Taken. Rosie Lewis
my way down. Hands held out in front of her in a position of prayer, as she neared I saw that she was clutching a phone between them, her thumbs running speedily over the keys. When she looked up I slowed my step and steeled myself for introductions, only to find that her eyes drifted over me unseeingly, without a flicker of recognition. Half a second later they fell back to her phone.
I had no idea what she was really like, or how well she handled Megan during her supervised contact sessions, but somehow it was nice to know she was close by, and that there were only a few hours during the day when the chair beside her newborn daughter sat empty.
The day of Megan’s planned discharge, the third Sunday in July, was clear and bright. With record high temperatures forecast for midday and no air-con in my old Fiat, I set off early, keen to avoid getting caught in another snarl-up. Mercifully, with only DIY store enthusiasts, football mums and committed members of the National Trust on the roads, the morning traffic was light. By 11 a.m. I had completed the mandatory infant resuscitation course hosted by the hospital and packed the few bits that Christina had bought for Megan in the little Winnie-the-Pooh case I’d bought especially for her homecoming. A small white rabbit went in there as well – a gift from Angie, and some beautiful sleep suits that the other parents on the ward had clubbed together to buy.
Midday found us back on the ring road, Queen Charlotte’s Hospital shrinking in the rear-view mirror, the precious cargo secured in her car seat beside me. Driving along, I was struck by the number of speed bumps between the city centre and my house, something I rarely noticed before. I cringed every time we went over one, holding myself stiff as if the effort would somehow lessen the impact on Megan’s tiny form. She seemed unconcerned though, alternately dozing and then staring with curiosity around the car, tongue darting out through her parted lips.
There was a welcoming committee waiting at the door when we got home, Emily clasping and unclasping her hands and Jamie making a poor job of maintaining his cool. There was no sign of Zadie, I noticed, as I walked up the path with the car seat resting in the crook of my arm, which was probably just as well because by that time the baby was shrieking, the skin on her face a deep, blotchy red – not the gentlest way to make a first impression.
My mother was standing behind her grandchildren. Shorter than both of them, all I could see of her was an arm resting on each of their shoulders. ‘Oh, look at the little love,’ she said reverentially, peering around Emily’s shoulder.
‘Me first!’ Emily trilled, on her knees in front of the car seat as soon as it touched the floor. Carefully, almost in slow motion, she released the wide straps and laid them gently to one side before reaching in and lifting Megan out. I resisted the temptation to offer any advice; the mother of one of her school friends recently came by a perimenopausal surprise of her own and Emily had been over to babysit quite a few times in the last few weeks. She knew what she was doing well enough.
With Megan secure in her arms she turned away and walked slowly into the living room, the three of us an eager entourage behind. We spent the next hour passing the blanketed bundle between us, already enchanted. When it was Jamie’s turn to hold her he sat with rigid arms and scrunched shoulders, as if she were made of the most delicate silk.
Sometimes it took time to encompass foster children into our home and feel completely at ease around them, but we seemed to mould ourselves easily around the under-fives, I suppose because our family dynamics remained largely unchanged.
What with visits from Peggy, the community midwife and our health visitor, plus an unexpected dash to Accident and Emergency one night after Megan suffered convulsions (a frightening but rare symptom of withdrawal) the next few days alternated between frenzied activity and dazed sleeplessness.
The jarring cries of a newborn were such a foreign sound in our house that when I woke during Megan’s first night at home, I lay still and staring into the darkness, thinking that perhaps foxes were getting acquainted outside my bedroom window, or that next door’s cat lay injured somewhere nearby.
I knew that babies born with substance addiction sometimes suffered a range of health problems, and Megan seemed to have more than her fair share – if anything about neonatal abstinence syndrome could ever be described as fair. Violent stomach cramps left her crying piteously for hours at a time, interspersed with bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, and then periods of the jitters, when her hands, legs, and even her lips trembled. Clammy to the touch, her chest rose and fell at alarming speed and when I sat still with her in my arms, I could feel her body vibrating, almost like a toy that was running low on batteries. If I placed my hand flat on her tummy her insides trembled against my palm, something that caused my heart to lurch.
The emergency doctor suspected that reflux was partly responsible for her frequent vomiting and prescribed Infant Gaviscon, an antacid in powder form that was to be added to her formula milk. The thickened feed was more likely to stay down, so he said, but he told me that I shouldn’t expect her symptoms to disappear overnight.
He explained that Megan’s system was overwrought and advised swaddling her tightly and handling her as little as possible. The less stimulation the better, he recommended, but it wasn’t advice that sat easily with either of us. In truth, there were a handful of occasions in that first testing week when I felt I would go mad if I didn’t have a few moments to myself. Almost at the end of my tether, I tried placing her firmly in her cot and walking away, but I didn’t get far. After a few minutes of pacing the hall, trying to block out the noise, her hoarse screams always drew me back. At least when she was in my arms I felt I was doing something to alleviate her discomfort, and when I picked her up her small body would sag in relief, though she often continued to fret.
Our nights were worse, each a feat of endurance sliced into short, disorientating segments where I got little and Megan got poor-quality sleep. If I tucked her up in her crib she bellowed with a desperation that seemed, in those disconcerting early morning hours, life threatening in its intensity. On more than one occasion, gripped by unadulterated fear, I called the on-duty midwives at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital to make sure I wasn’t ignoring dangerous symptoms that needed urgent medical care – I’m still grateful for their unending patience and generous reassurances.
My mother, a woman capable of giving the researchers at GCHQ a run for their money, scoured online forums on Mumsnet and Netmums in search of a solution, producing and printing off a detailed list of suggestions for me to try. I worked my way through all of them, and then varying combinations of each, though nothing worked better than a good old-fashioned cuddle.
After the first few nights I got used to snatching a few moments of sleep sitting upright, with Megan’s contorting tummy pressed against my chest and her lips quivering against my neck. She still fretted, but it was a soothed, soft whimper rather than a full-on assault on the ears.
As the days went on and the last of the methadone wore off, her cries escalated to shrill, agonising screams. She loved her dummy, sucking on it with furious gusto, but even that didn’t stop her crying. Whenever she was out of my arms she grew frantic; in her pram and car seat, strapped in the sloped seat of a supermarket trolley. Sweeping around the shops at speed, I tossed whatever I needed quickly into the trolley with barely more than a glance and then raced into the street again, desperate to offer her the comfort of a hug.
In desperation I bought one of those all-singing, all-dancing bouncy chairs, the ones that some mothers swore by, their newborns whiling away many a contented hour swinging to and fro. Megan was having none of it though, not even for two minutes while I attempted a solo visit to the bathroom.
One of my most successful purchases was a baby sling, and for much of the day I kept Megan strapped close to my chest as I pottered around. After a few hours my shoulders felt like they didn’t belong to me, but at least my arms were free to get on with other essential tasks, like eating.
There were days when the tiredness didn’t affect me much, and others when my mind was so vague that even making up Megan’s bottles seemed like a cryptic puzzle that