The Mothers' Group (31 page)

It had taken one operation and nine expensive IVF cycles before finally they were blessed with a pregnancy.

Perhaps it was the struggle and effort involved in conceiving their first child. Perhaps it was their reckless sense of relief when, finally, the pregnancy reached full-term. Whatever the reason, neither of them was prepared for what occurred after Heidi was born.

It had all happened so quickly. When she was six centimetres dilated, the urge to push was overwhelming.

‘Don't push!' the midwife scolded, peering between her legs. ‘You need to wait longer. You're not ready yet.'

But Pippa couldn't wait. She'd pushed twice, as hard as possible. The baby had shot out of her and into the midwife's hands.

She hadn't felt the tear, or the repair work completed by the obstetric registrar under local anaesthetic. She was too elated to care. With Robert lying next to her in the birthing suite, she'd cradled their baby and cried with joy. The daughter she'd always hoped for.

‘Heidi,' she'd whispered, kissing the baby's slippery cheek.

Three days later, she'd been released from hospital. A midwife had given her a fact sheet entitled ‘Caring for Vaginal Tears' and a starter pack of absorbent pads.

‘You'll have some vaginal bleeding and incontinence for a while,' the midwife advised. ‘The stitches will dissolve over the next six weeks. Any questions at all, just call.'

In the initial weeks, she'd been too deliriously happy and too focused on Heidi's needs to pay much attention to her own. The bleeding stopped within three weeks, but her perineum stayed swollen like a tennis ball. Urine and faeces continued to trickle onto the incontinence pads. The volume surprised her, the smell was repulsive.

When Heidi was six weeks old, she'd telephoned the birthing suite and described her symptoms. The midwife had retrieved her file and counselled her to wait.

‘You had a big baby—a nine-pounder,' said the midwife. ‘So your symptoms aren't all that surprising. It can take quite a while for everything to heal. Has the leaking got worse?'

‘No, it's been fairly constant,' Pippa replied.

‘Well, I'd recommend waiting longer. Having a baby is a big thing for your body to go through, especially when it's your first time. It can take up to six months for everything to return to normal.'

And so incontinence pads had become a staple of Pippa's weekly shopping list. After three months, sick of bleaching her underwear, she found a website that stocked incontinence aids. She upgraded from sanitary-style pads to pull-on adult nappies, which allowed her to leave the house for short stints without having to take a stash of pads with her. Ordering on the internet alleviated the embarrassment of standing at the supermarket checkout, handing over items with jarring names like ‘Confidence', ‘Assure' or ‘Depend'.

‘It's just for a little while,' she'd explained to Robert, the first time he'd caught sight of her stepping out of her skirt with a nappy on. ‘Heidi was so big, the midwife at the hospital said it can take six months for everything to get back to normal.'

Robert nodded, a strange expression on his face. Pippa recognised it instantly for what it was: revulsion.

*

As Heidi grew, so did the distance between her and Robert. They'd always had a good sex life, but making love was now fraught. She was too embarrassed to talk to him about it, and she could understand his abhorrence. After all, she was repulsed by the incontinence too.

She started to reduce the amount she ate, especially in public. Robert had railed against this initially, as eating out had always been something they'd enjoyed together.

‘For God's sake, Pippa,' he'd said, four months after Heidi was born. ‘We can't avoid the outside world forever.'

‘I can't control what comes out of me,' she'd snapped. ‘But I
can
control when it goes in.'

His face softened. ‘I'm sorry . . . I guess I don't really understand.'

It didn't surprise her. He couldn't understand why she refused to go jogging either, an activity they'd both relished prior to her pregnancy. But her pelvic floor just wasn't up to it now. As it was, lifting the washing basket or walking up a flight of stairs could cause an alarming surge between her legs.

He began to take on more work, as they were missing her income. They had a mortgage to pay, a car loan, a credit card. But how could she return to work in her condition? As a human resources officer for a small firm specialising in ‘career transition'—a euphemism for redundancies and restructures—she spent her working days in close proximity to others. Conducting one-on-one interviews, breaking difficult news, comforting the crestfallen. They'd originally planned for her to re-enter the workforce when Heidi was four months old, but her medical problems now forced her to extend her maternity leave for up to twelve months.

To compensate, Robert slotted in extra jobs at the beginning and end of his working day, as well as on weekends. There was always a steady stream of work for a reliable builder on the northern beaches. There were plenty of young families renovating homes, as well as house-proud retirees who needed a handyman. Most days he left the house by six am and didn't return until after eight pm. He was tired, and it showed.

She tried to be the best homemaker she could be; it only seemed fair. Once Heidi was asleep for the night, she would reassemble the ruins of the day in preparation for Robert's return. Warming his meal in the oven, cleaning the kitchen, tidying the lounge room, wiping over the bathroom basin and turning down the sheets. Trying not to resent the many domestic chores that had somehow naturally become her lot in life. The endless cycle of washing, drying, folding and ironing. I'm not a maid, she would sometimes think as she pegged Heidi's tiny jumpsuits, singlets and socks in neat lines. Often she would stop under the washing line and stare up at the night sky, watching clouds skidding past the moon. How can those clouds be moving so fast, she would wonder, when my life is moving so slowly?

Despite her fatigue, she had trouble sleeping at night. She would lie next to Robert, listening to his breathing, until long after he'd fallen asleep. As she felt the leakage creep up towards her hips, she would remember their former life. The hiking, the cycling, the lovemaking. Where had it all gone? She had turned into someone she never imagined she would become, with a cornucopia of minutiae tumbling out of pockets and bags. Nappies, wipes, rash cream, teething rings, soft toys, cloth books. Endless piles of clutter, a baby marketer's dream, crammed into the voids of her existence.

When Heidi awoke in the night, as she inevitably did, Pippa would curl her fists into tight balls and press them into the mattress so hard that her fingernails bit into her flesh. Eventually she would sit up and make her way to Heidi's room, feeling the weight of her nappy wedged between her legs. Hating herself. Despising her life.

Robert slept on. He always did.

And so he never saw her stand at the foot of the cot and watch, immobilised, as Heidi screamed and screamed. He never knew how hard she sometimes held Heidi to her body, trembling with the desire to shake her. He never heard her spit obscenities at Heidi as she changed, fed, settled and resettled her. But the words she spoke in those dark, small hours always returned to accuse her in the morning. How could she treat this tiny, defenceless human—the baby they had longed for—so badly?

The guilt was annihilating.

*

She'd attended the mothers' group at Robert's urging.

‘We don't have much family support,' he'd said, stating the obvious. ‘And you're not seeing as much of your friends.'

He was right about that. The incontinence had made her antisocial.

‘A mothers' group might come in handy,' he said. ‘Just go along for a few months and if it's not for you, drop out.'

She'd gone along to appease him, despite her debilitating anxiety. Was she leaking? Was it staining the seat? Could her nappy be seen under her skirt? At the first session of the mothers' group, she'd deliberately suggested an outdoor venue for future meetings, in the hope that none of the other women would
smell
her. She'd resented having to worry about it at all. No one else in the group had a similar problem, as far as she could tell. Everyone else was
normal
.

Apart from the mothers' group, she had few social outlets. Her own parents extended little help from their flat in Fairlight, through no fault of their own. Whenever Pippa visited them, they would sing to Heidi, or bounce her on their laps, but they offered no other practical support. They were getting older, and always asking Pippa for some kind of help themselves: to change a light bulb, go to the shops, or reprogram the television channels. Pippa didn't begrudge these requests, but she needed a place of respite. With her own problems to contend with, she started avoiding her parents. She felt bad about it, but what else could she do?

Instead, she paced the hallway of her home with Heidi crying in her pram, or did hundreds of circuits of the small square of concrete that Robert called a backyard. Eventually she ventured further afield, spending whole days walking Heidi to nowhere in particular. One week, she summoned the courage to visit Warringah Mall, doing loop after loop of its air-conditioned levels. But then a humiliating incident in a bookstore sent her home again quickly: she'd passed wind, loudly, while buying
Eat,
Pray, Love
. Her body had betrayed her, she loathed its imperfection. And so she resolved to walk without rest, staying ahead of the repugnant odour that she imagined trailing behind her. She walked from Freshwater to Curl Curl, Dee Why or Manly. Every day, irrespective of the weather. Her jeans became loose, her face haggard. She just couldn't keep the weight on.

‘You're going to the beautician tomorrow,' Robert announced one evening, when Heidi was six months old. ‘A facial at ten o'clock. I've paid for it already, and I'm taking the day off to look after Heidi. All you have to do is turn up.'

Pippa sat up on the sofa, taken aback. She'd never known him to have a day off work.

‘You need a break,' he said. ‘Look at you, thin as a rake. You're so busy looking after Heidi, you've forgotten about yourself.'

She looked at him as though for the first time. This
was
Robert, the man who bought practical birthday gifts—socks, underwear, sports equipment—if he actually remembered her birthday at all. They'd been together for sixteen years and he'd never once surprised her with a spontaneous gift.

I really must have let myself go.

Her eyes filled with tears. They hadn't had sex for more than six months, a prospect neither one of them would have believed before Heidi's birth. Every time she considered it, Pippa recoiled.
If we have sex,
I might split into pieces or leak all over you.
Without their usual physical intimacy, an awkwardness had developed between them, an unspoken rift that neither one of them knew how to breach. Robert's generosity was overwhelming.

Tears began to stream down her face.

‘What?' asked Robert, his expression confused. ‘Don't you want a facial?'

She struggled for composure.

‘Thank you,' she whispered. ‘It means a lot.'

It was the first time she'd left Heidi, ever. As she slid into the car and turned the key in the ignition, she fought the urge to run back into the house, wrest Heidi from Robert's arms and retreat to the lounge room. Robert waved at her through the bedroom window, jiggling Heidi on his hip as she reversed down the driveway. She glanced over her shoulder one more time as she steered the car onto the road. She'll be fine, she thought. It's just two hours.

Before she reached the end of the street, her telephone beeped receipt of an SMS.

We'll be fine. Enjoy yourself.

She laughed aloud.

Driving the car was a different experience without Heidi in the baby seat. She turned off the
Baby Meets Mozart
CD and found an FM radio station, catching the end of the ten o'clock news. It had been months since she'd caught up on current affairs. The world had continued rotating on its axis and yet
she
had radically changed: irrevocably altered by the heady intoxication and utter devastation that having Heidi had entailed. Even the weather forecast sounded different.

The news ended and a familiar tune began, an anthem from her youth. She turned up the volume, bobbing her head in time with the beat. She could remember crooning ‘Forever Young' into a hairbrush with school friends in her lounge room, dancing about in fluorescent socks and ‘Choose Life' T-shirts. That was twenty-five years ago, she thought, with a jolt of shock. She wound down the window and, abandoning her usual caution, belted out the lyrics.

Let us die young or let us live forever
We don't have the power but we never say never
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip
The music's for the sad men . . .

Waiting at a red light, she glanced at the vehicle in the next lane. A tradesman winked at her from the open window of his ute. Embarrassed, she stopped singing. The tradesman pulled a face, as if disappointed.

Her eyes widened.
Oh my God, he's
flirting
with me.

She gripped the steering wheel, repressing a smile.

The traffic lights turned green and the tradesman accelerated away, tyres squealing.

She smiled all the way to the beautician's.

She checked her telephone three times before the facial.

‘Sorry,' she said, activating the mute setting. ‘I've just never left my daughter alone with my husband before.'

The beautician laughed. ‘Oh, don't worry, I know how you feel. I always check on my husband when he's babysitting our kids. It's hard to relax, isn't it? But you've got to have a bit of me-time too.'