Lucy Prebble: breastfeeding is body horror

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Nights with a newborn I expected to be draining, chaotic, comic, romantic. I hadn’t expected the genre they most resemble to be horror. People jovially share, “They grow up so fast!” but I didn’t think that would be so BODILY, to see his skull expand after two hours of sleep in a way that feels genuinely unnerving.

My mother remembers night feeds with her first baby warmly. He was born in the summer of 1976, the hottest then on record. Nights were a respite from the sticky days, and mum and baby communed in cool moonlight together.

My first baby is born mid-January in one of the grimmest, darkest winters London’s ever known. It rains constantly and night takes up most of the day. My partner and I buy wipe-warmers for the changing stations we’ve dutifully dotted about. It seems unfairly harrowing to bring this tiny, wriggling being into the world, then wake it many times a night to icily scrape at its crevices.

The bedroom is now a nest. I’ve never felt more like an animal. Sheets and pillows surround us, held together by tangle and various fluids I’m leaking. Aside from the blood and the milk and the piss, I’m waking with extreme night sweats. The doctor idly wonders if I have “oedema” post the C-section, where fluid builds up under the skin and needs to be released somehow. This would also explain the monstrous swelling of my hands, feet and neck. I find myself waking, desperately searching the soaking sheets for the baby. In a semi-conscious state of night terror I wander the upstairs hall until my husband finds me, barefoot and bleeding and creepily asking, “Where’s the baby?” This might sound terrifying, and it is, especially when I’m apparently also HOLDING THE BABY. My husband is trapped in a nightmare. I, however, am the nightmare. We all return to the stink of the room, which he wisely never mentions. A good week in, when I finally find a moment to shower, I laugh out loud at the heat, at the heavy luxury of a new bar of soap. When I return to the bed, the baby screams. He no longer recognises the perfumed breast. He needs the stink.

The baby cries a lot. He cries when we feed him, he cries after we feed him and he cries when he is not being fed. It’s reflux. It’s colic. It’s neither. It’s wind. Reflux is a myth. Colic doesn’t mean anything. The baby has acid in his throat. This is a normal baby. The baby is unusually unsettled, which is what they call it when a baby screams over and over in pain. The baby needs you to stop worrying. Is this your FIRST baby? You have to hold him upright for an hour after he feeds. You should feed him slowly, over the course of an hour. You have to feed him little and often, at least every two hours. Wait, then when do I — Sleep.

Apparently, “things turn a corner at six months”. SIX MONTHS. Do you know how many nights there are in SIX MONTHS? No, neither do I. My brain is broken from getting LITERALLY NO SLEEP. I’ve become a creature of the Moon. I haven’t thought about the Moon this much maybe ever. Bedtime books are obsessed with it, saying good night to it, having it watch over you, loving your baby to it and back. The baby’s room has a spherical lamp and I say things like, “Shall we turn on the moon now?” when I need some light. I realise this will eventually confuse the baby, believing that it’s the actual Moon. I don’t mind him thinking that for a while. That the Moon belongs to him.

The baby smiles and spring arrives.

Sunlight streams in, waking the baby from 4am. Blackout blinds go up, as we try and extend a perpetual winter, turning the baby’s room into a dark box. The blinds are covered in bears. It reminds me how in the neonatal intensive care unit, cute puppies and giraffes adorn the tapes that keep a baby’s tubes in place. Who is this for exactly? The babies can’t tell the difference. It’s not like the adults are thinking, look, my newborn is hooked up to medical machinery but couldn’t this all be a bit more emotive? The amount of animal life we surround them with, a baby might expect a life bouncing between the jungle and the farmyard. But those things will feature pitifully little. As it is, most kids will re-encounter animals on the dinner plate before they ever do in the wild. At that point, having trained them expertly in how the deceased cow “went” seems unhelpful. It’s like in raising our children, humans know, instinctively, suddenly, what is so majestic about life. We want to share it with them, the colour and the wonder. We do know what is worth preserving, but then just, somehow, don’t.

Summer comes. Things turn a corner at six months (I don’t know if you know). The first time the baby “sleeps through the night” my partner and I are exhausted. We have been up staring at the eerie night-vision images on the monitor. Why isn’t he moving? Should we go in? Did he just make a sound? Turns out we haven’t been sleep-training him, he’s been sleep-training us. We will never not have one ear open again.

In the morning I creep in. He is still sleeping.

There is something sacred about a sleeping baby. How can something so commonplace be so mysterious?

I sit and watch him.

His head is definitely bigger.

Eventually, I turn off the moon, and go.

Lucy Prebble is the author of the plays ‘The Effect’ and ‘Enron’ and the TV show ‘I Hate Suzie’, and was a writer and executive producer on the series ‘Succession’

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