see the hair?”
But in my confusion I had mistaken the dark patch of hair for my own pubic hair, forgetting I had been shaved.
“Keep pushing,” he insisted, “it won’t be long.”
“I see it now,” I said with relief, as a small, dark, fuzzy orb appeared in the mirror, balancing in space.
“Push hard. It’s almost over.”
Then suddenly through the searing pain, a large fleshy lump, raw and bloody, slid into view.
Minutes later when the doctor lay the lump on my stomach, umbilical cord still uncut, it was shining and beautifully formed, like a rubber doll I had as a child with succulently curved arms and legs, except instead of pink, it was entirely purple. For a moment I felt like the leading lady in a gala performance who had just been handed a bouquet of flowers after the final curtain call.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor announced with satisfaction. I hadn’t thought to ask. “Congratulations!”
“But you told me I was going to have a boy,” I protested.
“Never believe what I say,” he shrugged, and I closed my eyes against the confusion and dire exhaustion.
I was astonished to see how lovely Ronit was when the nurse brought her for her first feed. Through some magical metamorphosis, the shapeless slimy lump in the mirror had changed into a beautiful baby. She had a full head of black hair, creamy white skin and large dark eyes. I gazed at her with the same wonder I had once watched a nasty-looking egg, splattered with muck, turn into a fluffy yellow chick.
Next day the young nurse on duty tied Ronit’s hair with a red ribbon and asked if she could show the baby to her boyfriend. “Just to prod him a little,” she explained. She planned on enticing him with a state of the art product. Each time Ronit was brought for her feeding, the nurse pulled the curtain around my bed so as not to offend the three other mothers in the room, none of whom were breast feeding — “the sight might be somewhat repulsive,” she explained.
“Mind you, I think it’s a good thing,” she added. “Cow’s milk is for calves, mother’s milk is for babies, but then they don’t see it like that.” At least my mothering met with some initial approval.
Two
Early Days
As if in revenge for her enforced silence during those desperate days in the womb, the state of the art baby didn’t stop crying for three months. Because we were penniless, Shimon and I were living with my family in my parents’ two-bedroomed flat. My brother had one bedroom, we had the other and my parents slept in the living room. My brother and father had to get up early for work and Shimon was suffering from a recurrence of the hepatitis he had contracted in the Israeli army. (The night I was giving birth, the doctor had been more concerned about him than about me, he looked so ill.) Rest was crucial to his recovery. I was under constant pressure to keep Ronit from crying and disturbing everyone’s sleep. All through the night I rocked her in her crib or in my arms, pacing back and forth in the narrow space between the bed and wall. Worried she would cry, I fed her every time she opened her mouth. It was difficult to sit because of my burning stitches (cutting and stitching were standard medical procedures at the time), and nursing was painful.
The nights were a never-ending agony. During the day, when my mother, brother or father took over the pacing, I tended Shimon who was bedridden and very ill, boiled piles of nappies, sheets, blankets, baby clothes and maternity bras, because my mother said that boiling prevented skin rash.
Ronit didn’t need sleep. Her days in the womb had trained her to do without it, but I, without her advantages, craved it, falling asleep in the bath, on the loo, once with my head pressed in the rungs of her crib.
Aside from sleep deprivation, I was deprived of fresh air and social contact. I was unable to leave the house, not being permitted to take an infant outdoors. She was born at the end of November, winter in Montreal. It was considered dangerous to expose babies to the severe cold before they were six weeks old.
After three weeks the situation was unbearable. My eyes were puffy from lack of sleep; my stitches ached and itched at the same time; Ronit wailed incessantly no matter what I did; I was unable to visit friends because she couldn’t be left with anyone, not even my mother, as she seemed constantly hungry and in need of feeding. I felt the walls pressing against me and the ceiling descending to flatten me, squeezing the juices from my soul. Motherhood was a desperate affair. I did not go gently into maternity, I was dragged into it kicking and screaming.
One day when Shimon was at the doctor’s, and my mother was out shopping, I indulged in a deluge of tears, crying with frustration, with rage, with bewilderment, railing against my fate. I was trapped in a nightmare from which there was no possibility of waking. Ronit was in the living room finally asleep in a rickety old pram, loaned to us by a friend. All at once I heard that piercing relentless wail I had come to dread. It filled my head, pounding in my blood, each mindless “wha…” stoking a volcano waiting inside me. Suddenly I exploded. I knew only one thing. I had to stop that sound. I ran from the bedroom, rushed into the living room and flung the source of the howling into space. The pram impacted against the wall, teetered and fell over. Ronit rolled on to the floor. I turned my back, stalked into the bedroom and locked the door.
My first reaction was a burst of exquisite joy, a wonderful sense of being young and free, and alive, a relief so overwhelming it was as though I had survived some terrible death and found myself with another chance at life. Then, just as suddenly, I was drained of life, emotionally dumb, feeling nothing, knowing nothing, hearing and seeing nothing. Limp and wilted, bereft of will or desire, I collapsed on to the bed, shattered like a windscreen after a head-on collision.
About an hour later I woke abruptly with a sense of panic and rushed into the living room. Ronit was on the floor, still crying.
Carefully I picked her up, like a broken doll. Her face was crimson with howling and her small fists clenched blue, but she seemed unhurt. I gave her my breast and cradling her in my arms, sang her a song Shimon often sang to her, Hush Little Baby Don’t You Cry. My mother found us both asleep on the sofa.
Despite a severe case of colic, Ronit thrived, but I was withering. At her one-month check up, the doctor prescribed sleeping medicine. When I balked at giving such a small baby sleeping medicine, he said, “it’s not for her, it’s for you. She’ll be fine, I’m not worried about her, it’s you I’m worried about … you need sleep and you need to get out of the house, you look like a ghost.” I knew he was right.
When Ronit was less than six weeks old, Shimon and I were invited to a new year’s party, at a musician friend’s house. Life was trickling back into my veins, Shimon was on the mend, and with the doctor’s orders fresh in mind, I decided we would take Ronit and go. My mother protested wildly, raising the objections of cold, of noise, of smoke, of drink, of the late hour, of the inappropriateness of the occasion, “you don’t take an infant to a party with crazy musicians. The music alone will make her deaf.” As a last resort she tried, “but you don’t have a carrier cot … you have nothing to take the baby in and nothing to put her in when you get there.” Undeterred, I wrapped Ronit in blankets, placed her in a cardboard carton with holes in the lid for air, and Shimon carried the carton to the party. My mother was in a state of shock.
Once there I put the carton in the corner of an unused room, out of harm’s way. But soon afterwards when I went to check on Ronit, I couldn’t find the carton. I searched the other rooms frantically,
