wanted to teach people whose minds could in some measure answer my own. In two years all the children would be in school. My days would be my own again; I could have again the forgotten experience of being alone. I would have time to read, to bring my knowledge up to date. I could perhaps write. I could locate a school in which I could teach part time.
It was in this forward-looking state of mind that I learned that I was pregnant for the fourth time and that the job was to be done all over again.
Except for the initial depression as the gates clanged shut, the pregnancy was uneventful. The household was full and active, I had no choice but to be busy, and depression gave way to an intermittent, semi-comic rage that was much easier to handle. The only way to deal with the jokes played by feminine biology is to agree that they are funny. Nothing unusual happened until I was in my sixth month, when the children picked up measles. I had not had it. For a pregnant woman, ‘measles’ is a frightening word, but my doctor reassured me. It was not the severe disease that was dangerous, but the milder German measles: there was nothing to indicate it would affect the unborn baby, who was in any case advanced beyond the vulnerable stage of development. Besides, I was probably mistaken; most adults had had measles; it was easy to forget these things. I was still worried enough to call a doctor in Boston, a personal friend. She concurred. Accordingly, I received gamma globulin from my own doctor, enough to modify the disease but not to prevent it. When it came, I was very sick, but only for a week, and I recovered without after-effects.
Three months later, on 20 July 1958, on schedule and without complications, the baby exploded into life. Once again it was over, this birthing, this experience unassimilable to any other, in which brain and familiar personality are incredibly harnessed to an enormous body whose work and pain spread from the centre to take in every remotest nerve-end and at last the whole world. Doctor and nurse moving dreamlike above me, I lay in the delivery room worn out, in the state of heightened emotional perception that accompanies an experience that has involved totally everything that one is. What had I made this time? The nurse anticipated my question. ‘You have a lovely little boy.’
But that wasn’t true, I didn’t have a little boy at all. She had made a mistake, a slip of the tongue perhaps, corrected inside the minute. But one is very vulnerable after prolonged pain. Until they took my little boy away I did not realize how much I had wanted him — a brother for Matt, who would now be isolated among three sisters — a boy, because one can dream bigger dreams for a boy than for a girl. But the baby was a girl, and the doctor had been right. The measles had left no trace. She was healthy and perfect.
And then there was the matter of the name. For three days Elly lived nameless, as none of my other babies had had to do. We had thought we had a name ready. She — if she was a girl — was to be Hester, a restrained New England name, which my husband and I thought beautiful. But complications arose, the silly complications of a happy modern family in which everybody’s ideas count. Sara hated the name Hester, she thought it was awful. It had been agreed for months that this baby, born within a month of her birthday, was to be in a special sense hers, as Matthew had been Rebecca’s birthday present almost four years before. Sara’s very own baby couldn’t have a name she thought was awful — we all saw that. So the little bundle went unnamed as we tried to suit everybody and finally settled on a compromise that nobody liked or objected to very much. The baby would be Elinor. It was a strange, uncertain beginning. First sex unclear, then name, in which, irrationally, so much of personality seems to inhere. David Copperfield was born with a caul. A nineteenth-century novelist could have imagined no more fitting introduction for a child whom twentieth-century psychiatrists would see as suffering from a condition which Erik Erikson calls early ego failure, in which the very boundaries of the self are confused and undefined.
But nobody thought of portents then. Elly was fine and healthy, unusual in no respect except that she cried with colic day and night. Even that was not unusual in our family. Becky had done exactly the same thing. There is a section in Spock on three-month colic. Our copy opens of itself to those grimy pages. Colic is a strain on everybody concerned, but it is nothing to worry about. We took turns rocking and cuddling her, my mother and I, so the family could have some peace by day and sleep by night. Elly cried and cried and lay at my breast and ate and cried again and grew. By the time she was three and a half months old the colic was largely gone, by five months she was a gay and cheerful baby, though as late as seven months she would sometimes give a sharp yelp after her milk went down to remind us of those early weeks.
One does not watch the second baby as closely as the first, and the fourth may hardly get watched at all. Nevertheless, I remember that Elly did the usual things roughly on schedule. I remember that at seven weeks she smiled, in a brief interval between screams. At two months she even smiled at her teddy bear. That seemed very advanced to us; none of the others had recognized a human surrogate so early. She reached for objects at the usual time. Photographs of her at five months show an alert, gay baby, smiling up out of her bath straight into your eyes. Memory can play tricks. My children all have the same hair and colouring, and their baby pictures are very much alike. Three years later, in the midst of Elly’s dreamlike remoteness, I went over the old pictures, combing my brain for clues to when it began. I found one of a baby laughing aloud, eyes focused. directly on her father’s face behind the camera. I rejected it altogether. That was not Elly’s empty gaze, straight through you to the wall behind. The pictures had been scrambled. That was not Elly. That had been Matt. But I was mistaken. Two years afterwards, my mother produced her copy of the picture, incontrovertibly dated. That was Elly. The smiling baby had really existed. She had been different then.
I nursed Elly, as I had the others, for nine months. Her head was small and warm like the others’, her body snuggled soft against mine. It broke my heart to wean her. I am a thin woman, grown from a nervous child, a nail- biter, a ring-twister. Serenity is not natural to me; I value the rare experience that brings it.
The long hours spent nursing my children, relaxed, not moving, only functioning, each of us completely satisfied in the other, were to me the happiest times of their babyhood.
When I weaned her, Elly was still very much a baby. Other people’s children, after six months, begin to do all sorts of things — they sit up, they crawl, they fall down, they eat pins. At an age when other people’s children are pulling themselves to their feet in their playpens, mine are still flat on their backs on a blanket. I had got used to this long before Elly came. Matthew had not sat up until eight months; Becky, who had not crawled till eleven months, was seventeen months old before she stood alone, nineteen months old before she walked. Elly followed a month behind. At nine months she finally sat alone. At a year, she crawled. Months went by and she did not walk. Another family might have worried at such slow progress. We felt no reason to. Elly crawled very well once she began. It was true that even when she became mobile she seemed satisfied with very little, but what mother of four does not consider that a virtue? Does not Spock point out that babies may prefer very simple toys? She did not want to put rings on a stick, but I knew already that not all babies did. I remembered vividly that Becky had taken the educational toys that Sara had delighted in assembling, and methodically dropped the parts, one by one, down the stairs.
So when did it begin? A friend, also a mother of four, tells me she began to wonder as early as eight months, seeing Elly lying in her baby-tender, content without even a rattle in her hand. Has she hit on something significant? And there are pictures from around nine months or so (dates are vague; it did not occur to us that one day Elly would be a case-history). The friendly bubbly smile is gone, and there is only one picture in which she faces the camera. She looks serious. Had it started then? But those photographs were taken on one day. There are often days when a baby doesn’t photograph well. Perhaps Elly was tired that day. If I could go back I’d know in a moment. I can never find out now.
Was it significant that as early as eight months, propped up in a chair, she showed that strange quivering tensing of all muscles in a kind of passing paroxysm — that response to intense interest or pleasure which has been with her ever since yet which no doctor has ever seen? Was it significant that as she approached a year she would not play hide-and-seek behind a diaper? If I held her on my shoulder and her father dodged up at her from behind my back, instead of discovering him, as the others had, with squeals of pleasure, she paid no attention. But children differ, and not everyone likes the same games. Elly seemed independent and cheerful. All this description is based
