My Five-Year-Old Son Looked at Our Newborn Baby and Whispered, "That's Not My Sister" — I Thought He Was Jealous Until He Told Me What Happened at the Hospital
My Five-Year-Old Son Looked at Our Newborn Baby and Whispered, "That's Not My Sister" — I Thought He Was Jealous Until He Told Me What Happened at the Hospital
The night we brought her home, Ned stopped in the doorway of the nursery and would not go another step.
He stood there completely still, looking at the cot, and the look on his face got me straight away.
It was not jealousy and it was not temper.
He was frightened.
And then he went backwards, slowly, and said: "Mummy. You've brought the wrong baby home."
For about a second I thought he was being funny.
That boy had spent nine months counting down to his sister. He chose the blankets. He picked a stuffed rabbit for her cot out of about forty of them in a shop in Harrowbeck and would not be moved on it. He announced to his entire class that he was going to be the best big brother there had ever been.
And at the hospital he had been besotted with her.
He sat up on that bed next to me with her hand round his finger and told her, very seriously, that he was going to look after her.
Which is why what happened at home made no sense at all.
He would not go near her. He would not touch her and he would not say her name. When she cried he put his hands over his ears and went into another room like the noise was coming for him.
And Tam and I decided it was jealousy, because that is what it looks like in a leaflet.
And then one evening I found him sitting on the floor outside her room with his face wet.
"That baby isn't my sister."
And this time there was nothing stubborn in it at all.
I got down next to him and took his hands and asked him, properly, why he kept saying it.
And he looked towards the door and got tighter round my fingers and dropped his voice.
"Because I saw what they did at the hospital. After Daddy took me to get a juice."
What he saw.
On the fifth of October, at about four in the afternoon, my husband took our five-year-old down to the machine on the ground floor at St Ewan's.
Coming back they went the wrong way round — up the stairs at the far end and along the corridor from the other direction, past four rooms instead of one.
And one of the doors was open.
In that room there was a woman sitting up in a bed on her own, crying — not quietly — and a midwife with her hand on her shoulder.
And about four seconds after they went past it, a different midwife came out of the treatment room behind them carrying a baby in a cot on wheels, and went into my room.
That is what my son saw. In that order, in about eleven seconds, at five years old.
A woman crying about a baby. A baby being wheeled out of a room near her. The same baby going in to his mum.
And he put it together the way anybody would with that information and a five-year-old's idea of how a hospital works.
What actually happened.
Nothing.
That is the whole of it, and it took three days, two phone calls and a woman called Catrin going back through a ward log to establish, and I want it stated plainly because the version that goes round Harrowbeck is not this one.
My daughter was taken to the treatment room at twenty to four for the heel-prick and the second hearing check, which I had signed for, and which I knew about, and which I had forgotten within about ninety seconds because I had been awake for thirty-one hours.
She was gone eighteen minutes. She came back in a different hat, because they had taken the one she went in with, and in a cot with a card on it that had been rewritten because the first one had got wet.
Different hat, different card, and a brother who had been away getting a juice.
And the woman in the other room — and this is the part I have had to be careful with, and I have been given permission to say this much and no more — had lost her baby that afternoon.
That is why she was crying. She was not crying about a baby being taken out of her room. She had no baby to take out.
Nothing was swapped. Nothing went wrong with my daughter. A hospital did its job and a five-year-old watched eleven seconds of a corridor and built a whole thing out of it.
Except that is not quite the whole of it either.
The three days of finding out, which I spent in a state I am not proud of.
Because I did not believe him at first. That has to go in.
I sat on that landing and heard a five-year-old say I saw what they did and my first thought was not what did you see. It was where has he got this from.
I asked him whether he had seen it on something. I asked him twice.
And then at about eleven that night, when he was asleep, I was downstairs on my phone looking up whether babies get mixed up in hospitals, and by one in the morning I had read eleven articles and watched a thing from another country and I had my daughter's hospital bands out of the memory box on the kitchen table.
Both of them. The ankle one and the wrist one. I checked the number against the discharge letter at about half one in the morning with a magnifying glass off the shelf.
They matched. Obviously they matched.
And then I sat at that table and did the thing that I think a lot of women do at half one in the morning with a nine-day-old upstairs, which is look at my own daughter's face on my phone and try to decide whether it was the face I had seen on the fourth.
Four minutes of that. I want it written down because nobody writes it down.
I rang the ward at ten past nine the next morning and asked, in a very calm voice, whether there was any possibility that my daughter had been in a room with another baby.
And the woman who took that call did not laugh at me. She said: "Let me get the person who was on."
What his father said.
There is one more piece, and it is the piece, and it did not come out for another eleven days.
In that corridor, going past that open door, my husband did what any parent does, which is try to move a child along.
And what he said — and he has told me exactly, and he has told the woman we have been seeing exactly, and he does not try to soften it — was:
***"Don't look in there, mate. That's not ours."***
He meant the room. He meant: that is somebody else's business, keep walking, do not stare at a woman who is upset.
Ned was looking through that door at a cot.
Three weeks.
For three weeks my son would not go within four feet of his sister because his father had said that's not ours within about a second and a half of him seeing a baby, and because at five years old there is no part of your head that goes, hold on, which noun?
And Tam remembered saying it in about four seconds, on the night Ned finally got it out, sitting on the floor of that landing.
I watched it arrive on my husband's face.
What I did for three weeks.
And now mine, which is the part I have had to go at properly with a woman called Marisa Quill since the January.
I asked him four times.
And all four times I asked the same closed question, in slightly different words.
***Are you cross about the baby?***
***Are you feeling a bit left out, love?***
***Is it hard having a sister?***
***Do you wish it was just us again?***
Four questions, all of which contained the answer I had already decided on, and all of which that boy answered no to, truthfully, because none of them were about what was actually wrong.
And after the fourth no, I heard it as him being difficult.
I never once said: tell me what you saw.
Not one open question in twenty-two days.
And here is the reason, and it is not that I am stupid.
Jealousy was a brilliant explanation. Jealousy is normal, jealousy is in every leaflet in that hospital, jealousy passes, and jealousy required precisely nothing from me except patience.
I had a nine-day-old, stitches, a husband back at work after a fortnight, and a four-hour night.
I needed the answer to be something I did not have to do anything about.
So I chose the explanation with no work in it, and I defended it for three weeks against a child who was telling me, out loud, in plain English, every single day, that it was something else.
And the twenty-two days from the inside, which I have had to be honest about with Marisa because the version I told everybody was cleaner.
I did not spend three weeks patiently waiting for a jealous child to come round.
On the fourteenth of October I made him sit on the chair for four minutes because he would not say her name at dinner.
On the nineteenth I told him, in a voice I did not know I had, that he was being unkind.
Unkind. To a five-year-old who was frightened.
And on the twenty-second — which is the one — I was changing her on the floor and he came as far as the doorway, which he had not done in a fortnight, and I said: "Come and see your sister."
And he said no.
And I said: "Ned. She's going to remember this."
She was eighteen days old. She was going to remember nothing. I said it to a child because I was tired and because I wanted him to feel something, and it worked, and he cried, and he still did not come in.
There is not much in my life I would take back word for word. That one I would.
Because what I was actually saying to a frightened boy was: your sister will hold this against you — about a baby he had spent three weeks believing had been taken from a woman in another room.
The other half.
And there is a worse one underneath, which took until about the March.
I was relieved when he said it.
On that landing, when he finally said because I saw what they did at the hospital, the first thing through me — before the fear, before anything about my daughter — was relief.
Because it meant it was not me.
For three weeks I had been doing the arithmetic every night that mothers do at four in the morning, and the number I kept getting was that my son had gone off me.
That I had been absent for two days and had come back with somebody else, and that something had broken between us that I was going to spend ten years mending.
And then he said the hospital and something in my chest unclenched, and for about four seconds I was pleased.
My son was sitting on a carpet in a state about a dead woman's baby and his mother was quietly relieved that it was not a problem with her.
What we did.
We took him back.
That was Catrin's idea — she is the midwife who went back through the log — and it is the single best piece of advice anybody gave us.
On the eleventh of November we drove to St Ewan's on a Tuesday morning with a five-year-old and a five-week-old and we walked that corridor.
Catrin met us. She did it properly: she showed him the treatment room, she showed him the little trolley cots, she let him look at the hats in the box and take one, and she explained — to him, at his height, in about four minutes — what they do and why a baby goes out and comes back.
And then she did the thing I would not have thought of.
She took him to the ward office and showed him the book.
The actual log, with my daughter's name in it, and the times: out at 15:42, back at 16:00, with a signature.
A five-year-old who cannot read properly stood at a desk and had a grown-up in a uniform point at a line in a book and say: that is your sister, going out, and that is your sister, coming back, and nobody else was in that room.
And he looked at it for a long time and then he said: "Can I have a copy?"
She photocopied it. It is in his room, on the board, next to a drawing of a dinosaur.
What took longer.
He was all right about his sister within about four days of that.
He was not all right about the woman.
Because the one thing Catrin could not do, and would not do, and was right not to do, is tell a five-year-old what had happened in that room.
So for about six weeks he had a different question, which he put to me in the car on the twenty-third of November.
He said: "Why was that lady crying then?"
And I had to decide, in about three seconds, at a roundabout, how much of the world a five-year-old gets.
And what I said — after checking with Marisa Quill afterwards, and being told it was about right — was that sometimes babies are poorly and do not get to come home, and that the lady in that room was very sad because that had happened to her.
And he was quiet for about a mile.
And then he said: "Does she know Bee came home?"
Which is the question I have not been able to put down.
What I did about it.
I wrote to the hospital in the December.
Not to her. I did not know her name and I was never going to be given it and I did not ask.
I wrote to the ward, and I asked whether there was any way a card could be passed, and I said in the letter that I understood entirely if the answer was no.
The answer was mostly no. They cannot pass things between families. But the woman who wrote back — not Catrin, somebody senior — did something that I think about a lot.
She said that the bereavement midwife holds a book, and that families leave things in it, and that if we wanted to write something that was not addressed to anybody in particular, it would go in that book, and that the book is on a table in a room that those families use.
So Ned dictated four lines and I wrote them, because his writing is terrible, and he signed it himself.
It says: My sister went out of the room for eighteen minutes on the 5th of October and I thought someone had swapped her. I am sorry about your baby. From Ned, age 5.
And then he drew a rabbit on it.
I have no idea whether anybody has ever read it. That is the correct outcome and I have had to be at peace with it.
Tam.
My husband had three weeks of letting a theory run that he knew, somewhere, he might have caused.
He has said since that he had a feeling about the corridor from about the second week — not the sentence, not clearly, but a sense that something had happened on that walk — and that he did not say anything because jealousy was going round the house and was easier.
And when I was angry about that, in the November, for about four days, he said one thing that stopped it.
He said: "I know. And you were doing the same thing."
Which was true, and which I did not enjoy, and which is the only time in eleven years that man has said something like that to me, and he was right to.
We did six sessions with Marisa, which were mostly about us and not about Ned, which neither of us expected.
And Catrin, who did not have to do any of it.
She is a midwife of about fifty and she was on that afternoon and she is the one who rang me back on the eighth.
She had gone through the ward log on her own time. She told me so when I asked, straightforwardly, without making anything of it: she came in early on the Thursday because the day book had already gone to be filed.
She gave me the times. She gave me the hat. She gave me the thing about the cot card getting wet, which is the detail that made the whole of it make sense and which nobody would ever have thought to mention.
And then she said the sentence that organised the next three months of my family's life.
She said: "He's not making it up and he's not confused. He's seen four true things and put them in the wrong order. That's all this is."
***Four true things in the wrong order.***
I have used that about nine times since — about Ned, about Bee, about my husband, once about my own mother.
And when I rang the ward in the December to ask about the card for the book, I asked for Catrin by name and was told she had retired in the November.
Three weeks after she came in early on a day off to read a book for a woman she had met twice.
Where things are.
Bee is thirteen months.
She is enormous and she is obsessed with her brother to a degree that is slightly embarrassing for everybody.
Ned is six and a half. He had four sessions with somebody in the spring, which were not about the corridor in the end, and which were useful anyway.
And he has a thing now — which started on his own and which nobody taught him — where if something is bothering him he says I've got a hospital thing, which means it is a thing he has seen or heard that he has not understood and wants explained.
He used it about once a week for a year. Most of them have been nothing. One of them, in the June, was not nothing and was about a boy at school, and we got to it in about four days instead of three weeks.
And the eighteen minutes, which I slept through.
That is the detail I have had to sit with longest, and it has nothing to do with my son.
At twenty to four on the fifth of October a midwife came in, told me she was taking my daughter down for the heel-prick and the hearing check, and I said yes and signed something.
And then I went to sleep.
I had been awake since one o'clock on the fourth. I had been in that bed about thirty-one hours. I went out like a light and I was still out when she came back at four, and I did not properly surface until about twenty past.
So when my son came into that room with his juice, the only adult in it who could have told him what had happened was unconscious.
He stood in a doorway at five years old having seen a woman crying and a baby being wheeled about, and the one person he would have asked was asleep with her mouth open.
And he did not wake me. He got up on the chair and waited.
Tam says he was quiet for about ten minutes, which for Ned is unheard of, and that he assumed it was tiredness.
Ten minutes of a five-year-old sitting in a chair with a carton of juice, next to his sleeping mother, deciding what he had just seen.
That is where the whole of it was built. Not the corridor. The ten minutes afterwards, in silence, in a room where every adult was either asleep or somewhere else.
And the last thing.
The rabbit.
He chose it in a shop before she was born and he was extremely particular about it and it went into her cot in the September.
And on the eighth of October — the day after we came home — it was gone.
I thought it had gone in the wash. I actually bought a second one in the November and then found the first one afterwards, which is why there are two.
It was in the bottom of his wardrobe, inside a wellington boot, under a jumper.
I found it on the fifteenth of November, four days after the hospital, when I was putting his winter things out.
And I sat on the floor of my son's bedroom holding a stuffed rabbit in a boot and understood exactly what it was.
He had taken it out of that cot on his first morning home.
Because he was five, and because he had been given eleven seconds of corridor and one sentence from his father, and because he had concluded that the baby in that room belonged to the lady who was crying.
And you do not leave your rabbit — the one you chose, the one you were particular about — in the cot of a baby who is going to have to be given back.
He was not keeping it from her. He was keeping it for his sister, for when they sorted it out.
I did not say anything about it. I put it back in the boot, and I put the boot back, and I waited.
And on the twenty-eighth of November, about a fortnight after the hospital, I came down in the morning and Bee was asleep in the chair and the rabbit was in with her.
He had put it back himself, in the night, on his way to the toilet, without saying one word to either of us.
May you like
And he has never mentioned it, and I never have, and he is six and a half now and I think there is a decent chance he does not remember doing it.
But for twenty-two days, that boy kept his own rabbit in a wellington boot in the dark, because a baby he thought was somebody else's had been put in his sister's cot — and because at five years old he had worked out that if you cannot fix a thing, you can at least not let it take anything else.
