Clover Stroud - My Wild and Sleepless Nights

Clover Stroud is a writer and journalist writing for the Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Cond Nast Traveler among others. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and five children. Her first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.

Also by Clover Stroud

The Wild Other

For Jimmy, Dolly, Evangeline, Dash, Lester.

Heres looking at you, kids.

With the monitor hooked around my belly like a seat belt, I can hear the heartbeat of my unborn baby galloping along inside me like the tiny hooves of a miniature horse. Its breathing with me, the pulse so much more real than any of the watery scans I had at twelve, twenty, thirty weeks, which just looked like moving snowstorms. Those hooves of heartbeat are fast and persistent, and in between each small, perfect beat I feel my own huge, messy life realizing itself. The galloping heartbeat sounds ancient and wild, so different from the controlled, institutional medical authority surrounding me. NOW WASH YOUR HANDS, demands a bright yellow sign by the sink in the corner of the room, as if the sign itself were standing there, hands on hips, waiting, just as I do with my younger children when they refuse to brush their teeth.

Im thirty-eight weeks pregnant, that moment in this forty-week marathon when pregnancy feels like a practical joke Ive played on myself thats gone badly wrong. Its lost the urgency of eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-two weeks, and now is an experience thats endless, holding me stiller and stiller as my belly tightens, a huge, hot, heavy presence that accompanies me everywhere and thats really not that much fun. I had been worried the baby was too still, hiccupping less, rummaging around inside me with less insistence. And this is my fifth baby, so the stakes are high. Ive rolled the dice and its fallen dazzlingly well in my favour four times over the past fifteen years: Jimmy, Dolly, Dash and Evangeline. Sometimes I think much of my life has been about seeking strong motion both to make me feel alive and distract from the pain of existence. I have found that strong motion through adrenalin and danger, or drugs, or sex, but none of those comes close to the wild feeling of emerging from the brink of labour, blood pouring from me, my body split open, holding new life in my arms.

I dont want to leave the hospital to go home to the other children or to Pete, to the demands which send me running around the house in circles, finding hundreds of shoes, poking small feet into rolled-up socks, draining soft broccoli, mopping up splashed milk, incessantly negotiating with adolescents about whose house I will drive them to and what sort of cereal I will buy later, looking at Year 7 maths homework I dont understand, chasing small, slippery, wet bodies out of the bath and into their pyjamas, then back down the stairs next morning to do it all again and again. I want to stay cocooned here, soft and quiet, imagining the baby who will soon arrive, listening to his or her heartbeat, while sleeping, resting, absolving myself from my job as a mother to my children at home, just for a few hours. When Im ready, there will still be time to wash and fold muslin squares, and pull the zipped-up suitcase of old baby clothes out of the attic, wash the sheets of the Moses basket, press drops of lavender oil into a small knitted blanket thats somehow made its way across time from my mothers hands when I was a baby. There will be time to pack a hospital bag with disposable pants and those old-fashioned sanitary towels you can bleed and bleed into, and miniature newborn nappies so small Evangeline will use them for her toy dolls. There will be time for all these things, but now the hospital room is calm, the babys heartbeat a hypnotic passport to sleep.

My phone rings. I slip the monitor down my bump, fishing into the bag for the phone. Its Jimmys school. I ignore the call, but the call will not be ignored.

The womans voice is tight with urgency, insisting I need to come into school immediately. I stare at the gel on my huge stomach, basically the only thing I can see, blocking my view of my feet, or the end of the bed, or anything beyond it. My abdomen, right now, seems to fill the entire room.

I cant come to school immediately. Im having a baby soon, next week maybe, I say, even though this sounds ridiculous. Im actually having a scan right now.

I think shell understand.

Miss Stroud, you need to come into school now, she repeats. I sense her frowning at me through the telephone.

Is everything all right? Can you tell me whats going on? Is Jimmy OK?

She tells me that Jimmy is OK. But due to student confidentiality I cant tell you more, except that you must come into school.

Confusion and a little anger rise through me: there should be no student confidentiality, since this is my child we are talking about. For a moment a feeling of horror passes through me, the prospect that Jimmy might have done something really awful, but it doesnt seem possible, since this is Jimmy we are talking about. Jimmy, my first child, who tells me everything, who would not lie to me, who still kisses me on the lips when he leaves for school every morning, and still ends calls with love you, Mum.

The baby gallops on. And suddenly I have a strong urge to throw the monitor and phone on to the ground and run barefoot out of here, away from everyone, my unborn baby and my four children and my husband. This wasnt supposed to be the emotion of today, and of these last moments of pregnancy. This was supposed to be the day I started taking it easy, giving myself space to enjoy these last days. It was supposed to be the time I started actually visualizing the baby, breathing into the end of the pregnancy to see my uterus and cervix and vulva like a flower expanding into life.

I suggest I could come in this afternoon, after the baby has been fully monitored, or tomorrow morning, inflecting my voice to make it sound helpful. She interrupts. Its a safeguarding issue, she says, but something in the tone of her voice tells me its not my sons safety she is guarding.

Less than an hour later Im searching for a place in a crowded school car park, and signing in to school, as if visiting a prisoner. Heat seeps from my body, and because I am so hot and so huge, theres no way I look anything like efficient, or on-the-case, or even that parental, which is odd, considering I am thirty-eight weeks pregnant.

By contrast, the headmistress, waiting for me in her office, looks severe in a sharp pencil skirt and heels, her hair swept on top of her head. She also looks quite hot. No one says anything as I pull my huge belly into the room. Sitting at the table is my son. Jimmys fifteen years are worn so heavily on him, his blond hair a fuzz across his face, his expression furious and defiant. And I have to assume that the Tupperware box in front of him which contains a handful of perfectly rolled joints must be the reason were here.

They cant be his though, because Jimmy would have told me. He is my first child and we have no secrets.

In that moment the whole kaleidoscope of motherhood shifts. Have I been completely blind? Did I really not notice anything? And has Jimmy got a secret life that he has been applying all of his wit and originality to hiding from me, for weeks, months, maybe even years?