Memoirs about giving birth, a subject once shrouded in mystery, have become so popular that another may seem otiose. We are all produced in variations of anxiety, pain and delight: what is the point of labouring labour?
Two years ago, the novelist Francesca Segal gave birth to twins ten weeks prematurely. Her account of their struggle to survive in the neo-natal units of two London hospitals could be mawkish, banal and of no interest to anyone save those who have experienced a similar ordeal. That it is, in fact, as gripping as a thriller and as moving as a love story is testament to her exquisite writing and deep humanity.
Her narrative moves from the joyful and humorous (‘we shared a new and urgent interest in anchovies and cottage cheese,’ she says of the developing twins inside her) to the appalling: finding herself bleeding in the hospital loo, she tries to clean up the mess before pulling the emergency cord. Her introduction to motherhood feels ‘not like a birth but an evisceration’.
Unable to be cuddled or touched, the babies she initially calls A and B each weigh less than a bag of sugar. Too fragile for clothes, but with their ‘fine leaf-veining’ visible beneath translucent skin, they are menaced by their immaturity, by the flu virus season and by endless interventions that can go wrong. What can make the difference to a premature baby is the milk its mother must express eight to ten times every 24 hours. Still recovering from abdominal surgery, Segal becomes one of a number of such mothers, attached to a breast pump and experiencing the accelerated intimacies of medical trauma.
What these new mothers call ‘the milking shed’ is a novel topos, described as ‘a place, a state, of grace’.
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