The feeling of delight in my body lasts all of one week, then wanes. My mom comes to visit in my 22nd week. While sitting on the couch, Ricky and I consider what to do with the placenta. It is an organ I have grown, and which grows my baby. I don’t want to just throw it away, incinerate it like trash. It is a hardwon piece of me and sacred in its fleshy way. We look up placentophagy – or eating it, while my mom stares pointedly at her knitting. Most people freeze dry it and make it into nice, neat little pills, but that sounds expensive. Instead Ricky looks up recipes, reading them out as my mother slowly sinks further and further into the couch: placenta chilli con carne, placenta lasagna. I think we should bury it. We consider the hole. It will have to be very deep. Who was willing to dig it? We could ask our gardener; he dug Plato’s grave. But that will require explaining why we want it. “Never mind,” I say, “we’ll just pop it into the freezer till we figure it out”, which is the final straw for my mother, who throws down her knitting with the look a cat gets when you downgrade his feed.
My mother and I spend the day baking, cooking and shopping, planting flowers on Plato’s grave and then, to end it, a whirlwind tear through the study, which I have been using as an art room and which will be the baby’s room. We had been piling a growing mound of stuff into two boxes and the floor in anticipation of having more room when we renovate the kitchen and dining room. But without a job, it seems wrongheaded for us to spend at this point and we decide to suspend the renovation till we’re more certain of things.
My mother suggests we box the art stuff and put it in the garage so the baby’s room can take shape. I’m tired and footsore. I agree. All of my craft stuff is handled and boxed, all my sewing stuff, my paints and canvases, my half-finished pictures and projects, my colours carefully chosen, my spools of thread, my sharp material scissors, my brushes washed in turps and massaged with linseed oil. I watch as my mother handles a small, almost complete painting of Ricky naked, as she tries to close the lid on my crate of folded skeins of shweshwe and cotton, linen and calico, as she unravels a space that used to be just mine. In the evening we attend an antenatal class on zoom and learn about perineum massage. Exhausted, I go to bed.
But I wake at midnight, strangely bereft. I ponder the feeling, noting a rising panic. Is it the baby? That must be it. I haven’t felt her for hours, days even. Has she died? Is she in distress? I know the foetus is not yet viable, meaning that if she goes into distress in the uterus now, cutting her out won’t help: she won’t survive on the outside. But I’ve become increasingly obsessed with feeling her.
Our midwife has put this fear into me, I bemoan, by emphasising that after viability – or 26 weeks – you must feel 10 kicks a day. If you don’t, you must urgently contact her and she can check the baby with a machine. If she is in distress, then something can be done. If you lose concentration, however, it could be too late. Though I’m a month away from this even mattering, I keep worrying about feeling activity. I keep prodding her, and mewling at her, trying to get a reassuring reaction, the foetus equivalent of a WhatsApp blue tick. Just tell me you’re okay. I must know. I must know. And even before this little squirrel has made it onto dry land, I am badgering her with my gargantuan fear.
I get into a tizz lying in bed and wake Ricky. “I can’t feel her,” I whisper, and begin to cry. Ricky says something comforting and falls back asleep. I cry some more, then wake him up again. “What if she’s dead?” “She’s not dead.” I curl up. I start saying how I didn’t feel her when we baked and cooked, or when we shopped for so many hours or when we planted the flowers or when we cleaned out my art room.
Oh, my art room. All my stuff. All my stuff! Just turfed away like it was nothing, just bagged and banged up in the garage. All those maybes, my great and undoable love, the expressiveness I could never quite gestate and give birth to, all swept away. And by my mother. As it was happening I could feel something was wrong, some process was not being undertaken, some mourning not being done. Something was coming away from me, a part of myself was being dismantled, and I could not stop it: it had to be done. It had to be done, but perhaps not in the way it was. It was a private thing, the putting away of one’s self to make room for another. This was more a murder than a send off. I weep. Ricky sleeps and wakes and we speak in the dark. I fall asleep again sometime after 1am.
The next day, after my mother has left, I stand in the now-neat room. There is a bit of green thread, and there a feather, under the table a packet of seeds, small tokens litter the place, as though it were hastily cleaned after a bomb went off. This will be the baby’s room. It is no longer mine. Her alphabet worm is in the cupboard, as are the size-two leather shoes with little foxes on and the blanket my mother’s dead sister knitted for me and which will now be my daughter’s. The place seems also to be adjusting, trying to find a comfortable position for this new pose it must take. Now, here, I will be a mother. I must endure this metamorphosis. I must liquify so something new can be stitched from the soup.
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