That first day, when the lactation nurse had been off and India had had a bottle, had made Sam terrified she’d mess up breastfeeding again. The more terrified she was, the more India sensed it, cried and refused to feed. Sam’s breasts ached. India wailed with misery and Sam’s breasts ached even more at her child’s cries.
‘How is this so hard?’ Sam had said tearfully twenty minutes after her fifth attempt at feeding, when India had just cried harder, pitiful little wails that broke Sam’s heart. The inner voice screamed at her:bad mother!
‘It can take a while,’ said the lactation nurse. ‘Not everyone finds it easy at first, but keep trying, you’ll do it.’
They gave India a little bit of milk that Sam had laboriously expressed earlier from a machine that sounded like it was pumping oil from eight thousand feet beneath the earth.
‘I know you are going to manage this when you go home tomorrow,’ said the lactation nurse, beaming with encouragement, and she left Sam with a sheaf of papers about the right way to do it.
Finally, India slept in her little bassinet, Ted was gone and the ward was mercifully quiet because all the visitors had been sent home by the ringing of a bell.
There was snoring in some corners where exhausted women tried to sleep. There were little murmuring baby noises, the odd small whimper and, sometimes, full-blown baby wailing. And all the while, Sam looked at beautiful India with that precious little face, the fluffed-up dark hair. She looked so like Ted with those huge eyes and all Sam could think was that she had failed her baby because she hadn’t been able to feed her.
The woman next door, Larissa, who was on her third child, had juggled her baby onto enormous bosoms and the baby had grappled on like a mountaineer grabbing a crampon expertly.
‘It’s very easy,’ said Larissa, in a relaxed tone that Sam envied from the bottom of her heart. ‘I don’t know what you need all them bits of paper for. Come here, I’ll show you,’ she said, when Sam had been lying in bed on the verge of tears, still failing to get India to latch on.
‘No, no, I’ll try later,’ Sam had said.
The nurse passed by again and, seeing Sam’s devastated face, said: ‘It can be a little stressful if you have people beside you who are doing it so easily, and remember, Larissa has had two more babies. She’s used to this now, it’s all new to you and it’s new to India.’
‘But it’s new to Larissa’s baby too and he seems to know how,’ said Sam tremulously. ‘India doesn’t know how and that’s all my fault, because if I knew, then India would know and I would be able to transfer that information to her and ...’
‘She’s not a computer,’ the nurse said kindly. ‘Now get a bit of rest and it will look easier the next time.’
The next time was two o’clock in the morning and Sam did not feel as if it was any easier. She was zombified with tiredness, woken from an uneasy sleep and desperately trying to get India’s tiny little mouth to attach onto her nipple. Another nurse tried to help her, holding Sam’s breast and squashing it up into India’s little mouth, trying to squeeze milk out and get India to suck. But it was no good.
‘Why am I such a failure at this?’ said Sam, giving up and bursting into tears.
‘You’re not a failure at all,’ said the nurse. ‘I’ll get the pump.’
The breast pump, nicknamed Daisy by Larissa next door, made enough noise to wake the dead, but miraculously none of the other women or babies on the ward stirred. It hurt, too. Sam had thought that the whole breastfeeding business was such an earth-mother thing to do that it wouldn’t feel uncomfortable in the slightest and yet letting the pump remove the milk from painfully engorged breasts was agony.
‘You might have a touch of mastitis there,’ said the nurse kindly.
‘Mastitis?’ said Sam, ‘I thought cows got that?’
‘We’re mammals too,’ the nurse said wryly.
When she’d expressed enough milk via Daisy, she managed to feed little India from a bottle and at least there was the pleasure of watching her baby drink her milk even if it hadn’t come straight from the breast. Where were all her visions of perfect motherhood now?
She’d thought of the ideas she’d had of lying on her hospital bed and her darling baby snuggled up beside her attached to a breast, happy and serene like an Old Masters’ painting of motherhood. It was nothing like that. It was messy and sore and she felt she was doing everything wrong. What was gloriously joyful about that? The only perfect thing was India herself, who was the most exquisitely beautiful creature to have emerged into the world. Despite years of yearning for this very time, Sam’s primary emotion was fear.
The next morning, both mama and baby were ready to go. No breastfeeding had been managed.
Instead of feeling like the serene madonna Sam had imagined she would be, she felt on the edge of an enormous panic attack.
‘Have you fixed the car seat properly?’ she snapped at Ted.
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘The guy came out of the shop when we bought it and made sure I knew how, plus Patrick came over this morning and helped me, OK?’
‘Fine.’ Sam sat uncomfortably on the edge of the hospital bed, and knew she sounded like a bitch, not Earth Mother supreme, but everything was suddenly so complicated. She didn’t know what to do, and it was scaring her. Apparently fear emerged as wild irritation and bitchiness. But she couldn’t help it. Today, somewhat less than two and a half days since India had been born, they were leaving the hospital.
Sam didn’t want to go. Only her long, painful labour had meant she’d been kept in a second night. Today was going-home day, come what may. But she needed this place, despite the noise and screaming babies and no sleep. At least it was safe.
