Good Enough

by Niamh Campbell

After the caesarean, I felt itchy and I was embarrassed – it seemed indecent to scratch in the way I wanted to scratch – so even though the nurse with her blank expression told me yes, this was a side effect, I resisted it, I tried to stop my hands travelling to my face and chest. Tried also to stay awake because they were waiting for the doctor to clear the baby for something – clear her, yes, to join me on the ward – and in this lull period, anteroom of tsking monitors, itching and almost unconscious, fighting in case I would need to advocate for the bundle in her incubator, fighting to remain awake and to hold back from scratching myself all over, imagining the claws of others drawn erotically down my back, and in this state of stoned confusion, this delay, I WhatsApped my husband to say, She is here! Meaning our second child.

…

She was early: five weeks early. I had woken abruptly at five a.m. and popped like a water balloon. It was an ordinary weekday on which everyone had work but now the arc of the term had come to a sudden stop and there was really no arguing. A week previous, I had been in Scotland for the funeral of my father-in-law, walking through a forest burial site of chimes and tumuli, breezes slanting from a sheep pasture. In Irish folklore, a pregnant woman should not enter a graveyard because the veil between worlds is too thin, but I am not all that superstitious.

…

A baby is too outrageous to describe. They are just completely outrageous. I knew she was mine, I knew which tentlike souped-up incubator, from the moment I stepped through the frictionless swish of a sliding door to neonatal intensive care. Or not stepped, no, but rolled: in a wheelchair, vomiting at intervals into a basin made from eggbox cardboard. Each time I vomited, I passed the eggbox off to somebody then once more looked ahead in anticipation of holding the baby. After three eggboxes they told me I could not remain in the NICU vomiting. It was not even vomit but the bile you bring up when you haven’t eaten, that tastes like gasoline.

…

I had come into hospital with the following things packed into a duffel bag: one shower bar, one razor, a toothbrush, toothpaste, towels, elegant inexpensive pyjamas, the book I was reading, my laptop. You don’t need much else. Oh yes and clothes for the baby too, which, since it was summer, were mostly footless, and this was a misstep. A newborn needs onesies with feet.

…

The laptop was packed because edits were due on my third novel, the hard-won interregnum novel written between babies. I had planned on three more weeks at least and now those weeks were lost. The laptop was brought because I would not let this deadline slide, lose my slot, nor would I face into taking the baby home – into the white nights – with a mass of outstanding edits; because I gripped the laptop and thought from my cold dead hands, from my cold dead hands, and I wanted to do this, I so wanted to write, I so wanted to finish it. Between oxycodone spins and sneaking to the bathroom, nurseless with catheter, I commenced those edits again.

…

When I brought my first baby home, the house was cold, part-demolished and part-rebuilt, the bones of the house revealed in flashes. This is what I remember when I think of the weird private fear I developed, of harming the baby with writing, somehow especially since she was a girl. I kept thinking of Joan Didion. Particularly of Didion describing her daughter, Quintana, who died from complications of alcoholism, like a child or a doll: the pert ironical daughter with so many dresses and Hawaiian lays, the girlish details of her ornate wedding to a bartender you never hear about afterwards; of Didion’s starry-eyed romanticisation of this doll-child and the simultaneous crispness of her writing style, of her fame and her incontrovertible cool; as if Quintana had been sacrificed, as if the reification of one’s daughter for the purposes of populating an ambassadorial imaginary, for writing and remaining ruthless in style and content, for glassiness of style or content, was necessary. For a time postpartum, I was grimly fixated on this. Can a mother with so sharp a gift of apprehension see her child? Can she do mothering well when committed to writing well; are these things possible? How selfish am I?

…

When I was pregnant the first time, my mother told me members of her family were surprised because we always thought you were so into your career. And it amazed me just how shaming I found this to be. I’d thought I left home joyfully, without apology. EAT MY DUST etcetera.

…

In hospital, the edits were epiphenomenal, in that my editor riffed on reactions and suggestions and I tried to kind of copperplate these or to bed them into the vision, the greater vision, something which only becomes visible incoherently and then finally coherently. The document glittered on screen, subject to insectoid glitches like flickers or strobes, the laptop old, as optimistic as toothpaste – hygienic, dignified. I hardly noticed the surgical wound until my pain relief wore off, and I had to reach for the button console and call for more. Nurses and doctors were trying to discuss my body with me but I only longed to be left alone, softly drugged, to climb into the attic of my mind. Nurses slashing the blue flannel curtains open, crying each time, still working! They thought, I suppose, that I had a career in the conventional sense, that I was making money or shouldering somebody out of the way or leaning in.

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Early memory uncovered at random, brain fritted by hormones postpartum: sent to my room as a toddler, gales of uncontainable anguish, pressing against a pink hippo stuffed with beans or grains or something unyieldingly granular. Smell of dinner downstairs. Agony of loneliness.

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Nurses fed the baby, or I fed the baby, from miniature bottles, but if she didn’t finish the feed they tipped the formula into a feeding tube and shook it smartly and overrode her sleepiness or resistance to fill her belly nonetheless. This, I later understood, trained her to feed robustly at strict three-hour intervals even after NICU and made her the easiest baby on earth.

…

A horror story from the life of Jean Rhys, who wrote and drank while the nanny escorted her little daughter out for the day. One day the pair return early and Rhys, who lost her first baby to pneumonia and distraction in a Parisian garret, bursts into tears of rage at the interruption.

…

At least, to me, this is a horror story.

…

Have you opened your bowels yet? They asked. I hadn’t, but I lied a little bit; I wanted to go. A woman had been admitted to my three-person room in the small hours. She’d laboured for two days and then had a section and now, partly paralysed on a hospital bed, she still had to feed her newborn, who was not sent to NICU. The thing is that she would not stop talking. Talking and talking and talking to me. Also she had a man with her always, at every moment of the day and well after visiting hours – her husband, a brother, some male family member or other playing videos on a phone, looking up to track me when I went to the toilet. Anxiety rose like fumes. I started to curl over at the shoulders. I sat, hands clawed above the keyboard and my face stiffened in a superficial smile, as she talked and talked in waves of most unwanted friendliness to me. Oh god oh god I could not take it, it was Day Three, hormone hell. And so I lied about the bowels and had myself discharged with vibrant insistence; yes yes yes.

…

Even though I was not finished. Even though the baby was still in NICU. Wire mother: nerves fried. The baby was doing well. They said, she is looking around for the source of your voice.

…

On Day Three you get a payload of misery. Something icy in you upends and pours through your system ghoulishly. I had to wait for my lift, with my bag, and my knees getting weak, so I sat in the waiting room from which I’d been admitted days ago and stared at the television on its wall bracket. A gameshow was playing, daytime gameshow television. I felt poisoned and I started to weep openly, collapsing, baffled; sorry very sorry to be returning to the world.

Niamh Campbell is an award-winning author based in Dublin. She has written three novels: This Happy (2021), We Were Young (2023) and Make Strange (forthcoming in 2026).

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, curated by Hettie Judah, continues until 11 January