Lately I’ve been thinking about sobriety. I have been sober for four years, so not drinking during pregnancy should be no different, yet somehow it has been. My husband went away for two friend-soaked weekends recently while I stayed home, eating lasagna and moaning about the dogs like Garfield. Between sobriety and Covid, I sort of lost my way to fun. Now that I really can’t drink, I begin to wonder – perversely – should I?
Something about my utter helplessness in the face of what is taking place in my body has triggered this. It is to do with a new sense of my rigidity, my frozenness in the flow of life. I want to be powerful and in charge. I want a big fat career I can wield like a cudgel at parties, beating people with my prowess and success.
When my doula called attention to the movement of water, I was reminded of a trip I took on my own over New Years. Sitting by a river, I had come to understand that part of why we suffer is because we hold too firm, too rigid. We should be soft, like water, softening always into everything that comes along, the fear and the joy both. (The issue here is the imperative “should”. Ironically, I become hard about being soft, militantly demanding I soften up, soften in. Melt! Melt, goddamn you!)
The feminine way is to soften into it, allow, let ourselves be moved by whatever is in our world, and thus we move around it, taking the course of least resistance but also learning this obstacle’s shape, and by running by it, we soften its edges, and so affect the world in turn. I think I want to drink because I want to be loose like this, no longer clutching, white-knuckled, for dominion and domain. I am coming to see that I am not in charge, and that anything can happen.
Each time I pee, and it is frequently, I look at the toilet paper. Will I find blood? Will this all go up in flames, like last time? I came home from the shops and found a 10c-sized coin of brown blood in my underpants. I bled slowly, brown blood, then fresh, then brown, and on and off, so it took many days to understand and to come to know completely what was happening. Then I bled heavily – one night it pulsed out of me to the beat of my heart. I worried I was haemorrhaging – for a further 13 days.
Now every day on the toilet I divide neatly into two parts: one is a Catholic schoolgirl, the other despises her. The Catholic wants to please a father God by complying with a set of well-defined rules. If I say a mantra/prayer before wiping everything will be okay. Just be positive. No bad thoughts. If I’m good, very good, I’ll get to keep the baby. The other is disgusted by how all this hollows out the depth of mystery and strangeness with which we must all live. She is calm and worshipful, in awe and at war with the Catholic.
The schoolgirl wants to live in an intelligible world in which good is rewarded, prayers are answered, things make sense, and there is a knowable hierarchy you can hack through something like a points system (you can, for example, achieve diamond status through charitable works and not masturbating). The other one scoffs at this, wants me to be perpetually barefoot padding through the woods and elongating my vowels, scorning money, communing with fire and trying to swap homemade jam for goods and services. Between the two I balance as on a wire, looking at the toilet paper, hoping for a good outcome but knowing it is not in my hands. This is my form of surrender.
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