No Baby On Board
By Samantha Cook
I want to feel part of this community, I really do.
I’ve lived here for fifteen years, seen friends come and go, move in and move away again – often, ironically, for the so-called ‘sake of the kids’. I’ve loved my years in this neighbourhood that calls itself a village, feeling central and safe and at home, feeling that I’d found my place. But in the last couple of years things have begun to change. Stoke Newington has more babies per head than anywhere else in the country, they say, and for those of us not lucky enough to have been blessed with that ordinary miracle, it feels less like a village than a foreign country. As a woman of forty-one who is not a yummy mummy (has there ever been a more repulsive epithet?), who is just that bit too old to fit in with the crowds of twenty-somethings with their choppy-short fringes and 1970s handbag, and who is certainly too young to feel ready to disappear, my place feels increasingly precarious.
Sunday afternoon, strolling with a friend and her baby. We’ve reached the goat enclosure at Clissold Park. Another buggy approaches. Smiles and hellos all round. The talk turns to how old is yours now, what’s their name again, are you back at work? Superfluous, invisible, I drift off to gaze at the deer. A toddler and her older brother fish chunks of bread out of a Fresh and Wild bag, and poke them through the fence. A faun comes trotting up, snorting slightly. The sign which explains that feeding the deer, even feeding them leaves, can cause sickness and lead to death, is in full view. I want to say something but I don’t. Why do I simply glare rather than speak? Is my concern for the deer overridden by my British fear of confrontation? Not exactly. It’s more the dilemma of the childless – the acquiescent silence that is expected of us. It’s not my place to interfere, to tell the parent off in front of the child; they would look at the blank space beside me, the lack of a small hand clasping mine, and somehow that would explain my crankiness, my curmudgeonly desire to ruin this innocent moment of childlike delight, this Sunday afternoon parent-child bonding. So I keep quiet, say nothing, disappear, the welfare of the deer a grubby smudge on my conscience.
10.30am on a Tuesday morning, reading, writing, in Clissold Park café. The trees are glorious; the cloudless sky a sharp autumnal blue. Slowly, relentlessly, that distinctive sound: the rustle and rumble of rubber tyres on paving as the barrage of buggies approaches. I’d forgotten; it’s baby singing day. Tired-looking mums and bleary tots form a barricade, a wall of baby hardware that just moments later blocks the entrance to the café, turns it into a fortress that I feel an increasing need to escape.
A Wednesday in July, 4pm. A walk down Church Street to Green Lanes. I detour down Queen Elizabeth’s Walk, adding fifteen minutes to my journey. All to avoid the happy, noisy, lively, community picnic-cum-group sunbathe-cum-playgroup-cum girls’ day out that is the paddling pool on summer afternoons. That’s one giant party to which I am definitely not invited.
All Church Street resounds with that rustle and rumble, the endless cavalcade of Bugaboos, trikes, plastic wheelbarrows, rollerskates. Does anyone else hear it as clearly as I do? In the Blue Legume, Clicia, at the Farmers Market, proud parents display their offspring like medals. All around, the up-and-down of mums and dads chasing their toddlers, stopping them from straying, stumbling, falling. The muddled, taken for granted chaos in which I have no place. On the narrow pavement outside Errol’s florist I squeeze myself against the wall to let the mighty Bugaboo pass, make myself small so their family can expand.
Empty-handed, I walk along the street, no buggy to push, not tied to anything. Free to move and to do as I wish. So why doesn’t it feel that way?
Samantha Cook is a local writer. Her latest book, The Rough Guide to Chick Flicks, is reviewed on p.38. For more, see her blog on www.chickflickguide.com.
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