When she was five weeks old, my mother in law came round. 'I think I'm coming down with something,' she said. 'I feel all hot and cold.' My husband was cooking us all dinner. I held my baby and was silent for the entire evening, knowing if I did what I wanted - which was to scream for her to get out of my house - it would provide more proof for him that I was insane.
The world looked hazardous.
The pram didn't seem safe. She wasn't actually touching me if she was in the pram. I couldn't bare it if he was pushing it instead of me. I made him keep stopping so I could look. Once he refused, just kept on walking really quickly. I had had a C section, so I couldn't keep up. I wailed in the street and begged him to stop and come back.
I made him buy me a sling. I couldn't go out and buy it myself because I was afraid to go out without someone else there. We went out. It hurt, the weight of her resting on my section wound, a very long way from healed. I couldn't say anything because then he'd make me use the pram again, and it hurt to push the pram too, so he'd push it and then... 'We'll go buy you some clothes,' he said. I was still wearing maternity stuff. We went into the shop. I couldn't move. Everyone looked, or so I thought. To try on clothes, I'd have to remove the sling, and I just couldn't do it. I burst into tears. We went home.
You're mad, you're mad, you're mad.
'By the time our baby was the age of yours, we'd already started going away for the weekend!', said this friend of my husband's. 'You need to start letting go. Me and Jen are going to York this weekend. You two should come!' He nodded at my husband. 'Leave the baby with your Mum, or his Mum.'
My husband looked at me. Our baby was three months old. He wanted me to say yes. I felt panic rising like fire. I had to prove myself sane. We were standing in the pub I didn't want to be in, holding my daughter. I looked at them both. I was not leaving her. I was not leaving her with anyone, to go to fucking York with people I hardly knew to get pissed.
'I'm still breastfeeding.' I said.
'Then stop.' he said. My husband nodded, like a puppy.
I said no. It was Valentine's Day. We went home. 'You're not fucking normal!' he muttered. He went out and came back late that night, drunk, angry, feeling hard done by. I looked at him, as he burped and swayed and thought, roundly, that he was the biggest shit I'd ever met.
I wonder what his side of this part of our story is. I wonder what it is like to find yourself back up north after having made the Big Move South, and to return with a pregnant wife and no job. I wonder what it's like to not know who your wife is anymore. I wonder what it's like to become a father. I think he felt she had stolen me from him. He had no model of fatherhood that matched the man he was, or the woman he had married. The more he felt it, the crueler he became, and the more I retreated into a world where there was only her face.
He once stood in my way in the corridor when she was crying cos he wanted a hug. I kicked him.
People are flawed.
A friend and I had a picnic, months after this. I talked and talked. I expected him to tell me I had to leave him. He told me I was right to have stayed. Maybe he will eventually, when she's older, become the man I want him to be, he told me. That I wasn't to rob myself or her of him until I was certain.
I remember light-less days growing up in a home with no father and a mother who wanted to be loved. I remember the intrusion of suitors, sizing them up, and realising our little unit was coming apart. And I remember, vividly, brilliantly, dancing with him in a garden lit with fairy-lights on a summer evening, right in the kernel of love, feeling that the meaning of everything was to be found in his arms.
'Please forgive me,' he said.
Okay.
