Almost eleven weeks now, and the nausea is beginning to ease off, though it is always humming in the background. This does not mean the experience is any less physical. I am now always – thunk! – in a body contemplating pendulousness. My nipples pop dark and large and begin to peel. I ask my husband to buy proper nipple cream, pure lanolin, which is the good stuff according to the internet, but he finds one full of petroleum jelly, a fossil fuel! I use it.
My breasts become weighty, my belly curves outward. I am not sure if this is the baby or all the sugar I am eating. I simply cannot stop consuming mounds of sugary foods and drinks (“Another hot chocolate? Really?” my husband unwisely asked one morning.) I feel this burning sensation in my torso all the way down to my lower back. I look up “burning in lower abdomen pregnant” and keep getting results for heartburn. It is not heartburn, although I do have that too. This is some other species. I feel burned inside, scorched. My whole digestive system is alive to me. I can feel the food in my stomach and then in my small intestines and then my large. I feel amoebic, ancient and floating in a slightly acidic ocean. I cry when my husband jokingly refuses to buy me Big Korn Bites.
But, although I feel all these life-consuming symptoms, my whole body awash with this pregnancy, I am far from any connection to the baby. Baby, baby. When I think of it, I think of a money pit, screeching hell at dawn, bad smells, becoming a husk, never writing, artless and fartful and desperate, bitching at my husband and growing a great wobbling jowl, yelling at the baby who yells right back and crying hopeless in the dark, keening for a life lost and subsumed in a hellish vortex of baby talk and ei eye ei eye oh. All the wives I’ve hung with who have had babies are completely incapable of full sentences, sit on rubberised, colourful mats beside compartmentalised lunch boxes full of baby carrots and tiny plain pretzels, looking wistful and washed out (though often with improbably straightened hair and neat, white jerseys) but always utterly absorbed and indifferent to me. Conversations begin but never end. It is, in a word, boring.
Being in academic circles and then in environmental circles has only underlined my feelings: babies, without frontal lobes, make terrible scholars, and also actively destroy an already ailing planet. (Not knowing we were trying to get pregnant, vegan friends of ours went on a short but seering rant about how some people still insist on having children even when they know the planet is burning. As meat-eating would-be breeders – but also hypocrites – Ricky and I nodded emphatically into our water-slurping, nonorganic Checkers coffees. The bastards.)
So I make an appointment with my doula. I need to change my mind. And I want to connect with this being growing inside me, this portal, the one coming to incarnate in the vessel I’m growing – or something. In the past four years I’ve got heavily into new age books, especially the ones where very earnest people hypnotise equally earnest people who are regressed either into past lives or to the in-between place. These are my favourites, the detailed descriptions of lives between lives (this last phrase is incidentally the name of at least a couple of the books I’ve read – and I’ve read scores of them). So it is not a stretch for me when my doula suggests a visualisation in which I meet the spirit of my child.
She puts on ubiquitous sitar music while her diffuser bubbles out a steady stream of high-end essential oils, which she also sells. I like my doula. While I was so nauseous with morning sickness she said, “Some women take heroin while pregnant. Just eat whatever you want. And keep eating.”
Now she teaches me circular breathing and does a relaxation session before asking me to imagine being by a body of water. I see a river, a “brook” if we were in England, and a paisley blanket on which I sit. She tells me to hold in my attention the way the water moves along the path of least resistance. I note this, then think of vomiting into the water and imagine the vomit being carried away along the path of least resistance.
Then my doula asks me to imagine someone coming, the spirit of my child. I feel a whoosh of feeling run through me and tears prickle under my eyelids and slide down my face, curve around my chin and run into my neck. I’m acutely aware of their path. I can’t quite see the being, but it is a woman with something like a fish tail. She is by far my elder, wise and calm, and I know her. I feel the strong urge to apologise to her, to go on my knees. She clasps my hands together and is happy, smiling, like a matriarch meeting a maiden with much to learn. “Be joyful,” she says. “Be prayerful.” She hands me a red ruby that looks like a token in a video game. I hold it between my palms, which are held together between her two hands.
I am so moved by this woman, the one coming, and I am shocked that I will birth someone so much my better. Afterwards, I feel a great weight has been lifted off me. I am not alone. The one coming is clear and sharp and intent. She has simple instructions and she is full of an easy laughter.
I leave buoyed, and afterwards get two massive fantasy books from the library (along with my food tastes drastically changing, so has my reading. I decide to begin the Wheel of Time series.)
When I get home and tell my husband about the visualisation, he raves about chicanery while we eat ham sandwiches (only later do I find out ham is verboten in pregnancy), suggesting I got the fish tail image from a bizarre Al Jazeera clip I’d shown him of the latest craze in Joburg: “mermaiding”, in which grown people don fish tail flippers and flop around a public pool. I had felt sorry for him, missing all this depth and mystery, not experiencing either the drastic shifts in the body or the new connection with the baby and its spirit, but he calls my doula a chancer and a charlatan and asks if one of the oils she sells is snake oil. So much for that.
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