The rains come, at last, first softly and then in great solid sheets. I step out into a night high with wet grass and quenched ground; the dust on the roof is all washed away and the jacaranda blooms unfurl a luminous blue-purple carpet on the streets, making all who drive or walk through it royalty. The moon is hazy amid the mute drip, drip everywhere. The water has put out the burn in my balloon feet, and also in my head, and I wonder, at 30 weeks, what I was obsessing over with the movements and the weird rage in the garden. This keeps happening: I am smashed and then awaken reconfigured and somehow blank. What was I doing? I wonder. What was I thinking? I forget. I reset as the day comes up to meet me, full of busyness.
And then I slosh around in overwhelm and the familiar glee at the drama of a chaotic, overfull day. Oh God, there’s so much to do, so much, so much, how will I ever? I make lists to get some semblance of control. Lists end. I can end them with my actions so I can feel the world has a knowable shape. But this is not strictly the truth, because though I can finish a list, there is no real end to any of it. There will not be an end to the dayness of my days, the dishes will mount again and the dogs will need to be fed. The builders will be replaced with nappies and feeding and later swimming lessons and play dates. Work today. Work tomorrow. This, or whatever comes to replace this, will not end till I die, and maybe not even then. There will always be things to do in a day; even when there’s nothing to do, I’ll have to eat and breathe and shit. Everything is changing like water, but like water it is also staying the same. I will never come to the end of anything. All things slip into the next.
So I could skip all the fretting and anticipation and simply do what is mine to do in a day. That is all that’s ever asked of me. Just do the day. And at the end of it sleep or don’t sleep, dreaming in fits and starts. I feel soothed by this realisation. It’s not going to end. I will never, ever conquer life. I will not sit back and survey it like a completed puzzle. Why react? If not this burst pipe then something else – perhaps something easier, but something nonetheless: the dog will lie down on the computer cable and pull it out of the wall, or the washing will be left out in the rain. And what are we running towards when we put everything into finally, finally finishing? Netflix?
For a brief, luminous moment, I know this, I feel it in my waters, in my animal, and I am calm. But a week later I am hoofed out of it and back into the frenzy, weeping and honking into hanks of toilet paper, perched on the side of my bed. I get a cold and worry it’s tick bite fever after I find two ticks leeching me following a foray into the veld. I go for an appointment a week early and nearly dissolve when the receptionist breaks it to me. I decide I hate everything about the renovation we have done so far and mope from room to room, unable to find pens or scissors. The fridge is bare every time I open it looking for something to sate a hunger that is not really for food. I feel I am a ghost in my own life, drifting or angrily zooming around, leaving cupboards and drawers open. I desperately want to meet this moment, meet the growing girl inside me, meet myself and my body, but I can’t. I stand in the passage and feel the grit beneath my bare feet, contemplate boxes of kitchen stuff. I am desperately tired.
Then it is the anniversary of my miscarriage, which happened over Halloween and the local elections, in which I did not participate (and I used to scowl at people with unmarked nails, those yahoos who did not vote). Last year we planted a purple bougainvillaea over some of the blood I’d collected on homemade cloth pads, knowing that around the end of October each year it would flower, and it does, thorny tendrils shoot left and right and burst into pinky purple. The pads have probably broken down by now beneath the curling roots. I imagine the press studs I sewed into the pads floating in the soil, remnants, like dinosaur bones. I look on at the plant, holding my bulging belly, feeling strangely little. Shouldn’t I feel more? For the last week I’ve been having more crying jags than usual and I comfort myself that it is probably the underlying sorrow of the miscarriage, my body remembering and weeping. But my top self feels almost nothing, and for that I feel guilty. Feel more, feel less, where are these directives coming from?
Last year, when we planted the bougainvillaea, I read a letter to the nub that had come and gone, and later I wrote a long, exhaustive description of what had happened, the horror of the hospital experience in which we were treated like slappable insects, the days afterwards, the blood tests and scans and doctor’s appointments, the whole thing limping on. I felt then that grief had come to me to rouse me from a kind of stupor.
Grief had felt so familiar, like an old jacket found at the back of a cupboard, slipped on and re-sensed, hands hanging from pockets in which you find a coin, a folded till slip. Oh yes, I remember now. Grief large is like grief small, and we are confronted with small griefs all the time, finishing a cherished book, getting a bad haircut and losing a sense of yourself as beautiful, holidays ending, pot plants dying, the fade of the day when you wake from a Sunday nap. All the tiny aches echo the larger aches, which in turn reverberate back down through the tiny aches, till you are a chamber of sound.
And the sound is not unbeautiful, mixed in as it is with the small joys, the dogs dancing for their breakfast, the light patter of rain outside the window, an egg still warm from the chickens, lying down on a Sunday in the ticking afternoon, letting the book fall from your hands. So I am both, and nothing, now, looking at the plant in flower, hands resting on the new girl inside me. I turn away, decide not to pick the flowers to bring them inside. I leave them be.
But it is not entirely true that the crying this week was prompted only by the anniversary of the miscarriage. In part it came from a line that immediately brought me to a shuddering stop: I can let this unfold. These words, which came to me spontaneously, felt like mourning, though I am aware the sentiment and the feeling don’t match. I can let this unfold, and over and over as I whisper the line something inside me dies. What, who dies, I don’t know. Some part that loves power, probably, some part that set my life to tick, tick, ticking, which I developed to wrap my hand around things, to feel the hardness of ground beneath my feet, to order life along. Now it is as though I am a creature newly at home in the sea, forced to grow gills.
This is the sense I am getting, that pregnancy is a change of form, a passage from one place to another, and these are passwords spoken at the threshold: I can let this unfold. I tell Ricky I want us to have a matchbox funeral in which we bury in matchboxes some token of ourselves and speak words over it, so we can find ways to let go of what is over, and so not resent what is to come, so as to be open handed, open hearted. I fear resenting this girl for bringing me to change, heaping my great unlived lives onto her, burying her. I must bury myself first, or try. But how do I die?
At the same time, this feels overwrought. I start reading The Continuum Concept, which is about plopping the baby into a carrier and carrying on with your life, neither overly attending to her nor ignoring her. Oh God, I think, having put in for six months maternity leave, having heaved and hoed my life to reorientate completely, I will now have to resurrect a self. I have always been good at compartmentalising. My concerns, which are numerous, varied and sprinkled across all facets of my life, are often for some other self, some imagined she who will go through this and about whom I can write and speculate.
But the one who will have this baby and the me of today are fast approaching one another, soon, and horrifically, to meld. It has occurred to me, just recently, that I will have a baby, an actual baby, and that I, in my terrible tied-dyed sleep shirts, will be taking care of it. Not some other being who will grandly die and mourn and so on, standing by bougainvillaeas, composing paeans, full of gravitus. I, with my bum feet and flat nipples, with my good husband and shedding dogs and piles of used bedside tissues, will give birth, will muddle through. And I will not actually die. I will live. And live and live. Oh crap. Surely not me? Who gave me a baby almost all cooked and ready inside me?
And I love her, the squirming fish, her weird fists and knobbly knees making of me mountains and valleys, her bum protruding and leaving my large belly lopsided. I push her back and we play, the blind and silly with the half grown and nascent, we two, together, leaping like frogs in the rain.
I am now the closest to her I’ll ever be, at least physically. From here she’ll move out and out, at first into my arms, and then in hand, and then beside, and alongside, and then across a room, a house, a town, a continent, and then just there, a buzz on the phone. Always it is a movement out, spanning wider circles, revolving like planets – at least, it is my hope that we will stay in each other’s orbit and not pass by like comets. For now, we are as tight as two finger joints pointing to the moon.
Leave a Reply