The First Breath by Olivia Gordon

Author:Olivia Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

7

‘Mum’

‘Nothing makes a woman out of a girl faster than coping with a congenital defect in her child.’

EVERETT KOOP, ONE OF THE FIRST PAEDIATRIC SURGEONS1

Every day, we travelled to the hospital from East Finchley, carrying bottles of my expressed milk, then left at night. As I walked up the escalator at Warren Street station, then around the corner towards UCH, I felt with every step a growing magnetic pull towards my baby; then, when I entered his ward, I was shut down by sadness at finding him in this lonely place, being cared for by strangers, and having to leave him there. At home, I set my alarm clock through the nights to express milk for his tube feeds, while he lay in a plastic box, having never tasted a drop.

The fact I couldn’t just pick Joel up or lie next to him or take him outside made him seem, sometimes, like a stranger. The experiences Joel was undergoing, one after the other – having a tube placed via his nose into his intestines; having a drip inserted under his scalp because he had run out of other veins; his heart failing – and then the diagnosis of a genetic condition, and the prospect of major surgery – eventually started to feel too much to take in.

In some of the worst moments, as I was holding Joel in the high dependency unit and crooning ‘I Can Sing a Rainbow’, my voice continued – outwardly performing the maternal role – while inside I didn’t know what I was feeling. A tiny piece of me wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mother any more and I felt this part of myself was unacceptable. I didn’t realize that mothers could feel this way. I believed I was the only mother in the world who felt this, that I was the worst mother in the world. Grieving for my son, whom I was convinced I had failed and lost, I sat for hours as I held Joel in the neonatal unit’s big reclining armchairs, wondering how I could magically rewind time and erase my fears; I even considered begging for a lobotomy. On the very worst morning, I dressed in silence in the dark; birds tweeting in the swelling light; the inevitability of another day. Every movement felt impossibly heavy. I looked out of the bedroom window and thought about whether I really could jump. Went into the bathroom, took a razor and ran it over my wrist, pressing lightly. I realized then how hard I would have to push to cut my wrist. I knew I could never actually do it. Teeth chattering, I walked downstairs, where Phil and my parents were waiting for me.

On the Tube into central London, every day for weeks, I thought of jumping under trains. I didn’t want to be a bad mother. But I also didn’t want to die. So I carried on, thinking weird morbid thoughts, like envying old people because they must have had happy lives not to have ended them.

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