Postnatal thoughts: Having a baby is so irrational – but I did it anyway

Dorothy Spencer is a London-based poet who wrote this article and poem about her baby for Big Issue’s 10Foot Takeover.

The only depiction of birth I’ve ever seen is in primary school when we had the afternoon of lessons to sit on the floor in the assembly hall while they wheeled out the television trolley and played a 60-minute film of a woman giving birth in hospital. 

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Other 90s babies might recall this traumatising interruption to the usual curriculum which came with little explanation. I remember camera shots of the clock, the speeded up hand roving round the face, demonstrating to us just how long it took to labour, and then the woman’s vagina opening like the mouth of a carp fish to a small (yet far too big) purple and white mucky skull. I was just disgusted, I don’t even know if I equated this to my mother and myself.

I had until not so long ago believed that babies came out of your bum and were made by kissing, when things swam in between you and the other person’s mouth. I thought babies were strange then and that remained the same until I was well into my 20s. I had my palm read when I was a teenager and was told I’d be rich and childless. I thought that sounded quite good. The money never came, and now the prophecy has been disproven. 

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Choosing to have a child is a confusing decision when you live in a culture where families are so opaquely private. It’s like that game when you put your hand into a bag and guess what the object is. Having a child is an instinctive grab at something you can’t really grasp the full reality of.

Unless you count children among your familial relations it’s unlikely you’ll spend much time with them, the only moment at which collective ownership of the next generation really seems apparent is people getting involved in the behaviour of pregnant women and abortion rights.

Instead you collage together comments and popular fictions; ‘life changing… never be the same… the best thing you’ll ever do… hard, hard, hard.’ I hadn’t held a newborn baby ever before having our daughter, had never changed a nappy, had never winded a baby, cooed a baby, rocked a baby. This makes becoming a parent seem somewhat speculative, and we start as shocking beginners. 

We cannot ask our children if they wish to be born. Our daughter was summoned forward by us in February 2023 without asking. I like to think of souls as more than bodies, as bodies as more than containers. But wherever souls might linger, they are brought here now under such terrible circumstances.

There are some people who, reflecting on the world the way it is now, choose not to have children. In some ways having a kid seems to indicate that I approve of this world, that I think it’s a decent place for life, which I don’t. The society I bring her into is profoundly sick, and hostile to life in all its forms.

She spent the first three weeks of her life in neonatal intensive care after having surgery at 72 hours to correct a congenital anomaly which meant her oesophagus hadn’t properly formed. Everything she swallowed went into her lungs, which caused her to stop breathing at six hours old. Having a seriously ill child was a type of pain I haven’t experienced before.

It had a depth and physicality new to me, and I thought frequently of the mothers in other places, of the mothers in Palestine in particular – who are forced to pull their children from rubble, and where the last neonatal unit closed during the weeks we were inpatients at King’s College Hospital.

I have no conclusion to this thought, I just say it here as something that haunts me, an amazement that mothers have to survive the death of their children, though I’m sure in many ways they don’t.

The shibboleth that humans are intrinsically bad or evil, apart from being lazy and convenient, is an insult to all the people who do continue to live in a way that is sustainable and free, and to all of us who are depressed by the habits of behaviour and consumption we feel pinned into and harmed by. And I refuse to take responsibly for it.

We do our best within an architecture built by monsters that deal in death and war. I have faith that our daughter will love the world the way I do, the way her dad does. Having a child is rarely a rational choice, but for me was driven by the desire to be combined with the person I love the most in a living, pulsating, breathing thing.

To have a shared object, a human anchor, an agreement in flesh that our union should be permanent, everlasting, transcendent beyond our own bodies and souls in a non-reversible way. Having a child is a way to demonstrate love; for your partner, the world, life itself. 

Antenatal poem

Every mother has 

DDT in her breast milk now 

but I still want you to be my 

baby daddy 

and for us to watch my

tummy get 

hard and big and shiny 

like a hazelnut 

amongst all the terror 

and mourning of the world

i sleep like a princess 

beside you and 

dream that i am 

a cockroach, a raccoon, 

a rat

and i don’t care, really

if it’s okay to have a child

i just want to see 

you and me 

united

in the body of 

someone new

and when my belly rises 

like a strong and vicious army 

i will squeeze my big breasts 

and squirt my poisoned milk 

all over the world 

just look at it!

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