I had presumed I would love her instantly – but a traumatic birth led to devastating numbness. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was waiting for an overwhelming rush of love, but when I looked at my newborn baby what I felt was utter despair. No matter how much I smiled at her, crooned at her, fed, patted, caressed and changed her, I was absolutely numb.
I had yearned for her. Growing up in Italy, I was surrounded by images of perfect motherhood. Every rural crossroad has its tiny shrine to the Madonna and Child. I was certain by the end of my teens that I wanted to have at least one baby. I knew almost nothing about real babies, of course. I didn’t have the kind of large nest of siblings and extended relations that many other people seemed to have in the 1960s; just one sister.
My parents, both of whom had survived grim childhoods, tried for a third child but the unborn baby died, and my poor mother nearly did, too. From then on, human reproduction was associated only with tragedy. We lived in Rome, where my father worked for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. The few infants I saw in real life seemed boring or noisy. My mother abstracted herself from being interested in them.
I had a godmother, a woman who adores all children and who gave me a lot of the love and warmth I missed at home. It was her fourth child, born when I was in my early teens, who gave me the inkling that a baby is something wonderful. For it is no good just looking at a baby, I think. Visually, a baby can seem almost grotesque, with its bald, over-large head and stunted limbs. You must hold and smell that warm, moving bundle of flesh and vulnerability, to feel: I want this, too.
As a young feminist with access to free contraception, I could and sometimes did sleep with men out of curiosity, lust, loneliness, admiration, boredom or naivety. Only when I parted with the worst of them did I step back and wonder why I kept choosing such dreadful partners. As I reread Jane Austen, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, I realised that what I really wanted was what they described, not in terms of money or class but in moral compass: an unequivocally good and loving man, with whom I could have a child.
I was lucky enough to find him. We got married and, it being the 1980s, could buy a tiny one-up, one-down cottage in Kentish Town, north-west London, on a single salary – mine, because he had just finished his PhD. At last, we could start a family. But babies do not arrive to order. I had a miscarriage, which I’m pretty sure was not unconnected to what felt like being kicked in the stomach when my debut novel was savagely reviewed. I wrote a second novel, better received, and began a third. We moved into a bigger home. This time, the pregnancy stuck.
