Mrs Covet

Now that the baby was born I felt a little clearer in my head. And my life was so easy with Nat in charge. She had turned out to be the Mercedes of baby nurses. She kept the baby changed, bathed, in clean clothes. She gave him to me when he was about to be hungry. He was the most contented baby I had ever seen. I looked back on the other two and marvelled that I had been able to cope at all by myself. Since my sister, Virginia, died, I had been so scared that something would happen to my babies. Now, with Nat here, I felt safe. She was a nurse. She would be able to handle any emergency. I started taking better care of myself and got myself a manicure and pedicure; I had my hair blown out. I looked fat around the middle, but healthy. No one could believe I had just given birth. Craig and I went out to dinner. We made love. I started feeling better about myself, and even daydreamed about going to grad school one day.

One morning, I came upstairs and found that Nat had moved the baby’s crib into her room. That way, she said, the minute he cried in the night, she could bring him in to me. It would save me getting out of bed. I thought that was a little strange. I said, ‘It’s okay, I don’t mind getting up, I like hearing him breathe next to me.’ She seemed a little put out by this, but she heaved and huffed the crib back into our room. After a few days had passed, she started saying I should think about weaning him. I had fed both the other boys myself for six months, but Nat thought that was extravagant. ‘They get everything they need in the first few weeks, after that it's just comfort.’

‘What’s wrong with comfort?’ I asked.

‘This one you’re not going to spoil,’ she said. I thought that was an outrageous thing to say; we had a fight. She calmed me down by saying she had fallen in love with our family. She thought I was a terrific mother; my kids were the best kids she’d met aside from her own. That was the first I heard of her three children — two girls and a boy, grown now and moved away. Nat was a dark horse.