My Animal Life(27)

‘What was that Aileen?’ came through the tiny hall, past the two open, flimsy doors, his voice weaker with the Parkinson’s but still insistent, reluctant to lose its grip.

‘Nothing, Vic.’

There’s a saying, or maybe a song, ‘Lucky if you don’t get old before you get dead.’ Not true of my parents. They were lucky to get old, if not very old, because age was a destination, a place they could go as of right and be welcomed. Somewhere they could finally arrive. Another class, kinder and more comfortably furnished, offering them at last a respite from climbing the hill, and from pushing their children on. A narrow ledge in the light, before it went out; a small warm plateau.





My animal luck (iv)


What do children need? (parents)


Yes, parents. Since rights, really, are a luxury, a fiction, that’s all biology insists we have: parents. Egg and sperm, conjoined. And to be allowed to be born.

So really I am asking something different — what do children need to have a chance of happiness? What do they need to live their lives?

And ‘parents’ is still the answer. My parents, for all their difficulties, for all the moments they gave us of worry, and pity, despite the pressures and even the fear, were all the parents that I needed. They loved me greatly. I never doubted that. They loved all three children, ‘you kids’ — and always put us first. My father was really a frustrated artist, with the darkroom he loved where he developed large black-and-white photographs, some of them stunningly bold and good, but a time had come after the war when he had to make choices. Photographer or teacher? He chose the steady job, teaching, because he put his family first. And with that choice came some of the deformations of his character from which we suffered.

Children of course need space, food, water, the animal necessities, which most of them get, in the developed world. They need food that isn’t too faddy; so far as possible, they need foods that children have always eaten, because new ideas tend not to last. Skimmed milk, for instance, was the fad of my time; ‘healthy’ margarine of my mother’s. She changed over to Flora because it was better for us. Years later, we discovered it wasn’t. Just as we discovered, a few years ago, that whole milk contains more fat-soluble vitamins, more essential fatty acids, all things children need. My daughter had been drinking semi-skimmed milk, along with her parents, for most of her childhood. Sorry, Rosa.

Breast milk is so obviously best for babies that the success of formula milk is astonishing, after a hundred thousand years in which Homo sapiens raised their young without it. Not so astonishing, of course; formula milk frees women to work outside the home, which means, in the modern world, she can help feed the rest of her family. But breast must be best for the babies, except in those cases where the mother just can’t. (Not fair to blame the babies, though. How many times did I hear in clinics, ‘He won’t latch on properly,’ ‘She doesn’t seem to suck.’) With enough time, and not too much pressure, for the great majority of mothers and babies, it will happen.

What helped me? My mother, coming with my father to the University College Hospital bed on Christmas Eve, the day after Rosa was born, saw me ineptly nuzzling her to my hard dry breasts, swinging her from one side to the other, with exhausted arms, and said, with a delighted smile, ‘Isn’t she doing well?’ to my father. ‘Oh, Margaret, you are doing well.’ Which made me feel I was doing all right, and helped me stumble on till we found our own way, Rosa and I, as we fell in love, which with luck is what parents and babies do. Mum did what a parent should: she encouraged.

What didn’t help me was the hospital. In those days they had charts, which seems unbelievable now, that all mothers had to fill in, with a column for ‘LH’ and a column for ‘RH’, twenty minutes each side, to be ticked five times a day. Insane. Fortunately, there were a lot of mothers, all lying around annoying the nurses, so no one noticed I wasn’t doing it right. Rosa and I took much longer than that, and always did, for the nine months I fed her. If she had a long feed, she was perfectly contented, and at around four months, began to do something glorious afterwards, something which, in retrospect, looked forward to the teenage years when she began to sing: she produced, this little scrap of a thing, unable to talk, of course, or crawl, a sound we called her ‘milk song’, a humming, silvery sound that soared and dipped, tiny and pure, angel music. The sound of perfect happiness. In a few months, the song had gone. But Rosa and I had our animal bliss.

(After writing that paragraph, I worry. Of course I only write it because I did breast-feed, it worked for me, we were both happy. If I had not been able to, as might well have happened, for at one point my nipples became so painful that I had to use, briefly, an anaesthetic spray that is now no longer legal — sorry, Rosa — I would see things differently, would take the practical line about babies surviving perfectly well on formula milk — which of course, they do. Advice, advice. How pleasant to give it. But taking it’s like eating pellets of paper.)