don’t know. I’m tired. Have I mentioned that? Jason gave me this beautiful dress and I put it on because we were all going out to lunch at a café, and just before we left Luca did this giant vomit all over me. I nearly died. Not because of the dress because who cares but because of how much vomit came out of that teeny little body! Where was he storing all that—in his legs? Anyway, we had a lovely day. I was so exhausted by the end of it, we opened a tin of baked beans and collapsed in front of the TV, but I was so tired I couldn’t process all the information coming at me so I asked Jason to mute it. We sat there with our baked beans watching the news with no sound. Still, it’s been the best birthday of my life and I’m not even joking.’

  It was quite a shock when we were allowed to take Luca home, five days after he was born. I mean, didn’t these people realise we were unlicensed?

  Before we left I borrowed—okay, stole—one of the hospital baby nightgowns that tied up at the back. It was the only item of clothing Luca had worn since birth, and unlike the outfit we’d dressed him in for his homecoming, it could be put on and taken off in less than an hour. Those little suits with the arms and legs and all the press-studs? Oh man, intimidation factor: HIGH.

  I sat in the back with Luca on the very slow drive home. The idea of abandoning him alone in the scary backseat was absurd. Suddenly the world seemed huge and threatening and full of danger. It was also very loud. When did it get so loud?

  Having been cocooned in a small room for days, my senses were barely coping with the onslaught. Every noise made me jump—and the number of things to look at! I kept blinking as I gazed dumbly out the window, trying to filter the amount of information flying towards my brain through my eyes.

  As Jason pulled the car into our driveway, I quickly got my first taste of my changed status. After nine months of being a pregnant princess, not having to open a single door for myself or lift anything heavier than a sandwich, I looked up to see Jason halfway inside carefully carrying Luca in his capsule as I struggled awkwardly from the car. ‘What about my bag?’ I called out to Jason. ‘Oh, can’t you carry it?’ he called back. Right. That would be the sound of me being evicted from my ivory tower.

  The next few months were wonderful. Confusing, exhausting and wonderful. Luca didn’t have his own room, so he slept next to us. There was no nursery. Our second bedroom was used as a study for Jason and had my treadmill in it so we set up the change table in an alcove in our hallway and stored Luca’s clothes on the shelf underneath.

  I’ve never been a proper girl like that. I’ve never been interested in interiors or furniture. I can appreciate other people’s beautiful homes but I don’t speak decorating. So I just kind of give up and make do. Sometimes, Jason picks up the slack but neither of us had considered creating a nursery. I was too busy reading pregnancy books and freaking out.

  Having Luca sleep in our room worked perfectly well until he was about six or seven months old. That’s when it became clear it would be quite challenging to, ahem, make a sibling for him in the future because he’d begun to sit up in his cot and wave a sock at us during private moments. So we decided it might be time for him to have a room of his own. It was still nothing like a proper nursery. More like a spare room with a couple of bits of baby furniture shoved in it. But we were happy and Luca voiced no complaints.

  The sleeping thing was never great though. From birth Luca had been feeding every couple of hours around the clock, and at about four months he started to cry for long stretches through the day. This was new.

  Baffled and exhausted, I made my first phone call to the Karitane mothers’ helpline and explained my problem to the nice lady on the other end of the phone.

  Her: ‘And when was the last time you put him down in his cot?’

  Me: ‘Um, well, last night.’

  Her: ‘But it’s five o’clock in the afternoon now. You mean you don’t put him down during the day at all?’

  Me: ‘No. Um, not really. Should I?’

  Her: ‘A baby of that age should only be awake for ninety minutes to two hours at a time, maximum.’

  Me: ‘Oh.’

  Her: ‘Then he needs to go back to bed.’

  Me: ‘Oh.’

  Her: ‘That’s why he’s crying. Because he’s exhausted. He’s been up for eleven hours.’

  Me: ‘Oh.’

  I knew the midwives shouldn’t have let us go home unsupervised. Despite the fact Jason and I were grown-up, well-educated, intelligent people who had read an absurd number of books, there was a gap in our baby knowledge about the size of the Northern Territory.

  Somewhere in one of the books, Jason had read that a baby should associate long sleeps with his cot so you should only put him in there at night. This meant during the day we played with him until he passed out wherever he happened to be lying, no doubt dreaming of parents who knew what they were doing.

  And yet we all muddled through, able to see the humour in most situations. The day Luca had his four-month injections he reacted quite badly and was impossible to settle. We tried everything—rocking, patting, driving around the block, baths, the BabyBjörn. Nothing worked.

  ‘I know!’ I declared at about 7 pm as we neared the fourhour crying mark. ‘Let’s introduce solids!’ Hell, I figured, things can’t get much worse and it might be a good distraction.

  Like so many milestones, it was a bit of an anticlimax. A bit of rice cereal that sort of fell out of his mouth. The End.

  About a month later, Jason became sick. He’d been to the US for work and had come home with the flu. No
thing major and it passed after a week but afterwards he was exhausted and not himself. His health rapidly deteriorated.

  The next few months were spent in a haze of doctors’ appointments, alternative therapies and increasing frustration. The eventual diagnosis was chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), an umbrella description for a post-viral state of fatigue that lasts longer than six months.

  There’s still a lot of misunderstanding about CFS. Many people mistakenly assume it just means you’re really tired and want to sleep. But one of the ironies of CFS is that sleep is often impossible.

  Symptoms vary from person to person, but for Jason it manifested itself in severe physical exhaustion, insomnia, joint pain and extreme sensory sensitivity. His concentration was obliterated. He couldn’t tolerate loud noises or even music. He found it hard to have conversations because his mind was so foggy. He felt like an old man.

  In some ways, the symptoms were similar to extreme sleep deprivation—which I was also experiencing—but worse. Some days he could barely get up the stairs. He couldn’t work. The simplest task—like driving to the shops to buy milk—would leave him unable to do anything else for days.

  We tried everything in search of a cure. It was 1998 and, like most people, we didn’t yet have the internet at home so researching a little-understood illness with no known cure was a nightmare. It was virtually impossible to find information and support and it didn’t help that there was a widely held suspicion among Joe Public that CFS was all in the mind. Equally insulting was the idea that Jason was just tired. I wanted to slap stupid people who said things to us like, ‘Yeah, I’m tired all the time. Maybe I’ve got chronic fatigue too!’

  Any social isolation we may have experienced by being the only new parents in our circle of friends was amplified a thousand per cent by Jason’s illness. The sexy, energetic, positive, enthusiastic man I loved slowly dissolved. He used every ounce of strength and energy to do what he could to help around the house and with Luca, but most of the time he was utterly spent.