AFTER BIRTH

The nurse’s voice woke me out of a shallow sleep. ‘Witzl-san, your baby is crying. She wants to be fed. Can you come here or shall we take her to you?’  I opened my eyes and lay there for a moment studying the dark shapes in the room.  Where was I? Then it all came back. Hospital. New baby. Feeding time.  I lumbered to my feet, wincing in pain and made my ungainly way to the Feeding Room.

The clock said that it was 6:20. Two other mothers were there already, feeding their babies. They were wearing the regulation white mop caps we were issued to keep our unsanitary hair away from our babies, and they had already disinfected their nipples: I could see the torn foil packets from the anti-bacterial towelettes in front of them. I took one from the basket as we had all been instructed to do, but I had no intention of using it. It was bad enough having to put on the silly cap. There were pictures on the wall of women from all over the world nursing their babies. My favorite was a beautiful North African woman grinning broadly as she nursed twins. She wasn’t wearing a mop cap and I knew she wouldn’t have disinfected her nipples first.

The nurse brought my baby to me, then turned to leave. She was half out of the feeding room when she suddenly turned around and looked back at us. ‘Shall I put on some music for you ladies? I blanched. Oh please, no!

I had already noticed that one of the other mothers feeding their babies was the Sad Mother. I called her this because almost every time I saw her she was either sitting in the dining room, tears streaming down her face, or sobbing to someone over the telephone. I never saw her chatting with any of the other mothers and she never seemed to have any visitors. The nurses treated her very gently and the other mothers seemed a little wary of her.  The problem was, the Sad Mother requested the same music every single time:  the Carpenters’ Greatest Hits.  I felt ashamed of myself for begrudging her the small bit of pleasure she seemed to get from this, but barely a week ago I had gone through labor. Having to endure twenty to thirty minutes of We’ve Only Just Begun several times a day now was insult to injury.

After feeding my baby, I took her back to the nurse station and saw her tucked safely back into her cot in the nursery. Three years earlier when I had my first child in Wales, I had kept her with me in the ward every night and all day long. I had read that a closer bond would result from having her in such close proximity at all times, and I was keen to start forming this relationship right away. In fact, I became a nervous wreck. My first daughter was like me, I quickly discovered: a very light sleeper. If I wasn’t waking her up, she was waking me up. And if by some quirk we managed to let each other sleep, then one of the other infants on the ward would wake us both up. After almost a full week in the hospital I was thoroughly sleep deprived and beginning to realize that not everything you read in parenting books and magazines was necessarily true. So when they asked me if I wanted my baby in the room with me, I said NO. I couldn’t help but notice that all the first-time mothers kept their babies in their rooms with them, while all the veterans opted for the Call-me-when-she’s-hungry plan. The new mothers all looked like wrecks.

I had spent the first week of my post-natal period flat on my back, waited on hand and foot. All I had to do was feed my daughter, and she was brought to me at regular intervals. But finally I was able to walk again, and although I was finding it rough going, I was glad to be up and about. I cruised the corridors several times every day, moving along at a fast limp, wincing with every step. Most of the other new mothers were walking normally by this time, but I was still lurching awkwardly like a sailor just back on shore. Dr Yokota, a slim, tall young beauty who favored straight-leg jeans and cowboy boots, took exception to this. ‘You ought not to be walking like that now, you know,’ she commented, raking me with her eyes. ‘I can’t help it, it still hurts.’ ‘Oh for pity’s sake, you’re a week post-labor now!’ I waddled past her with as much dignity as I could muster and did my best to imagine her heavily pregnant. Then I imagined her in labor, and that made me feel a little better.

Most other mothers stayed in the hospital for only a few days or perhaps a week at the most. But I’d had trouble with stitches, then an infection, and the doctor had agreed to let me stay longer. I was lucky:  at home we lived Japanese-style and slept on futons on the floor, and I would have found it extraordinarily difficult to rise from a prone position. Plus, the hospital, unlike our rickety old house, was air-conditioned, someone else did all the cooking, and I didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to take my three-year-old to the toilet.

My biggest problem in the hospital was boredom. The daily routine was a real yawner. I was woken up early to feed my baby, then had breakfast, followed by a shower, then a stroll about the Obstetrics ward and a trip over to the nurse’s station for a  look at the new babies and to confirm that my baby was the finest one there. Then I would go back to my room and read until lunch. Visiting hours were from 2 to 4, but I rarely had visitors other than my husband and three-year-old. Even they could not come every day, as we lived over two and a half hours away by train, and coming to see me in Tokyo was a lot of trouble for my husband, who had the challenge of keeping a three-year-old entertained on the train for five hours. After lunch I was generally called to feed my baby again, and then it was time for more reading. Meals, feeding times and showers became huge events that I tried to stretch out as long as possible for maximum entertainment potential. I began to have fantasies about going back to work.

At least 90% of the other mothers were Japanese, but there were a few foreigners as well: an Israeli, a Chinese woman from Taiwan, and a Puerto Rican, Marietta, who was a naturalized American. Marietta had stopped by my room one day for a chat and a whine; like me, she had never developed a stiff upper lip or the ability to keep her irritations to herself. I felt an instant rapport. She too could not walk without limping and she too been reprimanded for this by the gorgeous Dr Yokota. ‘Well, she’s obviously never had babies herself,’ I said, pretending to be understanding, but Marietta’s take on Dr Yokota was more honest: ‘Bitch.’

One day, Marietta and I found ourselves in the feeding room with a Japanese woman who was having the calluses on her nipples trimmed off with surgical scissors. If I had not seen this with my own eyes, I would never have believed it, but there the woman sat, breasts bared, the nurse snipping away.  Marietta and I looked on in horrified fascination. ‘Jesus, Joseph and Mary, am I glad that’s not me,’ she murmured. The woman smiled and glanced over at us. ‘It really isn’t so bad.’ We both did a double-take. She was speaking in English!

‘How did that happen?’ I asked, unable to stop myself. The woman, who told us that her name was Noriko, looked up at us shyly. ‘My baby sucks too vigorously.’

When the nurse had finished ‘trimming’ the woman, we were astonished when she brought out Noriko’s baby to be nursed. In her place, I would sooner have put my hand in a bear’s mouth, but Noriko bravely persevered, and I was filled with a mixture of emotions. I’ve heard all the arguments, and I believe that breast-feeding is best, but surely this was taking it too far?

Over the next few days, Marietta and I got to know more about Noriko, and I have to say that she had ‘martyr’ and ‘stoic’ written all over her. Noriko had noticed that my husband and daughter came to see me almost every day and she wistfully commented that I was lucky. ‘I can’t even get my husband to bring me shampoo,’ she confided. ‘He tells me to use soap instead. He’s angry because he has to look after our four-year-old boy on his own.’ Her husband sounded like a jerk, but I felt that I ought to try and defend him. ‘Well, it is hot outside, and the trains are packed, after all.’  Noriko smiled sadly. ‘But we only live two blocks away.’  Marietta and I were both appalled at this. ‘Japanese men can certainly be chauvinists,’ Marietta began cautiously. Noriko blushed and looked away. ‘My husband is an American.’  

Although I was luckier than Noriko in that my husband came frequently, bearing gifts, there was a woman two rooms over that I envied:  I could not help but  notice that her father came to see her every single day. My own father was in America andin any case was not the sort of person to take much interest in his grandchildren. When my sister's baby -- his first grandchild -- was born, he never got around to calling her and when she finally called him, he had to cut the conversation short because he was watching television. This woman’s father was a study in contrasts. He was there the minute visiting hours began, and he always came loaded with bags of fruit and magazines. ‘Thought you might like this,’ I could hear him saying in his gruff, deep voice. I would pass him and his daughter sitting in the visitors’ lounge and see him producing fruit, snacks, books and candy, and I would feel a slow envy begin to burn inside. It wasn’t just the fact that he bothered to come every day and showed up with gifts, either: it was their easy, obvious camaraderie, the companionable way they sat and chatted together. One day I met this woman in the feeding room and couldn’t resist commenting on her father’s attentiveness. Perhaps she would tell me that he was really a brute and this was his way of making up for it. ‘Oh, he’s always been like that!’ she said. ‘You should have seen him after my eldest was born. Fruit, chocolates, candy, flowers.  I had to give the stuff away.’ She spoke diffidently, but you could see how proud of him she was. My envy of her was complete.

One day all of us young and not-so-young mothers were invited to attend a lecture with accompanying video on how to express milk. I was bored enough that this was a treat not to be missed, and it turned out to be quite an event. At least 80% of us new mothers were in attendance, and we all had to introduce ourselves first. Everyone started out with names and ages, so I followed suit. There was a pause after my introduction and one woman spoke up in awe:  ‘Wow. You’re older than my mother!’ This prompted at least three women to declare that they were personally acquainted with new mothers of even more advanced ages, followed by a general discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of being an elderly mother. I doubt I have ever felt so old and out of place.

Then the video began. It was unintentionally hilarious. A woman in a modest white nightgown, sitting in a sterile-looking hospital room, undid her buttons and produced one of her breasts, then began deftly expressing milk into a stainless steel container. We all sat there fidgeting in our seats for a few minutes, then I heard someone behind me snicker. I looked over at Marietta, and when she burst out laughing, I did too. I am not sure just why this was so titillating; it might have been the woman’s youth and beauty, it might have been the very serious male voice-over describing each step precisely (this woman, too, used an anti-bacterial toilette to sterilize her nipples and was shown washing her hands over a stainless steel sink for an untoward length of time). It might have been the fact that it was all made to look so weirdly clinical. Or it might simply have been that we were bored and ready to laugh at anything, but after three minutes of this video, we were all rolling in the aisles. ‘Gosh, this is great!’ one woman gasped, ‘I haven’t seen anything that exciting in – well, about nine months.’  After the video, a midwife in her late fifties showed us how to massage our own breasts to stimulate milk production, and I am afraid that we did not receive this useful demonstration with the proper seriousness it deserved.  

After almost four weeks, it was finally time for me to be discharged. Allthough the Sad Mother had stayed in the hospital for weeks, Marietta had long since gone home, as had many of the other mothers who gave birth around the time I did. I was still sore and mending very slowly, but I was bored out of my mind and it was beginning to get embarrassing to hear the comments made by people who came to look at the babies. ‘Look at that Caucasian child!  He’s huge!’  He’s actually a girl, I wanted to say, and she was born four weeks ago.  But I didn’t.

As I was getting ready to leave, the pediatric nurse peeked into my room. ‘Leaving today?’ I said that I was. ‘I bet you’ll be glad to get home.’ I had to admit that I would be, but I also felt nervous. The long, hot journey back home on the trains. Having to care for two children instead of one. No more sumptuous meals prepared for me, no more air-conditioned comfort, no more leisurely whining sessions with Marietta or any of the other new mothers. ‘You’ll never forget this time,’ you know, she remarked casually. And she was right. I never have.

Stepping outside of the hospital was like walking directly into a boiler room, and the noise of the cicadas and traffic was almost deafening. We passed Dr Yokota just outside the hospital entrance and I did my best to glide gracefully past her.

For months after leaving the hospital, though, I got a milk let-down every time I heard a Carpenters’ song.