It does not rain at 27 weeks and early October. The water runs dry in Johannesburg. It is unclear if this is because of the late rains and terrible heat, or because of the now-continuous loadshedding – without electricity, the pumps cannot move the water into the reservoirs. One night the power doesn’t come back after loadshedding. We find out all the cables have been stolen. It takes days for them to restore us. Our fridge stops working – a power surge? I weep.
In the midst of this we begin the build we’ve been planning. We scribble difficult-to-read lists full of question marks; we source and price and buy materials; we pack, scrambling, barely keeping afloat. My feet ache. Men come and gut our bathroom and kitchen. We cover the couches and TV with sheets and move into the garden, setting up a field kitchen and using a bucket and sawdust for a toilet. Dust billows over everything and the men step out of the back door covered in concrete. They clap their hands together and pat their shirts, which puff with white; they blink and the dust falls from their eyelashes into their cheeks.
The power does not return after loadshedding once more. I go to a coffee shop to work, but then they get shod. I leave, ride the tide of dead robots till the traffic starts to move and I know I’ve located power again. This is how it is in the city now, everyone barely holding on. We buy a 25l container of water. Will there be a shortage? Rumours abound. The builders cut into a live wire; they cut into a water main. I try to do my work in the tiny room in the garden. My feet swell in the heat. I check the chickens one hot, dry afternoon and find them out of water and one dead. I crumble. How will I keep a baby alive? We are chicken murderers – from neglect. That night I cannot sleep and keep apologising to the air around me. Sorry, sorry. Oh God, sorry. Of thirst. She died of thirst. Ricky thinks it was the one we rescued from the SPCA several years ago. Maybe she died of old age, he says.
All the while I peer into my belly, trying to find and to feel this baby, whose movements are completely inconsistent. She seems not to enjoy it when I work and is quiet for days at a time. When she doesn’t move I collapse into obsessive worry. I worry that the stress I’m experiencing is affecting her. I Google. I shouldn’t, but I Google, especially at 3am when I can’t sleep. I read that the baby feels what I feel, to the same degree, the same intensity. I must feel better. Or at least less. Or I must swing less far from one extreme to the next. (On the night after the builders cut through the wires and pipes, when I by turns had wept and screamed, I sprayed Ricky down in the garden with a hose. He jumped from foot to foot, breathing hard and rubbing soap on his armpits. He called it a gulag shower. I laughed and laughed at him hopping naked under the moon and pointing his groin at me to rinse the soap. I bathed more sedately in a bucket with some water I boiled on the gas cooker. Afterwards we brushed our teeth while the dogs dotted the garden and the rats scratched and squeaked in the chicken cage. Besides our lone cricket, it was very quiet. The trees moved silently in a small breeze.) The online post I read says that babies whose mothers were emotionally inconsistent don’t trust easily. How do I control myself? How do I improve?
Ten kicks. I’m supposed to feel 10 kicks in a day, according to my midwife (though the internet says every two hours) and if not I must contact her and she will check the baby using a machine. Somehow this has undone me. It is because it will be my fault if the baby dies. During the first trimester, when there was nothing I could do but surrender, I could find a way, not always successfully, but I could at least imagine letting go. This though, this having to feel and respond, leaves me spun out and insane. Everything is darkened by it. She has not moved. She has not moved. I poke my belly. I drink orange juice. I close my eyes and beg her, then try to act mature and motherly, whispering, I’m with you, I’m with you, no matter what. I become a bowl of jelly. I do everything with half a heart, half a mind. I keep swinging back to her. Where is she? Nowhere. Oh God, nowhere and gone. I slip gears, I grind.
We must buy a bathroom vanity. We must design the cupboards in the dining room. I must edit documents, but I keep jetting up and out of my life, horrified in advance, wondering if the stress of not feeling her is making her move less. Will I kill her with irony? I itch to call my midwife. Once I do but she is short with me and doesn’t make me feel much better as I falter on the phone, unable to answer her questions. What exactly does she mean by “movement”? I begin to hate her. I resent Ricky. I despise the builders who fill the place with the whine and shout of grinders and hammers. I crack up and throw pens across the tiny space outside we have to work and Ricky gets the hell in and I run deeper into the garden to cry some more. Afterwards, over and over, I regret the outburst and promise to be more even, to be nice and calm and confident, to be trusting and trustworthy. Then the electricity goes out and my computer warns it will shut down soon unless I connect to power.
In the garden I sit on the compost toilet and look at my veggie patch. Despite the heat and the lack of rain, the nasturtiums are out in abundance, pops of orange that taste peppery and strong. The beans are winding their way up the stems of sunflowers and the kale makes for the sky. Here is life, unstoppable, despite all of it. Here is the garden I planted, seed by seed, some weeks ago, a gift, an equation that always equals the same, a mystery. I am alongside my garden, harvesting greens I take always with awe and surprise, and always only as a kind of afterthought. (Thank you, I say to the plant I pick. Thank you, thank you, we will eat you for dinner tonight.) I relate to my veggie patch as its witness, or at best, its steward.
When I first started I would get upset by pests; my stunted marrows would offend me; my blighted tomatoes would be a personal affront. Then I began to see that it had so little to do with me. Something was taking place almost despite me, as I bumbled with my sunlight liquid and chilli sprays to combat mealybug and aphids. Some force was coming through, a power well beyond my ken, and the pests were a part of it. Plants died or lived. I ate, or the bugs ate, or we both ate. It was enough to watch it unfold, and I looked forward each season to planting the seeds and laying the mulch and watering just a bit, to playing my tiny part as a catalyst. It is the same with the child. Though we made a choice, we were mere sparks. The flint is not the flame.
I read somewhere that the opposite of death is not life, but birth. Birth is the entry and death the exit. Life is both. And my garden tells me this, and this baby tells me this too, in her way, as she moves or does not move. I want to clutch onto her and reject death, but this is a misunderstanding, a miscategorisation. Life is both. I want only births, but births and deaths are difficult to quantify and both are hard. It may, at first glance, seem simple: birth is when something enters the world and death is when it leaves. But when exactly is that? Is this baby alive? Has she entered? Yes and no. When something dies in my garden, when, where is death exactly? Because though in front of me there is no longer an edible pumpkin, there is still something teaming with life: bugs feast, bacteria abounds, mould sends tendrils of fur to this curve and that, liquifying, devouring. And beyond that, even when the plant is just a husk and I pull the spiky vines up and throw them on the compost, still there’s life, woodlice and heat, a wet, black world that next year will be tucked around the new seeds, who’ll burst their seams and begin.
Death is often a struggle, as is birth. And certainly when something or someone dies, an animating force leaves them, an emptying out undeniably takes place, just as a filling out takes place at birth. I feel the whole world is undergoing a death – or is it a birth? They are so often so similar. I’m not sure what is dying and what is being born, but we seem to be in transition.
In birth I’ve read about transition. It is the moment between the cervix being fully dilated and the start of pushing. This is where women waver. They beg their husbands for mercy, for hospitals, for the cut. They demand their midwives sedate them or give them the epidural or knock them out. They say, I can’t do it. I can’t do it anymore. At this point everyone begins getting the umbilical cord clamps and laying down the sterile sheets. It means it is time. The very worst, the very lowest, the most painful, doubt-filled moment is also the moment when the birth is imminent.
Is that what is happening in our world? All things feel close to total collapse. We wonder out loud if we should be spending money on renovating or trying to flee the country. We wonder if we should have met each other in bed on that early morning seven months ago, if we should have started anything at all. No power, no water, everything teetering, all the birds dying and the bears too, fear everywhere, and rage. What is this? A death/birth, an end/beginning? How will we endure? And how will I hold to the path, carry this child inside me without falling into despair, without becoming quite mad with uncertainty? I feel very, very lonely.
Leave a Reply