Babyville Page 0,98
decides she's had enough and goes in to get him up.
She took him to the baby clinic for a checkup, wanted to make sure the birthmark at the back of his neck was not, as she occasionally thought in a panic, meningitis. Sat in the waiting room with bags under her eyes and lank, greasy hair, and wondered whether she looked as terrible as all the other mothers in there, all with the same vacant, exhausted appearance.
One woman shook her head wearily at Sam as her baby started to wail again, and soon the entire room struck up as a background chorus. I hadn't understood, Sam thought as she rocked George back and forth, shushing him softly to calm him down, people who harm their babies. I hadn't understood how anyone could possibly do such a thing. But now, in this waiting room, unable to quiet George, exhausted with frazzled nerves, Sam knew. She also knew she would never do such a thing, but she knew how you could be on the edge, and how little it would take to push you over.
She had reached into the huge black bag (ostensibly a “diaper bag,” despite being the size and weight of a small suitcase filled with rocks) and drew out one of a selection of fourteen pacifiers that were rattling around in the bottom, to silence George's crying. It worked instantly.
A disapproving look from the weary woman, now calmly unbuttoning her shirt as she prepared to breast-feed.
“Do you find,” she said lightly, her tone giving nothing away, “the pacifiers good?”
“They're a life-saver,” Sam said defensively.
“I just think it's such a bad habit, really. Aren't you worried he'll grow up to be a thumb-sucker?”
“No, fuck off. It's none of your fucking business,” was what Sam wanted to say. She swallowed hard and heard herself say lightly, “Not in the slightest.”
“Sometimes I wish I could get Oliver to take one,” the woman said, stroking the head of her rather ugly baby, who was now sucking vigorously on her left nipple. “But he's just not interested, and it's probably a good thing.” She smiled indulgently at her baby, clearly lying.
“Oh push hard enough and I'm sure you'll manage to force it in,” Sam said, and laughed, slightly too hysterically. It shut the woman up.
But the pacifiers were causing something of a problem at night. George slept like an angel from seven in the evening until two-thirty, from which time he screamed every time the pacifier fell out of his mouth. Roughly every twenty minutes.
In the early days Chris and Sam would take turns. And on the weekends Sam would put earplugs in and leave Chris to do the night duty while she tried to catch up on her sleep, although it never actually worked. George's screams were far too loud to be blotted out by a couple of balls of wax (even though she did what the instructions tell you never to do: break one earplug into two, roll both halves up and shove them in as far as they'll go). Sam would lie there, rigid, too exhausted to move, pretending to be asleep.
It became a game. Who could pretend for longest. Sam always lost. Always climbed out of bed hissing at Chris that she was exhausted and it was his fucking turn, and did she have to do absolutely everything around here.
They didn't even fight about it anymore. She didn't have the energy. She just got up, every night, at two-thirty and continued to get up until she'd had enough and she blindly stumbled down to the kitchen to heat the bottle.
“What about sleep-training?” Chris said one night, having spoken to some colleagues who had children, had been through the same thing. “You take away the pacifier and let them cry it out for timed periods.”
They tried it that night. Sam sat cross-legged on her bed and listened to George scream, tears running down her face. Eventually, after one hour and fourteen minutes, she jumped up. “I can't do this,” she explained to a bewildered Chris as she picked up a hysterical, red-faced George, and cuddled him until he calmed down.
“That's the worst thing you could have done,” Chris said calmly. “Now you've taught him that if he cries long enough Mummy will eventually come and get him.”
“Oh fuck off,” she said in fury. “He's my baby and he needs me. He's a tiny baby. This whole sleep-training's a farce, it just makes them feel abandoned and scared. Poor baby. Poor Georgy.