A shriek rips through the blackness.

I struggle to process it in the muddy depths of sleep. A fire alarm, maybe, or a car backfiring? It is familiarly unfamiliar, a continuous rasping cry, insisting itself on me even as I beg it to retreat.

But then my brain starts to clear and I recognise it: the rawness of my own voice, echoing back at me in the disorienting dark.

“Where is she? Where is she?”

The sound is coming from me.

I rake through the bed sheets, animalistic. “I fell asleep. I must have fallen asleep.” The pads of my hands pressing into the softness around me, searching the emptiness, finding… nothing. “She was here, right here, in my arms! Did I roll over? Did I… Oh, God, did I–”

“Beth? Beth! Elizabeth!”

At the sound of the name in full, I freeze, a Pavlovian reaction that makes my skin itch. Twists of bed linen are still squeezed beneath my fingers.

A shadowy figure looms over the side of the bed.

Another sound joins my own: a low, insistent wail.

The figure turns. Bends. Reaches.

“She’s in the cot.” The speech is urgent and hissed. “She was asleep…” The implication is unspoken: until now.

“She’s…here?” My words are thick, caked in sleep.

“Yes. See?”

I unspool myself from the tangle of sheets. Rouse fully upright as the mass is handed to me. Feel the weight of it, heavy and fragile all at once. A wriggling, furious thing. A creature that smells of lavender fabric softener, the sickly curdle of milk and, uncannily, of me.

“It must have been a dream.” The voice soothes, gentler now, more forgiving. And somehow it is the smell that crystallises me fully, that makes my body respond, my mind unfurl.

She’s here. Etta’s here. She was in her cot. Safe. As always.

Etta cries, louder now. And with more action than thought, I pull at my top and curl her into my chest, feel the tension in the black room dissipate as the baby quiets, sucks.

The figure stands beside us for moment, watching– and then yawns, retreats. “Will you two be all right now, darling? You know I’d help, but I have that meeting first thing. Besides, you know it’s you she really wants…” Adam, my partner. His words already sleep-slurred. I feel the depression of the bed as he returns to his side, rolls back into the night.

And so I remain, cradling my daughter in the darkness until she is content. Slip Etta softly into her crib and shush away the grunts of protest.

But when I can finally reclaim the night as my own, I can’t sleep. Adrenaline quivers through me, won’t let my mind rest. It unearths the miasma of past fears that cling to me, tells me that I’m not safe. That none of us is safe.

That maybe I’ll never feel safe.

When I finally wake for good, daylight spills across the room, seeping under the too-thin blinds. The room is airless, muggy. The heat always swells in our small attic bedroom, like a bottle with a cork in it, and I can already feel the dull ache of dehydration throbbing at my temples as I blink my eyes open.

Adam stands at the door, holding a mug of tea. Places it on my bedside table. ‘I thought you’d like a lie-in,’ he says with a verbal eyebrow raise, “seeing as this one’s obliged.”

He’s already wearing his suit, a tie loose around his neck, but his hair is still damp from the shower, spraying droplets of cool water over me as he bends down to kiss my forehead. He smells of the mint shower gel he likes, fresh and clean, making me even more aware of my morning breath, my creased T-shirt, maternity bra half-unclipped beneath it.

I look to my left, where Etta snoozes peacefully in her crib, as though her antics in the night were all imagined. There had been more wakings, innumerous, all blurring into the endless stop-start of what nighttime has now become, although the last one, at five am, has at least afforded me a window long enough to reclaim sort of rest. My eyes are still desert-dry, the bitter taste of bad sleep lingering in the back of my mouth, but I feel at least as though I can paper over the cracks of the day until the whole thing begins again, on repeat.

But I shouldn’t – can’t – complain. The me of a year ago, exhausted from blood tests and pessaries, pills and patches and injections, would have resented a woman like the one I am now, for having anything negative to say, for having the gall to look at the privilege of motherhood in the face. To not cherish every single moment.

I love Etta, with every ounce of my being. But it is so hard.

I reach for the mug of tea. My hand shakes slightly as my fingers grasp the handle and I hope Adam doesn’t see.

Is it me? I often wonder in snatched moments of quiet. Am I uniquely unable to cope? The sheer magnitude of responsibility for preserving another human being. The constant anxiety over whether I am doing the right thing. The nagging fear that I have no right to do this, that I can’t do this. How the hell did I think I could do this? If only I had someone I could talk to. Not Adam—I can’t burden him more than I already have. Someone who understands. A place where I can truly be myself.

I take a sip of tea.

Don’t mind that it scalds my lips.

Welcome the way it stuns me into wakefulness.

I watch Adam from the bed as he opens the wardrobe, adjusts his tie in front of the mirrored inner door. His movements are unthinking, the muscle memory of the action well honed, and as I drink I can’t suppress the jealousy that pools acidly in the corner of my mouth, envy of the world he is about to walk into so effortlessly. Coffee cups and laptops, meetings and lunch breaks: his days have sharp edges, clearly defined. Mine are marshmallow: nappies and milk and laundry, each hour blurring softly into the next.

In another life, it could have been me. Before. I’m no stranger to hard grind. Even in my most recent job – admin for a small travel agency in West Hampstead – the work had been uniform and unhurried, just busy enough that my mind didn’t wander. And the move to flexible working had been ideal, affording me a borderline anonymity that I had worn like a comfort blanket. Sidebar sniggers during boring Zoom calls with the boss – a consequence-free way of attempting a social life.

Now that has been stripped away, my even newer identity – Beth the mother – feels more formless than ever.

“I’ve got back-to-back meetings today.” Adam’s groan breaks my thoughts in two. “What have you got planned?”

“Oh…” I flail, weighing up the blank canvas of the day. “The usual. Maybe we’ll go to Alexandra Park if it stays nice.”

“Again?” His face wrinkles, and my stomach flips. When I say nothing, he fiddles with the tie, looping his index finger into the knot and pulling. It’s a tell of his when he’s annoyed. I wonder if he’s aware he’s doing it. “We should have done that antenatal course like I suggested.”

I put my mug to my lips. Look down in surprise, finding it empty. I didn’t realise I’d finished it.

“You know I didn’t want to.” I begin my well-worn argument slowly, putting the mug aside. “I didn’t want to sit through ten hours of different birthing methods, listening to other mothers scaremongering. I didn’t want anyone to change my mind. Natural birth – that’s what I wanted.”

I hold his gaze.

No hospitals. No doctors. The added benefit of not needing to make myself more visible than was one hundred percent necessary.

A risky choice that came back to bite me.

Surprisingly, our fertility doctor, Dr Stone, had agreed. He’d even found me a doula well-versed in home births, although I’d quickly skirted his suggestion of hypnobirthing, the mention of “affirmations” making my palms sweat.

Adam nods silently.

The memory of the ambulance careening in the race to the hospital sits in the empty space between us. The blaring hospital lights, my eventual emergency C-section. I will never get his look of terror out of my mind. Or my own secret fear, hounding me until we were finally discharged, that this would be the moment I would finally be tripped up.

Excerpted with permission from Be Mine, Lizzy Barber, The Bombay Circle Press.

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