The deluge of purees frozen in the freezer is glutted and claggy in my throat. Liver. Beetroot. Butternut. The spoon drips in front of closed lips. My whole family rises up in the body, generations of hunger, neglect, diets, the Holocaust, the Great Depression.
C at first eats well, is interested, but soon begins to lose interest then actively dislikes eating. I force her, the spoon a battering ram. I get so scared. She must eat, eat! She’s not eating. I’ve made all this food for her. Ungrateful, spiteful. I feel a new shudder inside me. Here, the curves of the bad body, bad desires.
I speak to my therapist and she asks me, What is food? What is food for? I don’t know. I give some answers: nutrition, love? She asks me to make the sound of food. I hesitate but then go, Mmmmm, mmmm, with eyes closed, and I realise, Oh, it’s pleasure.
Food. I feel a deeper fear and loathing, a deep worry. She must eat. C does not eat or sleep or poo. It all just stops. And I fall apart. I take her to the doctor who finds nothing wrong with her but comments that she’s dropped off the curve in her weight gain.
I begin to despair that C will ever eat again, and C sets up a wall of refusal. She begins to breastfeed almost all night. She is on the boob 10 or 12 times a night. I become wavery and strange. I can’t focus. I almost pour a can of tomato into the chickens’ scrap bowl instead of the cooking pan. I want to cry. I dread every meal. It is a massive blackhole for both of us. She begins to cry as soon as I put her in the high chair. I give her a chicken bone and as she moves it to her mouth I stuff in a spoonful of whatever I’ve selected from the growing number of puree food packets in the freezer. I trick her. She spits it out. I begin to sweat and shake with anger and fear. She’ll die. She’ll starve. I’m hopeless. I’m tricking her. I’m a terrible mother. I don’t know what to do.
Again, no sleep. Again, no eating. Again, no pooing. At night she cries and farts and moans for the boob. Finally we give her a laxative and she makes a poo so large there’s more of it than her. Then she goes right back to being bunged up. The new nanny, who is loud and poor and very into force feeding, says it’s something she’s eating. But she’s not eating anything!
I decide she wants variety. It is two hours till loadshedding starts at 6pm. I must get C’s food ready and get her fed, bathed and rocked to what little sleep she has in her cot. I must make us dinner – pizza, which requires the oven, which requires electricity. I decide I’ll also make four new meals for C. I will make cumin and tomato chickpeas, fried cayenne chicken, lemon and herb roast chicken, garlic kale, and livers with onion and garlic.
Everything is happening at once. I’m cooking on all four burners, chopping the toppings for the pizza, rolling the dough. C is watching bemused from her Bumbo chair. Ricky is buzzing around. I am frantic, moving like a flyfishing line between the counter and the hob and the oven and the sink and C, whipping, frenzied. I’m not going to make it! I’m so tired. I feel so empty and so full at once. I feel full of an impotency I will fight with my chicken and beans, with the sheer variety of delicious foods on offer.
The clock winds down. I scream at Ricky who screams back, why did you decide to make four meals at once? I am full of rage and despair and a weird glee. Oh, I love it. Running from counter to counter. I love the drama of it, the mounting pressure. I can feel something! I love the pain of it, the operatic high jinks. Everything pulls into focus. No more calm. Fierce mania now.
I only manage to get the pizza in the oven with 20 minutes of power left, not enough, probably. I crank it. C eats a little of the chickpea mixture and I’m triumphant. Ha! I have beaten the losing streak. Hahaha! C is whisked away to bathe, and the power snaps off.
In the new dark I listen to the oven tick-tick-tick as it cools. I feel the piles of dishes around me. It is as though I’ve just come off a binge drinking spree. The mother power, the doer, the fixer. If I drank there would have been wine in this mix, but there really isn’t that much of a need. It’s there anyway, the wine energy, the frantic attempts to quell life, to control, to get a handle on it, to force it to my will.
Later, after describing this scene to my therapist, we have a miscommunication. I say, It is as though I am being sucked dry, but my therapist thinks I’m talking about sucking a marrow bone, or sucking deeply at the font of life. I’m not in my life. I’m on top of it. I’m on it. Not in it. To be in it is to admit I don’t know, have no clue how to have a baby, how to have a body, how to feed myself, how to feed her. How to love. How to be with people and the world, how to be in the world.
I freeze mounds of liver, chickpeas suitably mashed, chicken whizzed down to a paste. I mark little ziplock bags and store them, freeze them. Liver, I write. I will feed this to her. But I am disgusted too, and feel far from it. I feel frozen myself. Sometimes while feeding her I’ll unconsciously lick my finger and then make a face. Yuck. She watches me. Eat! I command. I’m so tired.
I think of my gran being fed porridge, the big bib, and her face pointing all the way down, her mouth slack and full of bits of egg. My mother and aunt leaving when the feeding happens. The grossness of it.
The morning my gran died we went to a CPR course because I was desperate to learn how to help C not choke. We didn’t cancel. I breastfed over and over so I could cry in the other room while listening to what to do about burns and poison and how to do chest compressions and the kiss of life and the heimlich manoeuvre.
I think about the wasted food. I heat up ice cubes of puree and then scrap them into tiny containers and put them in the fridge. We joke about offerings to the Fridge God, amounts too little to matter but we’re unwilling to throw them away, because that would be a waste. C must eat. She must sleep. She must poo. I think about bone marrow and sucking deeply on life, stepping into my life. Pounding the CPR dummy’s chest till we can hear a click, and beep-beeping C’s mouth with a caked spoon, and nappies piling up, and bodies. Mmmmm, mmmm. Pleasure.
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