Now it is eight weeks. Each morning I open my eyes onto a lurching nausea and close my eyes at night on a slightly less lurching nausea. I am beset and constantly sick. I must eat all the time. If I stop, the queasy sensation becomes overwhelming and I quietly cry while I make toast and dare not open the fridge, the thought and smell of which makes me instantly gag.
I am shocked by how completely subsumed I am by this. What was I doing before? I wonder and can’t think. Nothing occurs to me. But before my life felt as full, as intense as it is now, if much less physically visceral. The nausea whips me over and over into my body. I cannot daydream or ponder for longer than a few minutes before I am sent hurtling back back back into my belly, my mouth full of saliva.
What was I doing before? I honestly can’t remember. Everything has come into a different focus, all things are seen through this new prism. And I wonder (but not for too long before I have to eat another banana), how much of our lives are spent moving from all-consuming thing to all-consuming thing? Before this pregnancy it was something else, though I can’t quite put my finger on it, and now this takes up every bit of my attention. Afterwards I will be as taken up by the next thing, the baby and then the toddler and then the child and then the teen, and alongside that, whatever my life is offering up.
It seems a great waste of effort and energy to be caught up so spectacularly by something, only for it to wane and pale when the next shiny thing comes along. Ricky thinks this means not holding on to outcomes. I think it means holding a light but persistent focus on the present. Both of us agree that the world pulls us back and back into its thrall, if by nothing else then by the demands of survival.
Beyond that, because if you’re middle class and healthy, as we are, survival is more or less assured, then it is the more frilly pressure to have a life, to find and fulfil your purpose, to contribute, make good, achieve something and so on.
Today we went for the eight-week scan. A tall jolly Afrikaans woman did it, squirting gel she’d heated almost to searing onto my abdomen and pressing hard towards my pubic bone. There, my womb, a great black hole, and in it a bean holding a white balloon: the baby. She turns on the sound and we hear the fast qua, qua, qua, 153 beats per minute. That heart has begun to beat and will continue to beat until the being dies.
My gran is 91 in a month. Her heart, like this child’s, began in the womb and never once stopped, not for a second. I feel this strange sorrow for the child, this longing, this sense of protectfulness, with my body wrapped around it, my heart a slower drum to walk by. I feel this ache for the beginnings of this life. What will the life be, that unfolds, is unfolding as of now? This fleshiness, this new fleshiness and the dumb flub of life, pulsing and pulsing unstoppably?
My gran wishes out loud and often that she could die already, as she waits in nappies by the window. But her heart will not hear of it, beats and beats and beats. There is also grief in the new pulse of life, the kind of grief that comes with beginnings, freshness, yes, but also callowness and the whole world awaits. There is grief in the end of things, which beginnings bring on. And I am in a kind of mourning too, even as I begin the life of a mother, overwhelmingly and absolutely, my whole life whittled down to a single point of nausea. I mourn for what is over.
But joy is here too, finally, a strange joy, just an inkling, but there now, assuredly and finally. It beats along with the heart.
Leave a Reply