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Her Outdoors: The Day I Gave Birth Was the Day I Lost My Mind

Posted on: Sunday, 24 October 2004, 08:00 CDT

Continuing my casual but completist observation of the London hospital scene, this week I've been checking out UCH, where I've just had a baby. Having recently been to the opening of the new breast-cancer wing at Bart's, a beautiful combination of restoration and modern alteration with wonderful artworks throughout, the aesthetic at UCH compares pretty badly. As far as I know, the Bart's transformation was achieved with mostly private donations; I guess most grateful new mothers are too shagged to be out fundraising for the O&G department at any hospital.

The look of the labour ward hardly matters when you are discussing delivery positions with your midwife in between contractions. But when the euphoria dies down and you are left in a private room, for which you are paying because there are no beds on the ward, and it has no heating and smells of take-away and is next door to a building site, you do start to think - for this price I could be down the road at Hazlitt's hotel.

I am too happy with this delicious little mite beside me (a baby, not a bed bug - things aren't quite that bad) to complain, and the midwives have got better things to worry about. She is beautiful, in the fleeting way that babies are. Only occasionally I glance down and could swear I see a miniature Michael Gambon at my breast. Or is it Jim Broadbent? Thinking about it, I remember my first-born, also a girl, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Jack Nicholson. Which makes me wonder - is it them, or me?

Basically, when you give birth you no longer carry around seven- or-so pounds of baby, a lot of blood and a placenta (though some people like to hang on to theirs; we are minding a friend's in our freezer at the moment. It looks like a liver and puts me in mind of fava beans and a nice chianti. I tend to shriek when stumbling upon it by accident, looking for the peas); you also lose, at least temporarily, your brain. Proof - the day I give birth, I complete the cryptic crossword; the day after - not one clue. Not one! I nearly ring the solutions helpline. But that is a slippery slope and besides, phone calls from my hospital room are far too expensive.

Back at home, to test my theory, I sit at the computer. Instantly I become an automaton playing solitaire. You see? Oh who am I kidding, I've always played solitaire. But now I really love it. And I can't finish a sentence, let alone a - what are those things again? These interrupted thoughts are like walking to the edge of a cliff and sailing blithely over. I've developed a twitch in my fingers as though to push my glasses up on the bridge of my nose. I don't wear glasses.

Waiting for my last ante-natal appointment, I sat next to a woman reading the same Primo Levi novel as me. Her partner remarked that it was a strange choice of book for pregnancy. Subconsciously she and I knew that once our babies were born, all we'd want to read would be magazines. And even then I'm only looking at the ads, wondering (for quite long stretches) what it would be like to be that girl, wearing those pointy brown shoes, as though she really exists and the shoes have meaning. Perhaps they do. Or perhaps the stereotype of the busty bimbo originated with a breast-feeding mother. Who knows? What was I saying? Where did I put my specs? n

Source: Independent on Sunday, The

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