At 35 weeks I enter again the wilds of the body. Like in the first trimester, the third is characterised by a constant bounding back into my stippled thighs, my pink, unlikely calves, a new roundness in my face faced in photos in which I look very young, very moon-like and strangely content, my fat, sore feet and my huge, huge belly preceding me everywhere. (While shopping a woman tells me I need a beacon “for that thing” and a man asks Ricky if he’s ready while wrestling a wriggling toddler. Everyone looks at us for longer. We are in a state of suspense, somewhere hovering between and the population gentles us, cooing and chatting and staring, meeting us with trolleys and words.)
Beyond simply being in a body morphed beyond my imagining, and beyond what I find acceptable, I am moving into pain and its environs. I have never really been in any real kind of pain, only discomfort, or only very temporary pain. But now I hurt, and the stab and pinch, rub and grind and screech, sloughs off niceness and words. I am shorn of images. No more wolves. No more metaphors for this and that. I stagger and ache. I limp to the toilet three times a night. I turn and turn and turn around in bed, but no matter which way I face, pain pools and spreads across my back, groin and hips.
I stop all exercise, sending messages to the tai chi and zumba WhatsApp groups about seeing them “on the other side”. I go to a hijab-wearing physio who cups my vagina and asks me to breathe so I push her hand outwards – I am unable to achieve this – and holds my hips as I lean over a table telling me to “make as though I were farting on her”. The stretches she recommends help not at all. The pain sinks me deeper into some mire where all the fluff falls away. No contemplation here, no relating, just sensation, animal, elemental. All is dropped in the roaring and I meet the uncivil self. “Urggg,” I grunt getting up. “Ing, ah,” I harumph sitting down. I am reduced to vowels.
Ricky runs his hands along the spine of a vein spidering bluely across my stomach and says it worries him. Why, I ask. Because it seems you’ll burst, he says. People begin using the word “pop”. They say, Looks like you’ll go any second. Or, You’ll go early, just look at you. I am like a horse at the races. Predictions are made. Certainties abound. My body is slapped and hands move over me; my teeth are inspected. A Christmas baby, people chorus. A New Year’s baby. How sweet. You must be tired. You look tired. What are we complaining about, just look at you! Shame, man, sit down. They talk about presents, the birthday-Christmas combo. Will I “go” anytime? And where am I going?
Much of this takes place at my baby shower in which I gather a circle of women to string together a necklace. It is a blessing way, a way to try to bring some ritual and gravity back to birth and new motherhood. I so want to be guided, to be held. I find I am afraid. Yes, I am afraid now, the weeks leaking away and the unknown coming. My mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, a cherished friend and many others sit in a circle and tell me to breathe as they thread a bead, or tell me that I have a certain grace that will carry through into motherhood. They give me children’s books they have loved. They give me succour, tea, an excellent lemon tart. Then we join the men in the garden. They have started a braai, which, once roaring hot, spontaneously collapses. Coals spew out. I turn away. When next I look, they’ve set up the now-legless braai in a galvanised bath we have outside and are braaing inside it. It is a neat solution and very on par with our jerry-rigged lives. I feel a species of joy. It is utterly silly, and the job gets done. We will be okay.
This is the thing about the unknown: it is unknown. You cannot plan. All you can do is observe and then respond. But first, often, you must be willing to be in chaos. The hot coals must spill. You must risk the burn, weather the shriek, the tumble down. A few years ago I attended an event that scaled the walls of creativity like nothing I’d ever experienced – real creativity, which means being in a place where you don’t know what will happen. If you know, if you can predict and anticipate, then it’s not actual creativity. There were five or six of us older people and about 40 late teens. We sat in a large circle in a hall. The man in front had spread before him every manner of instrument and object, drums and whistles, two mics, colourful scarves, shakers, recorders. He sat by a piano alongside a cello and a loop station. The space bristled with the quiet of unspent sound. He told us to close our eyes and feel into our bodies. When our bodies moved us, when our souls twitched and itched and inched, we should only then respond, stand, and move without thinking to whatever we were drawn to, either to begin playing an instrument, singing, dancing or waving a scarf. But we must wait for the deep signal from self.
Then he pulled in his piano chair and began to whistle into the mic, making a long strand of sound loop before playing chord after chord. No one moved. He played. We sat. He added some cello, layering, thickening. Some began to stir, to shift in their seats. We knew the drums would come soon, could feel them vibrating. And then he added them, and almost as one, the kids leapt up and in profound joy rushed to every object available and began banging. It was pure chaos, a cacophony of epic proportion. Two then three people grabbed the mics. One rapped, one crooned, another just shouted. Still the man played. His sounds were just about drowned out. One woman in our group shrank back, appalled. She sat down again. I danced with a scarf, feeling the wrongness of the sounds grind into my bones, just barely tolerating it, but also enjoying the exuberance of the kids who didn’t seem to mind at all. This went on for about 15 full minutes.
Then, with no one directing the change, a shift began to be felt. The rappers dropped the mic and moved on, leaving a girl with a high beautiful voice to sing over and over a refrain. The drummers started beating in a syncopated rhythm. The man’s sounds clarified and emerged, changed by the room and what it offered. The recorders alternated with the shakers. And just like that, we were making music. It was glorious. I moved with others who had dropped their instruments and began simply to dance. A circle formed. For another perhaps 20 minutes we revolved, the music shaping and reshaping like a murmuration. Then, again without any signal being given, the song ended, and a hush descended. We held in that silence, all sitting down again. We were worshipful. Something holy had happened.
Perhaps the world does not tend to entropy. Perhaps from chaos order is possible, or perhaps one emerges always from the other: order decaying, chaos reforming, back and forth. In this type of world learning doesn’t help much. We can fall back on a set of skills, but not on rote reactions. We must tolerate the total uncertainty and sometimes ugliness of things falling apart, of not being in control, trusting all the while that an inherent melody will emerge, that there is genius and playfulness in the spilled coals.
This is a form of unlearning, a turning away from mastery. It is the Buddhist’s beginner’s mind. Can I be at sea? Can I risk the unknown? Creativity lives there, and thus also life – and death, decay, chaos, followed by order and beauty, followed by breakdown again. The whirl. The tide. In the unknown something is possible, some response felt deep, deep in the body. All layers of civility and pride fall away. You become empty, stripped, losing acculturation, losing your embarrassed childhood and languishing hurts.
Somewhere in the middle you find a pulse, a pure pulse, hot and burning white. There you are made and unmade, and there you make and unmake the world. Though I fear birth and motherhood, it is this, too. It is the unknown, and the unknown is where I am making a person – both the girl inside me and myself.
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