Along the canal path

Words by Chloe North

For the first few weeks after my daughter was born, I lamented our not having a garden. I had read somewhere that it was important for babies to be taken outside every day to help them differentiate between day and night and, in this way, understand that the night is for sleeping. It seemed imperative that she should understand this as soon as possible. We were moving to a house with a garden but the process was taking ages, so in the meantime, I heaved the buggy down the stairs every day, feeling sorry for myself, and wheeled it at random around the streets of Failsworth. But my daughter is three months old now, and we have developed a routine. When we go out we invariably head to the path that runs alongside the canal. We join at the big Tesco and then walk along by the water, usually just as far as the big Morrisons before we turn back, occasionally further.

It is May. On the canal path, a profusion of green. The sky is so intensely blue it feels urgent to me that she sees it and so I push the sun canopy on the pram back. She shuts her eyes as she comes out of shade and into sun, but as we pass under some trees and dappled shadow falls once again on her face, she opens them again tentatively, now frowning slightly. In one of the gardens that back onto the canal, people are having a barbecue. In the next, a woman is sunbathing. In the water, there are geese with their goslings. We stop. Look at all the babies, I say to her. Look at all the trees! Before having her, I feared the banality of such observations. I point out the same things to her daily - the shrub, the ducks, the steps by the lock where I take her out of the pram and we sit and have a bottle, the submerged shopping trolleys, the utter blueness of the sky - but none of it now seems banal. I like framing things for her so that they seem full of wonder; and there is no dissonance for me, no interior sense that things are not, after all, that wonderful, because just thinking about the way that she may be captivated by these humdrum, everyday things, makes me feel a sort of bubbling joy, a tenderness that is like transcendence. It is midday. 

Most days we wake up very early. Hello, I say, and she peers up at me from the crib or, more often, from beside me in the bed where I have put her in the night to settle her. It’s morning time! You’ve slept through the night! And her eyes light up, and she beams. Her hair sticks up. Soft little tendrils, flyaway tufts. Recently she has started to make a coo sound, a cue that she is done with sleeping and wants instead to talk. This morning she started making it even earlier than she usually does. It’s not morning time yet, I said, but she cooed and kicked insistently and so I relented, I picked her up and lay her next to me in the bed. I turned off the fan and suddenly we could hear the sound of birds singing outside, surprisingly loud for a street I never think of as having trees. (Instead there is the tram stop and the pub and the Chinese chippy.) I think I must have adjusted to the lack of sleep, because I didn’t feel tired at all, or anyway I didn’t notice my tiredness. Lying there with her in the crook of my arm, saying coo back and forth between us, I felt serene. 

It feels like a strange, almost traitorous thing to say that I feel serene with a very young baby, as though I may be perpetuating some dangerous myth of motherhood as a beatific state - dangerous because surely it is disingenuous, because surely it obfuscates the lived reality of motherhood: sleep deprivation, isolation, spirals, boredom etc. But whilst it is true that I often feel exhausted and lonely and sometimes, because of those two states, quite deranged, it is also true that being with my baby can at times make me feel so serene that it is like being on something. This has been surprising to me. Before I had a baby, I heard so much about the drudgery of looking after young children that I dismissed the idea of maternal bliss as a fiction, deployed for no other reason than to keep women churning out children. But it isn’t a total fiction, at least not always, at least not for me. (And I am, more and more, conscious of how insanely lucky I am to have this particular experience of motherhood: that each morning I get to wake up somewhere safe, that I get to spend every day strolling up and down a canal path with my baby, that I get to sit down and give her a bottle and see her fat legs flexing in contentment, that when I point things out to her it is with the knowledge that I have a partner coming home that evening with whom I can speak about other things.)

Recently I went on a three day holiday to Murcia on my own. It was a birthday present from my husband, the idea being that I could have some respite from sleepless nights and making up bottles and changing nappies and walking around Failsworth every day. And it was a lovely idea, and I was grateful, but when I got there - actually, when I left the flat and got in the taxi to go to the airport - what I felt wasn’t relief so much as a sense that I was being exiled. I wandered around the city feeling aimless. I sat outside a restaurant in a square by a cathedral and drank a glass of sangria and ate some salt cod croquettes and tried to focus on my book, but I felt flat. I kept noticing other babies. I walked by the river, and crossed a bridge, and went through the Jardin de Floridabanca, but I felt I may as well have been walking through the same streets on Google Street View. On the second day there was a national power cut, and I lay in bed watching the TV and feeling anxious, and on the third day I came home. Then I was back to walking along the canal path, and glad of it.

Just off the path there’s a little housing estate made up of flats with balconies, and a big patch of green in the middle that people have put a leather sofa and a couple of armchairs out on. We have to cut through this estate to avoid the steps on the canal path. Today, doors and windows have been left open because of the heat. Washing has been hung out to dry. A dog watches us from his balcony. A crushed can of Stella Artois glitters in the sun. In front of one door, a woman is sitting on a blanket reading a book, her daughter sitting beside her. The little girl is playing with a toy that makes a tune, a haunting sort of sound in the way of ice cream van chimes. It all reminds me of an opening scene in a horror film, the sense of calm is so complete that I feel it must foreshadow something.

Back on the canal path again, there is another woman pushing a pram. We smile at one another, an acknowledgment of shared experience. Some people we see regularly. There is the man with his two dogs who always asks me how I am sleeping and then peers into the pram with a cigarette in his hand, oblivious to my discomfort. There is the woman who always wears a red beret, and the man who is always fishing with his little son, and the woman I know from the coffee shop who will tell me about when her own children were very young. In motherhood I feel more legible to other people and there’s relief in this. I no longer feel as outside of things as I once did. That feels like an embarrassing thing to say, but I think I spent so long feeling adrift that to be subsumed now by this new type of love is, despite what I once feared, a joy, a relief. But maybe subsumed is wrong. In the last few months I have more myself than ever. Again, this has been surprising to me given what I thought I knew about motherhood meaning the loss of myself. 

When we get to the bridge, we turn around and head back in the direction of home. On the way back, there is a duck with a twig in its mouth moving diligently towards a nest made up of other such twigs, also a plastic bottle. There is another duck that is dead, its head stuck in a shopping trolley. There are dandelions and celandine and pink cuckoo flowers and empty crisp packets. We will do the same walk tomorrow, and the next day too. It looks now like the house move will be happening soon, and I will get my garden, though I no longer feel so anticipatory. I will miss this. 

Chloe is a writer of short stories and an aspiring flaneuse who lives with her husband Alex and baby daughter Elise in Manchester, England.’