Читать книгу The Baby Diaries - Sam Binnie - Страница 25

So I’ve finished A Womb of One’s Own. Wow.

Wow.

What a mixture of preachy, hippie garbage and self-congratulatory smugness. Here are some of my favourite bits:

On discovering the news:

It was a moment I shall never forget. As Bill and I looked at the doctor’s report telling us that our great blessing had arrived, we held hands. ‘Our souls are fused together forever,’ Bill’s eyes seemed to say. ‘This is a child of love,’ mine replied. Bill started to cry, then I joined in, and even the doctor wiped his eyes. ‘I’ve been doing this job for thirty years, and I’ve never been so moved when I told a couple the good news,’ he exclaimed. ‘Thank you. Thank you for reminding me of the magic of this job.’

On going into labour:

It was a swelling wave, a jungle noise that I rode, crested, becoming stronger and more powerful than I ever could have considered possible. I reached inside my soul, and found myself as a small girl, a teenage beauty, a handsome woman, a wise old crone. We stood in a circle holding hands, and they guided me to the place I needed to be, delivering me strength and love. I knew my child was being born, and that it was a journey only I could go on. I could hear my doctor: ‘One more push, Ms Martel,’ and my selves nodded at me, smiling. With one final effort, I could feel myself doubled, grown, as the love Bill and I created became a person, a name, a life. It was Creation.

On feeding the baby:

I had watched others around me struggle with breastfeeding, discovering pain and bleeding. Others had simply given up, and turned to a plastic bottle for their newborn wonder. Blessed as we were with our child, so was I blessed with his feeding. He took to it like a natural – as that’s what it was, the most natural thing in the world. We stared into each other’s eyes, and I could feel the love flow between us. I knew that no pain could ever touch me, as I was giving him the greatest gift in the world – mother’s milk, which would be with him for the rest of his life, bettering him and lifting him among his peers, wherever he went.

On the baby’s toys and clothes:

Bill and I agreed from the start that we wanted only beauty for our child. We had no plastics in the nursery, which our own interior decorator had redone completely for us, in shades of dove grey with a yellow accent. The cot was made from an old altar from Brazil, with wood which was hundreds of years old. The changing unit was fashioned from a table Bill’s family had kept for generations, while the baby’s wardrobe was an heirloom from my grandmother, shipped from France in the eighteenth century. We carpeted the room in the softest New Zealand wool, with a feature rug from Morocco. The toys were handmade – an artisan in upstate New York made a whole family of wooden animals, and an Italian craftsman designed an original light fitting in a giraffe shape. All the bed linen and blankets came from handcrafters across the country when I’d sourced throughout my pregnancy. We even had a film prop-maker fashion us the baby’s name in lights, to go on the wall – Bill and I both knew how important it was for this baby to feel at home the second we brought him in.

I cannot wait to meet this woman. Orrrr … not meet. One or the other. Probably the latter.

TO DO:

Find out if Thom will repaint our living room in dove grey and accent yellow. That actually sounds lovely.