Now I am 25 weeks pregnant and really starting to feel it in my body. My left shoulder aches as though from an old war wound. I struggle to sit for long periods – which I need to do now that I’ve found a new job. My feet burn and my lower back complains when I get up to wee in the night. I have a faint, off-centre linea nigra that pools around my belly button, which is now an outy.
I feel the girl inside me kicking and swirling around. Sometimes in the morning I watch my belly bounce and morph, moving off to the left as a head protrudes and then settles back down. I still don’t quite know how to connect with her. I sing softly in the shower, telling her about the warm water and rubbing my stomach. I move and dance in the kitchen, holding my hands under my belly. But I don’t really feel connected. I don’t know how to connect with this being inside me. Is she a body or a soul? Ricky says she’s grub-like, nascent, still forming. She’ll know my voice, he says, because I speak to you. What is she? What degree of life or sentience is emerging, and how do I relate to it? In the more New Age books I’ve read they say the soul of the baby sort of hangs around, moving in and out of the foetus. When the soul is out (say), what is the body inside me? Does it have its own intelligence, its own life? Do I relate to the ensouled foetus as a peer, even an elder, which is the sense I got from that earlier visualisation? I am confused, and feel no instinct for this, no gut sense to guide me. And the gut is where I want to focus now. You see, the car we bought is a lemon.
After taking it in for its last remaining service on its warranty, Ford found it had been in a massive accident. We took it back to the dealers who said they had told us – they hadn’t – but that they’d try to sell it on. I went to that meeting in a long dress and wept. The tears were genuine, sitting in a very shabby room in a converted old house in the bad part of Highlands North, as the man behind the counter told us it’ll take a month or more. But I’m also highly aware of the image I cast: pregnant and vulnerable in my swaying dress. I have used my baby for gain, for the look of it. I want this man to feel sorry for us, and to give us our money back. It is the only weapon I have.
The car, which is now in our name, squats like a toad in our driveway. It is a monument to our gullibility. We are patsies, suckers for a bargain. So what I want is a gut feel. I want to have some kind of body sense for these things, a yes/no switch that can reach through the world and give me guidance, give me direction. This is a bad buy. The baby needs to be held, or needs to be put down in her cot. My mind has failed me. My wits are no longer the stick with which I best stride. I want a heart that talks, that whispers and tells, and I want an ear that can hear it. I want a body that glides over the thistles like a slug, blind but seeking and knowing and not harmed by the hard edges.
And I want it for the coming baby. I want to put down all the books I’m slogging through and find a simple knowing, or a simple self assurance, because the more I read and listen to the mountains of unsolicited advice, the less confident I feel. What are they talking about, sleep windows and milk of magnesium? Everyone smiles at us, at our innocence. It’s almost sweet, their eyes suggest. Sometimes they nod politely when I talk about cloth nappies, but mostly they scoff. I feel threatened by a maelstrom I cannot decipher but that is coming, like a hand across a throat, a promise of future violence. I watch it, frozen, passive, a hurricane on the news, its spiky edges edging towards the bed where I lie, bringing with it the water that will engulf me and my life. How, amid all this, am I to find my body, to find the ground of my being, to find the well that sustains me rather than drowns me?
And my body is now a site of comment and touch. People tell me I look beautiful, more beautiful than I ever have – it feels like there’s an insult in there somewhere – or that I’m big, or small for my time. My midwife tells me I’m putting on too much weight; my chiropractor says I eat too much sugar. (I imagine skewering and eating them both, sprinkled with sugar.) I fire my chiropractor (not to her face, of course, I just will not make another appointment. Ha! I showed her.) and worry about what my midwife has said. I look at my thighs when I squat to put the internet onto battery power – there’s stage six loadshedding again – and begin to hate them again. Too big/small, too fat, too full of inflammatory sugar.
All my actions seem to have massive and dire consequences: don’t sleep on your back or you could deprive the baby of oxygen. Have you eaten enough protein today? Because if you haven’t your baby will not grow right. I feel I’m losing a grip on myself and falling to the eyes of others, somehow up for grabs, up for comment. I eat muesli with blueberries and strawberries and yoghurt and nuts. I stop eating morning rusks. But I don’t feel good. I feel ashamed and overwhelmed. The baby room slowly fills with stuff but I constantly feel I am behind, not doing enough, and I don’t know how to do enough, or what enough looks like. I pick up baby books, determined to finally get a grip on something, but they are soon left hopeful and open on their spines on the backs of couches or next to my bed.
Work is coupled with the pressure to begin the renovation on our kitchen, dining room and bathroom. This is at the same time as Ricky’s mom is hospitalised after a cascade of problems following a routine operation. We visit daily and she alternatively raves and slurs. I don’t manage to get any exercise during the day and at night my restless legs syndrome makes me feel as though I need to run marathons. I stalk through the house at 3.55am, confusing my dogs and craning to hear the lone cricket I adore.
My life and my body seem at odds. I am like that soul that hovers outside the foetus, just to the left of myself. And if I am always besides myself, what then is my body? How do I relate to it, my creature, my beast? I wish to connect, and to hook into the world, to arrive, to feel, to no longer be blown up and away. I want to be the ear of wheat that falls to the ground, and not the chaff that is caught in the wind.
I have a therapy session and weep copiously and snottily. My therapist asks me to articulate the tears, to speak them. I’m surprised to find “I’m not good enough” falling out my mouth, and, “I can’t even feed myself, how will I nourish a baby?” My talk is garbled. I describe how my bra cuts into the little space I have left between my boobs and belly, my only breathing room; how my mother-in-law fights with her clothing in hospital, getting tangled in wires; how I drift round and round the house, my body compelled to move. What I’m describing, she says, is a restless anxiety coupled with a sense of claustrophobia.
We do an active imagination session to try to meet some of what is inside me. I breathe and move through the images as she describes them, asking me to see and sense into what is in my body, my fascia and my organs, but also the things that are hidden and boxed and lie as sediment inside me. Then she asks me to say what parts have arrived with the stirred up emotions and I find something like that dirt-ball character from the Peanuts cartoons, Pigpen, a fast-moving pencil scrawl, a spidery creature that wants to hop out of my throat. She asks me to enact or embody this move, to do what my body wants to do, and I almost melt with embarrassment. There is another being with the scrawl, a small scared girl carrying this command from my mother, the nuns at my primary school, the teachers at my Methodist high school, the polisieman inside me: don’t do what your body wants to do. I try but can’t. I hold a pillow and sort of gag but don’t know how to voice or leap or let live this weird ball of elbows and instinct I’ve found inside me. Finally I take out my earphones (we do Zoom sessions) and fall to my knees and scream into my meditation cushion. (Only afterwards do I think about how much I fart into it.)
When I stop and breathe again I get a new image. I am deeper down now and there is something like a baby monkey or a sloth crawling out of some mud. Observing this is a professorial part making anthropological notes. The mud creature’s crawl reminds me of the ones made by just-born babies as they creep up a mother’s belly to the breast, still attached to the placenta inside. My therapist says the image is like the lotus whose roots are still deep in the mud. The sense I get from the creature is that it is massively powerful and that all the other lesser parts fear it and try to contain it, but that would be like trying to contain a volcano. The mud part could, but doesn’t, break its levies.
Somehow this all underlines more powerfully what I wanted from before – to finally sit in the seat of myself. We agree that the way to do this, to get to a knowing I already have in a body already doing and feeling what I hope and wish for, is to just go inside and observe. The act of awareness will shift it. I am almost at the point that I can cross over into allowing myself to know what I know. Like that I eat okay. Like that I don’t want to work more shifts when my body hurts. Like that my baby is not the baby of others, and I’ll make my own way, mistakes and all – but thanks for the advice all the same. My therapist also says to eat avos when I crave sweets. I do not scream at her.
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