'I dance, he hoots with laughter'

When he is a bit older, still a baby, not hungry or cold, he yells that he's bored, that he wants to go out, that he wants to go home, that he's sick of being dependent, that he hates us. Out of laziness, out of irritation, out of sadism, we leave him frothing at the mouth in rage, strapped into his bouncinette.

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Front-carrying baby slings are designed to indefinitely prolong pregnancy. I was wearing the baby in one the first time I took him outside, on a boulevard near our apartment.

A homeless man I know lives under the chestnut trees there. He congratulated me and gave me a hug. As soon as I turned the corner, I ran home and frantically soaped and washed the baby.

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I love patting his buttocks, on the big padded nappy. The sound of crumpled paper, like handling a toy.

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How incompetent of the grandparents not to buy the right packet of nappies. The baby weighs five kilos. Depending on the brand, the nappies are divided into sizes: from two to four kilos, from four to nine kilos, from seven to 18 kilos. Each brand has its own chart, listing age, size, even gender.

The grandparents, all of them longsighted, are physiologically incapable of deciphering the reference to weight, the only important one, in small print on the side of the packet.

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When he was born, I wanted to get pregnant again immediately. I wanted to make him again, him, the same. I wanted to have two of him, three of him, collect his clones, give birth to him in an eternal present tense.

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Now, watching television, when I see a woman holding a baby in her arms, walking along a road in a war-torn country, I wonder if she has been able to feed him, if she has been able to change him. I know that's what she'll be thinking about.

For the first time, I appreciate the intense stress she's going through. To have to leave her home, with the crying baby, who will soon cry with hunger. Who will have nowhere to rest. Who will fall sick. To have to be the baby's home, without any help, without any magic.

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Every day I'm amazed that the baby feeds exclusively on milk. So milk is the miracle food, royal jelly for humans. It makes brain cells, muscles, skin. The baby is made of milk, molecules of milk piled on top of each other; white flesh, like that of a calf or a piglet.

The baby is cost-effective, according to the baby's father. Leaving aside the breastfeeding, seven kilos of powdered milk have produced four kilos of baby: very little loss involved. On the scale of an adult, that means drinking nothing but milk, eight to nine litres of it a day.

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Without fail, every time the baby catches sight of one of our friends or family members, he starts crying, and embarrasses us all – he's a genius at it.

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"So what did you do to make this child so premature?"

So much for the sympathy of the midwife when it came to the synthetic hormone medication I was exposed to as a fetus, and which 30 years later still produces the same symptoms in my own uterus. Even though she was aware of the symptoms, it was as if I had – ha! – a good excuse for being such a bad mother.

Later, the same midwife came across me writing: "That will interfere with your let-down reflex."

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When I was a teenager, I tried out various versions of the world. All it took were a few drugs to dissolve certainties – about colours, about the sequencing of time, about what was vertical and what horizontal, about sounds and tastes, touch and gravity.

On the basis of these memories, I like to imagine the insane novelty of the baby's experience. Apparently, some of the brightly coloured television shows for very young children are based on psychedelic trips and are a favourite of acid-takers.

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We rock him, and rock him, and rock him. The baby's father dreams up an electric piston engine on a lever arm, attached to the crib.

At last, after a few months, we devise a simple rule: if the baby's cries make either of us miserable, we can pick him up without giving it another thought.

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I know an 18-month-old child who takes it upon himself to lift up his mother's clothes to suck on her breasts. The arrogance of this little boy, the manners he has missed out on in his learning and the consequent damage he suffers, the humiliation of the mother who is devoured by her son in public – it all disgusts me.

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I remember photographs of the baby better than the baby himself. The photographs capture his face in a precise moment; they flatten it, break the spell: he crosses into the material world. Then I can see him. And I gaze at him when he's asleep. The rest of the time, he is a lively presence, an explosion, an obstacle in space – the space that he twists, stirs up, throws around, and bursts.

I see a round splash of light, two sparkles of blue, a smile. Or a purple lump crouched in a scream. Or else I hear panting, I see a beak in a V-shape; or I smell his warmth, the aroma of flour and of milk, the pastryness of his flesh; or I feel the strength of his fingers. I can almost focus on his mouth, wide open for swallowing, attentive, or smiling.

And so, is there anything between these founts of life? The connection eludes me. That is how he is separate from me: I can only envisage the parts, the central image of the coat of arms remains hidden from me. The baby is this inconceivable, secret creature, both complete and nebulous, in the making.

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I knead dough, sunlight on the tiled floor. He is sitting back in his stroller, sucking the snout of his rubber giraffe. I hum waltzes, circus music and paso dobles, in snatches and medleys, crooning or warbling.

I behave like an idiot, I dance for him, he hoots with laughter, his eyes follow me all around the kitchen. I am the queen, the best of all mothers, the most beautiful, the most amusing, his motherstar, his true love.

I grab him out of his stroller and we waltz. He is an excellent dancer.

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Lying in his bed, he watches the elephants turn. It is an elegant mobile, Danish, blades of plastic in cut-outs: a red elephant, a blue elephant, a yellow elephant. I chose it.

The baby's father observes soberly that all the baby can see is three slivers of plastic and a brass frame.

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Today the baby is coughing. The first thing I think of is germ warfare. Ever since I saw a report on the television about it, I am obsessed by the idea of getting him vaccinated against smallpox.

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Our apartment is defiled by this presence: it is a trap, a pit bristling with baby-impaling spikes, a nest of slipknots, of vipers. We child-proof the handles of the bassinet: we are criminals never to have considered how lethal this object was!

Later on, when he begins to crawl, we try to view the apartment calmly, not from the perspective of potential death, but with his exploring eyes: a playground seen from the height of 70 centimetres.

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One night, in the maternity ward, I went down to see the baby; he was, I estimate, about 60 hours old. When the sun rose, he would be three days old.

As a preventive measure, the paediatric nurse had settled him on his back: something about his hips, or else the notion that, two months premature and three days old, he should not get into any bad habits.

An upside-down tortoise, he was thrashing his limbs in the air, feeling for the walls of the uterus that were no longer there; and he was crying himself hoarse, a pathetic little dinging bell behind the plexiglass.

I went to find the nurse. She was on her break, I was playing the role of the anxious pain in the arse – the mother. What about the decreasing oxygen levels? The cardiac alarm signal going off? I knew he should be building up his strength. I knew he should be sleeping on his belly, nestling, feeling secure.

The nurse, she knew that he would end up a cripple if he lay there like a frog, she knew that in a few weeks, at home with us, he would have to sleep on his back anyway, otherwise Snap! Sudden death!

I came back to the incubator. I opened the door, and the moist heat rose up inside my sleeve. I slid my hand under his back, and in one movement, without worrying about the wires, tubes and electrodes, I flipped him over like a crêpe. A second later, he was asleep. The alarms went silent.

That night I learned I was his mother.

This is an edited extract from The Baby by Marie Darrieussecq (Text Publishing Australia).