I like books. My baby does too: Where Is Baby’s Belly-Button? and the collected works of Spot have long been favourites of hers. Such is her enjoyment of books that she even allowed me to read without interruption during her marathon 90-minute breastfeeding sessions. I’ve even managed to keep the reading up - though at a much reduced pace - as she has continued to grow, and become much less malleable to my will. This liking of books is not completely random - I do have a point and I’m getting to it.
There are many, many books around on the subject of pregnancy and childbirth, which I would’ve thought I would devour when my time came. Yet I felt strangely uninterested in reading them while I was pregnant. I dipped into things like What to Expect When You’re Expecting if I needed an answer to a specific question, or just wanted to check in as to what kind of fruit the baby had turned into that month. But I hardly read any of the many books on offer cover to cover.
From this distance, it reads kinda like denial, and maybe it was, in a way. But throughout most of my pregnancy, I had a strange sense of calm and an unusually upbeat frame of mind. On some level, I seemed to have intuited that reading a lot about all the many things that could go wrong during pregnancy and birth - and encylopaedic books like What to Expect ... usually cover everything, no matter how rare - would just be a massive downer. Of course, I didn’t give up reading all together: I decided that I would collect all of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries - my literary equivalent of comfort food - and read them all again for about the twentieth time. Mercifully, I managed to find out who murdered Roger Ackroyd before I went into labour.
This long preface about my pregnancy reading habits is by way of introducing novelist Anne Enright’s essay collection - is that what it is? - Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. This is one of the few books that I did read on the subject - and read from beginning to end - while I was pregnant. I think the reason that it proved an exception to the ‘everything you needed to know from ectopic pregnancy to pre-eclampsia’ type of book is that it was a) witty, b) personal and c) made no claims to be talking about every woman’s experience. I was beguiled from the first sentence of ‘Breeding’: ‘Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t need aliens - we already had a race of higher beings to gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will: we called them priests (p 5).’ How could I not be won over by a first essay on the parallels between pregnancy and alien abductions?
Each piece is a little different. ‘Nine Months’, for example, mimics the What to Expect ... month-by-month narrative, and lyrically details the first nine months of her baby’s life. She tells us what her baby’s stage of development is that month, paralleled with her own ‘regression’. In the eighth month:
The baby is in flying form, lying on her back and just laughing and kicking for no reason. I don’t know what she is laughing at. Is this a memory? Is she imagining, for the first time, tickles, even though there are no tickles there?
She may be the only truly happy person on the planet. I look at her and hope she isn’t bonkers. (p 62)
‘Babies: A Breeder’s Guide’ contains several mini-topics: idiosyncratic thoughts on everything from God - ‘all religions ... prize and praise the figure of the mother ... which makes up, in a way for being skipped in shop queues and looking like a heap‘ - to Buggies - ‘pushing a buggy makes you look like you’re on the way to the methadone clinic’ - to Poo - ‘often, when a mother is whispering to her baby, she is whispering about shit’. (pp 111-35)
Looking at the comments on the back of the book, Enright has received praise for her ‘truth-telling’, giving the ‘true facts’ and being an ‘effective contraceptive’ (presumably because of that truth-telling). While these commentators may be picking up on the same intimate tone to which I responded, or the many pithy turns of phrase, these comments also seem to echo the obsession with ‘truth-telling’ that marks many other books about pregnancy and birth. I should also add to my growing list that I am currently reading feminist Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions at the moment, and she is another ‘truth-teller’. I’m wondering why we need so many truth-tellers when it seems like every new mother with a pen is telling it like it is.
But I digress. Back to the book at hand. While Enright’s recounting of the birth of her first child sounds horrific, and the maternity care she experienced somewhat appalling, it strangely didn’t act as a downer in the way that those other ‘truth-telling’ books seemed to threaten. Part of the reason is because it wasn’t patronising, in that she never implied that because something was a certain way for her, then it would be like that for anyone else. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was uplifting, but it felt considered, and, in a strange way, intimate. By that I mean, it felt almost a privilege to have someone share such a personal experience and give a ‘warts and all’ account of it. Like a friend who trusts you enough to tell you something that they’ve never told anybody else. Except, of course, she had told anyone who cared to read the book.
I say ‘account’ deliberately. These pieces may have been crafted in snatched moments while her baby was asleep, but they are most definitely ‘crafted’ narratives in the way that her short stories, in particular, are. Perhaps what sets this book apart, then, is that it pays tribute to the singularity of Enright’s embodied experience. The tender descriptions of her daughter’s development are not those that another mother could, would or should give. And, in my view, the book seems to be just as much about exploring how to write a new life - both hers and the baby’s - as well as how to live it. The mix of styles offers a patch-work approach that doesn’t attempt to represent the totality of pregnancy, birth and parenthood. In recognising the limits of representation, but also pushing those limits, Enright doesn’t so much ‘tell the truth’, as write herself into being in the subject position of new mother.
