I fell pregnant with Elizabeth the month we were married – I did not have a period after we married: she was a honeymoon baby. I had stopped the pill in the month prior to our marriage under the belief that one was not fertile for several months after stopping the pill – that was the received wisdom of the day: how wrong it was!
Not that we had a honeymoon. Michel had put it about at the wedding that he had a surprise destination for us to go to and I was not being told the destination. In the car when we had driven away from the party after the wedding he told me what he had done: he had lied to everyone, telling them we were going on a holiday, however we weren’t – we were just going to hole up in our flat for the week and pretend we had been away. Wasn’t that a wonderful idea and a good trick? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t say anything. I just felt deflated, as if a present had been taken away from me. I found it hard to keep my mouth shut over the incident.
In that week after the wedding we had an argument about my parents, my mother in fact. She had had the temerity to wear slacks to my wedding. My mother had, some years, previously, decided never to wear a skirt again. So at my wedding she wore a pair of slacks and a pretty shirt. It didn’t worry me, why should it worry anyone else? However Michel got into a fine lather about it one night and I dared to contradict him and he slapped me. Well, not having been slapped as an adult, I was astonished and pained, and I cried out. Michel was mortified – not at my reaction, but at the fact I was crying out. What if the neighbours heard? I am not quite sure how a good Lebanese wife is supposed to behave in these circumstances – be slapped and not cry out, take it quietly so no-one will ever know? Our neighbours were only a wall away, as we had a small section of a federation house – a garden flat- and they could most probably hear everything we did or said.
The upshot of that argument was that I told him immediately that if he hit me again I would walk out and go home to my parents. He must have believed me because he never hit me again. He just changed tactics and indulged in emotional and mental abuse instead, much harder to fight or even cope with. Much more insidious.
I found out I was pregnant in a very dramatic fashion. About three weeks after we were married, on October’s Labour Day, we went to the Zoo, by ferry. On the way home I had a hot-dog, and on the ferry I began to feel very queasy. As we alighted from the ferry I fainted, and was taken to the ticket booth to recover. As I went home I realised I might be pregnant. However that night I become violently ill with food poisoning, with bad vomiting and diarrhoea, bad enough to make a nasty mess trying to get to the toilet, and not making it. One thing for Michel, he did not blanch at cleaning up the mess. Perhaps he knew no-one else was going to do it. It took nearly a week for me to recover from the food poisoning and I missed a week of work after the honeymoon week as well. I was weakened by it but continued to vomit mainly in the morning, so thought I must be pregnant. At six weeks when my period still hadn’t come, I gave my urine sample to the chemist, (that how we did it then) but the answer came back negative. The vomiting continued, so I tried again 2 weeks later, and the answer was positive.
I did not have a good time with this pregnancy from the very beginning. One is supposed to glow with pregnancy, but I was sick for most of it. In the first three months I seemed to have a continuous bladder infection and in the third month spent most of my working day trotting upstairs to the toilet and back down again. It even caused the bank’s auditor to wonder why I was going upstairs so much if my job was downstairs in the banking chamber. I told the bank accountant I would have to leave work early as I was not coping and got the smart arse comment that his wife had five children without a fuss – why couldn’t I? I did not deign to give that remark a reply as I knew that there are some women who sail through pregnancy and some don’t. My mother had taught me that. So I left work at 4 months pregnant, with my blood pressure already rising and causing concern to my obstetrician.
For a while I sewed clothes for myself and the baby. I did not have a sewing machine, so I sewed by hand. The whole layette was hand sewn. After I had finished that, as it did not take long, even for me, I was at a loose end. By five months the obstetrician had put me on valium, to control my blood pressure as it was too high.
My sister had given birth to her son Daniel when I was 3 months pregnant and after a few months decided to go back to work, I think for pecuniary reasons. I offered to baby-sit my nephew as I had nothing to do, and as I had looked after my brothers, and had plenty of experience, and was about to be a mother anyway… Well, it lasted about six weeks before I called it quits. I was not well, and I found looking after a baby as a full time job too difficult and had to ask her to find an alternative. I hated to let her down, but I was finding life difficult, especially as all I wanted to do while I was taking the valium was to sleep. It made me very drowsy.
The last two months of the pregnancy I felt a little better. These were the days before routine ultrasounds; however I was informed by my obstetrician that things were preceding as they should, from my blood pressure. As I reached eight months, the obstetrician started to talk about inducing me – my blood pressure was getting too high. I now know I was heading for pre-eclampsia, and that I had toxaemia. I asked him to defer the induction until I had been married for nine months, as I didn’t want my in-laws to start counting and whispering things behind my back (even if they may have had cause, the baby was not conceived until after we married and I didn’t want anyone to doubt it).
The date was set for 29 May, two weeks before the due date of 12 June. I was admitted the night before and early the next morning woken early with tea and some toast. Around 9am I was prepped, shaven and taken down to the delivery suite and given several tablets under the upper lip, and my waters were broken. I was then told it may be at least 24 hours before anything happened, as it was my first delivery. I started to feel nauseated after a few hours and the most vivid memory of the experience is of feeling nauseated. Michel was not in the room with me, as this was the time before husbands were encouraged, nay expected to be in attendance. He waited outside.
I continued to feel nauseated without very much happening for several hours and was told “some time yet”. There had been little pain at this stage. Around 11am the doctor come and decided it would be several hours yet, and left to play golf. The tablets in my mouth had not dissolved, and I continued to feel sick. Around 12.30pm I felt an urgent need to push and said so. At the same time I felt wave after wave of contractions, like a period pain or the need to go to the toilet. The midwife examined me and found I was fully dilated and was about to give birth. The doctor was called, but did not make it: I gave birth at 1.30pm, with the midwife assisting me. I did not have access to painkillers during the birth, because no-one had told me how to use the gas that was supplied. I didn’t really need it, as the pain was no worse than the period pain I had experienced for the previous ten years every month. The worst part was the tearing: I tore the top of the labia minora near the clitoral hood and it had to be stitched – then I used the gas and realised why it was so popular!
Afterwards I asked the midwife what was I to do with the pills under my lip – they were still there – undissolved. They hadn’t had a chance to work!
I felt it was a non-event in some ways. The birth itself had come and gone so quickly that I had barely time to register that I was experiencing it. The midwife told me then that I had given birth too quickly: next time, she said, you must be careful, don’t delay or you will give birth in a taxi or at home. Nowadays it is called a precipitous birth and is considered bad for the mother. Back then I was just thankful it was quick.
Elizabeth was born 5 pounds 13 ounces, just under the “normal” weight and was whisked away in a humidi-crib as an underweight baby. Her Apgar score was 9, so was very good; however she was very small and had jaundice. So we were in hospital for 5 days, a fair time for a new mother.
Michel’s reaction to the birth was not good – he had his hopes on a boy and blamed me personally for having a girl –as if I had any say in the matter! He left me after he saw the new baby without a word and did not come back for several hours. He was very short and abrupt with me, and I knew what he was thinking and I tried to ignore him. I had a little girl and I was very happy – I didn’t care what sex the baby was, but girls were rare in my family, so to have a girl was unexpected.
My milk had come in when I was only 4 months pregnant so I had no trouble with breastfeeding – quite the opposite. Once I had the baby, the milk just flooded in and I had rock hard breasts with milk seeping out continuously. I was told to express some and then try to breast feed. The extra milk was given to the premature babies whose mothers could not breast feed.
I had a lot of trouble breast feeding Elizabeth. My breast spouted milk and she would be drowned by the spouting milk – it was coming out of my breast at speed and she could not cope. I had to express some to quieten the flow down and lay flat on my back so the milk did not pour out. It was hard for the first three months. I was determined to breast feed as long as I could.
As a father, Michel was not supportive. He left the parenting up to me, and gave me no support as a new mother. I was on my own. I know now that I was mildly depressed after the birth, and my feeling of desperation at not being able to cope with Elizabeth’s crying was due to a form of post-natal depression combined with lack of support. My husband had by this time cut off most of my communication with my parents, making it difficult for me to call on them for advice. Most of the time I had to find my own way.
I remember several times being in tears with Elizabeth crying and not being able to stop it or to know what was wrong with her. I suffered from sleep deprivation, as all new parents do, but mine was worsened by my husband’s indifference to my plight. In the end, at night after I had breast fed her, I took Elizabeth into the bed with me, to get her to sleep again. I would often find her half way down the bed, sound asleep in the morning when my breasts woke me with the signal that it was time to feed again.
One time when Elizabeth was about two months old, she had been crying for several hours non stop, I lost my temper with her, and slapped her. This of course only made her worse. I was in a terrible state, and was crying myself with frustration and anguish. Having slapped her, I was mortified, guilty and even more anguished that things had come to this. I didn’t know what to do with her or with myself.
Luckily these feelings passed, but it took until Elizabeth was about 4 months before I felt able to say I was coping with her. I was very lucky that her progress was good and she thrived on my milk. I had no trouble with her health as a baby.
My own health after the birth was a different matter. I had a problem in that I needed a form of contraception that would allow me to breastfeed without worry. The is an old wive's tale that you cannot fall pregnant while you breastfeed, but I had been trapped by that sort of thing before. So I arranged for an IUD, an intra-uterine device to be fitted. This is a loop of plastic that is supposed to prevent the embryo from settling in the uterus and thus preventing conception. It sounded good. Not invasive, not medical. I had it inserted within 5 weeks after Elizabeth was born, while I was still bleeding somewhat. I continued to bleed. And continued to bleed. It appeared that I could not cope with and IUD. I bled. So it had to be removed. I think the gynaecologist was not happy about it. I appear to have stymied him with this reaction to the IUD. So I had to rely on luck until I could go back on the pill.
The top photo is of me with my nephew at about three months of age. I had just found I was pregnant. The third photo shows Elizabeth at about three months old sitting in my mother's lap. The second photo shows me with Elizabeth at 5 months, with Mary and Daniel, 11 months and my mother, in Hyde Park in Sydney in early October 1974, just before my departure for Lebanon.
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