In her comic masterpiece Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932, Stella Gibbons
divided women who wrote about childbirth into three groups: the unmarried
ones whose dire predictions included lots of dots arranged in threes, to
indicate the horrible bits; the brightly dismissive school,
“So-sorry-I’m-late-darling-I’ve-just-been-having-a-baby-where-shall-we-go-for-supper-afterwards?”;
and the ones who “combined literature and motherhood by writing a good,
serious first novel when they were 26, then marrying and having a baby, and,
the confinement over, writing articles for the Press on How I Shall Bring Up
My Daughter, by Miss Gwyneth Bludgeon, the brilliant young novelist, who
gave birth this morning. Miss Bludgeon is in private life Mrs Neil
McIntish”.
Seventy years on, Miss Bludgeon’s heirs are easy to spot, hard at work at the
maternal coalface. Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, for
example, infuriated some critics in 2001 when she compared pregnancy to a
boot camp, and (in words that would no doubt have inspired Gibbons to pick
up her satirical pen again) characterised problems with breast-feeding thus:
“Is my milk polluted by its passage through my unclean self? Is it carrying
messages? Is the dark turmoil of what I feel being broadcast by my
daughter’s cries?”
This is the sort of writing with which Anne Enright, the author of Making
Babies, would probably have little truck. Her own take on breast-feeding —
“But what fun! to be granted a new bodily function so late in life. As if
you woke up one morning and could play the piano” — is typical of the joyful
attitude to motherhood and its extraordinary physical demands that infuses
this fizzingly entertaining non-fiction debut.
Enright, like the imaginary Miss Bludgeon and the real Ms Cusk, is a
successful novelist: anyone who has not read her wonderful novel What Are
You Like? should rush out and buy it. Making Babies inspires the same
enthusiasm. A fine antidote to high-minded and prescriptive baby “manuals”
(as if children, like cars, just required a bit of tuning to run smoothly),
it is an account of her pregnancies and the first two years of her
children’s lives that brings common sense, powerful intelligence,
unflinching detail and above all a sense of humour to a subject all too
often treated with overwhelming seriousness. Reading it is like having a
conversation with your funniest friend.
In tune with our times, Enright had her first child in her late thirties, and
she is characteristically acute on the reasons for the delay. “I was reared
in the 1970s by a woman who had been reared in the 1930s, and we were both
agreed that getting pregnant was the worst thing that could happen to a
girl. My mother thought it would ruin my marriage prospects, and I thought
it would ruin my career prospects (same thing, really, by the different
lights of our times) . . .
By ‘career’ I meant something more than salary. I could not get pregnant, I
thought, until I had ‘gotten somewhere’, until I ‘knew who I was’, until I
was, in some way, more thoroughly myself.”
A quizzical, informed writer, (passing references include the painter Georges
Roualt, the film My Dinner with André, King Solomon’s Mines, and the poems
of Eavan Boland), Enright skilfully anatomises the experiences of
parenthood. Setting her child down on grass for the first time, for example,
she realises how much more exciting the moment is for her than her daughter,
for whom everything is different and delicious: “Sometimes I feel as though
I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.” And whenever she
finds herself getting too serious, she sends herself up: musing on her
baby’s perfection she writes, “And if you think I am biased, this is what
other people have said about her, ‘There’s no doubt about it, she is a
fabulous child’ Donal Enright, Grandfather; ‘I have to say I
have never met a more interesting or nicer, two-year-old’ Theo
Dombrowski, a friend.”
In many ways this is a deeply political book. As well as allergies, colic and
sleepless nights, Enright takes a sharp line on the economics of parenthood,
on why mothers want to work, on people who clean too much, and on
evolutionary sociologists (“Why do we give birth in pain? Humans give birth
in pain so that they can’t run away afterwards”). Along the way we also
learn a great deal about the Ireland in which she grew up (she is a
Dubliner) and about the very different place that the country has become.
She expresses beautifully both the sense of connectedness to the world that
motherhood has brought her and its rages (her account of rocking the
pushchair against the legs of the man who has pushed ahead of her in the
bank queue is a comic gem). Her own mother features prominently; when
Enright told her about her first pregnancy she said “very little, but every
time I looked at her, she looked five years younger, and then five years
younger again. She was fundamentally, metabolically pleased. She
was pleased all the way through, as I was pregnant all the way through”.
Enright knows that her subject matter will not appeal to everyone. “Married
Woman has Children in the Suburbs — it’s not exactly a call to arms,” she
says, and in her preface, Apologies All Round, she says sorry, ruefully and
drolly, to family, friends, husband and children. For a work of this kind
can’t help but reveal all sorts of personal details; it’s hard to review it
without feeling that you are in some way reviewing Enright herself. But she
need have no qualms on that score. The sort of woman with whom you’d look
forward to going out for a drink (indeed, one of her short chapters is
called How to Get Trolleyed While Breast-Feeding), she exudes a spirit of
indomitability that’s extremely appealing. She has also pulled off that
rarest of tricks: writing brilliantly about happiness. A seam of
contentment, with not the slightest smugness about it, glitters through this
book. Never saccharine or sentimental, it is human, fallible, and aware of
life’s blessings.
You feel that Enright probably spends a lot of time laughing and having fun
with her children. What better recommendation could there be?
A NEW LIFE
I wake up to the sound of my baby saying “Ah.” It is the morning after she
was born. “Ah.” She says it clear and true. This is her voice. It sounds
slightly surprised . . . It certainly surprises me. “Ah.” There she goes
again. She should be crying, but she is talking instead; experimenting with
this sound that comes out of her mouth. The womb is so silent. And of
course. Of course! It is obvious! I have given birth to a perfect child.
MAKING BABIES: Stumbling into Motherhood by Anne Enright
Cape £10.99 pp196
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £8 plus 99p p&p
on 0870 165 8585
READ ON...
websites:
www.nctpregnancyandbabycare.com
National Childbirth Trust site, friendly and informative
