On the Peace and Pleasure of Reading Books About Babies as a New Mother

The brevity of infancy is only matched by its intensity. That saying, don’t like the weather, wait five minutes —it’s the same with babies. Teething begets teeth, sleeplessness begets sleep.

But also, this time is sometimes so boring, thick with the maintenance of diapering, feeding, laundering that it can be forgotten altogether. The baby and its needs are prelingual. It becomes unbelievable, almost, unless it is written down. Milk leaks from the breast when the baby cries, no real thoughts passed between mother and child. And later there will come talk, argument, betrayal even and isn’t that more interesting?

But what of this brief hallowed time of total animal dependence? The baby’s breathing at night confirming the continuance of their delicate existence.

With my first child the love brought on an almost adolescent sense of heartache. I did things like thrust her deserving head between the limbs of an apple tree in bloom just to smell the flowers. Already broken into maternal love, my second child feels more like an extra limb whose fattening I watch with self-congratulatory pride.

I look curiously into his blue-grey eyes, crescent moons set in his soft head, for signs of recognition. My daughter learns to make him laugh by talking in unending syllables of a made-up language they both seem to understand.

I began searching out babies in literature with my first and again that same craving returned. Not unlike the sudden desire for an intensely green vegetable or a chocolate bar, I just want to read about babies. It is, like many cravings, both brief and strong, and seems to wean as the baby gains perceptual strength and begins to surpass the broadest mammalian classification.

I don’t know whether I am looking for a new kind of art made under the conditions of parenting, a model, or simply the pleasure of recognition. At the least, a fellow witness to the highs and lows of raising of a child.

One of my favorites remains the introductory pages of Tarka the Otter, a book devoted almost entirely to animals. The author, Henry Williamson, details writing his seventeenth draft of Tarka while holding his colicky baby and caring for its sick mother, “I could hardly bear his wailings which wrung a nervous weakness in myself.”

By the light of a single candle Williamson held nightly vigils with his son, “I began to write about 10 p.m. when things were quiet, and continued three, four, sometimes five hours while nursing the baby in the crook of my left arm.”

This fight for survival presages much of what is to come in the story of the otter, which begins with the birth of Tarka’s litter, their mother nursing them through the “nights and days of their blind helplessness.” “This was her first litter, and she was overjoyed when Tarka’s lids ungummed, and his eyes peeped upon her, blue and wondering. He was then a month old. Before the coming of her cubs her world had been a wilderness.”

Having children can be such a basically animal experience that to read about it as performed by otter, whale, or even bird all seems relevant. The grandeur of individual love (something I don’t claim to know if animals experience) is rightly tempered by the humble, yet reassuring, profusion of life on earth.

But I am participating in the distinctly human pastime of reading about it. I suppose it is this accounting of parenthood, the naming of it instead of simply experiencing it, that I find so moving.

Before the arrival of either child I reread the passage in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow of pregnant intoxication. Anna, who marries into the central Brangwen family, is pregnant and dancing naked and exultantly by the fire before she is interrupted by her husband, “with slow heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn…her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying, uplifted to the Lord.”

The much darker Chekhov story, “Sleepy,” features a “little nurse,” who in a dream state fatally strangles a baby that won’t stop crying. Here were records of altered states that felt apart from the normal goings on of our mutually agreed upon society, proof that something else was afoot. I looked to books to feel less invisible in the unaccountable and strange hours of pregnancy and child rearing.

Soon after the arrival of my second child, I read this punishing sentence from Annie Ernaux’s A Frozen Woman, “I can no longer think of any way to change my life except by having a baby. I will never sink lower than that.” She is disgusted by the food she cooks, “almost prechewing” it during her preparations. “Nine hundred sessions with the frypan” a year she estimates.

Feeling claustrophobic, I unwittingly start reading the writing of fathers who probably had an easier time sitting down to write. Or perhaps the novel is too neat a form to easily reflect mother’s messy experiences in the early days of parenting.

Home with my second when I should be more accustomed to going dark for a time, I dream of driving a tractor through rows of cabbage on the farm where I no longer work. I look longingly out at the night stars and miss going to the bar.

Simply put, everything has changed. It took months to write this small essay (perhaps a more telling essay would be a cataloguing of the child-led interruptions incurred along the way). Babies monopolize my thoughts. The parent author is a person whose actions are often not propelled by the self but the baby, a being whose influence on language seems to be one of frequent interruption or even abandonment.

Bernadette Mayer and her (then) husband Lewis Warsh’s solution to the problem of writing about the two-sided coin of domestic chaos and drudgery was to apply a formula: every other day they alternated diary entries during the first August of their daughter Marie’s life. This makes up the text of Piece of Cake.

In the middle family pictures are printed notably ending on a photo of the unsung hero, the family dishwasher. The book is good because of the freedom in its simple design. The form accommodates most manner of daily experience: dentist visits, to-do lists, ailments, poems, fights, books read, inner thoughts, philosophical diatribes, and transcripts of babble.

“Aah, oo-eh?”

“What”

“Aoo!?”

“What? Did something taste bad, did you eat a pencil?”

“Ahb-hah!”

“Thank you, Marie.”

Marie is not simply an interruption to her parents’ writing but a point of curiosity between them. Her consciousness is recorded like an additional probe stuck out in the world to gather perceptual information, deepening their own. For her parents writing is experimental, for Marie everything is. “Marie’s new teeth have broken through. She’s trying to attack Pilgrim’s Progress with them.”

William Carlos Williams’s novel White Mule centers around a baby named Flossie. In the book, speech is lumped together unquoted in whole paragraphs so that reading it feels as if it is a story one is telling oneself.

Williams describes the emergence of Flossie into the world with earthy realism: “In behind the ears there was still that white grease of pre-birth. The matted hair, larded to the head, on the brow it lay buttered heavily while the whole back was caked with it, a yellow-white curd”.

Williams, who delivered more than two thousand babies during his career as a pediatrician, was perhaps able to capture this fleeting thing, birth, not because he was a father of two sons, but because he had seen it so many times at work. Like Henry Williamson, he wrote at night. His wife Florence, for whom the character of Flossie is named, neither worked outside the home nor wrote poetry.

With the baby Flossie’s introduction to each new character, we see her anew, the aspects of the baby demarcated by nursemaid, relative and acquaintance all, no less miraculous with repetition. When taken to the home of “the Captain” he fawns over the child. “I can’t get over such a fine baby, the Captain went on as Gurlie, was still unwrapping it. They are like little flowers, a flower that is just opening.”

“Each time they wake from sleep it is as if they were just born,” the Captain further remarks.

Alongside the sweetness of new life, there is the nagging worry over the baby’s survival expressed in her failure to gain weight or to stop crying. In the 1930s, when White Mule was published, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. was six percent, around ten times what it is today. This is the first and central crisis of the book.

In this way Flossie is even compared to other animal babes and left wanting, “The baby yawned and blinked and wrinkled up its brows. A kitten or pup would have been crawling on its belly. Not she. She was not able. Her mouth against the tit, unlike an animal, she sucked indifferently.”

The dramas of adult life: a strike at the printing press where Flossie’s father works or the discontent of her mother marooned in small city apartments, are braided with those of the baby’s own: Flossie getting her nail torn off, her bout of whooping cough, all that she eats. The process of being born and becoming a part of this world, a process that is often lost in narratives of “adult” and even family life, is instead given a place of primary importance.

Flossie’s every preference, smile or grab for something seems to accumulate positively as if to say yes, I’d like to be one of you, there is much goodness to be had in this world. The whole story ends abruptly, with Flossie, her face smeared with berries in the countryside, being “a part of it all.”

In flashes I get my own feelings of contentedness like these. On a mid-April morning it snows hard outside. The baby, weeks old, lays on my chest panting soured milk breath upon my cheek. My three-year-old sleeps beside us stripped from the waist down after wetting her own bed hours ago. Her breath still smells of the night’s strawberry toothpaste.

My love emanates from the small fairy ring of children. I listen through their breathing to the plow’s rumble against the road each piece: weather, persons, snowplow, indistinct and intensely belonging to the day.