knew. She hadn’t even told the man concerned. It was a common enough story: she thought she loved him, but going to bed with him had changed everything. By the time she found out what had happened , she didn’t even like him any more. She didn’t want to involve him in any decisions she had to make. Above all, she was afraid of them being forced together by a combination of social pressure and circumstance, and it would all end badly, of that she was certain. More than ten years later, sitting in her own kitchen and looking sideways at Nuala frowning with concentration over her photos, she felt completely vindicated in what she had decided to do.
She still didn’t like to think back to that time. It was no cliché to say that the first weeks had been a nightmare to her. Part of her reason for not telling anyone had been denial on her part. First there was the hope that she was mistaken, followed by the certainty that she was not,which was coupled with a superstitious and certainly absurd idea that if she didn’t tell anyone then it wasn’t real, like a child thinking she couldn’t be seen when her eyes were closed. But then she started to be sick in the mornings. She was living in a grim bedsitter at that time, where the bathroom was three floors down. Wretched with nausea, she would look out over the roofs and chimneys of the city, and despair of knowing what she should do. Every possible scenario she could imagine seemed ghastly in its own way. She looked around the squalid room, and tried to imagine living there with a baby. What if she had to drop out of art school? That was the last thing she wanted. What was she to do, how was she to make a living for herself and the baby? She would have to do what was best for the child: she accepted responsibility for the situation she was in, but couldn’t work out a plan that seemed viable and which would allow her to keep the baby and look after it as it would need to be looked after.
Adoption began to look like the only course open to her. Lots of people who wanted children couldn’t have them, people who could give a baby a degree of material comfort she could never hope to provide.
One of the strangest things was that, through all of this, the baby remained an abstraction. She thought of it constantly, but she knew that the reality of it was somehow always eluding her, until one day when she found herself sharing a table in a café with a woman and a baby, and realized that she was staring at it as if this were the very child whose fate she was trying to decide. She thought she’d never before seen such a gorgeous baby, although she was well aware that nature haddesigned them to look appealing; cuteness was built into them as an evolutionary weapon. Knowing that made no difference: looking at the baby’s big soft eyes and wet mouth she thought that it was as wrong to regard the situation in which she now found herself in purely functional and pragmatic terms as it would be to deal with it in a purely emotional way. You had to take them on their own terms, which did involve irrationality and affection. The baby smiled across the table at her. Claire smiled back.
She also took careful note of the woman on whose knees the baby was sitting. Not much older than Claire, she was elegantly dressed, and obviously well off. As the woman spooned pudding into the baby’s mouth, Claire gradually realized that without even being aware of it, she had bought society’s message: that some women were entitled to have children and some women were not. This woman was one of the former; Claire was not. And this by her own definition! What had she been doing over the past days and weeks but rationalizing herself out of motherhood. When she imagined giving her baby up for adoption, her image of the child had been hazy, while the image she had in mind of the woman who would become the adoptive mother had been consistent and clear: a woman such as this.
Claire had been long enough in
She still didn’t like to think back to that time. It was no cliché to say that the first weeks had been a nightmare to her. Part of her reason for not telling anyone had been denial on her part. First there was the hope that she was mistaken, followed by the certainty that she was not,which was coupled with a superstitious and certainly absurd idea that if she didn’t tell anyone then it wasn’t real, like a child thinking she couldn’t be seen when her eyes were closed. But then she started to be sick in the mornings. She was living in a grim bedsitter at that time, where the bathroom was three floors down. Wretched with nausea, she would look out over the roofs and chimneys of the city, and despair of knowing what she should do. Every possible scenario she could imagine seemed ghastly in its own way. She looked around the squalid room, and tried to imagine living there with a baby. What if she had to drop out of art school? That was the last thing she wanted. What was she to do, how was she to make a living for herself and the baby? She would have to do what was best for the child: she accepted responsibility for the situation she was in, but couldn’t work out a plan that seemed viable and which would allow her to keep the baby and look after it as it would need to be looked after.
Adoption began to look like the only course open to her. Lots of people who wanted children couldn’t have them, people who could give a baby a degree of material comfort she could never hope to provide.
One of the strangest things was that, through all of this, the baby remained an abstraction. She thought of it constantly, but she knew that the reality of it was somehow always eluding her, until one day when she found herself sharing a table in a café with a woman and a baby, and realized that she was staring at it as if this were the very child whose fate she was trying to decide. She thought she’d never before seen such a gorgeous baby, although she was well aware that nature haddesigned them to look appealing; cuteness was built into them as an evolutionary weapon. Knowing that made no difference: looking at the baby’s big soft eyes and wet mouth she thought that it was as wrong to regard the situation in which she now found herself in purely functional and pragmatic terms as it would be to deal with it in a purely emotional way. You had to take them on their own terms, which did involve irrationality and affection. The baby smiled across the table at her. Claire smiled back.
She also took careful note of the woman on whose knees the baby was sitting. Not much older than Claire, she was elegantly dressed, and obviously well off. As the woman spooned pudding into the baby’s mouth, Claire gradually realized that without even being aware of it, she had bought society’s message: that some women were entitled to have children and some women were not. This woman was one of the former; Claire was not. And this by her own definition! What had she been doing over the past days and weeks but rationalizing herself out of motherhood. When she imagined giving her baby up for adoption, her image of the child had been hazy, while the image she had in mind of the woman who would become the adoptive mother had been consistent and clear: a woman such as this.
Claire had been long enough in
Similar Books
