At 13 weeks I wake with a very sore jaw. That morning at 3.30am I opened my eyes in the pitch dark. The power was off. I checked the loadshedding schedule. It was an unannounced outage. I began to fume, then worry. Did Ricky plug the internet into the mains and turn the battery off? Finally I got up and was met with an eerie blue glow in the dining room. The battery had been on all night, and was almost run down. And there was no power. I cursed out loud and Ricky woke up. I found him sitting up in bed going, “Fuck, fuck, the battery,” head in hands. Without the battery there’s no internet and we can’t work. Our tenants also rely on us to keep the internet on during loadshedding.
It had been a week and a half already of stage six rolling blackouts, meaning 12 hours a day of no power. Trying to live like this requires a form of intense nimbleness. You must be well ahead of the curve, defrosting food for dinner by the power of the sun and keeping batteries charged and ready. Don’t run out of candles. Don’t forget the battery on and run it down. Put the gate on manual; put the gate back on automatic. Don’t get stuck outside or inside. Leave 10 minutes before you have to in case the gates don’t work.
In the early hours I said to Ricky that there was no power and he asked if we could have run out of credits on our meter. A cold wind swept through me. Our metre is broken. If the power runs out you cannot load more electricity on it. You have to slink to the neighbour to do it and you can only do that at a reasonable time, like 8am. He checked. Zero. Then I began to cry. Not cry, howl. Loading power is my responsibility.
Two nights before this my mother in law fell in the bathroom and my husband received a 2.30am call to drive across the city to help her get up. He arrived back at dawn. She had broken her left wrist. Her right hand does not work, so she was now fresh out of usable appendages. That night we took them some curry and timed our arrival back home to coincide with the power coming back on, but it didn’t – an actual unscheduled outage.
In the dark of a single candle and the mighty cold (we heat the house with fire, which is cold and dead after an evening out) I tried to pour boiling water into a hot water bottle and ended up pouring it all over my left hand. After screeching, dropping the bottle and spilling water everywhere, I smeared on burn guard that had expired in 2019 and which had directions in Norwegian, for some reason, and bandaged it. Ricky made an ice pack, mentioning that he had used the last of the ice. The ice tray sat on the sink.
So at 13 weeks, when I wake with a sore jaw and my dentist asks if I’m stressed, I am able to say yes, unequivocally. She threatens a root canal but luckily I’m pregnant, so she tells me to gargle with warm salt water, use ice and heat alternately and to get a bite guard.
That afternoon, while the ice tray still sits on the counter so I can’t ice my jaw, I lose my job. Then the power fails to come back on for 24 hours. Everything dies, all the batteries. We run out of candles and sit in the dark. My colleagues and I start severance negotiations with a labour lawyer. Things get nasty quickly. I buy a Death by Chocolate magnum ice cream and eat it in the sun. The petrol price goes up. I decline the bite plate the medical aid won’t pay for and trawl the internet for work.
With all this happening, and because I no longer feel so ill (though I still gag when taking pills), I sort of forget I’m pregnant – though much of my worry is about not having enough money for maternity leave. So I waver between these two realities. I ask Ricky if maybe I’m not pregnant. He high fives me. Have I somehow digested this foetus? Has it dissolved? Its reality wanes.
This is despite our 12-week scan with the gynaecologist who waves the wand over my belly and calls up the most astonishing image: a fully formed ghost baby stretching and rolling and rocking back and forth. Ricky goes still and pale under his Covid mask. The doctor can barely take measurements, the baby is moving so much. How can there be so much life in me of which I am utterly unaware? But without the benefit of a live scan moving in front of me, I go back to feeling like this is all some sort of weird fever dream. I call a midwife anyway and make a 16-week appointment.
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