The next Monday, we put down our old dog, Plato. It had been a long time coming, as he weakened and Ricky took to giving him helicopter rides up and down the stairs in our house and to the garden. Finally he could no longer hoof himself up at all, and so couldn’t go get a drink or pee. We decided he had crossed the line between quality of life and not. Still, it was a slow decline and nothing was different between Sunday, when he was allowed to live, and Monday, when we had organised his demise. It seemed cruel and strange, and yet we also felt it was the right thing to do.
We buy him a pie and a rice crispy square and take him to the park in his carry cart. He sits with us by a lake and shouts at the ducks and other dogs. Ricky cries twice there and many more times at home, vomiting once when feeding him his last meal. I don’t cry and wonder if there’s something wrong with me.
We debate if I should be part of this. Will the killing and the subsequent sadness affect the baby? We decide that grief is one of the emotions that runs through life, and in utero too, as long as I let it flow and don’t let it get stuck anywhere in my body. So I worry that I’m not crying because I wonder if I’m somehow storing up this well of sorrow that will drown my child who will, 30 years down the line, wonder why she has a small but pervasive underlying depression.
At home we sit under the tree and have a cup of tea, Plato’s head on Ricky’s lap, the other dogs ranged around. Then the vet and her assistant arrive. They ask if we’re ready and we say yes, even though I feel a rising panic. No! I’m not ready. She injects him with two strong-smelling vials of anaesthetic. I watch and feel as the life drains out of him. She listens to his heart for a full minute before saying, “He’s gone.” But I could feel he was gone. All the way through, his small trusting self allowed all this to take place as we stroked him and said, Good boy, good boy. Distantly, in the house, I heard the rest of the pack go into a barking frenzy. When I let the vet out, Dudley, our other dog, tries to bite the assistant.
Once the gate closes behind them, I really begin to cry. We sit with the body, weeping. We let the other dogs out and they sniff him. Sister tries to play with us, dropping the ball on Plato’s body. We wrap him in a sheet I washed the night before and carry him out to a massive hole our gardener dug some days before. Ricky gets in and then pulls the body in and lays it down. We begin filling the hole, stopping to cry and talk softly about the death and about his life. I feel the baby kicking inside me. Afterwards there is nothing reasonable to do, and for the first time ever I wish my house were dirty so I could clean it. I lie on the couch, then end up watching Netflix.
The next day I must do my taxes. After we woke I mentioned to Ricky that I thought I would take my doula’s course after all. We were already taking our midwife’s antenatal course, but it was the medical perspective, and I wanted insight into natural, unmedicated births, especially home births, which I was planning to do. Ricky was wary of the costs piling up. My doula was more expensive than other doulas by about half, and my midwife was also one of the priciest out there (she only takes five clients a month to be sure she can attend each birth).
The fight starts slowly, and those are never good, the slow burners, the ones that build. It builds all morning, as I print out my bank statements and while Ricky sends emails. It builds over breakfast and beyond, until it becomes a proper screaming fight – something we hadn’t had in years. He doesn’t understand why I want a doula in the first place, and why this one, the most expensive in town. He thinks she’s a fraud and that I’m being hoodwinked.
I cannot explain why exactly, words keep leaving me, but I simply do want it: the expensive midwife and doula and the two courses, all of it. I want to be prepared. He says I’m giving away my power to these women who are taking advantage of me. I tell him not to be patronising. It devolves. We bring up the past. Finally it comes down to money and power, money and power, as it always has.
I scream something, and he screams back, “Why don’t you go eat your placenta with the rest of your coven?” (which I find funny only much later). I take my computer and my bank statements and go to the library where I do my taxes for two hours. It is awkward when I return and the fight starts up again. More crying. I worry about the baby. When he asked why I left I said it was because I had a duty to protect the baby, but that wasn’t altogether true. I felt I wanted to protect myself. I couldn’t handle the voice boring into me any longer.
A few days later I speak to my therapist about it and we play with the idea that though Ricky certainly does have these opinions, their massive effect on me seems disproportionate and perhaps that’s because he represents or I’m projecting onto him a voice I carry around inside myself. I know the voice. It is my mother’s voice and her mother’s, my aunt’s voice and my girl cousin’s. It is my voice. And each voice says to herself: be practical, be small, be quiet, don’t make a fuss, don’t make waves, shut up, be quick and seamless, don’t make a mess, you are not good enough, you are not worthy, you should try harder, you could be better. This is how to be a woman, this is how to be in the world, get it done, stop making it difficult, be happy, have fun, slap a smile on that dial, try, try, try, don’t use up more than your fair share, or more than you deserve or, better, use as little as possible. The money/food/time/love is extremely scarce. Do not waste. That most of all. Do not waste.
Wanting the expensive support team, wanting both courses, wanting a home birth or to be at home in my body is a gargantuan waste, a gargantuan ask from someone who should be dedicated to neatness and smallness, to frugality and silence, the just-swept kitchen, the freshly made cake, iced and ready to go, the old underpants used to mop up spills, are all poured into the same dirty dish water, they all swirl together to form a kind of soupy sorrow passed from mother to daughter, down the line, all the way down the line.
I see a line of women with me in front, my mother behind and behind her my grandmother, all the way back. And in front of me my bulging belly with a new daughter in it. I do not want to hand this to her. So I must now somehow turn around and hand back to my mother what she unconsciously gave me. I cannot do it all the way. I will certainly pass some of this burden on, some of this voice, this weird sadness that the women in my line heave and swallow and regurgitate one into the next. But I can hand back some of what is not mine. I can say: This is yours. It was given to you by your mother. You might choose to return it to her, or you might choose to carry it, but I no longer wish to hold what is not mine. I am going to step away from this chain of women and walk my own path, so my daughter can walk hers. The chain will never be fully broken. I will always live linked to my ancestors – and I am grateful for them too. But I can stretch the chain between us, so there is room to roam and grow and gather what is mine. I try this as a meditation and each time I am filled more and more with sadness. I don’t know why. Maybe these kinds of breaks with tradition always leave a wound. But it cannot be any worse than the wounds we hold and pass on.
Ricky and I apologise and comment on our depletion after Plato’s death contributing to the heat of the fight. We decide to choose a new, cheaper doula, but I insist on taking the expensive doula’s course. We are both vaguely unhappy, and so the compromise is sealed.
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