People keep telling me to bank my sleep now, as though I can bottle it like beans in a bomb shelter. But my sleep is broken. I wake during loadshedding and can’t seem to soothe my hind mind, even when I explain that one doesn’t need electricity at 2am – besides for a sorely missed fan – and that everything is okay. But reasonableness doesn’t help. I lie and lie and lie, turning first onto one hip and then the other 15 minutes later because of a throb and ache that extends into my groin and from my lower back into my bum. The power comes back but sleep doesn’t. My heart pounds.
Again, fear is here, pawing the ground. But this fear is less discernible. Of course, I have plenty of things with which I can scare myself on Google: protein in my urine, a belly that isn’t growing at a rate that would please my midwife, a moratorium on exercise because of my aching back and bum. A friend casually tells us that according to indigenous cosmologies, the world has eight years before we’re all slitting each other’s throats to drink the blood, because the water is gone. This is why he has no children. Another of our friends is adamant and loud about not having children for reasons of bringing them to “untold misery”. I sit with my belly between us. They seem unembarrassed by the fact of this foetus. My girl moves and turns inside me. I wonder about what we’ve done, what her life will be like on what feels like a dying planet. I’m sorry, I whisper to her. Is life worth it, or not?
Simultaneously, something is subtly shifting for me. On a sleepless night at 33 weeks, in the deep loadshedding dark and with only my heart as company, I begin to contemplate wolves. There’s a meme that makes the rounds on Facebook every so often in which two innocent timber wolves are pictured. One, usually a lighter coloured one, is the good wolf, the courage wolf. The other is the bad wolf, the fear wolf (or the anger one, the hatred one, etc). Which will you feed? the kicker asks. I think about the fear wolf, starved, lolloping inside me, mad from neglect, half dead, its own hunger making it savage. And there, its fat joy brother, sedate, full, following me with its eyes through the bars of its cage.
There’s a Buddhist meditation in the tantric tradition brought to and adapted for the West by Lama Tsultrim Allione called feed your demons. In it, you call up your demons – your cravings and aversions, your addictions, your fears and immolating desires – and you ask what they need. After listening, you make your essence into an elixir, a concentrated form of whatever would fill that need, which you feed to that demon, who then shows its other face, the side of itself that is your ally. You then ask the ally for its gifts, which it shares, and you are shored up – or so the practice is meant to go. I tried the meditation for a while but it was strong and strange stuff, and I quickly went back to simply breathing.
Lying in bed I chastise myself for the fear, for the feeling, for its irrationality, for my stupid heart spewing blood round my body at a rate I cannot control, for my own deep hunger for cradling and safety, nurturing and cleanliness and order, for unimpeded, direct-access love, for a womb, an umbilical cord to feed me, for containment. Or not for this. I don’t really know exactly what this fear wants. I have never truly asked. But I know I’m not allowed to feel this. I think, You’re not allowed. Fight. You must fight the fear. You must sleep like a good girl, otherwise tomorrow will be a terrible mess. And you can’t make a mess. I hold my body tight, hold my mind in a headlock. Don’t feed the fear wolf. Only good things. Only positive things.
But then, on a new moon night, I just… stop. In the quiet I meet the wolf. He has come down from the hills of my heart. His paws walk one step, two, towards me, waits, wary. This is not how it usually goes. I hold out a hand, small, at my side. It could be a gesture that signals the wolf to stop or an act of peace, an invitation to smell. Here we hold in a prism of impossible relation, in the dark. It is only a moment before the wolf attacks, and I am devoured.
And then, nothing. The feeling lifts a little and then a little more. I am still awake but now no longer struggling. It brings me no real relief, nor any sleep, but I am very slightly loosened. The next night I cannot sleep again, and the next. I cannot nap either. I become frantic and then remember to loosen. Here I am, I think. Here I am with this now. The wolf and I meet over and over and I am eaten again and again. Now this, now this.
I try to be with what I am experiencing even when it is terrible and I don’t want it. I try to just let it be, the fear, the sleeplessness, the dying planet, the living girl. I stop wanting to make it different – or I try to. I try to give up, let go. And I try not to do this in a sneaky way to somehow get out of what I’m experiencing through my monk-like zenitude. But to honestly just be devoured by fear, be eaten up and eviscerated, without hope of bypassing any of this. Not to suffer grandly, an Opelia surrounded by flowers, beautiful and pale, captured on a canvas floating away – which I am wont to do – but rather to simply reject nothing, the ungrand dirt of it, the crunch eyes in the morning and still the day must be done. To be awake when I want to be asleep and to stop struggling. Surrender, without submission, not defeated but willing, curious, not apart but part of it, trusting, trusting. It is dreadful. I hold still, asking what is hard in me to melt, over and over and over, to come back to the place where the fear wolf and I meet at midnight. Each night I let myself be devoured, and each day I am reconstituted.
This time reminds me why I got sober. To be clear, I stopped drinking alcohol because I drank too much too often. It was going in only one direction, and with the history in my family, it was not unclear where that direction led. My anxiety was becoming unmanageable, even though I was on medication – stupidly or naively I was using alcohol to try to control it, exacerbating it all the while. It is an old story.
But once I had begun to consider the leap into sobriety I began to get excited by an aspect on offer: an unmediated meeting of life. What would it look like, I wondered, to come right up against life without a filter or a buffer, to dare to not take the edge off but to be abraded by that edge, to feel its sharpness, even to be cut or cut up by it? What would it be like to be sober at parties, to be only myself without the sparkle? Of course, to do this properly you’d have to take away the other life augmentors: TV, sugar, books, dumb scrolling, idle chitter-chatter, the radio drone to fill up the silence. I started with booze.
After the physical withdrawal symptoms subsided – headaches mostly, for just three or so days – I had to deal with the more subtle withdrawal symptoms: the reach for the bottle by habit and rote. I dealt with this by drinking nonalcoholic drinks – something the sober community sometimes frowns upon. It worked for me. I got to keep scratching that itch of what to do with my hands after work and before dinner without actually imbibing alcohol. And within a few months I started not really feeling like them anymore. Now I don’t really drink them at all.
Once the physical and habitual symptoms eased I entered the pink cloud. What a phase! Everything was spectacular. I would marvel at trees as though they had unfurled just for me. Each morning I fairly leapt out of bed; I hadn’t even known I was pretty much always vaguely hung over, even if I’d only had a glass of wine the night before. I got clear and sharp; everything was solid and lovely. This lasted about six months, then faded. I began to return to my old life, to even out. It became normal. Clarity was my new hazy. Unhappiness beckoned. I waved back. Give me a moment, I signalled.
Nothing as yet has come close to the euphoria of my just-sober days, and often I wonder if I should drink again, feeling I’m missing out or wanting to check out and shut down or to be tipsy and giddy, to catch the brightness that first glass gives you. I remember, always, the cascade afterwards, the shame associated with, and don’t. But what you don’t want is only one side of things, and can only get you so far. It is what you do want that takes you further.
Now, with this new season rolling through my body and bedroom, I remember again the other reason I wanted to be completely naked right up against the hilt of the world. It is the same reason I want to birth naturally at home. I want to feel all of it. I want to meet life unbuffered, unadorned. I want to risk absurdity, pain, failure. Ricky says it’s a form of female machismo, the natural birth movement, the breastfeeding movement, a way to shake power like a stick at other women who make different choices. And I agree with him. I feel the machismo in myself, and the very masculine need to order and control the world – I will control this birth by scheduling a caesarean or I will have a natural unmedicated birth at home that will not be augmented in any way are two ways of saying something very similar: my rules, my way. I am trying to be more open and surrendered to the birth, to hand it over in part to my body and my baby – it is after all her birth, not mine, though it is coming through my body and though I am being metaphorically birthed as a mother. I am working on becoming willing to simply meet this birth, to realise, like the rest of pregnancy, it is not in my hands.
Nonetheless, before my labour – whether it goes the way I hope or not – I have chosen an unmedicated home birth because I want to experience it. I am almost 40, and this will be a completely new experience. It is rare now to feel something totally new in the body – even enormous pressure, even pain. And so perhaps it is a privilege. I don’t want to half live. I don’t want to shy away and shelter myself. I want to drop in. I want to dare. Even if it’s terrible. And it is very often terrible.
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