Edel Coffey: The village it takes to raise a child doesn’t exist anymore

It is no place for a baby but still, perhaps instead of tutting, we might try a sympathetic smile, because life is hard enough. Photo: Ray Ryan

A few weeks ago, I attended a literary talk as part of my ongoing efforts at returning to living a culturally engaged life, as opposed to the post-Covid legacy of living an enclosed life. I booked an evening event that was part of one of those ‘ideas’ strands that festivals offer these days, you know the ones that make you feel more clever than you really are and everyone leaves with a great sense of their own intellectual cultivation.

As I took my seat, along with about 250 other people, an usher entered the room at the last minute to ask my row to shuffle down one seat as a woman with a baby was coming and she would need to sit on the end of the aisle in case she needed to beat a hasty retreat. We all moved down but there were dark mutterings. A baby! No place for a baby! Who brings a baby to an event like this?

I knew the answer to that question. New mammies did. Mammies who were starved of intellectual stimulation. Mammies who had no support. Mammies whose babysitter had cancelled at the last minute. Surely a baby should be in bed at this hour, someone else stage-whispered as the sunlight streamed through the windows. If babies went to bed when they should, parents wouldn’t spend the first three years of their child’s life looking like extras from the Walking Dead.

The muttering subsided and we waited with bated breath for the mammy to arrive. A few moments later, as the lights dimmed, she appeared, the baby strapped to her chest and ominously wide-eyed. She shuffled darkly into the empty seat. My adrenal glands activated. It was a Pavlovian response to being in a quiet room with a baby capable of a lot of unpredictable noise. I could sense my fellow attendees’ outrage, even though the baby was silent. I willed the baby not to cry, not to fuss, just to snuggle into its mother and just give her this one thing. I held my breath. Sixty seconds, more. The baby gurgled, no louder than the average adult clearing their throat, I thought, but still, someone tutted.

I was projecting wildly here, but I thought there was only one reason any new mother would take her baby to a stuffy talk in a quiet auditorium of an evening — desperation. Desperation for intellectual stimulation. I remember feeling the same in those early days of motherhood, reading prize-nominated tomes over the nursing head of my baby at 3am, watching arthouse movies with the volume turned down to one while my baby slept. Public talks and events were an intellectual defibrillator to the temporarily arrested brain of early motherhood.

I recalled being on planes and in coffee shops, attending funerals and communions in churches and I remember the heads turning to seek out the crying baby and the mother who couldn’t control the baby, couldn’t soothe or settle it, and you’d have to stand up and be banished to the little soundproof glass box at the back of the church, the vale of tears.

But what do I know? Maybe it was women who requested these little rooms as there is actually something liberating about not having to stress about whether your baby will stay unnaturally quiet for the duration of whatever adult-oriented event you have to attend. I did eventually seek those places out in the end, tired of leaving events 10 minutes in.

My favourite was the mother-and-baby cinema screenings at my local cinema. The venue was called the Eye and the baby screenings were cleverly called the Eye Scream, just to let everyone know what they were getting themselves in for. But these were actually some of the most enjoyable cultural events I attended in those early days when the baby had to go where I went.

Every Tuesday morning, a bunch of culture- and sleep-starved mothers wheeled their colicky babies in to watch the latest film. Mostly the babies burbled and cooed or even slept their way through the films — they really didn’t intrude — while the mothers relaxed in the knowledge that should one of the babies burst into heartfelt, bloodcurdling screams, nobody was going to tut them out of the room. And most of the time those mothers left the room anyway because nobody wants to be that person.

I was sorry to see that after about ten minutes at the event, with the baby being very good and very silent, the woman left. I wanted to run after her and tell her here, go back in, listen to the talk, and I’ll mind your baby. It feels like five minutes since I was in the same position myself but actually it’s five years since I had a newborn. And I know that’s not how it works anymore. 

You can’t hand your baby to a stranger. The village it takes to raise a child doesn’t exist anymore. So you have to walk the path alone and sometimes you’ll be so desperate you’ll end up at a public talk one evening, baby in tow. And it is no place for a baby but still, perhaps instead of tutting, we might try a sympathetic smile, because life is hard enough.