Equipment
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” —William Morris
We had almost no equipment when our son was born. We moved to London when I was six months pregnant and even though it was clearly only a matter of time before there would be a baby, we had nothing.
Leaving my beloved one-bedroom on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was an exercise in minimalism. Except for a Jennifer Convertible couch, I owned next to nothing. The couch was deposited on the sidewalk outside of a restaurant I lived above because we owed the movers an extra $100 for taking the door off the hinges. So, I sat on it and waited for my fiancée to return with the cash. Meanwhile my rather awful ex-boyfriend suddenly appeared and demanded to know where I was going. This boyfriend had left for a Kibbutz several months earlier without any warning.
“I’m engaged, pregnant and moving to London,” I said. He looked downcast. “I was coming back,” he said. “You could have waited.”
We found a nice flat in Islington and my husband disappeared to work at his new job while I tried to recover from being called a “trailing spouse” by immigration. I had no job and while some friends from Dublin were now living in London, few of them were even in a committed relationship. They liked children but had none. My family was in the United States and the baby was in my belly, so I felt lonely. My new husband spent all his time at the newspaper where he was a reporter. I tried to make lists of things the baby would need but instead the lists became short stories about sad women. It had been a few years since my eldest sister, my role model and a mother, had been killed and now her widowed husband was dating a woman who referred to my unborn child as an incubus. The word meant a demon and in some translations a demon who had intercourse with sleeping women. The first Christmas Eve after my sister died this woman answered the door and said, “Who are you?”
And then there was this issue of equipment. Baby equipment. Monitors, diaper warmers, diaper genies, bottle warmers, breast pumps and bassinets and cribs and pacifiers and all sorts of warnings about babies dying in crib death because of a plethora of fancy 500 thread count bedding and ways to get your baby to sleep through the night and books and latches and plug covers. We had nothing. My ex-husband had an assignment to visit a mall outside of London and since we apparently needed things I went along, now eight months pregnant, teaching despite my “trailing spouse’ title but free to shop.
Oh, I had no decent maternity clothes as well. I’m not a shopper and somehow it seemed that giving birth was about buying stuff and I had a real aversion to being in stores, any stores but book stores or fancy paper and pen stores or candy stores. None of which was really helpful when you were supposed to have a layette and a stroller and a nightgown for looking glamorous after the birth. Someone gave us a stroller which was sweet and until he could sit up, he would ride in our very unchic papoose thing which was turquoise.
photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova
The thing was, he was gorgeous. Not like all babies are gorgeous, but truly gorgeous. And he smiled and giggled and dimpled and babbled. He could wear mismatched socks and a diaper and someone would be raving about his beauty. When he came home, he slept in an Ikea laundry basket with a pillow to raise him up and because it was straw at one point, I thought he had a rare and potentially fatal disease because there were stripes on his otherwise perfect scalp. He was bald. We realized he had grown and his head had been up against the weave so we added another pillow. He snored so we needed no monitor and aside from a few fancy French outfits he could wear any old thing because he was so very beautiful.
Yes, I occasionally noticed looks of scorn from more posh mothers but then again, they had these boring, frankly plain babies so they needed all that equipment.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach