Uggggg
Have just managed to clear head from total brain fog after three nights of hellish Screaming Tomato every hour on the hour from 2am….
Amazing how with just an uninterrupted block of 4 hours sleep a person can go from feeling like maniacal non-coping Mother of Screaming Tomato to calm, slightly bemused, coping-well-enough mother of dear little Current Bun-head boy. Can wash hair. Can wash clothes. Can even tend to blog. Will now stop writing like a demented Helen Fielding character.
Last week C and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary (which is 12 years of being a couple – we enjoyed a long engagement) with a posh dinner out.
Yes! Dinner! Out! Sans Tricky, who was looked after by his Blessed Aunty N.
At 7.30 I mooched up to her with the baby.
What are you doing still here? she hissed, in a quite good impression of Gandalf clinging by his fingernails to the edge of a Morian mine chasm with a Balrog dangling from his knees while the rest of the Fellowship milled about aimlessly, wringing their hands.
He’s been fed, burped and changed. And had a top up. Quickly! Fly you fools. Fly!
And so we did as if all the orcs in Middle earth were at our heels. I left my cruddy maternity jeans on (the only pants that still fit me) but swiftly popped a fresh, slightly fancy top over my less than fresh maternity bra.
In a few seconds I had gathered up my hair in one of those fashionable ‘bed head’ type pony tails and slung on an enormous beaded pendant necklace that would draw the eye down from my dark circled eyes. In the car I applied some lipstick I found at the bottom of the handbag I never use anymore because it’s too small to hold disposable nappies, wipes and a warm hat.
And lo I was set!
C proclaimed me beautiful and after a large glass of wine, so did I.
We tried very hard to not talk about Tricky and we almost succeeded. I told C how my sister AJ had explained when I would know I was a proper mother. The moment would occur when I sat down for a couple of moments peace in front of the telly and suddenly realize I had baby poo under my fingernails. Instead of leaping up in disgust and rushing to the bathroom I would casually pick it out and wipe it on my jeans.
First anniversary is paper, said C in an effort to steer the conversation back to adult topics. What is the second? Wood?
No. First anniversary is paper but second anniversary is diamonds, I explained.
We ate French entrée thingys and salmon and something else that was delicious but too much of a stretch to recall at this point. And desserts. Oh la. The most delicious chocolate cake ever and a rhubarb and ginger cream mille feulle (spelt wrong I believe but too knackered to google).
It was fabulous and too expensive even though a little man did come forth and shave our tablecloth free of crumbs which is always a nice thing to have happen.
The week continued in fine style with Tricky’s 8 week immunization which I believe is for Tetanus, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, Hep B, Polio, Poor Fashion Sense and Misuse of Apostrophes.
At the GP’s I asked if I could have breastfeed the baby while she gave him the injections.
She looked at me, confused.
I don’t think that’s necessary, she said.
I think it will help, I explained.
Well, she said. In my experience all babies cry but sure if you want to, go ahead.
So I did.
It is a horrible thing to see an enormous needle plunging into your baby’s thigh. He stopped sucking and opened his mouth wide to scream…and then instantly went back to sucking. There were two tears at most. It was as if he’d been half way through a mouthful of the most delicious, if poorly spelt, rhubarb and ginger cream mille feulle ever ...and suddenly seen the bill. But then without thinking he had shoved another mouthful of rhubarb and ginger cream in, and the bill was miraculously torn up and scattered to the wind.
If the GP was impressed she didn’t show it but I like to think she may have learned something at that moment. I felt vindicated. I had successfully comforted my baby.
Even with clean fingernails I felt like a proper mother.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Let Them Eat Cake
C had to go to Canberra this morning.
Canberra is a strange cold wet fish of a city where trees grow in strict formation and politicians come out to play. There are certain laws binding the rest of our sweet nation and ensuring our moral and physical safety that need not apply in this city - it’s that special and magical.
I am insanely jealous of course, not because of the Canberra thing but because C is there for two days and thus guaranteed at least one night of uninterrupted sleep. That is, unless he succumbs to Canberra’s unique charms and spends the wee hours trawling the streets for Xrated porn and firecrackers.
Something I read, or maybe someone told me, or possibly an angel visited me in a dream and proclaimed it so, was that having a baby often makes bad relationships worse and good relationships pretty much stay the same.
C and I are best mates and have been together for many years, laughing at each others crap jokes and taking it in turns to make the porridge (except when C discovered a new and vastly superior porridge making method and then do you think I was allowed to go within two metres of a rolled oat?).
And certainly when I had to do that Will I Kill My Baby? Test they make you do after 6 weeks or so, I ticked all the right boxes (although I paused over the Are You Ever Afraid Of Your Partner box when I recalled his frightening obsession with the porridge).
But still, the truth is things have been getting a wee bit snappy around here of late.
We’re both tired and there have been more terse words and less cuddles than say 8 weeks ago. And there’s been little or no Special GrownUp Naked Time, not for want of trying. It is oddly difficult to get down and dirty when the other hand is occupied with rocking a cradle. A slight soiling is all we’ve really managed.
The other day we decided to go out for lunch with the baby.
Naturally in the car there were tears and the screaming tomato face but this time it wasn’t Tricky. We tried to talk in an adult fashion about the snappiness and the grumpiness and the Too Busy for Special GrownUp Naked Time.
I miss you, I cried.
I miss you too said C. It’s like we’ve both fallen in love with someone else.
Someone tiny, brown and incontinent.
When we got out of the car we stood in the street and kissed.
And said how much we loved each other.
And how sexy we were, even with spew on our clothes and poochy tummies.
And then, in lieu of Special GrownUp Naked Time we decided to eat cakes even though we knew it was bad and would add to general poochiness.
We wanted to go to our favourite bakery and eat their cakes but several thousand Sydneysiders had decided to do exactly the same thing and it was packed. This saddened us. But across the street was another café, a café that had been the height of grooviness and brimming with popularity until the coming of the bakery. Now it was nearly empty and looked lonely and sullen.
I felt a stab of sympathy. This café knew only too well the bitter taste of rejection.
Let’s go there, I said. At least they’ll be happy to see us.
I waited outside the ex-groovy café, rocking the pram as I watched the bakery queue across the road go round the corner and down the street. After a moment C came out with a face like a slapped arse.
They said no, he told me.
No? I repeated, confused.
No, he said more loudly, they said we couldn’t bring the pram inside and I’M NEVER COMING BACK TO THIS SHIT HOLE AGAIN.
I looked at C’s outraged face and in at the once groovy near empty café that wasn’t into prams and I started to laugh. Then we crossed back over the road and found a couple of orange milkcrates outside the bakery. I sat on my crate on the footpath while C joined the queue. When an old woman, passing by exclaimed that Tricky was like a beautiful apricot I smiled and agreed.
A few minutes later I held a Styrofoam cup of Belgian hot chocolate in one hand and a strawberry and chocolate tart in the other. My beautiful apricot baby lay in the pram to my right and my sexy funny porridge-fascist husband sat on an orange milk crate to my left.
And the traffic zoomed by, and the sun shone, and satisfied customers walked past with fragrant loaves wrapped in brown paper under their arms…
And life was good.
Canberra is a strange cold wet fish of a city where trees grow in strict formation and politicians come out to play. There are certain laws binding the rest of our sweet nation and ensuring our moral and physical safety that need not apply in this city - it’s that special and magical.
I am insanely jealous of course, not because of the Canberra thing but because C is there for two days and thus guaranteed at least one night of uninterrupted sleep. That is, unless he succumbs to Canberra’s unique charms and spends the wee hours trawling the streets for Xrated porn and firecrackers.
Something I read, or maybe someone told me, or possibly an angel visited me in a dream and proclaimed it so, was that having a baby often makes bad relationships worse and good relationships pretty much stay the same.
C and I are best mates and have been together for many years, laughing at each others crap jokes and taking it in turns to make the porridge (except when C discovered a new and vastly superior porridge making method and then do you think I was allowed to go within two metres of a rolled oat?).
And certainly when I had to do that Will I Kill My Baby? Test they make you do after 6 weeks or so, I ticked all the right boxes (although I paused over the Are You Ever Afraid Of Your Partner box when I recalled his frightening obsession with the porridge).
But still, the truth is things have been getting a wee bit snappy around here of late.
We’re both tired and there have been more terse words and less cuddles than say 8 weeks ago. And there’s been little or no Special GrownUp Naked Time, not for want of trying. It is oddly difficult to get down and dirty when the other hand is occupied with rocking a cradle. A slight soiling is all we’ve really managed.
The other day we decided to go out for lunch with the baby.
Naturally in the car there were tears and the screaming tomato face but this time it wasn’t Tricky. We tried to talk in an adult fashion about the snappiness and the grumpiness and the Too Busy for Special GrownUp Naked Time.
I miss you, I cried.
I miss you too said C. It’s like we’ve both fallen in love with someone else.
Someone tiny, brown and incontinent.
When we got out of the car we stood in the street and kissed.
And said how much we loved each other.
And how sexy we were, even with spew on our clothes and poochy tummies.
And then, in lieu of Special GrownUp Naked Time we decided to eat cakes even though we knew it was bad and would add to general poochiness.
We wanted to go to our favourite bakery and eat their cakes but several thousand Sydneysiders had decided to do exactly the same thing and it was packed. This saddened us. But across the street was another café, a café that had been the height of grooviness and brimming with popularity until the coming of the bakery. Now it was nearly empty and looked lonely and sullen.
I felt a stab of sympathy. This café knew only too well the bitter taste of rejection.
Let’s go there, I said. At least they’ll be happy to see us.
I waited outside the ex-groovy café, rocking the pram as I watched the bakery queue across the road go round the corner and down the street. After a moment C came out with a face like a slapped arse.
They said no, he told me.
No? I repeated, confused.
No, he said more loudly, they said we couldn’t bring the pram inside and I’M NEVER COMING BACK TO THIS SHIT HOLE AGAIN.
I looked at C’s outraged face and in at the once groovy near empty café that wasn’t into prams and I started to laugh. Then we crossed back over the road and found a couple of orange milkcrates outside the bakery. I sat on my crate on the footpath while C joined the queue. When an old woman, passing by exclaimed that Tricky was like a beautiful apricot I smiled and agreed.
A few minutes later I held a Styrofoam cup of Belgian hot chocolate in one hand and a strawberry and chocolate tart in the other. My beautiful apricot baby lay in the pram to my right and my sexy funny porridge-fascist husband sat on an orange milk crate to my left.
And the traffic zoomed by, and the sun shone, and satisfied customers walked past with fragrant loaves wrapped in brown paper under their arms…
And life was good.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Surfacing
When I was 4, I lived with my family in Penang and on one memorable day I nearly died there too when I happily flung myself into the Grownups Pool at the Chinese Swimming Pools.
My parents and little sisters were eating lunch by the fountain. No one saw me run off in my kiddy brown skirted swimming costume with my Hiawatha rubber ring under one arm and by the time they realised I was gone I was hovering, suspended in greenish water, eyes boggling, lips firmly pressed together, marveling at the way the filtered sunlight played against the tiles.
In this moment there was no panic, more a sort of curious calm.
The world’s volume was suddenly switched down, reduced to the faint gush of the distant fountain, the rush of water in my ears and my own heartbeat. After what seemed like years I looked up to see a Brown Man in Batik Togs squatting on the edge of the pool, watching me.
I raised my arm and he lifted me out and that was that.
It’s been nearly 8 weeks since Tricky was born and that means I’m nearly all out of Ecstatic Birthing Hormones. This is the good stuff, the stuff that makes you ignore the tiredness and the ravenous hunger and the rectocele (yeah, go on, google that, I dare you) and the sore back and the flabby belly because you’re floating happily on your Hiawatha rubber ring inflated with pure motherly doting goodness.
It’s not that I’m out of the Motherly Doting Goodness, because I’m not, I’m reeking with the damn stuff – it’s splattered all over my bedroom floor, it’s just the other bits are starting to catch up with me.
On Thursday night the short film I wrote last year had a screening at a local cinema and I was there with C and Tricky and most of my family and a whole bunch of other people too and my face nearly fell apart with all the smiling and my head nearly exploded with all the convivial social chatting.
Because with the tiredness comes the shrunken vocabulary and the inability to focus.
I hear the voices, the questions, the conversations, but they seem oddly filtered, like through smoke or water.
Also, when standing about, I have a tendency now to rock, not in a groovy frayed denim and electric guitar kind of way, but in a bobbing boat kind of way – even when I’m not holding the baby. I noticed this for the first time when C took Tricky for a walk around the park and I stood holding the pram and after a few minutes noticed that I was rocking my handbag to sleep. (My friend Michelle tells me that I will find myself rocking the empty shopping trolley next.)
And then also there’s the soft haze of incredulity, the lordy lordy, My Whockety cloud of astonishment each morning when I wake (after two hours or perhaps three and once or twice five!) and see that lovely rounded currant bun face and those blue/brown eyes (colour yet to be finalized) and that worried wrinkled brow.
In the first week I could see my baby’s face everywhere, in the shadows on the blinds, the rolled up sheets on my bed. I saw his almond eyes in the grain of the wooden chest of drawers, the ceiling beams and in the whorled skin on my own fingertips. It was like being perpetually stoned on joy. In this state I can forgive all my shortcomings, the baby vomit on my cardigan, the breast milk drips on the bedroom floor, the failure to respond to text messages and emails.
Or, maybe, I just forget.
I have taken to carrying a notebook around with me because finally I got way too embarrassed to ask my dad for the tenth time when he was going in to have his knee operated on and what Grumpy Grandad’s new address was at the retirement village. I’ve still got a script deadline in October (and one in December and one in February) and it’s like squeezing blood out of a stone (or any number of constipated scenes, see previous posts) trying to get these written with my fuzzy blurry brain.
Eight weeks since I jumped into this wide wet pool of motherhood and my head is still below water.
I am still marveling, still mostly calm and curious, the light is still captivating, but those outside voices are getting louder.
Quite soon I will need to lift up my head and breathe.
I can’t wait to rejoin the land of the living, recover my brain and my body too, but I’ll also mourn the loss of this hovering underwater place, this soft focus, warm haze, babylove world.
My parents and little sisters were eating lunch by the fountain. No one saw me run off in my kiddy brown skirted swimming costume with my Hiawatha rubber ring under one arm and by the time they realised I was gone I was hovering, suspended in greenish water, eyes boggling, lips firmly pressed together, marveling at the way the filtered sunlight played against the tiles.
In this moment there was no panic, more a sort of curious calm.
The world’s volume was suddenly switched down, reduced to the faint gush of the distant fountain, the rush of water in my ears and my own heartbeat. After what seemed like years I looked up to see a Brown Man in Batik Togs squatting on the edge of the pool, watching me.
I raised my arm and he lifted me out and that was that.
It’s been nearly 8 weeks since Tricky was born and that means I’m nearly all out of Ecstatic Birthing Hormones. This is the good stuff, the stuff that makes you ignore the tiredness and the ravenous hunger and the rectocele (yeah, go on, google that, I dare you) and the sore back and the flabby belly because you’re floating happily on your Hiawatha rubber ring inflated with pure motherly doting goodness.
It’s not that I’m out of the Motherly Doting Goodness, because I’m not, I’m reeking with the damn stuff – it’s splattered all over my bedroom floor, it’s just the other bits are starting to catch up with me.
On Thursday night the short film I wrote last year had a screening at a local cinema and I was there with C and Tricky and most of my family and a whole bunch of other people too and my face nearly fell apart with all the smiling and my head nearly exploded with all the convivial social chatting.
Because with the tiredness comes the shrunken vocabulary and the inability to focus.
I hear the voices, the questions, the conversations, but they seem oddly filtered, like through smoke or water.
Also, when standing about, I have a tendency now to rock, not in a groovy frayed denim and electric guitar kind of way, but in a bobbing boat kind of way – even when I’m not holding the baby. I noticed this for the first time when C took Tricky for a walk around the park and I stood holding the pram and after a few minutes noticed that I was rocking my handbag to sleep. (My friend Michelle tells me that I will find myself rocking the empty shopping trolley next.)
And then also there’s the soft haze of incredulity, the lordy lordy, My Whockety cloud of astonishment each morning when I wake (after two hours or perhaps three and once or twice five!) and see that lovely rounded currant bun face and those blue/brown eyes (colour yet to be finalized) and that worried wrinkled brow.
In the first week I could see my baby’s face everywhere, in the shadows on the blinds, the rolled up sheets on my bed. I saw his almond eyes in the grain of the wooden chest of drawers, the ceiling beams and in the whorled skin on my own fingertips. It was like being perpetually stoned on joy. In this state I can forgive all my shortcomings, the baby vomit on my cardigan, the breast milk drips on the bedroom floor, the failure to respond to text messages and emails.
Or, maybe, I just forget.
I have taken to carrying a notebook around with me because finally I got way too embarrassed to ask my dad for the tenth time when he was going in to have his knee operated on and what Grumpy Grandad’s new address was at the retirement village. I’ve still got a script deadline in October (and one in December and one in February) and it’s like squeezing blood out of a stone (or any number of constipated scenes, see previous posts) trying to get these written with my fuzzy blurry brain.
Eight weeks since I jumped into this wide wet pool of motherhood and my head is still below water.
I am still marveling, still mostly calm and curious, the light is still captivating, but those outside voices are getting louder.
Quite soon I will need to lift up my head and breathe.
I can’t wait to rejoin the land of the living, recover my brain and my body too, but I’ll also mourn the loss of this hovering underwater place, this soft focus, warm haze, babylove world.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
The First Father's Day
Dear Daddy
Today is Father's Day. Woo hoo!
Wasn’t that excellent this morning when we went to the Bourke St Bakery and you sat outside on a milkcrate holding me while Mummy was inside buying croissants and then all those people stopped to wish you Happy Father’s Day?
It’s odd the way people in this city don’t generally like to make contact with strangers but when you’re carrying me in your arms they often smile and stop to chat. I did think that it was because of me but when we went through the park the other day I noticed people doing exactly the same thing except with dogs.
You don’t seem to swaddle me as much anymore which I’m frankly a little relieved about.
If you could have a word with Mummy I’d appreciate it because she has become a complete swaddle fiend. Sometimes I like to wave my hands in the air, you know, to express my masculinity and also to poke myself in the eye. And if I’m feeling a little peckish I like to suck on my fists. It’s very difficult when they’re lashed to my sides.
By the way, I also like it when you play your guitar for me.
You used to play guitar all the time for Mummy, in your courting days, and she really loves those three songs. I like them too but if we could extend the playlist I think that would be good. Sometimes when I’ve been “restless” and Mummy says in slightly strained tones Go To Daddy Now, you pop me on your lap and start to strum your guitar and I think that’s just lovely.
Truly.
When I make those screaming noises it’s actually me trying to jam along. For instance I like to throw a bit of seemingly hysterical hiccupping in now and then for a syncopated rhythm effect and that abrupt puking noise is my version of the famous gated drum sound as used so prominently on Phil Collins’ anthem In The Air Tonight and subsequently in much of the recorded pop drum sound of the 1980s.
I’m six weeks and five days old today and just this weekend I’ve started to really focus on your faces and also make little burbling gurgly noises now and then, as if I’m thinking about how much I love being your baby or else impersonating a teeny tiny drainpipe.
My farting is still cause for amusement and I’m trying to perfect a sort of lilting trumpet that could come in handy for those guitar/hiccup jam sessions.
I’m looking forward to growing up and playing with you and learning from you. Hey, won’t it be fun when I’m bigger and we gang up on Mummy together! Hee hee! What a cak. Ooh do you think she knows? Let’s not tell her, let’s just think of heaps of hilarious tricks we can play on her. Won’t she be surprised?
I knew we would be great friends the very first time you held me. It was just after I was born and I was lying on top of Mummy’s tummy. She gave me a little cuddle and then asked you to pick me up.
And you did, you held me and sniffed my head and loved me. And I stared up at you with my bright blue grey eyes and wrinkled my forehead and scowled and loved you right back.
I didn't make you a card due to my current lack of fine motor skills. I hope you're not disappointed. (Although Mummy did think of tying some paint brushes to my arms, propping me up against some thick paper and activating my startle reflex to create something bright and original.)
Still, it won't be long. In a couple of years I’ll be able to make you a Father’s Day card with funny stick figure drawings and wobbly handwriting.
I might even accidentally write Happy Farters Day like you did, in all innocence, to your own father when you were just a little boy.
But instead, this year, I made you a Father.
Happy First Father's Day Daddy.
I love you.
Your Son
Tricky
xxxxx
Today is Father's Day. Woo hoo!
Wasn’t that excellent this morning when we went to the Bourke St Bakery and you sat outside on a milkcrate holding me while Mummy was inside buying croissants and then all those people stopped to wish you Happy Father’s Day?
It’s odd the way people in this city don’t generally like to make contact with strangers but when you’re carrying me in your arms they often smile and stop to chat. I did think that it was because of me but when we went through the park the other day I noticed people doing exactly the same thing except with dogs.
You don’t seem to swaddle me as much anymore which I’m frankly a little relieved about.
If you could have a word with Mummy I’d appreciate it because she has become a complete swaddle fiend. Sometimes I like to wave my hands in the air, you know, to express my masculinity and also to poke myself in the eye. And if I’m feeling a little peckish I like to suck on my fists. It’s very difficult when they’re lashed to my sides.
By the way, I also like it when you play your guitar for me.
You used to play guitar all the time for Mummy, in your courting days, and she really loves those three songs. I like them too but if we could extend the playlist I think that would be good. Sometimes when I’ve been “restless” and Mummy says in slightly strained tones Go To Daddy Now, you pop me on your lap and start to strum your guitar and I think that’s just lovely.
Truly.
When I make those screaming noises it’s actually me trying to jam along. For instance I like to throw a bit of seemingly hysterical hiccupping in now and then for a syncopated rhythm effect and that abrupt puking noise is my version of the famous gated drum sound as used so prominently on Phil Collins’ anthem In The Air Tonight and subsequently in much of the recorded pop drum sound of the 1980s.
I’m six weeks and five days old today and just this weekend I’ve started to really focus on your faces and also make little burbling gurgly noises now and then, as if I’m thinking about how much I love being your baby or else impersonating a teeny tiny drainpipe.
My farting is still cause for amusement and I’m trying to perfect a sort of lilting trumpet that could come in handy for those guitar/hiccup jam sessions.
I’m looking forward to growing up and playing with you and learning from you. Hey, won’t it be fun when I’m bigger and we gang up on Mummy together! Hee hee! What a cak. Ooh do you think she knows? Let’s not tell her, let’s just think of heaps of hilarious tricks we can play on her. Won’t she be surprised?
I knew we would be great friends the very first time you held me. It was just after I was born and I was lying on top of Mummy’s tummy. She gave me a little cuddle and then asked you to pick me up.
And you did, you held me and sniffed my head and loved me. And I stared up at you with my bright blue grey eyes and wrinkled my forehead and scowled and loved you right back.
I didn't make you a card due to my current lack of fine motor skills. I hope you're not disappointed. (Although Mummy did think of tying some paint brushes to my arms, propping me up against some thick paper and activating my startle reflex to create something bright and original.)
Still, it won't be long. In a couple of years I’ll be able to make you a Father’s Day card with funny stick figure drawings and wobbly handwriting.
I might even accidentally write Happy Farters Day like you did, in all innocence, to your own father when you were just a little boy.
But instead, this year, I made you a Father.
Happy First Father's Day Daddy.
I love you.
Your Son
Tricky
xxxxx
Monday, August 28, 2006
And Then My Watch Melted And My Giraffe Caught On Fire
The other day, while breastfeeding, I made a decision not to pluck the long hairs growing from my nipples because I liked the way they curled around my baby’s nose and made him look like Salvador Dali.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
ESCAPE From St Hellacious!
Various events have conspired to delay the writing of this post, the biggest of which seems to be sleep deprivation. Using a combination of extreme willpower, sharp pointy bits of wood and the journal I kept at the time I have pieced together the following…
On what was to be my third and final night at the hospital I wrote these words:
Just woke after a three hour Panadol/Voltane sleep thinking it was morning! Refreshed. Delighted. This morning we’re going home! And oh look there’s sun outside. But then…strange… how cold I am. Pick up mobile phone, planning to ring C am astonished to see time – it’s not even one oclock.
Because I have given birth a couple of days previously to writing the above, I am knackered.
My body is awash with strange hormones. I have hemorrhoids, abdominal muscle separation, a fucked back and what feels like an entire embroidered tapestry of one of those creepy weeping clowns stitched into my perineum.
Also I have a baby.
This makes me very happy, very tired, very sore, very excited, very fearful and very ambivalent about cross stitching all at once. I am a badly blended cocktail of emotions, served with a bowl of salted mixed metaphors. In short, I am mere snotty putty in the Evil Midwife’s hands.
For the first two days there is no sign of Evil Midwife. Instead, a parade of bespectacled Reasonably Nice Midwives with English accents and sensible shoes march in and out of my room. Half of them are barking mad but all of them are cheerful.
On the first night, a few hours after my baby is born, they tuck me into the post natal ward, send C home (apparently his work is now done) and leave a sheaf of helpful How To Be A Mother type notes on my bedside table. The Reasonably Nice Midwives, much like School Prefects in an Enid Byton book, tell me everything I need to know to ensure I do well at St Hellacious; the mealtimes, the classes, the best way to fold a nappy. I tell the Reasonably Nice Midwife From Cornwall that I feel like I am in an English Boarding School and she smiles politely as she smoothes down her pigtails and waves her lacrosse stick about.
Let’s humour the post partum woman, her smile seems to say.
Early on it seems that I am going to fail Breastfeeding 101 or at the very least have to do Breastfeeding Detention.
Throughout the day the prefects come in and encourage me to squeeze the bejesus out of my breasts. A few tiny golden drops of colostrum appear but they wouldn’t feed a gnat let alone a baby. One prefect tells me, comfortingly, that for now baby will get his nourishment from the brown fat between his shoulder blades. This is both disgusting and fascinating and probably the only time anyone thinks kindly of backfat.
On the third night, I realize that man cannot live on backfat alone.
Moments after writing my impressions of experiencing a full night’s sleep in just three hours a new midwife entered the room. She seemed Cheerful. She seemed Blyton-esque. She didn’t have an English accent but she did seem Reasonably Nice. I told her how well I had slept and how good I was feeling. She admired the baby, told me his jaundice would clear up soon and expressed surprise at his birth weight - quite substantial despite his Nearly Four Week premature status.
“He doesn’t look premmie at all” she said. I told her that I wanted to go home the following day and she did a double take.
“But he’s jaundiced” she protested. “And, he’s premmie.”
Like my MS during the birth, the prematurity of my baby will be brought up whenever I attempt to do something the midwives don’t agree with. Something strange and radical like…going home.
Probably in an effort to gain approval and a Get Out Of Hospital Free pass I then agreed to “have another go” at breastfeeding. Perhaps oddly, this wasn’t something I had worried too much about. I felt fine. I was sure it would happen soon, I just needed to practice a bit more. I also told myself that if I couldn’t breastfeed I wasn’t going to freak out about it. Yes I wanted to breast feed but if for some reason I couldn’t that was ok. In fact, I had decided, formula feeding wasn’t the end of the world.
After all, I had a baby. He was healthy. He was absorbing his own backfat. Yes he had jaundice and a little sticky eye and tiny furry ears but to me he was lovely. Everything else was gravy.
In retrospect I can see that this was to be my final ‘happy thought’ at St Hellacious.
The breastfeeding coaching session begins at 1.15 am. It goes for an hour and a half. In this time I go from feeling “fine” to feeling “completely and totally fucked.”
Breastfeeding was not something I would learn with practice, it was a mystical and highly technical science which I should have started preparing for at the age of six. Like playing the piano or learning ballet, I had missed my opportunity and now I and my malnourished, jaundice ridden, hairy little sticky-eyed monkey baby would pay the price.
Over and over again I tried to coax him to latch on, over and over again he would mash my nipple into a variety of intriguing shapes. All wrong. All completely hopeless. The midwife tutted and clicked her tongue and asked me stupid questions like: How does that feel?
How does one answer a question like that at 2am? I have never breastfed before. I have never attempted to breastfeed before. How does it feel? I want to say "it feels like the worst foreplay in the world" but I am scared that this sounds pervy and weird, not to mention impertinent, and be grounds for taking my baby away and giving him to someone with proper nipples.
Finally, after yet another attempt, I realise my nipple is bleeding. A small bloody gobbet hangs from my son’s lip. I stare at the damage, aghast. I am so obviously incompetent I don’t even realize it when a section of my nipple is destroyed by my baby’s equally incompetent technique. We both suck.
The midwife asks in an incredulous voice: couldn’t you feel that?
My mouth opens and closes I can’t think of anything to say.
Yes of course it hurt but how am I meant to know that it was the wrong way to feel?
We try both breasts, we try different positions. I try and stay calm. Finally she decides I need to hand express into a little cup because otherwise my baby will starve.
She does the expressing and I try not to feel like a cow. She manages to get two and a half mils but then loses almost half when she tries to draw it up into the wrong syringe. I stare at the precious golden drops wasted and grit my teeth. Unsurprisingly he spits half of it out. At this point I ask about whether I need to supplement with formula. She hums and ha’s and purses her lips. She tells me that first of all the baby’s blood sugar level will need to be checked. She also says that we should have another breastfeeding session at…oh, five o’clock this morning.
I agree to this because I am starting to get scared about my ability to look after my baby, because I am tired and emotional, because I am intensely hormonal and because she is an Evil Midwife with special Mind Powers no mere mortal can resist.
Around 3am, a second midwife enters. She is also Evil and may even be drooling a little and sporting fangs. Vlad The Impaler is tall and stern and here to check my sleeping baby’s blood sugar level. She grabs a foot and pricks his heel with what can only be a rusty bayonet left over from WW1.
He screams and my heart nearly stops. I have never heard him scream. I have never heard him cry like this. I am paralysed with horror. What in God’s name have I agreed to? Vlad squeezes his foot hard and remarks on how little blood he seems to have: Most babies have a lot… she corrects herself…Normally babies have no trouble…. She smears some of the blood on her hand as she tries to make it register on her little Torture Machine. Mmmm, no, no good, I’ll have to try again.
She grabs his foot again and I leap out of bed. I beg her to try the other foot. Vlad scowls at me. I was going to stay on one foot in case we had to go again… oh whatever… She grabs the other foot and pricks him again and he screams again and cries and cries… and again there’s not enough blood to register. She picks him up, puts him over her shoulder, and I, shrinking, desperate, utterly miserable say to her in a cringing little voice: maybe I could…and gesture at him.
Vlad seems to find this offensive and flounces out of the room calling over her shoulder as she does I’ll have to send the head midwife because I’ve done it twice now and it hasn’t worked.
I am shocked. The only crumb of comfort is that in my arms my baby calms down again and some residual spark of myself shouts in a tiny defiant voice: you see! I managed to calm my baby. I am a GOOD MOTHER. You are a CUNT.
In comes the Head Midwife, not Evil per se and possibly even Reasonably Nice in other circumstances. She speaks pleasantly, she warms my baby’s foot, she manages to get more than enough blood in one prick and his blood sugar level is 3.3 which is perfectly fine. Now, finally, I burst into tears. My baby has enough blood. Not only that, his blood sugar level is “fine”.
Vlad the Impaler hovers by the door. Did you have ‘problems’? she calls out. His feet were cold says Head Midwife shortly. As I seem to be incapable of doing anything other than quietly weeping on my wailing infant’s head, HM leads me back to bed, tucks me in and herds Vlad out of the room. I sit up in bed with my baby pressed against my skin until at last he falls asleep.
The time is 3:15 am and instead of trying to sleep myself I am so distressed that all I can think of doing is digging out my journal and writing the whole fucking awful thing down. And I do. And I do feel a bit better. And I even get to sleep.
And at 5am in comes Evil Midwife 1 and the whole breastfeeding session starts all over again.
This time she manages to milk another syringe of colostrum from me. She also has to leave, her shift is over but she will send Another In Her Place to continue her dark work. There is no word of encouragement, no ‘keep going, it’ll get better’ or ‘you’re doing a great job, don’t give up’. There is no more said about the supplementary feed and I wonder why my baby was subjected to Vlad The Impaler in the first place. I’m left feeling fifty sorts of shit.
Waiting, waiting, waiting…finally a new midwife appears. She is slightly warmer but perhaps this is because the dawn has finally broken and the truly Evil Midwives must return to their underground crypts and hang by the toes until midnight strikes once again.
At 8am I wander forlornly into the meal room to have my breakfast. I tow my child behind me in his plastic sided bassinet. I have already rung C to tell him that I can’t come home after all, I am incapable of feeding and our baby is sick and nearly didn’t have enough blood. My mobile phone is bathed in snot as I blubber incoherently to him.
I continue to blubber all through breakfast which is substantial because I am starving. While eating my third bowl of weetbix I overhear a woman talking to another new mother about leaving the hospital today and I realize that this is someone from the Home Midwife Service. I nearly bathe my baby in breakfast cereal in my haste to catch her. Yes I should be able to go home today (previous midwives had assured me there was no way I could go because I hadn’t ‘booked in to leave’), she would get someone to see me this morning.
When C arrives I am able to tell him the saga of the previous night. N also arrives. Her advice is that I must come home and not be subjected to any further bullying and fuckwittery. I will have access to the Home Midwife service, I can hire a Lactation Consultant, there is nothing more I need from St Hellacious. I must say, firmly, that I am leaving at five that afternoon and would they please arrange the paperwork to suit. The 'please' is optional.
From here, I turn a corner and drag my way back up to normality. The HMS midwife is more than nice, she’s actually helpful and encouraging. I have a list of things that need doing before I leave, tests, checkups for me and for my baby. The very act of writing a list makes me feel better. C and I also attend a half hour lecture by a neonatologist. He talks about the biology of breastfeeding, the evolution of human childbirth – it’s interesting, stimulating and…I take notes. Again, the act of writing stuff down is incredibly comforting. When we speak to him following the lecture he looks at my baby and agrees that I should go home if I want to. He also gives me the phone number of a Lactation Consultant.
Finally I can face the St Hellacious midwives and ask (politely but firmly) for my paperwork, for a physiotherapist to assess me, for the pediatrician to check my baby (please).
They try to thwart me by citing his jaundice, his premmie-ness, his sticky eye and lack of latch. They try everything but his tiny furry ears. I prepare to launch myself at them and beat them about the head and pigtails with their lacrosse sticks but finally they relent.
And at five oclock I am finally released. It’s pissing with rain and freezing cold but I am nearly faint with joy and relief.
If it wasn’t for my piles, stitches, fucked back, and weak stomach muscles I would do a little happy dance in the lobby.
Instead, like in all good Enid Blyton books, I settle for a chocolate brownie and lashings of hot chocolate in the café, to build up my strength up for the long three minute drive home.
On what was to be my third and final night at the hospital I wrote these words:
Just woke after a three hour Panadol/Voltane sleep thinking it was morning! Refreshed. Delighted. This morning we’re going home! And oh look there’s sun outside. But then…strange… how cold I am. Pick up mobile phone, planning to ring C am astonished to see time – it’s not even one oclock.
Because I have given birth a couple of days previously to writing the above, I am knackered.
My body is awash with strange hormones. I have hemorrhoids, abdominal muscle separation, a fucked back and what feels like an entire embroidered tapestry of one of those creepy weeping clowns stitched into my perineum.
Also I have a baby.
This makes me very happy, very tired, very sore, very excited, very fearful and very ambivalent about cross stitching all at once. I am a badly blended cocktail of emotions, served with a bowl of salted mixed metaphors. In short, I am mere snotty putty in the Evil Midwife’s hands.
For the first two days there is no sign of Evil Midwife. Instead, a parade of bespectacled Reasonably Nice Midwives with English accents and sensible shoes march in and out of my room. Half of them are barking mad but all of them are cheerful.
On the first night, a few hours after my baby is born, they tuck me into the post natal ward, send C home (apparently his work is now done) and leave a sheaf of helpful How To Be A Mother type notes on my bedside table. The Reasonably Nice Midwives, much like School Prefects in an Enid Byton book, tell me everything I need to know to ensure I do well at St Hellacious; the mealtimes, the classes, the best way to fold a nappy. I tell the Reasonably Nice Midwife From Cornwall that I feel like I am in an English Boarding School and she smiles politely as she smoothes down her pigtails and waves her lacrosse stick about.
Let’s humour the post partum woman, her smile seems to say.
Early on it seems that I am going to fail Breastfeeding 101 or at the very least have to do Breastfeeding Detention.
Throughout the day the prefects come in and encourage me to squeeze the bejesus out of my breasts. A few tiny golden drops of colostrum appear but they wouldn’t feed a gnat let alone a baby. One prefect tells me, comfortingly, that for now baby will get his nourishment from the brown fat between his shoulder blades. This is both disgusting and fascinating and probably the only time anyone thinks kindly of backfat.
On the third night, I realize that man cannot live on backfat alone.
Moments after writing my impressions of experiencing a full night’s sleep in just three hours a new midwife entered the room. She seemed Cheerful. She seemed Blyton-esque. She didn’t have an English accent but she did seem Reasonably Nice. I told her how well I had slept and how good I was feeling. She admired the baby, told me his jaundice would clear up soon and expressed surprise at his birth weight - quite substantial despite his Nearly Four Week premature status.
“He doesn’t look premmie at all” she said. I told her that I wanted to go home the following day and she did a double take.
“But he’s jaundiced” she protested. “And, he’s premmie.”
Like my MS during the birth, the prematurity of my baby will be brought up whenever I attempt to do something the midwives don’t agree with. Something strange and radical like…going home.
Probably in an effort to gain approval and a Get Out Of Hospital Free pass I then agreed to “have another go” at breastfeeding. Perhaps oddly, this wasn’t something I had worried too much about. I felt fine. I was sure it would happen soon, I just needed to practice a bit more. I also told myself that if I couldn’t breastfeed I wasn’t going to freak out about it. Yes I wanted to breast feed but if for some reason I couldn’t that was ok. In fact, I had decided, formula feeding wasn’t the end of the world.
After all, I had a baby. He was healthy. He was absorbing his own backfat. Yes he had jaundice and a little sticky eye and tiny furry ears but to me he was lovely. Everything else was gravy.
In retrospect I can see that this was to be my final ‘happy thought’ at St Hellacious.
The breastfeeding coaching session begins at 1.15 am. It goes for an hour and a half. In this time I go from feeling “fine” to feeling “completely and totally fucked.”
Breastfeeding was not something I would learn with practice, it was a mystical and highly technical science which I should have started preparing for at the age of six. Like playing the piano or learning ballet, I had missed my opportunity and now I and my malnourished, jaundice ridden, hairy little sticky-eyed monkey baby would pay the price.
Over and over again I tried to coax him to latch on, over and over again he would mash my nipple into a variety of intriguing shapes. All wrong. All completely hopeless. The midwife tutted and clicked her tongue and asked me stupid questions like: How does that feel?
How does one answer a question like that at 2am? I have never breastfed before. I have never attempted to breastfeed before. How does it feel? I want to say "it feels like the worst foreplay in the world" but I am scared that this sounds pervy and weird, not to mention impertinent, and be grounds for taking my baby away and giving him to someone with proper nipples.
Finally, after yet another attempt, I realise my nipple is bleeding. A small bloody gobbet hangs from my son’s lip. I stare at the damage, aghast. I am so obviously incompetent I don’t even realize it when a section of my nipple is destroyed by my baby’s equally incompetent technique. We both suck.
The midwife asks in an incredulous voice: couldn’t you feel that?
My mouth opens and closes I can’t think of anything to say.
Yes of course it hurt but how am I meant to know that it was the wrong way to feel?
We try both breasts, we try different positions. I try and stay calm. Finally she decides I need to hand express into a little cup because otherwise my baby will starve.
She does the expressing and I try not to feel like a cow. She manages to get two and a half mils but then loses almost half when she tries to draw it up into the wrong syringe. I stare at the precious golden drops wasted and grit my teeth. Unsurprisingly he spits half of it out. At this point I ask about whether I need to supplement with formula. She hums and ha’s and purses her lips. She tells me that first of all the baby’s blood sugar level will need to be checked. She also says that we should have another breastfeeding session at…oh, five o’clock this morning.
I agree to this because I am starting to get scared about my ability to look after my baby, because I am tired and emotional, because I am intensely hormonal and because she is an Evil Midwife with special Mind Powers no mere mortal can resist.
Around 3am, a second midwife enters. She is also Evil and may even be drooling a little and sporting fangs. Vlad The Impaler is tall and stern and here to check my sleeping baby’s blood sugar level. She grabs a foot and pricks his heel with what can only be a rusty bayonet left over from WW1.
He screams and my heart nearly stops. I have never heard him scream. I have never heard him cry like this. I am paralysed with horror. What in God’s name have I agreed to? Vlad squeezes his foot hard and remarks on how little blood he seems to have: Most babies have a lot… she corrects herself…Normally babies have no trouble…. She smears some of the blood on her hand as she tries to make it register on her little Torture Machine. Mmmm, no, no good, I’ll have to try again.
She grabs his foot again and I leap out of bed. I beg her to try the other foot. Vlad scowls at me. I was going to stay on one foot in case we had to go again… oh whatever… She grabs the other foot and pricks him again and he screams again and cries and cries… and again there’s not enough blood to register. She picks him up, puts him over her shoulder, and I, shrinking, desperate, utterly miserable say to her in a cringing little voice: maybe I could…and gesture at him.
Vlad seems to find this offensive and flounces out of the room calling over her shoulder as she does I’ll have to send the head midwife because I’ve done it twice now and it hasn’t worked.
I am shocked. The only crumb of comfort is that in my arms my baby calms down again and some residual spark of myself shouts in a tiny defiant voice: you see! I managed to calm my baby. I am a GOOD MOTHER. You are a CUNT.
In comes the Head Midwife, not Evil per se and possibly even Reasonably Nice in other circumstances. She speaks pleasantly, she warms my baby’s foot, she manages to get more than enough blood in one prick and his blood sugar level is 3.3 which is perfectly fine. Now, finally, I burst into tears. My baby has enough blood. Not only that, his blood sugar level is “fine”.
Vlad the Impaler hovers by the door. Did you have ‘problems’? she calls out. His feet were cold says Head Midwife shortly. As I seem to be incapable of doing anything other than quietly weeping on my wailing infant’s head, HM leads me back to bed, tucks me in and herds Vlad out of the room. I sit up in bed with my baby pressed against my skin until at last he falls asleep.
The time is 3:15 am and instead of trying to sleep myself I am so distressed that all I can think of doing is digging out my journal and writing the whole fucking awful thing down. And I do. And I do feel a bit better. And I even get to sleep.
And at 5am in comes Evil Midwife 1 and the whole breastfeeding session starts all over again.
This time she manages to milk another syringe of colostrum from me. She also has to leave, her shift is over but she will send Another In Her Place to continue her dark work. There is no word of encouragement, no ‘keep going, it’ll get better’ or ‘you’re doing a great job, don’t give up’. There is no more said about the supplementary feed and I wonder why my baby was subjected to Vlad The Impaler in the first place. I’m left feeling fifty sorts of shit.
Waiting, waiting, waiting…finally a new midwife appears. She is slightly warmer but perhaps this is because the dawn has finally broken and the truly Evil Midwives must return to their underground crypts and hang by the toes until midnight strikes once again.
At 8am I wander forlornly into the meal room to have my breakfast. I tow my child behind me in his plastic sided bassinet. I have already rung C to tell him that I can’t come home after all, I am incapable of feeding and our baby is sick and nearly didn’t have enough blood. My mobile phone is bathed in snot as I blubber incoherently to him.
I continue to blubber all through breakfast which is substantial because I am starving. While eating my third bowl of weetbix I overhear a woman talking to another new mother about leaving the hospital today and I realize that this is someone from the Home Midwife Service. I nearly bathe my baby in breakfast cereal in my haste to catch her. Yes I should be able to go home today (previous midwives had assured me there was no way I could go because I hadn’t ‘booked in to leave’), she would get someone to see me this morning.
When C arrives I am able to tell him the saga of the previous night. N also arrives. Her advice is that I must come home and not be subjected to any further bullying and fuckwittery. I will have access to the Home Midwife service, I can hire a Lactation Consultant, there is nothing more I need from St Hellacious. I must say, firmly, that I am leaving at five that afternoon and would they please arrange the paperwork to suit. The 'please' is optional.
From here, I turn a corner and drag my way back up to normality. The HMS midwife is more than nice, she’s actually helpful and encouraging. I have a list of things that need doing before I leave, tests, checkups for me and for my baby. The very act of writing a list makes me feel better. C and I also attend a half hour lecture by a neonatologist. He talks about the biology of breastfeeding, the evolution of human childbirth – it’s interesting, stimulating and…I take notes. Again, the act of writing stuff down is incredibly comforting. When we speak to him following the lecture he looks at my baby and agrees that I should go home if I want to. He also gives me the phone number of a Lactation Consultant.
Finally I can face the St Hellacious midwives and ask (politely but firmly) for my paperwork, for a physiotherapist to assess me, for the pediatrician to check my baby (please).
They try to thwart me by citing his jaundice, his premmie-ness, his sticky eye and lack of latch. They try everything but his tiny furry ears. I prepare to launch myself at them and beat them about the head and pigtails with their lacrosse sticks but finally they relent.
And at five oclock I am finally released. It’s pissing with rain and freezing cold but I am nearly faint with joy and relief.
If it wasn’t for my piles, stitches, fucked back, and weak stomach muscles I would do a little happy dance in the lobby.
Instead, like in all good Enid Blyton books, I settle for a chocolate brownie and lashings of hot chocolate in the café, to build up my strength up for the long three minute drive home.
And the following day, my milk comes in and there's more latching than an entire girls' boarding school worth of dormitory doors.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Letter to A 39 Week and 4 Day Old Ex-Embryo Or Alternatively a 3 Week Old Baby
Dear Tricky
We’ve got this weird timeframe thing happening where you turned three weeks today but you’re not actually due till this Friday.
Also, when we were walking home from the physio appointment today I saw the moon, all round and getting ready to be full and that took me right back to just before you started making your grand entrance.
But then maybe this is just the effects of sleep deprivation because holey dooley that sleep three hours, get up and feed, go back to bed, get up an hour later thing is quite a headspin.
We’re doing a demand feed thing with you at the moment, so when you demand, I feed and my, for a small boy you can be quite the demanding little muppet. (That should probably be ‘moppet’ but with your cute round head and your little dark shiny eyes and blobby little nose you could get a part on Sesame Street any day. Also, who has time to fix typos? I’m a mum! And I’m tired! And I’m feeding on demand!)
Your father is completely smitten and sniffs your head constantly.
I allow him to do this because I think it’s a good way to get rid of house dust or skin flakes that may have gathered on your scalp. He learned how to swaddle you at the hospital and has since developed this to a fine art, wrapping you tightly and binding your teeny limbs to your body. At the moment you seem to enjoy this, you settle down and often fall asleep, but I’d like to see him try it when you’re, say, thirteen.
Sometimes your father takes the swaddling too far, like on the second night at home, at about three in the morning while I was waiting to feed you and trying to stay awake and he was saying…let’s try this new swaddle, now how did it go again… and I felt like screaming FUCK THE NEW SWADDLE JUST GIVE HIM TO ME. He’s calmed down a bit now but I still hear him muttering to himself “swaddle, swaddle swaddle” and catch him wrapping bits of cloth origami style about your tiny self.
Each day I try to achieve small goals such as returning emails, or writing a blog entry (!) or perhaps trying to edit one of my previously rejected scripts. Today’s goal was to try and gently extricate an unsightly piece of dried snot from your left nostril and guess what? I succeeded!
Meanwhile, your goal seems to be to daily increase the volume of your screaming. Hey! It’s working! Also, the velocity of your pooing. Today you almost managed to hit your father in the chest but he sneakily leapt sideways and instead you hit the door and the floor in one explosive farty squirt.
And then there's the scowling! Magnificent! You furrow your weeny fuzzy forehead and beetle your tiny brows and attempt to focus your little shoe button eyes and direct tiny laser beams at those who incur your displeasure. As a baby, I too was a furrower and a scowler and it makes me proud to see that you have inherited these disagreeable qualities. The explosive poo thing though…that’s completely your father.
I’m both horrified and jealous at your power to excrete. A week after we came home from the hospital, the combination of no walking, lots of fine cakes and especially, NOT ENOUGH WATER saw me staggering about the bathroom in agony. I have never been so constipated in my life. It was hell. It was worse than giving birth and it lasted three days. In the end I had to use those squirty up the bum things AND drink gallons of water AND march up and down Bondi promenade AND eat a coffee meringue before there was happiness again.
When I mentioned this to various friends and family who have had babies they all recalled the same thing happening to them. “It made me cry”, “It was horrible, I was too afraid to push”, “I nearly put a fist through the wall” “I was crippled” I was aghast that no one had seen fit to share this with me.
Yes, I was told to drink lots of water while breast feeding but no one actually said: because if you don’t you won’t just ‘shit a brick’ you’ll be shitting the entire wall, the bloke who built it, his ute with the blue heeler on the back, and his esky. Yesterday a friend said that, although truly appalling, once the constipation was over, it was forgotten and that's why no one had thought to warn me. There's just too much other stuff going on.
I suppose that all this other stuff is just part of the strange new territory that C and I have entered.
This place called parenthood.
We’re kind of scared, I have to admit. Sometimes we watch you sleeping and you look so tiny and cute and fragile and our hearts just overfill with love and love and more love for you.
And it’s sweet, but it’s painful too because how can we protect you from all the ghastly horrible things in the world? There’s just no swaddle big enough or strong enough for that.
So it’s scary yes but most of all it’s wonderful. And C and I gaze at you and then turn and look at each other and make “can you believe it?” hand gestures at each other and raise our eyebrows quizzically because, frankly, we can’t believe it.
But then here you are. Neatly swaddled and blissfully asleep on our bed. So it must be true.
Your full moon arrives tomorrow night. Let’s watch it together during that three o clock feed. We can toast it with breast milk and a large glass of water.
With love.
Your very own OvaGirl
xxxxxx
We’ve got this weird timeframe thing happening where you turned three weeks today but you’re not actually due till this Friday.
Also, when we were walking home from the physio appointment today I saw the moon, all round and getting ready to be full and that took me right back to just before you started making your grand entrance.
But then maybe this is just the effects of sleep deprivation because holey dooley that sleep three hours, get up and feed, go back to bed, get up an hour later thing is quite a headspin.
We’re doing a demand feed thing with you at the moment, so when you demand, I feed and my, for a small boy you can be quite the demanding little muppet. (That should probably be ‘moppet’ but with your cute round head and your little dark shiny eyes and blobby little nose you could get a part on Sesame Street any day. Also, who has time to fix typos? I’m a mum! And I’m tired! And I’m feeding on demand!)
Your father is completely smitten and sniffs your head constantly.
I allow him to do this because I think it’s a good way to get rid of house dust or skin flakes that may have gathered on your scalp. He learned how to swaddle you at the hospital and has since developed this to a fine art, wrapping you tightly and binding your teeny limbs to your body. At the moment you seem to enjoy this, you settle down and often fall asleep, but I’d like to see him try it when you’re, say, thirteen.
Sometimes your father takes the swaddling too far, like on the second night at home, at about three in the morning while I was waiting to feed you and trying to stay awake and he was saying…let’s try this new swaddle, now how did it go again… and I felt like screaming FUCK THE NEW SWADDLE JUST GIVE HIM TO ME. He’s calmed down a bit now but I still hear him muttering to himself “swaddle, swaddle swaddle” and catch him wrapping bits of cloth origami style about your tiny self.
Each day I try to achieve small goals such as returning emails, or writing a blog entry (!) or perhaps trying to edit one of my previously rejected scripts. Today’s goal was to try and gently extricate an unsightly piece of dried snot from your left nostril and guess what? I succeeded!
Meanwhile, your goal seems to be to daily increase the volume of your screaming. Hey! It’s working! Also, the velocity of your pooing. Today you almost managed to hit your father in the chest but he sneakily leapt sideways and instead you hit the door and the floor in one explosive farty squirt.
And then there's the scowling! Magnificent! You furrow your weeny fuzzy forehead and beetle your tiny brows and attempt to focus your little shoe button eyes and direct tiny laser beams at those who incur your displeasure. As a baby, I too was a furrower and a scowler and it makes me proud to see that you have inherited these disagreeable qualities. The explosive poo thing though…that’s completely your father.
I’m both horrified and jealous at your power to excrete. A week after we came home from the hospital, the combination of no walking, lots of fine cakes and especially, NOT ENOUGH WATER saw me staggering about the bathroom in agony. I have never been so constipated in my life. It was hell. It was worse than giving birth and it lasted three days. In the end I had to use those squirty up the bum things AND drink gallons of water AND march up and down Bondi promenade AND eat a coffee meringue before there was happiness again.
When I mentioned this to various friends and family who have had babies they all recalled the same thing happening to them. “It made me cry”, “It was horrible, I was too afraid to push”, “I nearly put a fist through the wall” “I was crippled” I was aghast that no one had seen fit to share this with me.
Yes, I was told to drink lots of water while breast feeding but no one actually said: because if you don’t you won’t just ‘shit a brick’ you’ll be shitting the entire wall, the bloke who built it, his ute with the blue heeler on the back, and his esky. Yesterday a friend said that, although truly appalling, once the constipation was over, it was forgotten and that's why no one had thought to warn me. There's just too much other stuff going on.
I suppose that all this other stuff is just part of the strange new territory that C and I have entered.
This place called parenthood.
We’re kind of scared, I have to admit. Sometimes we watch you sleeping and you look so tiny and cute and fragile and our hearts just overfill with love and love and more love for you.
And it’s sweet, but it’s painful too because how can we protect you from all the ghastly horrible things in the world? There’s just no swaddle big enough or strong enough for that.
So it’s scary yes but most of all it’s wonderful. And C and I gaze at you and then turn and look at each other and make “can you believe it?” hand gestures at each other and raise our eyebrows quizzically because, frankly, we can’t believe it.
But then here you are. Neatly swaddled and blissfully asleep on our bed. So it must be true.
Your full moon arrives tomorrow night. Let’s watch it together during that three o clock feed. We can toast it with breast milk and a large glass of water.
With love.
Your very own OvaGirl
xxxxxx
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Because he was Tricky going in and Tricky coming out...
His name is Tristan Patrick...
...also known as Tricky.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Moonrising (The Birth)
Two days earlier it had been a full moon.
As we drive home along the ocean I watch it hanging, hugely round and golden, above the waves.
Maybe the moon will bring the baby I say to C and we laugh because we had been told that the full moon does bring the baby and so, lacking any better idea, we had planned around it – our pre-baby holiday away, the baby book reading, the writing down of the birth plan, my sister AJ booking her ticket from NZ for the full moon - two days before the due date, the last minute intensive antenatal class…all scheduled before the full moon.
The next full moon.
You’re one lunar month away, says my sister in law N later that night and I think about the time we have left and the time that has passed and how much has moved and changed within the ocean of our lives and still the moon rises, and still the waves crash and suddenly, shockingly there is no more time.
On Thursday, C goes back to Northern NSW, and I potter on at home. On Friday morning I wake, back cramps, waves of period like pain, bearable but uncomfortable.
And… confusing. This is… early.
It’s the gnocchi, I think.
Earlier I babysat the Naughty Nephews and we had dinner together. The pasta was a month past its use by date.
I, on the other hand, am a month early.
The pain continues, regular, unsettling, and in the morning I ring the Birth Centre to see what I should do. Take Panadeine, they tell me, and rest and ring again if they continue.
I do, and they do, and I ring again.
Come in, the midwife says, but if you are in labour we can’t take you because you need to be 37 weeks at least. You’ll have to go to Delivery.
I am horribly disappointed and when later N and I arrive at the Birth Centre, a midwife steers me back down the hall to the other doors.
No, I want to say, I can wait, please! I can do better. I can hang on. Give me another chance. But she’s gone.
And all through Friday the pain continues to wash over me, stops while I am in the bath where I sway and sing the world’s a big blue marble through my contractions and the warm water slops over my belly rising like an island from the deep.
And we wait and we wait and we wait…should I stay, should I go, should C fly home now, or next flight, or last flight, or drive, or wait, N is waiting with me, calmly updating C, giving me arnica but no, stay don’t rush, don’t panic, not happening, don’t go….
Fifteen minutes after C’s last flight leaves the midwife examines me again. I am 1cm and fully effaced. I’m not going anywhere.
C swears loudly and exclaims delightedly within the same breath. He will pack up, drive back, be here in about seven hours – about 1 in the morning.
My youngest sister K arrives from Newcastle, her fiancé has driven her the two hours and will drive back again immediately. You look after your sister, he tells her. Don’t leave her alone at the hospital. K is nervous, excited, didn’t read Active Birth - she did order it from the bookshop but it didn’t come in time…
No time, no time…
That night I am given strong doses of Panadeine and a couple of mild sleeping tablets and I have three blessed hours of pain free sleep. I’m still 1 cm on Saturday morning so we’re sent home again.
It’s the day of the baby shower which is now postponed although a couple of girlfriends turn up and we have tea and cake and lavender oil back massages and the day passes in a beautiful blur of love and sugar.
And the waves keep coming and I am starting to turn into myself, getting into the zone.
By Saturday night the waves are much harsher, I hang off the walls and breathe, N is telling me to float above the waves and indeed at the height of the pain I do see myself floating above… something dark and far away, a canyon, impenetrable, mysterious…and then the wave recedes and I find my feet on the other side.
Minute after minute, breath after breath, hour after hour.
Walking down the hallway to go back to the hospital, I have to stop and breathe and float on the walls directly outside the Naughty Nephew’s bedroom. Vaguely I am aware of their bright eyes, their curious voices.
Earlier Naughty Nephew the 2nd had asked his father about why it was hurting so much and he began to explain…well the baby has to come out through her vagina… NN2’s eyes goggle. His mouth dropped open. Struck temporarily speechless he covered his cheeks with his hands.
After the birth he will draw a card for me showing a picture of me “dilating” and “being dilated by K”.
After a gruesome but mercifully short drive on my hands and knees in the back of the car, we reach the hospital where they discover my bladder has hugely distended. I haven’t been to the toilet all day. I’ve been in the zone and also I’m a bit iffy using any toilet other than my own. I resolve to get over this bit of fastidiousness but in the meantime the midwife uses an in out catheter to draw off a litre of urine.
K, N and C carry dish after dish to the sink and drain it away.
Sometime during the night will come the first of many discussions concerning my multiple sclerosis. Could this have caused the bladder retention? No, I say, in between breathing and floating, nothing to do with it. The MS comes up again and again and underlying the questions is the Potential for Problem and hence the need for intervention.
I breathe and float and argue.
They examine me and disappointingly I am only 3cm dilated. The contractions on top of a full bladder have made me seem far further progressed than I actually am. This time I get a shot of Pethedine to let me sleep.
Again, a few hours of respite, a few hours to catch my breath, clean the slate, start again. Until now Pethedine was on my list of No Thankyous, but I have changed my tune. This early in the labour it is Pethedine that is giving me strength.
By Sunday nothing has changed and I am sent home again. This time we will have no visitors, nothing but quiet and nourishment and breathing and rest. I am given the Panadeine forte and the sleeping tablets again but this time they do little, perhaps allowing me to doze between contractions, little more.
And once again my bladder starts to shut down, although my sister K is by me all through the night with a little bowl to help me relieve the pressure.
And so on Monday afternoon , I am back at the hospital. The pain is not so great but I don’t want to make the same journey I made on Saturday night. This time they tell me my bladder is retaining again but not like the night before, 600 mls instead of a litre. (Are you sure this isn’t the MS?) So now I’m going to have a catheter throughout the labour.
I ask if I can have more Pethedine which means another examination. This time a midwife suspects I could have a bladder infection (Could it be the MS?) so I will have to go onto IV antibiotics during the labour. They put a canula in the back of my hand in readiness and throughout the labour I will snap at people who clutch or press at it.
Stop it! My hand, you’re pressing my hand!
I am aware of voices and murmurings around me but by now I am pretty much into the zone and time which seemed to be so short before has now become slippery and elastic and I slip and slide in and out of now and another state, a more liquid state of consciousness, full of strange imagery and half dreams.
A midwife breaks my waters and they gush hotly down my legs.
Somewhere in there the obstetrician has reappeared, more MS discussion, concern that this labour is taking so long, I am now, after all this time, only five centimeters and he is concerned because…..because…because…
… the voice weaves around me, he is talking Syntocin to hurry the labour along and I think of how this will throw me straight into the deep end of these crashing wave contractions and I know I am not ready.
I ask for Pethedine, let me sleep, let my body try and finish the job.
My support team are around me, rock solid, N has come home early from work and I have asked her to stay for the birth, K is holding my hand, C is with me and around me whispering to me you are so beautiful, you are doing so well, you are so strong…
They work tirelessly, massaging me, applying heat pack and whisking it away when I screech too hot too hot on the eve of each contraction. I am silently congratulating myself for not swearing, for staying calm even though it is patently obvious that the massage is all wrong that the hot packs are too hot and then in the wrong place, that K’s hands are too small and in the wrong place…
C tells me later that I would snap out instructions and the three would roll eyes and smile at each other and patiently work on around me.
You said that K’s hands were too small and that they were like monkey paws, he tells me and I gasp at the meanness and cry with laughter at my cranky shitty labouring self, forgiven over and over again.
And eventually I am given an ultimatum.
Pethedine, yes, but then in two hours, I’ll be reassessed, to see if Intervention Is Required to Speed Things Up.
two hours only…
time, time, so little of it, so much of it, not yet, not yet, not yet
C and N withdraw to restrategise.
They are aware that I am rapidly being seen as A Problem, there are tight little knots of staff discussing me, they hush up as K walks past. C and N create their own tight little knot while K stays with me.
The pethedine only lets me sleep between contractions, and these are getting bigger, the waves are rushing down my body from head to toe, my back arches up in between. In these moments I moan and sigh and think yes, I understand why women choose epidurals, I understand fearing and hating this pain, I understand elective caesarians and my little sister despairs as I whisper all my fear to her.
I’m scared, I’m scared, I can’t, I don’t want, it’s not fair…I’m scared
But in between these moments I am drifting at the entrance of that dark world, that strange half life, illuminated by pain. Flickers of face and image and strains of music and words. I have never seen that image before I say to myself, I have never heard those words before…
And later we say that may well have been transition, the doorway into Stage 2 because when I am finally examined, exactly two hours later, I am fully dilated.
Fuck your syntocin I think.
In stage 2, fully dilated, the door to our world as fully open as it can ever be to the baby squeezed deep within my body, a light in the darkness, a path to follow through the incessant squeeze and writhe and push…
Push, I hear people saying, it’s time to push…
…and I do, for nearly two hours, with nothing to show for it. I hang from my husband’s arms, my sister rubs at my legs and squeezes my toes, my sister in law rubs at my back and stops and starts and talks me through, her voice is a clear bell in the storm brewing about my body.
Here now is the dark place, the black place, the canyon I floated over during earlier contractions. The world has split wide open, full of stars and the bright lights of faces I can’t place or properly glimpse.
All love and all hell rests here and I see, suddenly how thin the veil is that lies between us. Only women glimpse this place, I think. Only women see this power.
The shock of this.
The sprawl of this.
The intense terror and beauty that winds me through this landscape, winds this place to me, marked by the painful waves crashing against me.
Push, I hear the voices saying, and I push and I push but I know it’s not enough.
We’re running out of time, the obstetrician says…that word again…
With each wave I push with my first breath, push hard at something but when I break to gulp air and push again it’s as if whatever I’m pushing against has slipped further from my reach.
…the time…the obstetrician says. His eyes are like green orbs, they seem sorrowful and fanatical all at once and I hear him saying ventouse but then also forceps and maybe even emergency caesarian and I think no, that’s not fair, after all this, that’s fucked…
So, push again, he says…your baby’s head is flexed, I ‘ll try and turn it now, but if this doesn’t work we need to look at the options, it’s been two and a half hours now… do you understand?
Do I understand?
I do, but I don’t. I understand the logic but I don’t understand the enormity, the power of what I’m experiencing.
He reaches into me and twists and I scream and I hang and clutch and berate and groan from the arms and hands of people who love and support me, until my body, my vessel, slides further into the heaving waters of this new ocean, this new storm…
We’re running out of time…
Time
Time
Time
And the time it takes is one breath, perhaps, or the combined heartbeat of me and the child trapped within me, or one hour, or one year, but when the next wave hits me, deep inside I suddenly scream.
Mum.
Get the baby out. Mum!
Breath
Breath
Push!
Muuuuuuum! Get the baby Mum. Please.
Breath.
Breath.
But there’s nothing. And then time stops.
The obstetrician asks: the ventouse?
And I open my eyes and see N’s face. I know she had the ventouse with her second child, Naughty Nephew the 2nd has told me about how we was “hoovered” out of his mother because he wanted to stay inside and play football “with the bones”…
She nods. Yes. The bell in the storm.
And I say yes.
And bang! the room fills with staff who seem to have been hovering in the hallway waiting for the word.
C tells me later how it became suddenly a room full of people, busy, swift, efficient. He knew and N knew but my sister K didn’t and she was scared.
I’m told to get up on the bed, the doctors are waiting and I mutter the doctors can fucking well wait as I heave myself up onto the bed. I am tired beyond tired and sore beyond sore.
And now, a new kind of scream, a new kind of sensation.
But it’s all part of the same water, the same journey, the same road that led me past that huge golden moon so many years ago.
The ventouse is slipping and the baby’s heart rate is dropping but here now perhaps is where my mother is able to do her own intervention, or perhaps it’s luck, or love, or skill or all these things, or nothing but suddenly I hear people say:
Here comes your baby’s head!
And I feel that burn, that stretch, that I have read about, heard about…and now the head is out…and now, impossibly quick after all that has gone before, the rest of my baby comes slithering out and suddenly there is a new person in the room, a new soul… and people are laughing and gasping and my sister is sobbing.
It’s a he.
And he’s on my belly, large and wet. And his bright eyes look at me in amazement.
And I stare back, in amazement, this is you. This is you.
We saw you being put into my body, in the end of a pipette.
We saw you sparkle in the night sky of my uterus, a star beside your sibling’s smaller weaker beat.
We saw you alone, a tiny dancing baby, shimmying beneath the ultrasound.
We saw you at 20 weeks, still moving and dancing and bigger and bigger…
We saw you pushing and batting at my flesh…
We saw you coming from far far away.
And we thought we loved you then.
But we were wrong.
Because now you’re here, and so the world has changed.
And the stars have wheeled and turned.
And the moon has come and gone.
And time has stood still for you.
And the oceans have run dry and refilled for you.
And my love. And your father’s love.
Immeasurable.
For you. Our son.
And things will never be the same again.
As we drive home along the ocean I watch it hanging, hugely round and golden, above the waves.
Maybe the moon will bring the baby I say to C and we laugh because we had been told that the full moon does bring the baby and so, lacking any better idea, we had planned around it – our pre-baby holiday away, the baby book reading, the writing down of the birth plan, my sister AJ booking her ticket from NZ for the full moon - two days before the due date, the last minute intensive antenatal class…all scheduled before the full moon.
The next full moon.
You’re one lunar month away, says my sister in law N later that night and I think about the time we have left and the time that has passed and how much has moved and changed within the ocean of our lives and still the moon rises, and still the waves crash and suddenly, shockingly there is no more time.
On Thursday, C goes back to Northern NSW, and I potter on at home. On Friday morning I wake, back cramps, waves of period like pain, bearable but uncomfortable.
And… confusing. This is… early.
It’s the gnocchi, I think.
Earlier I babysat the Naughty Nephews and we had dinner together. The pasta was a month past its use by date.
I, on the other hand, am a month early.
The pain continues, regular, unsettling, and in the morning I ring the Birth Centre to see what I should do. Take Panadeine, they tell me, and rest and ring again if they continue.
I do, and they do, and I ring again.
Come in, the midwife says, but if you are in labour we can’t take you because you need to be 37 weeks at least. You’ll have to go to Delivery.
I am horribly disappointed and when later N and I arrive at the Birth Centre, a midwife steers me back down the hall to the other doors.
No, I want to say, I can wait, please! I can do better. I can hang on. Give me another chance. But she’s gone.
And all through Friday the pain continues to wash over me, stops while I am in the bath where I sway and sing the world’s a big blue marble through my contractions and the warm water slops over my belly rising like an island from the deep.
And we wait and we wait and we wait…should I stay, should I go, should C fly home now, or next flight, or last flight, or drive, or wait, N is waiting with me, calmly updating C, giving me arnica but no, stay don’t rush, don’t panic, not happening, don’t go….
Fifteen minutes after C’s last flight leaves the midwife examines me again. I am 1cm and fully effaced. I’m not going anywhere.
C swears loudly and exclaims delightedly within the same breath. He will pack up, drive back, be here in about seven hours – about 1 in the morning.
My youngest sister K arrives from Newcastle, her fiancé has driven her the two hours and will drive back again immediately. You look after your sister, he tells her. Don’t leave her alone at the hospital. K is nervous, excited, didn’t read Active Birth - she did order it from the bookshop but it didn’t come in time…
No time, no time…
That night I am given strong doses of Panadeine and a couple of mild sleeping tablets and I have three blessed hours of pain free sleep. I’m still 1 cm on Saturday morning so we’re sent home again.
It’s the day of the baby shower which is now postponed although a couple of girlfriends turn up and we have tea and cake and lavender oil back massages and the day passes in a beautiful blur of love and sugar.
And the waves keep coming and I am starting to turn into myself, getting into the zone.
By Saturday night the waves are much harsher, I hang off the walls and breathe, N is telling me to float above the waves and indeed at the height of the pain I do see myself floating above… something dark and far away, a canyon, impenetrable, mysterious…and then the wave recedes and I find my feet on the other side.
Minute after minute, breath after breath, hour after hour.
Walking down the hallway to go back to the hospital, I have to stop and breathe and float on the walls directly outside the Naughty Nephew’s bedroom. Vaguely I am aware of their bright eyes, their curious voices.
Earlier Naughty Nephew the 2nd had asked his father about why it was hurting so much and he began to explain…well the baby has to come out through her vagina… NN2’s eyes goggle. His mouth dropped open. Struck temporarily speechless he covered his cheeks with his hands.
After the birth he will draw a card for me showing a picture of me “dilating” and “being dilated by K”.
After a gruesome but mercifully short drive on my hands and knees in the back of the car, we reach the hospital where they discover my bladder has hugely distended. I haven’t been to the toilet all day. I’ve been in the zone and also I’m a bit iffy using any toilet other than my own. I resolve to get over this bit of fastidiousness but in the meantime the midwife uses an in out catheter to draw off a litre of urine.
K, N and C carry dish after dish to the sink and drain it away.
Sometime during the night will come the first of many discussions concerning my multiple sclerosis. Could this have caused the bladder retention? No, I say, in between breathing and floating, nothing to do with it. The MS comes up again and again and underlying the questions is the Potential for Problem and hence the need for intervention.
I breathe and float and argue.
They examine me and disappointingly I am only 3cm dilated. The contractions on top of a full bladder have made me seem far further progressed than I actually am. This time I get a shot of Pethedine to let me sleep.
Again, a few hours of respite, a few hours to catch my breath, clean the slate, start again. Until now Pethedine was on my list of No Thankyous, but I have changed my tune. This early in the labour it is Pethedine that is giving me strength.
By Sunday nothing has changed and I am sent home again. This time we will have no visitors, nothing but quiet and nourishment and breathing and rest. I am given the Panadeine forte and the sleeping tablets again but this time they do little, perhaps allowing me to doze between contractions, little more.
And once again my bladder starts to shut down, although my sister K is by me all through the night with a little bowl to help me relieve the pressure.
And so on Monday afternoon , I am back at the hospital. The pain is not so great but I don’t want to make the same journey I made on Saturday night. This time they tell me my bladder is retaining again but not like the night before, 600 mls instead of a litre. (Are you sure this isn’t the MS?) So now I’m going to have a catheter throughout the labour.
I ask if I can have more Pethedine which means another examination. This time a midwife suspects I could have a bladder infection (Could it be the MS?) so I will have to go onto IV antibiotics during the labour. They put a canula in the back of my hand in readiness and throughout the labour I will snap at people who clutch or press at it.
Stop it! My hand, you’re pressing my hand!
I am aware of voices and murmurings around me but by now I am pretty much into the zone and time which seemed to be so short before has now become slippery and elastic and I slip and slide in and out of now and another state, a more liquid state of consciousness, full of strange imagery and half dreams.
A midwife breaks my waters and they gush hotly down my legs.
Somewhere in there the obstetrician has reappeared, more MS discussion, concern that this labour is taking so long, I am now, after all this time, only five centimeters and he is concerned because…..because…because…
… the voice weaves around me, he is talking Syntocin to hurry the labour along and I think of how this will throw me straight into the deep end of these crashing wave contractions and I know I am not ready.
I ask for Pethedine, let me sleep, let my body try and finish the job.
My support team are around me, rock solid, N has come home early from work and I have asked her to stay for the birth, K is holding my hand, C is with me and around me whispering to me you are so beautiful, you are doing so well, you are so strong…
They work tirelessly, massaging me, applying heat pack and whisking it away when I screech too hot too hot on the eve of each contraction. I am silently congratulating myself for not swearing, for staying calm even though it is patently obvious that the massage is all wrong that the hot packs are too hot and then in the wrong place, that K’s hands are too small and in the wrong place…
C tells me later that I would snap out instructions and the three would roll eyes and smile at each other and patiently work on around me.
You said that K’s hands were too small and that they were like monkey paws, he tells me and I gasp at the meanness and cry with laughter at my cranky shitty labouring self, forgiven over and over again.
And eventually I am given an ultimatum.
Pethedine, yes, but then in two hours, I’ll be reassessed, to see if Intervention Is Required to Speed Things Up.
two hours only…
time, time, so little of it, so much of it, not yet, not yet, not yet
C and N withdraw to restrategise.
They are aware that I am rapidly being seen as A Problem, there are tight little knots of staff discussing me, they hush up as K walks past. C and N create their own tight little knot while K stays with me.
The pethedine only lets me sleep between contractions, and these are getting bigger, the waves are rushing down my body from head to toe, my back arches up in between. In these moments I moan and sigh and think yes, I understand why women choose epidurals, I understand fearing and hating this pain, I understand elective caesarians and my little sister despairs as I whisper all my fear to her.
I’m scared, I’m scared, I can’t, I don’t want, it’s not fair…I’m scared
But in between these moments I am drifting at the entrance of that dark world, that strange half life, illuminated by pain. Flickers of face and image and strains of music and words. I have never seen that image before I say to myself, I have never heard those words before…
And later we say that may well have been transition, the doorway into Stage 2 because when I am finally examined, exactly two hours later, I am fully dilated.
Fuck your syntocin I think.
In stage 2, fully dilated, the door to our world as fully open as it can ever be to the baby squeezed deep within my body, a light in the darkness, a path to follow through the incessant squeeze and writhe and push…
Push, I hear people saying, it’s time to push…
…and I do, for nearly two hours, with nothing to show for it. I hang from my husband’s arms, my sister rubs at my legs and squeezes my toes, my sister in law rubs at my back and stops and starts and talks me through, her voice is a clear bell in the storm brewing about my body.
Here now is the dark place, the black place, the canyon I floated over during earlier contractions. The world has split wide open, full of stars and the bright lights of faces I can’t place or properly glimpse.
All love and all hell rests here and I see, suddenly how thin the veil is that lies between us. Only women glimpse this place, I think. Only women see this power.
The shock of this.
The sprawl of this.
The intense terror and beauty that winds me through this landscape, winds this place to me, marked by the painful waves crashing against me.
Push, I hear the voices saying, and I push and I push but I know it’s not enough.
We’re running out of time, the obstetrician says…that word again…
With each wave I push with my first breath, push hard at something but when I break to gulp air and push again it’s as if whatever I’m pushing against has slipped further from my reach.
…the time…the obstetrician says. His eyes are like green orbs, they seem sorrowful and fanatical all at once and I hear him saying ventouse but then also forceps and maybe even emergency caesarian and I think no, that’s not fair, after all this, that’s fucked…
So, push again, he says…your baby’s head is flexed, I ‘ll try and turn it now, but if this doesn’t work we need to look at the options, it’s been two and a half hours now… do you understand?
Do I understand?
I do, but I don’t. I understand the logic but I don’t understand the enormity, the power of what I’m experiencing.
He reaches into me and twists and I scream and I hang and clutch and berate and groan from the arms and hands of people who love and support me, until my body, my vessel, slides further into the heaving waters of this new ocean, this new storm…
We’re running out of time…
Time
Time
Time
And the time it takes is one breath, perhaps, or the combined heartbeat of me and the child trapped within me, or one hour, or one year, but when the next wave hits me, deep inside I suddenly scream.
Mum.
Get the baby out. Mum!
Breath
Breath
Push!
Muuuuuuum! Get the baby Mum. Please.
Breath.
Breath.
But there’s nothing. And then time stops.
The obstetrician asks: the ventouse?
And I open my eyes and see N’s face. I know she had the ventouse with her second child, Naughty Nephew the 2nd has told me about how we was “hoovered” out of his mother because he wanted to stay inside and play football “with the bones”…
She nods. Yes. The bell in the storm.
And I say yes.
And bang! the room fills with staff who seem to have been hovering in the hallway waiting for the word.
C tells me later how it became suddenly a room full of people, busy, swift, efficient. He knew and N knew but my sister K didn’t and she was scared.
I’m told to get up on the bed, the doctors are waiting and I mutter the doctors can fucking well wait as I heave myself up onto the bed. I am tired beyond tired and sore beyond sore.
And now, a new kind of scream, a new kind of sensation.
But it’s all part of the same water, the same journey, the same road that led me past that huge golden moon so many years ago.
The ventouse is slipping and the baby’s heart rate is dropping but here now perhaps is where my mother is able to do her own intervention, or perhaps it’s luck, or love, or skill or all these things, or nothing but suddenly I hear people say:
Here comes your baby’s head!
And I feel that burn, that stretch, that I have read about, heard about…and now the head is out…and now, impossibly quick after all that has gone before, the rest of my baby comes slithering out and suddenly there is a new person in the room, a new soul… and people are laughing and gasping and my sister is sobbing.
It’s a he.
And he’s on my belly, large and wet. And his bright eyes look at me in amazement.
And I stare back, in amazement, this is you. This is you.
We saw you being put into my body, in the end of a pipette.
We saw you sparkle in the night sky of my uterus, a star beside your sibling’s smaller weaker beat.
We saw you alone, a tiny dancing baby, shimmying beneath the ultrasound.
We saw you at 20 weeks, still moving and dancing and bigger and bigger…
We saw you pushing and batting at my flesh…
We saw you coming from far far away.
And we thought we loved you then.
But we were wrong.
Because now you’re here, and so the world has changed.
And the stars have wheeled and turned.
And the moon has come and gone.
And time has stood still for you.
And the oceans have run dry and refilled for you.
And my love. And your father’s love.
Immeasurable.
For you. Our son.
And things will never be the same again.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Hot Dog! We Have A Wiener!
I am BACK!
from the HOSPITAL!
with a BABY!
sweet mother of God that has got to be the most amazing and extraordinary thing i have ever done in my entire life. it was amazing but so loooooooong and hard but la so so so incredible
he is a BOY born finally on tuesday 18th july at apout 2pm
i am so tired and sore
and so happy
and c and i are completely smitten...
also obviously completely unprepared and shocked, but I'll get a pic up here as soon as...as...oh you know...
something...
i have a lot to say about this: the birth, the St Hellacious hospital experience, the great escape but you know what...he just fell asleep which is my cue to drop on the bed beside him.
thankyou lovely people
*smiles and falls into unconsciousness*
from the HOSPITAL!
with a BABY!
sweet mother of God that has got to be the most amazing and extraordinary thing i have ever done in my entire life. it was amazing but so loooooooong and hard but la so so so incredible
he is a BOY born finally on tuesday 18th july at apout 2pm
i am so tired and sore
and so happy
and c and i are completely smitten...
also obviously completely unprepared and shocked, but I'll get a pic up here as soon as...as...oh you know...
something...
i have a lot to say about this: the birth, the St Hellacious hospital experience, the great escape but you know what...he just fell asleep which is my cue to drop on the bed beside him.
thankyou lovely people
*smiles and falls into unconsciousness*
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Important Community Message
When you start to do the whole labour/contraction thing, DRINK LOTS OF FLUIDS.
Then, when you have drunk lots of fluids, DO LOTS OF WEEING.
If you don't you will end up with a bladder the size of a bowling ball. Amusingly you will assume this large swelling is baby's head and tell your husband to feel it and maybe give it a little kiss.
Won't you feel a dill later on!
The contractions will intensify. They will come at 2 to 3 minutes apart and you will be feeling very ordinary indeed. You will go back to the hospital that night, absolutely certain that THIS IS IT and you will find to your great displeasure that you are STILL ONLY ONE CENTIMETRE.
Plus your enormous bladder will need to be catheterised to remove the one litre of fluid so diligently drunk by you during the day.
After another night in at the hospital you will be again discharged and sent home, except this time you will be tested for a urinary tract infection.
On the good side, if this goes on for say... five more days you will be out of the premmie zone. The birth centre midwives will welcome you back.
On the bad side, you will be knackered.
Also, if baby who has been lying perfectly for ages, decides to go all posterior on your ass...those back achey contractions hurt like hell.
That is all.
Then, when you have drunk lots of fluids, DO LOTS OF WEEING.
If you don't you will end up with a bladder the size of a bowling ball. Amusingly you will assume this large swelling is baby's head and tell your husband to feel it and maybe give it a little kiss.
Won't you feel a dill later on!
The contractions will intensify. They will come at 2 to 3 minutes apart and you will be feeling very ordinary indeed. You will go back to the hospital that night, absolutely certain that THIS IS IT and you will find to your great displeasure that you are STILL ONLY ONE CENTIMETRE.
Plus your enormous bladder will need to be catheterised to remove the one litre of fluid so diligently drunk by you during the day.
After another night in at the hospital you will be again discharged and sent home, except this time you will be tested for a urinary tract infection.
On the good side, if this goes on for say... five more days you will be out of the premmie zone. The birth centre midwives will welcome you back.
On the bad side, you will be knackered.
Also, if baby who has been lying perfectly for ages, decides to go all posterior on your ass...those back achey contractions hurt like hell.
That is all.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Home pass
When I was a kid living in Malaysia there was a tv show called The Big Blue Marble. It was about environmental stuff and the theme song started with a chorus of childish voices singing...the world's a big blue marble when you see it from up there...the sun and moon declare...our beauty's very rare...
It's a catchy little number and one that is deeply ingrained in my childhood psyche (much like the cheer song for the University of Minnesota, see post previously) so perhaps that's why I was singing it through contractions. In the bath. At the hospital.
Yes, I was told by the birth centre to come on in after the contractions that had started the night before...and just excuse me a moment as i get another one and have to call c to come and squeeze my thighs and rub my back...
phew, back again...so, in I went with sister in law N because C was still in northern NSW, a 6 hour drive away, only to be told that because I was just on 36 weeks I was considered premature and so I WAS NO LONGER ABLE TO USE THE BIRTH CENTRE.
Imagine my delight as they pointed me to the delivery ward. I was left alone to have a few more happy contractions and then, it seemed, I was about to be released. I talked as hard as I could about prelabour and my sister AJ being in it for a week before proper labour beginning, I argued that as an IVF baby, a FET baby no less, that it must be older than 36 weeks anyway, it was a 10 day blastocyst that was transferred... not only that I made a point to chat merrily throughout the contractions just to show I could though fuck knows what I was actually saying.
I was a hair's breadth from going home, C was on the phone asking if he should catch the last plane... god here's another one...breathing breathing making little moany noises but trying to keep my face loose...
we were saying no, no, plenty of time...and then the midwife decided to do a quick internal exam.
Cervix effaced, 1 cm dilated and midwife was touching the baby's head through the membranes.
And that's how, a few hours later, I ended up in the antenatal ward and then in the bath and the singing through contractions began.
Having missed the plane, C was now driving home and expected at half past 12 that night.
ooh ooh ouchy ow ow but relaxing face and breathe gasp breathe...
I decided I didn't want to progress any further without him. By the time he arrived...I hadn't.
And finally this morning, the new shift of doctors and midwives decided yes I could go home.
As a little goodbye present, my mucus plug emerged during a urine sample. It was beautiful, ruby red and gold. The midwife was pleased and encouraged us to leave quickly. It's just that if you stay, she said delicately, they'll put a clock on you and... we took the hint.
So here I am.
Back at home. N, C and my sister K are feeding me, rubbing my legs and organising all the baby stuff I failed to do. oooooh oooh another one, another one.....
Sadly the baby shower was cancelled but...then, it's currently raining and a baby is coming and as I look out my window and breathe through the last of the previous contraction I think: well there is a baby shower. Of sorts.
I've gone past the point of merry chatting through contractions, past even the point of singing old tv tunes. It's just breathing and vocalising through each contraction, calling for back massage or leg rubbing...and trying to remember each one brings me closer to this thing we have worked so hard to achieve.
and inside my baby stretches and moves closer and closer. Head is engaged, but then all our heads are engaged, all focused on this amazing journey.
oh baby oh baby ooh ooh
soon baby soon.
we're here and we're so looking forward to meeting you.
It's a catchy little number and one that is deeply ingrained in my childhood psyche (much like the cheer song for the University of Minnesota, see post previously) so perhaps that's why I was singing it through contractions. In the bath. At the hospital.
Yes, I was told by the birth centre to come on in after the contractions that had started the night before...and just excuse me a moment as i get another one and have to call c to come and squeeze my thighs and rub my back...
phew, back again...so, in I went with sister in law N because C was still in northern NSW, a 6 hour drive away, only to be told that because I was just on 36 weeks I was considered premature and so I WAS NO LONGER ABLE TO USE THE BIRTH CENTRE.
Imagine my delight as they pointed me to the delivery ward. I was left alone to have a few more happy contractions and then, it seemed, I was about to be released. I talked as hard as I could about prelabour and my sister AJ being in it for a week before proper labour beginning, I argued that as an IVF baby, a FET baby no less, that it must be older than 36 weeks anyway, it was a 10 day blastocyst that was transferred... not only that I made a point to chat merrily throughout the contractions just to show I could though fuck knows what I was actually saying.
I was a hair's breadth from going home, C was on the phone asking if he should catch the last plane... god here's another one...breathing breathing making little moany noises but trying to keep my face loose...
we were saying no, no, plenty of time...and then the midwife decided to do a quick internal exam.
Cervix effaced, 1 cm dilated and midwife was touching the baby's head through the membranes.
And that's how, a few hours later, I ended up in the antenatal ward and then in the bath and the singing through contractions began.
Having missed the plane, C was now driving home and expected at half past 12 that night.
ooh ooh ouchy ow ow but relaxing face and breathe gasp breathe...
I decided I didn't want to progress any further without him. By the time he arrived...I hadn't.
And finally this morning, the new shift of doctors and midwives decided yes I could go home.
As a little goodbye present, my mucus plug emerged during a urine sample. It was beautiful, ruby red and gold. The midwife was pleased and encouraged us to leave quickly. It's just that if you stay, she said delicately, they'll put a clock on you and... we took the hint.
So here I am.
Back at home. N, C and my sister K are feeding me, rubbing my legs and organising all the baby stuff I failed to do. oooooh oooh another one, another one.....
Sadly the baby shower was cancelled but...then, it's currently raining and a baby is coming and as I look out my window and breathe through the last of the previous contraction I think: well there is a baby shower. Of sorts.
I've gone past the point of merry chatting through contractions, past even the point of singing old tv tunes. It's just breathing and vocalising through each contraction, calling for back massage or leg rubbing...and trying to remember each one brings me closer to this thing we have worked so hard to achieve.
and inside my baby stretches and moves closer and closer. Head is engaged, but then all our heads are engaged, all focused on this amazing journey.
oh baby oh baby ooh ooh
soon baby soon.
we're here and we're so looking forward to meeting you.
Friday, July 14, 2006
But I'm NEVER early.
It's no secret that I was lagging at the back of the line when they dealt out 'organisation'. I pack at the last minute. I arrive at the last minute. I understand not the list or the timetable. These are strange and foreign beasts.
In a pivotal moment in my early schooling career, my third grade teacher Miss Morrison (from Minnesota, USA but slumming it for the year in Werribee, Australia) discovered that I had somehow failed to get my looseleaf binder into any form of useful system.
Instead of neat cardboard dividers separating my subjects, each nicely decorated with a hand drawn picture depicting SOCIETY or MATHS I had a haphazard sheaf of paper and cardboard all flung in together. They probably weren't even sitting on their rings properly and I distinctly remember that on the GEOGRAPHY divider I had drawn a duck.
But why? she asked me, distinct crossness in her voice. Why would you throw all your papers into your folder like this when I asked you all to organise your work and I even showed you how to do it.
Had she?
I was speechless. I felt my face grow red even as I racked my brains to remember when we had studied FOLDER ORGANISATION.
Luckily, one of my desk neighbours was able to recall that I had not been at school that day, that I had been off sick and so had missed all the crucial tips for keeping my folder nice.
I burst into tears with sheer relief.
Miss Morrison was instantly all smiles. There's no need to be upset, she said. I wasn't angry. Did you think I was a bear?
I laughed, as required, through my tears but inside I thought, a bear no, a fascist bullying cow, yes.
Having been in Sydney for the last week C has gone back to the country town where he is setting up a new arts project. The launch is on Wednesday and the plan is for him to come back on the Thursday or Friday. During that time I will finish a couple of writing deadlines. Then, the week after next I will be free to pack hospital bag, place rubber sheet over mattress, wash barrels of baby clothes I have been given and find the time for C and I to get away, on our own, just the two of us. And, tommorrow, I'm meant to be having a baby shower.
Cue outrageous laughter at Plan and pathetic postponement of organisation.
Last night I was woken with nasty period like pains. Every fifteen minutes. They were so unpleasant I had to get out of bed. Each time they hit I would do a little belly dancing which seemed to help.
I also spent a lot of time on the loo. It was as I hadn't been constipated for the past month. Surely that's just last night's gnochi I kept telling myself. After all it was a month over the useby date.
But the pains kept coming.
This morning I rang the birth centre. I'm having these pains, I told the midwife. Every ten to fifteen minutes. And...I'm just on 36 weeks.
That's fantastic, she said cheerfully. Although, if you are in labour you have to go to the labour ward, you can't come to the birth centre until you're 37 weeks.
Bugger, I said.
I rang C to let him know that we might have to go to Plan B. Not there was ever a proper Plan A.
It's alright, he said. It might not be It. Some people keep having contractions for weeks before they go into labour.
Oh goody, I said.
So here I am, perched over my computer, standing, because sitting hurts a bit too much. N went out this morning and got me some Panadeine (midwife wants me to take 2 and call in a couple of hours after resting) some new born nappies (because the only ones I have are the freebies I was given at a baby expo) wipes, jelly beans and barley sugars.
I started packing my bag. I started writing my blog.
Good lord, is this really how it's going to go?
The thing is, C said, we can't control this. It doesn't matter about the washing, or the packing or the deadlines. If this is going to happen there's nothing we can do about it.
And of course he's right.
Miss Morrison ended up being one of my favourite teachers. She was bright and cheery and she helped me organise my folder. I delighted in seeing my subjects set out neatly, my precisely placed dividers with appropriate pictures (the duck deemed more suited for NATURE). I enjoyed clicking the metal rings shut and doctoring the little holes in my work sheets with stick on plastic reinforcement rings.
It was a short lived pleasure. But I think back to those organised days with sweet nostalgia. And If I haven't retained her planning skills I did retain Miss Morrison's university theme song, some thirty years later...rah for the U of M!
While I've been writing this the pains have been coming quite regularly. The baby's moving about which is quite reassuring. Nothing like a kick in the guts to say: it's ok, we can do it!
Keep me posted, said the midwife when I spoke to her this morning.
I've put it on my list. It's right before...hold on for a week.
In a pivotal moment in my early schooling career, my third grade teacher Miss Morrison (from Minnesota, USA but slumming it for the year in Werribee, Australia) discovered that I had somehow failed to get my looseleaf binder into any form of useful system.
Instead of neat cardboard dividers separating my subjects, each nicely decorated with a hand drawn picture depicting SOCIETY or MATHS I had a haphazard sheaf of paper and cardboard all flung in together. They probably weren't even sitting on their rings properly and I distinctly remember that on the GEOGRAPHY divider I had drawn a duck.
But why? she asked me, distinct crossness in her voice. Why would you throw all your papers into your folder like this when I asked you all to organise your work and I even showed you how to do it.
Had she?
I was speechless. I felt my face grow red even as I racked my brains to remember when we had studied FOLDER ORGANISATION.
Luckily, one of my desk neighbours was able to recall that I had not been at school that day, that I had been off sick and so had missed all the crucial tips for keeping my folder nice.
I burst into tears with sheer relief.
Miss Morrison was instantly all smiles. There's no need to be upset, she said. I wasn't angry. Did you think I was a bear?
I laughed, as required, through my tears but inside I thought, a bear no, a fascist bullying cow, yes.
Having been in Sydney for the last week C has gone back to the country town where he is setting up a new arts project. The launch is on Wednesday and the plan is for him to come back on the Thursday or Friday. During that time I will finish a couple of writing deadlines. Then, the week after next I will be free to pack hospital bag, place rubber sheet over mattress, wash barrels of baby clothes I have been given and find the time for C and I to get away, on our own, just the two of us. And, tommorrow, I'm meant to be having a baby shower.
Cue outrageous laughter at Plan and pathetic postponement of organisation.
Last night I was woken with nasty period like pains. Every fifteen minutes. They were so unpleasant I had to get out of bed. Each time they hit I would do a little belly dancing which seemed to help.
I also spent a lot of time on the loo. It was as I hadn't been constipated for the past month. Surely that's just last night's gnochi I kept telling myself. After all it was a month over the useby date.
But the pains kept coming.
This morning I rang the birth centre. I'm having these pains, I told the midwife. Every ten to fifteen minutes. And...I'm just on 36 weeks.
That's fantastic, she said cheerfully. Although, if you are in labour you have to go to the labour ward, you can't come to the birth centre until you're 37 weeks.
Bugger, I said.
I rang C to let him know that we might have to go to Plan B. Not there was ever a proper Plan A.
It's alright, he said. It might not be It. Some people keep having contractions for weeks before they go into labour.
Oh goody, I said.
So here I am, perched over my computer, standing, because sitting hurts a bit too much. N went out this morning and got me some Panadeine (midwife wants me to take 2 and call in a couple of hours after resting) some new born nappies (because the only ones I have are the freebies I was given at a baby expo) wipes, jelly beans and barley sugars.
I started packing my bag. I started writing my blog.
Good lord, is this really how it's going to go?
The thing is, C said, we can't control this. It doesn't matter about the washing, or the packing or the deadlines. If this is going to happen there's nothing we can do about it.
And of course he's right.
Miss Morrison ended up being one of my favourite teachers. She was bright and cheery and she helped me organise my folder. I delighted in seeing my subjects set out neatly, my precisely placed dividers with appropriate pictures (the duck deemed more suited for NATURE). I enjoyed clicking the metal rings shut and doctoring the little holes in my work sheets with stick on plastic reinforcement rings.
It was a short lived pleasure. But I think back to those organised days with sweet nostalgia. And If I haven't retained her planning skills I did retain Miss Morrison's university theme song, some thirty years later...rah for the U of M!
While I've been writing this the pains have been coming quite regularly. The baby's moving about which is quite reassuring. Nothing like a kick in the guts to say: it's ok, we can do it!
Keep me posted, said the midwife when I spoke to her this morning.
I've put it on my list. It's right before...hold on for a week.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Brain To Bishop
I rang C in a state of great excitement.For a long time I have been fearful of Mush Brain, that evil pregnancy induced state of vagueness and general sorry what was that? syndrome.
But now I had proof positive that I could beat it!
Being school holidays my sister in law N had arranged a chess tournament. Slightly reluctantly I agreed to take part.
Chess, you see, is not my game. As a kid I played draughts and Chinese Checkers and a sort of dropping beans in a little wooden pot game. But not chess.
But then, the tournament started and an amazing thing happened and lo…I won ALL my games!
Every single one!
Even the grand final!
At Chess! Chess, I say! Which I only learned to play as a grown up. And is much harder than that game where you drop the little beans in a wooden pot.
Did you hear me C, I shouted down the phone.
Every single game! I was the champion!
And that means I AM NOT IN THE GRIP OF MUSH BRAIN!!!.
How can I be when my focus, concentration and strategy skills are obviously razor sharp?
There was a delicate pause.
But... C said, you were playing against a six year old.
AND a nine year old, AND their mother, I retaliated.
...who was playing in tandem with the four year old, C pointed out.
But it was chess, I whined. Chess is Hard. Some pieces go one way, some pieces go another. And the six year old kept making up rules which sounded like they might be true so I had to keep checking with his mother.
Mmmm said C.
It's not like dropping beans in a little wooden pot, I said crossly. In fact I don't even know if that was a real game, it might just have been me liking the plunkety plunk sounds.
What are you talking about, asked C.
I’d really like to end this post neatly with some sort of witty observation about chess and playing against one’s nephews and so forth but... it all seems suddenly too much for me and my it’s a nice day today and where did I leave my cup of tea?
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
The Pain Event (34 Weeks)
I left home at the age of 19. My parents were not particularly impressed. For starters, my timing was seen as rather poor. A couple of weeks earlier my paternal grandmother had died of thyroid cancer.
My mother, being a trained nurse, had taken on the role of carer in that last stage of the cancer, my grandfather being hopelessly out of his depth both emotionally and physically. As a result of my mother’s efforts, my grandmother was able to die with dignity in her own bed.
It wasn’t just my mother who waited out those final weeks. Our entire family, Mum, Dad, my three younger sisters and I, had decamped from Newcastle and were now living in the fold up bunkbeds and strange faux-holiday ambience of my grandparents’ caravan. Once the getaway vehicle for countless family adventures it was now permanently parked on the pebblemix drive, a few feet away from my grandmother’s bedroom window.
She eventually died after a few weeks of this strange sad caravan limbo and then Mum and Dad took us down the coast to spend some time in a friend’s beach house. The idea was to have some family time, some grieving time, some quiet reflective time.
The problem for me was that I had left a boyfriend in Newcastle and an active sex life, both of which I was missing. I understood the need to support my grandfather and look after my grandmother, I respected my parents' wish to spend precious post funeral days in a poorly furnished two bedroom fibro minus television and telephone, but when we got back to Newcastle I packed a bag and announced my intention to stay with my boyfriend in Sydney over the weekend so we could go sailing.
And my parents hit the roof.
Looking back I imagine they felt it was too soon to be enjoying myself so soon after such a sad event. My father, who had said little to me about his grief at losing his mother, was probably disgusted at my blatant desire to hang off the edge of a speeding catamaran not to mention my unspoken desire to hang off my boyfriend.
I argued that I needed a break, that I wanted a holiday…
But you just had a holiday, my father snapped back. We just spent a week in a beach house.
And I hated every minute, I wanted to say.
Because the thing is, the holiday I want is from you.
I didn’t say those things, some vestigal sensitivity must have held me back. Instead I began to whine to get my way, always a useful tactic when dealing with disapproving parents. In this instance, my piercing tones finally burst the emotional dam in my father, he was able to shout that I was an ungrateful bitch, which obviously went down very well with me, and finally he offered this ultimatum: if you walk out that door you’re never coming back.
It was a no brainer.
Fine, I shouted back. I’ll move out when I get back from Sydney.
My face was grim, my eyes hard and stony but as I walked down the stairs I suddenly heard my mother break down and cry. It was this more than any of my father’s threats that nearly propelled me back up the stairs but instead I kept going, knowing that a line had been crossed.
I would go to Sydney and have plenty of sailing and sex, I would come back and move into a friend’s place, close to the university. After a few months my parents would visit my new house bringing housewarming presents and hugging me close. I would return to the family home, we would move beyond the incident and never speak of it again, but on that day standing on the stairs that led to the front door, hovering between anger and regret I realised that for the first time I had knowingly broken my mother’s heart. I could have taken a knife out of the kitchen drawer and stabbed her and I knew it could not have hurt her more than the sound of my feet marching out the front door.
I had caused this pain.
I had done it willingly.
And I cried bitterly at the thought.
A few years earlier I had kept a diary and one particularly ugly day I had written about how much I hated my fucking parents, each of them, my fucking mother and my fucking father and how I wished they would both just fuck off.
I have no idea why I had written this, I only remember the words scrawled in pencil, jagged furious scribblings inarticulate with 15 year old rage.
And I remember coming home from school to find my diary open to that page on my desk, a pointed message that my parents had found the page and read it.
For several years whenever I thought about this discovery I became furious all over again at the invasion of my privacy. But then, not long ago, I thought about this incident and instead of feeling the familiar white hot incandescence of my teenage indignation I wondered how I would feel, reading those words, about me, in my child’s handwriting.
It was a strange sensation and oddly painful.
These and other memories came back to me this week following a phonecall from a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time.
I hear you’re pregnant, he said, congratulations, I think you'll be a great mother.
The friend asked where we were having the baby and we discussed the hospital, the same place his wife had her baby recently, except, I said, we're hoping to use the Birth Centre and be under midwife care.
My friend made a small derisive sound. His wife had had an elective caesarian.
Oh, he said, you’re having one of those ‘natural’ births.
Well, I said, we’re going to try. It’s very possible I’ll be wheeled screaming straight into the labour ward and the warm comforting arms of Mr Epidural but I’m going to try my best to have a ‘natural’ birth, yes.
I didn’t mention the stretches and the birth plans and the support team, it seemed pointless.
I just don’t understand why you’d put yourself through all that… and then with a Herculean effort at civility he changed his tone. Oh well, he said cheerfully, to each their own.
The word he had omitted was pain.
I understood that he saw pain as a needless exercise, as an unnecessary element of the child-bearing procedure. Nobody likes pain. God knows I don’t, I am after all the woman who, years ago, when my then GP had greeted my announcement that I wanted to have a baby with the news that I should start with a blood test, blanched with horror and shrieked a bloodtest!?
Pain is unpleasant.
Pain makes you cry.
Pain makes other people cry for you because there’s not much they can do to help and also because in an effort to alleviate one’s pain one might reach for one’s husband’s gonads and scream Breathe Through This, Cunt.
Oh yes, it’s all ahead of me.
I didn’t say to my friend that I’m afraid of pain too, but I am looking forward to the birth of my child. That I have struggled so long and so hard to bring this soul into the world and one of those struggles was giving up things like coffee and wine and painkillers and anything else I thought might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That to avoid pain in the way he preferred I would need to agree to the use of drugs that might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That I would perhaps undergo invasive major surgery.
I’m not inflexible about this. I know I might become exhausted, the baby may become distressed, there are a myriad of crisis situations that may necessitate intervention and I’m prepared to do what it takes. Including the drugs and the surgery and whatever else I have to do to ensure a healthy baby.
But just here, just now, with six weeks left to go, yes, I do want to have a ‘natural’ birth.
And the thing is, I should have said to my friend, that pain you can’t even bring yourself to mention? That’s just the start buddy. You’ve got a daughter whom you adore more than life itself. I saw the photographs you sent via email, the radiance on you and your wife’s face as you held up your precious bundle.
But amongst the many golden moments of joy, there will still be pain, blackly stitched in fear, in illness, in injury or accident, in anger, in rage, in death. How does a father feel when his daughter says she hates her family or she leaves home under a dark cloud with her mother crying beside him? And for some parents, the pain is overwhelming. Last week an 8 year old girl was found murdered in a shopping centre toilet. The week before that a father accidentally ran his toddler over as he reversed down the driveway.
There is no anaesthetic for parenthood.
In the last days of my mother’s life, we, her daughters and husband, were gathered around her bed day and night like moths drawn to the intoxicating glow of her dying.
Now it was my turn to have my heart broken, and not fast or cleanly, but slowly, in splintering fragments of grief. I was losing the person I loved most in the world and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
In one of my last precious moments with my mother, curled up beside her on the bed, while my sisters and father were getting dinner, or sleep, or simply walking their own patterns of distress around the hospice, she asked me to forgive her. I was immediately resentful at the thought that, now, with death twiddling his thumbs nearby, she felt the need for forgiveness.
Why, I said, my blind stupid tears welling up immediately, why do you need to be forgiven?
For all the times I made you cry.
Our faces were very close together, our voices little more than whispers.
Oh yes, I said, of course yes.
And, she continued… I forgive you. For all the times you made me cry.
We lay like this for moments or perhaps it was hours, this woman and her first born child, mentally snipping together at the black stitches of our past.
We had 26 years together, my mother and I.
When you forgive the pain caused by each other that’s a heck of a lot of gold.
My mother, being a trained nurse, had taken on the role of carer in that last stage of the cancer, my grandfather being hopelessly out of his depth both emotionally and physically. As a result of my mother’s efforts, my grandmother was able to die with dignity in her own bed.
It wasn’t just my mother who waited out those final weeks. Our entire family, Mum, Dad, my three younger sisters and I, had decamped from Newcastle and were now living in the fold up bunkbeds and strange faux-holiday ambience of my grandparents’ caravan. Once the getaway vehicle for countless family adventures it was now permanently parked on the pebblemix drive, a few feet away from my grandmother’s bedroom window.
She eventually died after a few weeks of this strange sad caravan limbo and then Mum and Dad took us down the coast to spend some time in a friend’s beach house. The idea was to have some family time, some grieving time, some quiet reflective time.
The problem for me was that I had left a boyfriend in Newcastle and an active sex life, both of which I was missing. I understood the need to support my grandfather and look after my grandmother, I respected my parents' wish to spend precious post funeral days in a poorly furnished two bedroom fibro minus television and telephone, but when we got back to Newcastle I packed a bag and announced my intention to stay with my boyfriend in Sydney over the weekend so we could go sailing.
And my parents hit the roof.
Looking back I imagine they felt it was too soon to be enjoying myself so soon after such a sad event. My father, who had said little to me about his grief at losing his mother, was probably disgusted at my blatant desire to hang off the edge of a speeding catamaran not to mention my unspoken desire to hang off my boyfriend.
I argued that I needed a break, that I wanted a holiday…
But you just had a holiday, my father snapped back. We just spent a week in a beach house.
And I hated every minute, I wanted to say.
Because the thing is, the holiday I want is from you.
I didn’t say those things, some vestigal sensitivity must have held me back. Instead I began to whine to get my way, always a useful tactic when dealing with disapproving parents. In this instance, my piercing tones finally burst the emotional dam in my father, he was able to shout that I was an ungrateful bitch, which obviously went down very well with me, and finally he offered this ultimatum: if you walk out that door you’re never coming back.
It was a no brainer.
Fine, I shouted back. I’ll move out when I get back from Sydney.
My face was grim, my eyes hard and stony but as I walked down the stairs I suddenly heard my mother break down and cry. It was this more than any of my father’s threats that nearly propelled me back up the stairs but instead I kept going, knowing that a line had been crossed.
I would go to Sydney and have plenty of sailing and sex, I would come back and move into a friend’s place, close to the university. After a few months my parents would visit my new house bringing housewarming presents and hugging me close. I would return to the family home, we would move beyond the incident and never speak of it again, but on that day standing on the stairs that led to the front door, hovering between anger and regret I realised that for the first time I had knowingly broken my mother’s heart. I could have taken a knife out of the kitchen drawer and stabbed her and I knew it could not have hurt her more than the sound of my feet marching out the front door.
I had caused this pain.
I had done it willingly.
And I cried bitterly at the thought.
A few years earlier I had kept a diary and one particularly ugly day I had written about how much I hated my fucking parents, each of them, my fucking mother and my fucking father and how I wished they would both just fuck off.
I have no idea why I had written this, I only remember the words scrawled in pencil, jagged furious scribblings inarticulate with 15 year old rage.
And I remember coming home from school to find my diary open to that page on my desk, a pointed message that my parents had found the page and read it.
For several years whenever I thought about this discovery I became furious all over again at the invasion of my privacy. But then, not long ago, I thought about this incident and instead of feeling the familiar white hot incandescence of my teenage indignation I wondered how I would feel, reading those words, about me, in my child’s handwriting.
It was a strange sensation and oddly painful.
These and other memories came back to me this week following a phonecall from a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time.
I hear you’re pregnant, he said, congratulations, I think you'll be a great mother.
The friend asked where we were having the baby and we discussed the hospital, the same place his wife had her baby recently, except, I said, we're hoping to use the Birth Centre and be under midwife care.
My friend made a small derisive sound. His wife had had an elective caesarian.
Oh, he said, you’re having one of those ‘natural’ births.
Well, I said, we’re going to try. It’s very possible I’ll be wheeled screaming straight into the labour ward and the warm comforting arms of Mr Epidural but I’m going to try my best to have a ‘natural’ birth, yes.
I didn’t mention the stretches and the birth plans and the support team, it seemed pointless.
I just don’t understand why you’d put yourself through all that… and then with a Herculean effort at civility he changed his tone. Oh well, he said cheerfully, to each their own.
The word he had omitted was pain.
I understood that he saw pain as a needless exercise, as an unnecessary element of the child-bearing procedure. Nobody likes pain. God knows I don’t, I am after all the woman who, years ago, when my then GP had greeted my announcement that I wanted to have a baby with the news that I should start with a blood test, blanched with horror and shrieked a bloodtest!?
Pain is unpleasant.
Pain makes you cry.
Pain makes other people cry for you because there’s not much they can do to help and also because in an effort to alleviate one’s pain one might reach for one’s husband’s gonads and scream Breathe Through This, Cunt.
Oh yes, it’s all ahead of me.
I didn’t say to my friend that I’m afraid of pain too, but I am looking forward to the birth of my child. That I have struggled so long and so hard to bring this soul into the world and one of those struggles was giving up things like coffee and wine and painkillers and anything else I thought might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That to avoid pain in the way he preferred I would need to agree to the use of drugs that might possibly harm or hurt my baby. That I would perhaps undergo invasive major surgery.
I’m not inflexible about this. I know I might become exhausted, the baby may become distressed, there are a myriad of crisis situations that may necessitate intervention and I’m prepared to do what it takes. Including the drugs and the surgery and whatever else I have to do to ensure a healthy baby.
But just here, just now, with six weeks left to go, yes, I do want to have a ‘natural’ birth.
And the thing is, I should have said to my friend, that pain you can’t even bring yourself to mention? That’s just the start buddy. You’ve got a daughter whom you adore more than life itself. I saw the photographs you sent via email, the radiance on you and your wife’s face as you held up your precious bundle.
But amongst the many golden moments of joy, there will still be pain, blackly stitched in fear, in illness, in injury or accident, in anger, in rage, in death. How does a father feel when his daughter says she hates her family or she leaves home under a dark cloud with her mother crying beside him? And for some parents, the pain is overwhelming. Last week an 8 year old girl was found murdered in a shopping centre toilet. The week before that a father accidentally ran his toddler over as he reversed down the driveway.
There is no anaesthetic for parenthood.
In the last days of my mother’s life, we, her daughters and husband, were gathered around her bed day and night like moths drawn to the intoxicating glow of her dying.
Now it was my turn to have my heart broken, and not fast or cleanly, but slowly, in splintering fragments of grief. I was losing the person I loved most in the world and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
In one of my last precious moments with my mother, curled up beside her on the bed, while my sisters and father were getting dinner, or sleep, or simply walking their own patterns of distress around the hospice, she asked me to forgive her. I was immediately resentful at the thought that, now, with death twiddling his thumbs nearby, she felt the need for forgiveness.
Why, I said, my blind stupid tears welling up immediately, why do you need to be forgiven?
For all the times I made you cry.
Our faces were very close together, our voices little more than whispers.
Oh yes, I said, of course yes.
And, she continued… I forgive you. For all the times you made me cry.
We lay like this for moments or perhaps it was hours, this woman and her first born child, mentally snipping together at the black stitches of our past.
We had 26 years together, my mother and I.
When you forgive the pain caused by each other that’s a heck of a lot of gold.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Letter To A 28 Week Old Mathematical Genius
Dear Tiny But Feisty Person Currently Occupying My Uterus
It’s been a while but I’m finally putting fingers to keyboard. How’s it all going in the Pink Palace?
A little snug is what I’m guessing, what with all the feet I keep finding in my bellybutton.
The other morning your father was feeling you kick about and he decided he’d do a little gentle prodding back and then suddenly the two of you were engaged in some sort of bizarre poke-off where he would poke at you and you would poke back.
I was banned from laughing because the movement was preventing C from feeling the full force of your amazing new power and anyway who am I right, I’m just the large warm fleshy barrier lying between you both.
When you both finally collapsed with exhaustion, C said he was teaching you how to count.
This week C is away setting up a new project. I told him that you started doing that belly button poking thing again and he got sad because he was missing you. So then I said that I didn’t poke you back because that was a special game you have, just between the two of you, and that made him feel better.
Of course I was lying through my teeth and when he gets back on the weekend you can show off your Long Division skills.
A couple of weeks ago your aunty N did the Scientifically Proved Ring Test over my belly which said that you must be a Boy. And then, while I was at a Playwrights’ Conference on the weekend a woman told me that according to every Italian woman she had ever known, my bump was boy shaped. But one of my friends had a psychic episode and declared you were a Girl and then last night I dreamed that I had already given birth to you and you were indeed a Girl.
So who knows?
The dream actually went on to reveal you were also incredibly slippery and I dropped you a couple of times and then decided you really would be better off back inside me and I'd only given birth so prematurely because I was impatient to meet you and then I was working out the best way to swallow you whole and then thankfully I woke up.
Your cousins the Naughty Nephews have been very helpful with suggesting names and because we’re not sure of your gender (although that woman with all the Italian women friends was very persuasive) they have given me both sorts.
Naughty Nephew the 1st has provided a selection of lovely names all based on girls in his class he fancies or boys who are among his best friends. Among the girls he rates Chloe and Phoebe very highly and I was pleased to note that the other day he included Bronte as a suggestion. I am yet to meet Phoebe or Chloe but I have met Bronte several times and she is a lovely thoughtful polite little girl.
Naughty Nephew the 2nd, with his finger firmly on the Literary Pulse, has suggested Klaus, Violet or Sunny (being the names of the Baudelaire Children in Lemony Snicket’s delightful “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”). Violet gets extra points because she is also the daughter in “The Incredibles”.
And finally Naughty Nephew the 3rd, he of the blue saucer eyes, has suggested…his own name. But with a 2 on the end. You know, like with Shrek 2.
Today, I went to visit Grumpy Grandad (That’s Grumpy Great Grandad to you) and he suggested that I could use my deceased mother’s name.
Just on the off chance that it hadn’t occurred to me.
All suggestions are gratefully received of course. But at the moment I treat names the same way I treat gifts of baby clothes and baby items. I just don’t know what to do with them so I shove them in a cupboard or a corner to deal with later.
Even now, at just on 28 weeks, it still seems a long time till you’ll be safely in my arms.
Even with the dreams and the Ring Test and Poking Belly Button games, it still seems surreal.
Yes, you might be a baby, but you also might be my liver wearing boots and equipped with tiny fists.
Which of course would explain why you keep trying to beat up my bladder.
But despite the regular thrashings of various internal organs, despite the necessity to sleep sitting up, despite the sore back and shoulders...things are good.
Sometimes I look at my belly in the mirror and am shocked at how quickly my body has changed. But shocked in a good way. I can be hypnotized watching the ripples in my skin caused by you turning over, or stretching, or sculling a little amniotic fluid (like I know you do). I feel you when I'm driving or watching Very Boring Plays or when I'm meant to be having important business type conversations and it makes me smile.
I don’t mind too much when old ladies and friends of my parents touch my belly because I think it’s amazing too. In fact I think it's a complete miracle and maybe it's my civic duty to provide a Belly Touching service to anyone who needs it because that's how incredible and wonderful it all is.
And above all, I'm happy.
That's you who’s done that.
So thankyou.
And give the bladder a break some times, ok?
OvaGirlxxx
It’s been a while but I’m finally putting fingers to keyboard. How’s it all going in the Pink Palace?
A little snug is what I’m guessing, what with all the feet I keep finding in my bellybutton.
The other morning your father was feeling you kick about and he decided he’d do a little gentle prodding back and then suddenly the two of you were engaged in some sort of bizarre poke-off where he would poke at you and you would poke back.
I was banned from laughing because the movement was preventing C from feeling the full force of your amazing new power and anyway who am I right, I’m just the large warm fleshy barrier lying between you both.
When you both finally collapsed with exhaustion, C said he was teaching you how to count.
This week C is away setting up a new project. I told him that you started doing that belly button poking thing again and he got sad because he was missing you. So then I said that I didn’t poke you back because that was a special game you have, just between the two of you, and that made him feel better.
Of course I was lying through my teeth and when he gets back on the weekend you can show off your Long Division skills.
A couple of weeks ago your aunty N did the Scientifically Proved Ring Test over my belly which said that you must be a Boy. And then, while I was at a Playwrights’ Conference on the weekend a woman told me that according to every Italian woman she had ever known, my bump was boy shaped. But one of my friends had a psychic episode and declared you were a Girl and then last night I dreamed that I had already given birth to you and you were indeed a Girl.
So who knows?
The dream actually went on to reveal you were also incredibly slippery and I dropped you a couple of times and then decided you really would be better off back inside me and I'd only given birth so prematurely because I was impatient to meet you and then I was working out the best way to swallow you whole and then thankfully I woke up.
Your cousins the Naughty Nephews have been very helpful with suggesting names and because we’re not sure of your gender (although that woman with all the Italian women friends was very persuasive) they have given me both sorts.
Naughty Nephew the 1st has provided a selection of lovely names all based on girls in his class he fancies or boys who are among his best friends. Among the girls he rates Chloe and Phoebe very highly and I was pleased to note that the other day he included Bronte as a suggestion. I am yet to meet Phoebe or Chloe but I have met Bronte several times and she is a lovely thoughtful polite little girl.
Naughty Nephew the 2nd, with his finger firmly on the Literary Pulse, has suggested Klaus, Violet or Sunny (being the names of the Baudelaire Children in Lemony Snicket’s delightful “A Series Of Unfortunate Events”). Violet gets extra points because she is also the daughter in “The Incredibles”.
And finally Naughty Nephew the 3rd, he of the blue saucer eyes, has suggested…his own name. But with a 2 on the end. You know, like with Shrek 2.
Today, I went to visit Grumpy Grandad (That’s Grumpy Great Grandad to you) and he suggested that I could use my deceased mother’s name.
Just on the off chance that it hadn’t occurred to me.
All suggestions are gratefully received of course. But at the moment I treat names the same way I treat gifts of baby clothes and baby items. I just don’t know what to do with them so I shove them in a cupboard or a corner to deal with later.
Even now, at just on 28 weeks, it still seems a long time till you’ll be safely in my arms.
Even with the dreams and the Ring Test and Poking Belly Button games, it still seems surreal.
Yes, you might be a baby, but you also might be my liver wearing boots and equipped with tiny fists.
Which of course would explain why you keep trying to beat up my bladder.
But despite the regular thrashings of various internal organs, despite the necessity to sleep sitting up, despite the sore back and shoulders...things are good.
Sometimes I look at my belly in the mirror and am shocked at how quickly my body has changed. But shocked in a good way. I can be hypnotized watching the ripples in my skin caused by you turning over, or stretching, or sculling a little amniotic fluid (like I know you do). I feel you when I'm driving or watching Very Boring Plays or when I'm meant to be having important business type conversations and it makes me smile.
I don’t mind too much when old ladies and friends of my parents touch my belly because I think it’s amazing too. In fact I think it's a complete miracle and maybe it's my civic duty to provide a Belly Touching service to anyone who needs it because that's how incredible and wonderful it all is.
And above all, I'm happy.
That's you who’s done that.
So thankyou.
And give the bladder a break some times, ok?
OvaGirlxxx
Friday, April 28, 2006
Breast Intentions
So the other day C and I went on our first babycentric shopping venture.
Or at least, preggerscentric.
I’m willing to now admit I’m pregnant but it’s a far larger leap of faith to say there will be a baby when my feet hit the ground. Other pregnant friends are filling their baby rooms with monitors and cots and dingly dangly things. C and I have bought nothing (yet) but we have received a load of hand me downs which have all been hastily stuck in the cupboard where we can’t see them.
Anyhoo, the time seemed right to shop for maternity bras.
I had actually attempted to do this a couple of months back when my bra size changed dramatically but I chickened out at the last minute and settled for a couple of non maternity bras that were a bit bigger than my normal size. These were now right at the end of their row of little hooks and uncomfortably tight.
I am not a well endowed woman, bras have generally only ever really been things to stop my nipples poking out of my teeshirt on cold days. Bra-shopping in the past was a quick and haphazard event based on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
It was clear we needed the help of an expert. I had heard the rumour of the necessity for proper fittings and the dire warnings of back strain, wrenched shoulders and milk pudding boobs that would ensue if said Proper Fittings were not had.
C and I wandered into the ‘intimates’ section of a Large Department Store and lingered awkwardly around the maternity section. Row after row of wireless, double clipped, enormous cupped, wide strapped bras dangled from their racks, taunting us.
We looked at them, we took them off the rack, we fingered their odd little fastenings and marveled at their extra hooks and eyes. Then we put them back because those whopping big cups were scaring the bejesus out of us.
Diddly diddly dee went the musack.
A chill wind began to blow and a lone tumbleweed scuttled across the floor.
C and I clutched at each other’s clammy hands. One of us may even have whimpered.
Someone will come, we muttered to ourselves. Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
At one stage a sales assistant did flit past, replacing frilly delicate non-pregnancy things as she went.
Why look! Here is Someone Who Can Help, announced C in his best Actorly Projected Voice.
Yes, I smiled, relieved.
We took our eyes off her for only a second but when we turned back she was gone.
Fuck, we said.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
Finally we decided we could work it out together. Were we not grownups?
Had I not received hours of valuable Bionicle Assemblage tuition from the Naughty Nephews?
Had not C once built a house (in a previous relationship yes but the experience still counts) and had he not just spent days laying lovely wooden floors and doing fiddly carpentery bits in the Big House? Well then.
We selected a few bras based on what appeared to be my current size but also on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
Then we located the fitting rooms.
Then we entered the fitting room.
Then the Shop Assistant who had done the neat disappearing act early on suddenly appeared in the doorway with a stern look on her face.
Then C was barred from the fitting room on account of him being a loathsome bosom-less man.
Then I bravely entered the fitting room alone.
Then I bared my boobs and attempted to attach the first bra to them.
Then it twisted itself round the wrong way and laughed at my ridiculous attempts to wind it round my body.
Then all the little clips in all the bras suddenly and maliciously sprung apart. An image reared up before me, of me, struggling to survive in my scanty brightly coloured pre-pregnancy bra, now faded and torn with use and held together with pins and bits of sticky tape. I was destined to be bowed down with strained back and wrenched shoulders, shackled to the cold hard earth by the weight of my ginormous Milk Pudding Boobs.
Then my face went red and tears of frustration crept into my eyes.
Then I swiftly redressed, did some deep breathing, and flung the bras down (but neatly) on Disappearing Shop Assistant’s plush padded seat thing as I stormed out the door.
I looked for my husband and wept bitterly because he had wandered off to the electronics section and also because lo the pregnancy hormones was surging through my body and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and odd looks from other customers.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
It was all too hideous.
C blew my nose and swiftly administered skim hot chocolate and small evil sweety thing to me and then we went into the Other Large Department Store.
Here we went straight up to the counter and asked for Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
And finally, finally the Someone appeared.
And Yes she knew Pregnant Bosoms and Yes she knew how to wrangle the nasty little clips.
C was once again banished from the fitting room but this time it was ok, I felt safe, I felt nurtured in the arms of wide experience, I was to be saved from back strain and wrenched shoulders (but alas probably not milk pudding boobs). I tried on bra after bra, was instructed on the mysteries of breast enlargement and shrinkage, advised on where my straps should sit, where my hooks should meet and where my nipples should point. She was very nice and very good and I felt much much better.
However after twenty minutes, I realised that I didn’t actually properly fit into any of the maternity bras she brought for me. If it fitted at the back then the cups were too big. If the cups were just right then we were right at the end of the hooks (and I had already been instructed that the bra should at this stage do up in the middle of the hooks).
(My friend Michelle later told me that I could buy a little extension thingy to increase the back of the bra for a few bucks and that would keep me going until I was ready for the next stage.)
Once upon a time, a long time ago, years ago, perhaps six, when C and I were in those first few months (stretching to the first year) of trying to conceive, C did buy something for baby.
It was a handmade patchwork quilt, just big enough to sit on a cot. Coloured frogs and rampant teddy bears were pieced together with boats sailing into clouds and wide eyed geometric cats. It was expensive, indulgent, impractical and beautiful. And perfectly fitting for C’s enthusiastic optimism for our impending offspring.
For years the quilt stayed folded up and hidden away. Once I unwrapped it, a year ago, when I was looking for blankets. It was a shocking reminder of our younger dreams. Instead of frogs and boats and teddies and cats I saw invasive tests and broken hearts and long empty years stitched together with self hatred and failure.
When we packed the flat and prepared to move to the Big House this year I found the quilt again. And the teddies were back and the quilt was beautiful once again.
C and I had decided to meet elsewhere in the department store and I sauntered towards him swinging my black and white shopping bag. C looked at it with interest.
No bra, I quickly told him.
No bra?
It’s a long story, I told him, but basically they don’t fit yet. So I bought a pair of trousers instead. They’re not maternity trousers but they fit comfortably over my tummy.
Also I liked the colour. Also, they were on Sale.
C nodded. It all made perfect sense. We held hands as we wandered out the door.
Behind us, racks of maternity bras jangled their fiddly hooks, waiting patiently for our inevitable return.
And diddly diddly dee went the musack.
Or at least, preggerscentric.
I’m willing to now admit I’m pregnant but it’s a far larger leap of faith to say there will be a baby when my feet hit the ground. Other pregnant friends are filling their baby rooms with monitors and cots and dingly dangly things. C and I have bought nothing (yet) but we have received a load of hand me downs which have all been hastily stuck in the cupboard where we can’t see them.
Anyhoo, the time seemed right to shop for maternity bras.
I had actually attempted to do this a couple of months back when my bra size changed dramatically but I chickened out at the last minute and settled for a couple of non maternity bras that were a bit bigger than my normal size. These were now right at the end of their row of little hooks and uncomfortably tight.
I am not a well endowed woman, bras have generally only ever really been things to stop my nipples poking out of my teeshirt on cold days. Bra-shopping in the past was a quick and haphazard event based on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
It was clear we needed the help of an expert. I had heard the rumour of the necessity for proper fittings and the dire warnings of back strain, wrenched shoulders and milk pudding boobs that would ensue if said Proper Fittings were not had.
C and I wandered into the ‘intimates’ section of a Large Department Store and lingered awkwardly around the maternity section. Row after row of wireless, double clipped, enormous cupped, wide strapped bras dangled from their racks, taunting us.
We looked at them, we took them off the rack, we fingered their odd little fastenings and marveled at their extra hooks and eyes. Then we put them back because those whopping big cups were scaring the bejesus out of us.
Diddly diddly dee went the musack.
A chill wind began to blow and a lone tumbleweed scuttled across the floor.
C and I clutched at each other’s clammy hands. One of us may even have whimpered.
Someone will come, we muttered to ourselves. Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
At one stage a sales assistant did flit past, replacing frilly delicate non-pregnancy things as she went.
Why look! Here is Someone Who Can Help, announced C in his best Actorly Projected Voice.
Yes, I smiled, relieved.
We took our eyes off her for only a second but when we turned back she was gone.
Fuck, we said.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
Finally we decided we could work it out together. Were we not grownups?
Had I not received hours of valuable Bionicle Assemblage tuition from the Naughty Nephews?
Had not C once built a house (in a previous relationship yes but the experience still counts) and had he not just spent days laying lovely wooden floors and doing fiddly carpentery bits in the Big House? Well then.
We selected a few bras based on what appeared to be my current size but also on Colour, Pattern and Is This One On Sale?
Then we located the fitting rooms.
Then we entered the fitting room.
Then the Shop Assistant who had done the neat disappearing act early on suddenly appeared in the doorway with a stern look on her face.
Then C was barred from the fitting room on account of him being a loathsome bosom-less man.
Then I bravely entered the fitting room alone.
Then I bared my boobs and attempted to attach the first bra to them.
Then it twisted itself round the wrong way and laughed at my ridiculous attempts to wind it round my body.
Then all the little clips in all the bras suddenly and maliciously sprung apart. An image reared up before me, of me, struggling to survive in my scanty brightly coloured pre-pregnancy bra, now faded and torn with use and held together with pins and bits of sticky tape. I was destined to be bowed down with strained back and wrenched shoulders, shackled to the cold hard earth by the weight of my ginormous Milk Pudding Boobs.
Then my face went red and tears of frustration crept into my eyes.
Then I swiftly redressed, did some deep breathing, and flung the bras down (but neatly) on Disappearing Shop Assistant’s plush padded seat thing as I stormed out the door.
I looked for my husband and wept bitterly because he had wandered off to the electronics section and also because lo the pregnancy hormones was surging through my body and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and odd looks from other customers.
Diddley diddly dee went the musack.
It was all too hideous.
C blew my nose and swiftly administered skim hot chocolate and small evil sweety thing to me and then we went into the Other Large Department Store.
Here we went straight up to the counter and asked for Someone Who Knows About Pregnant Bosoms.
And finally, finally the Someone appeared.
And Yes she knew Pregnant Bosoms and Yes she knew how to wrangle the nasty little clips.
C was once again banished from the fitting room but this time it was ok, I felt safe, I felt nurtured in the arms of wide experience, I was to be saved from back strain and wrenched shoulders (but alas probably not milk pudding boobs). I tried on bra after bra, was instructed on the mysteries of breast enlargement and shrinkage, advised on where my straps should sit, where my hooks should meet and where my nipples should point. She was very nice and very good and I felt much much better.
However after twenty minutes, I realised that I didn’t actually properly fit into any of the maternity bras she brought for me. If it fitted at the back then the cups were too big. If the cups were just right then we were right at the end of the hooks (and I had already been instructed that the bra should at this stage do up in the middle of the hooks).
(My friend Michelle later told me that I could buy a little extension thingy to increase the back of the bra for a few bucks and that would keep me going until I was ready for the next stage.)
Once upon a time, a long time ago, years ago, perhaps six, when C and I were in those first few months (stretching to the first year) of trying to conceive, C did buy something for baby.
It was a handmade patchwork quilt, just big enough to sit on a cot. Coloured frogs and rampant teddy bears were pieced together with boats sailing into clouds and wide eyed geometric cats. It was expensive, indulgent, impractical and beautiful. And perfectly fitting for C’s enthusiastic optimism for our impending offspring.
For years the quilt stayed folded up and hidden away. Once I unwrapped it, a year ago, when I was looking for blankets. It was a shocking reminder of our younger dreams. Instead of frogs and boats and teddies and cats I saw invasive tests and broken hearts and long empty years stitched together with self hatred and failure.
When we packed the flat and prepared to move to the Big House this year I found the quilt again. And the teddies were back and the quilt was beautiful once again.
C and I had decided to meet elsewhere in the department store and I sauntered towards him swinging my black and white shopping bag. C looked at it with interest.
No bra, I quickly told him.
No bra?
It’s a long story, I told him, but basically they don’t fit yet. So I bought a pair of trousers instead. They’re not maternity trousers but they fit comfortably over my tummy.
Also I liked the colour. Also, they were on Sale.
C nodded. It all made perfect sense. We held hands as we wandered out the door.
Behind us, racks of maternity bras jangled their fiddly hooks, waiting patiently for our inevitable return.
And diddly diddly dee went the musack.
Friday, April 14, 2006
One Night In Bed
So I was lying on my back feeling the baby slide around inside me and as it kicked I realised I could see my stomach rippling.
This made me laugh and so then there was more rippling.
And then my belly button bulged and heaved and other parts of my stomach contorted like a miniature earthquake was underway in my gut and I stopped laughing because to tell the truth it looked really quite disturbing and while it was funny before, now, frankly, it was just plain creepy.
This made me laugh and so then there was more rippling.
And then my belly button bulged and heaved and other parts of my stomach contorted like a miniature earthquake was underway in my gut and I stopped laughing because to tell the truth it looked really quite disturbing and while it was funny before, now, frankly, it was just plain creepy.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
The Kick Inside
We took the photo we received from the ultrasound up to Newcastle last week to show it off to my family.
My dad guffawed cheerfully when he saw it and my stepmother squealed with delight and told me that the baby had my nose.
Grumpy granddad said he couldn’t see anything but that might be because his spectacles were thickly coated with a yellowish layer of his own scalp tissue which has taken to flaking off in chunks and floating about his shoulders.
And yes I did offer to clean them (glasses, not scalp) and it took me nearly half an hour with the Windex and the paper towels and within a few minutes of my granddad putting them back on and exclaiming with delight at how clearly he could see the tv screen, I noticed the flakes starting to fall and cling to his lenses again.
My God this moving thing is slow.
Well not the actual moving out part, that was reasonably fast because we threw everything into cardboard boxes, and not the actual moving in part because two strong burly Chinese fellows named Johnny and Bob hurled our boxes into their truck and then lugged them up the stairs of the Big House.
The slow part is the unpacking part.
We have a bedroom, a bathroom and a large room for everything else in our cosy upstairs section of the Big House. At the moment this room features a couch, two desks, a dining room table and an enormous mountain of boxes, all full and all needing to be unpacked and sorted and stored.
Most of these boxes are labeled BOOKS or for a change LARGE HEAVY BOOKS. One of the boxes got broken somewhere between Johnny hurling it into the truck and Bob lugging it up the stairs and so a small collection of my childhood reading has been oozing out of the side of the box mountain. I can’t collect all those books together because that would necessitate putting them in a bookshelf which would in turn necessitate deciding where the bookshelves should go because god forbid we double handle things.
So instead I’ve been reading them.
I have gone through the Borrowers series and flirted a little with Anne of Avonlea and dipped extensively into the Little House series, even though I read most of the Laura Ingalls books not too long ago.
My idea of hell is that scene in ‘On The Banks Of Plum Creek’ where Laura Ingalls wickedly leads the hideous Nellie Olson into the part of the creek where the leeches dwell. Within a minute Nellie is covered in the bloodsucking fiends. And boy does she deserve it because she’s a nasty piece of work and a half but even so, it makes me wince.
And this is basically a long and raving introduction(which I blame on pregnancy induced mushbrain) into what I really wanted to say which is that this week was the 12th anniversary of my mother’s death.
My mother was born in a village in the Philippines on the island of Luzon. The country had been occupied by the Japanese army since 1941 and the local people hated and feared them. Within a few hours of my mother’s birth the village received a warning that soldiers were heading their way.
The entire village immediately evacuated and headed into the mountains. They planned to hide in some caves until the soldiers had passed by and then return to the village. There was no time to pack anything more than a few essentials. The tiny brown new born babe that wouold one day be my mother was wrapped in a rice sack.
It took them over an hour walking through forests and crossing a river to reach the caves.
The villagers hid deep within the caves and then one of the scouts told them that the soldiers were close by and they must all stay very quiet.
And then.
My mother began to cry.
The cry of a baby is piercing. Like an alarm or a siren. Or a betrayal. My grandmother tried desperately to feed her, to comfort her, to rock her back to silence but still she screamed.
The other villagers were terrified, they pleaded with my grandparents. The sound would draw the soldiers, they cried, they would all be killed. They had to do something, they had to stop her.
So my grandfather drew his knife and put the blade to the baby’s throat. He hesitated as my grandmother wept and prayed.
And then, just as suddenly, the baby stopped.
The soldiers passed, the villagers left the cave and made their way back down to their village. When they stopped to cross the river, my grandmother moved down to the water’s edge and unwrapped my mother from the rice sack so that she could bathe her in the river water.
And there, she discovered the leech. It must have made its way into the sack when they initially crossed the river. Now, hours later, it was firmly attached to the baby’s heel; black, glossy, swollen with blood and so fat it was as big as her entire foot.
When I imagine this scene, I think about how when my grandfather held back his knife, he spared not only his first born child, but also me, his first born grandchild, and my sisters and our children too. That ol' eggs within eggs thing again.
Today I should be unpacking boxes and writing things and Being Organised but instead I’m thinking about Mum and how much I miss her and love her. I look at the image of my unborn baby(week 21 - size of a banana), with its nose like mine, and its aunties and the grandmother it will only ever know from photographs and stories and the la la la of the one Filipino song I remember her singing.
I feel the familiar squirming deep within as the baby turns and stretches in my abdomen.
And there’s something more. Higher up, that soft pounding against my heart.
It’s been twelve years but I haven’t forgotten that grief kicks too.
My dad guffawed cheerfully when he saw it and my stepmother squealed with delight and told me that the baby had my nose.
Grumpy granddad said he couldn’t see anything but that might be because his spectacles were thickly coated with a yellowish layer of his own scalp tissue which has taken to flaking off in chunks and floating about his shoulders.
And yes I did offer to clean them (glasses, not scalp) and it took me nearly half an hour with the Windex and the paper towels and within a few minutes of my granddad putting them back on and exclaiming with delight at how clearly he could see the tv screen, I noticed the flakes starting to fall and cling to his lenses again.
My God this moving thing is slow.
Well not the actual moving out part, that was reasonably fast because we threw everything into cardboard boxes, and not the actual moving in part because two strong burly Chinese fellows named Johnny and Bob hurled our boxes into their truck and then lugged them up the stairs of the Big House.
The slow part is the unpacking part.
We have a bedroom, a bathroom and a large room for everything else in our cosy upstairs section of the Big House. At the moment this room features a couch, two desks, a dining room table and an enormous mountain of boxes, all full and all needing to be unpacked and sorted and stored.
Most of these boxes are labeled BOOKS or for a change LARGE HEAVY BOOKS. One of the boxes got broken somewhere between Johnny hurling it into the truck and Bob lugging it up the stairs and so a small collection of my childhood reading has been oozing out of the side of the box mountain. I can’t collect all those books together because that would necessitate putting them in a bookshelf which would in turn necessitate deciding where the bookshelves should go because god forbid we double handle things.
So instead I’ve been reading them.
I have gone through the Borrowers series and flirted a little with Anne of Avonlea and dipped extensively into the Little House series, even though I read most of the Laura Ingalls books not too long ago.
My idea of hell is that scene in ‘On The Banks Of Plum Creek’ where Laura Ingalls wickedly leads the hideous Nellie Olson into the part of the creek where the leeches dwell. Within a minute Nellie is covered in the bloodsucking fiends. And boy does she deserve it because she’s a nasty piece of work and a half but even so, it makes me wince.
And this is basically a long and raving introduction(which I blame on pregnancy induced mushbrain) into what I really wanted to say which is that this week was the 12th anniversary of my mother’s death.
My mother was born in a village in the Philippines on the island of Luzon. The country had been occupied by the Japanese army since 1941 and the local people hated and feared them. Within a few hours of my mother’s birth the village received a warning that soldiers were heading their way.
The entire village immediately evacuated and headed into the mountains. They planned to hide in some caves until the soldiers had passed by and then return to the village. There was no time to pack anything more than a few essentials. The tiny brown new born babe that wouold one day be my mother was wrapped in a rice sack.
It took them over an hour walking through forests and crossing a river to reach the caves.
The villagers hid deep within the caves and then one of the scouts told them that the soldiers were close by and they must all stay very quiet.
And then.
My mother began to cry.
The cry of a baby is piercing. Like an alarm or a siren. Or a betrayal. My grandmother tried desperately to feed her, to comfort her, to rock her back to silence but still she screamed.
The other villagers were terrified, they pleaded with my grandparents. The sound would draw the soldiers, they cried, they would all be killed. They had to do something, they had to stop her.
So my grandfather drew his knife and put the blade to the baby’s throat. He hesitated as my grandmother wept and prayed.
And then, just as suddenly, the baby stopped.
The soldiers passed, the villagers left the cave and made their way back down to their village. When they stopped to cross the river, my grandmother moved down to the water’s edge and unwrapped my mother from the rice sack so that she could bathe her in the river water.
And there, she discovered the leech. It must have made its way into the sack when they initially crossed the river. Now, hours later, it was firmly attached to the baby’s heel; black, glossy, swollen with blood and so fat it was as big as her entire foot.
When I imagine this scene, I think about how when my grandfather held back his knife, he spared not only his first born child, but also me, his first born grandchild, and my sisters and our children too. That ol' eggs within eggs thing again.
Today I should be unpacking boxes and writing things and Being Organised but instead I’m thinking about Mum and how much I miss her and love her. I look at the image of my unborn baby(week 21 - size of a banana), with its nose like mine, and its aunties and the grandmother it will only ever know from photographs and stories and the la la la of the one Filipino song I remember her singing.
I feel the familiar squirming deep within as the baby turns and stretches in my abdomen.
And there’s something more. Higher up, that soft pounding against my heart.
It’s been twelve years but I haven’t forgotten that grief kicks too.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Moving
We’re getting ready to move (next week) into The Big House (along with Naughty Nephews and their parents).
Half the belongings in our flat, the sturdy square edged half, is packed into cardboard boxes, the other half taunts us with its gamut of weird knobbly unwrappable shapes and thin fragile edges.
I’m doing most of the packing because C is working away on making the Big House habitable. My process is to pack a box, have a cup of tea, pack another box, eat five loaves and half an oxen and on it goes.
The other movements in our life are much smaller, but so much more impressive.
We’re at seventeen weeks now (!) and along with those tooth buds and the pissing-into-your-own-amniotic fluid-and-then-drinking-it-tendencies, apparently, if the Tiny Dancing Baby is a girl she’s growing eggs.
Eggs! I squealed at C. Teeny tiny weeny little eggs in her teeny tiny ovaries! How bizarre is that? And one day, one of those teeny tiny eggs might be half of a new teeny tiny baby. Only teenier! And tinier!
And then I stopped because all that high pitched squealing was hurting my throat and aggravating my mucous membranes.
Surely one of those most attractive and endearing Facet Of Pregnancy must be the cascading waterfall of slime that forms within one’s body.
One moment I could throw out my arms and inhale lustily the warm Sydney morning through my nostrils, the next I was drowning in snot.
Snotty Nose rapidly became Evil Mucous Dripping Down The Back Of The Throat. This led to much hacking. Quite quickly I managed to give myself a throat infection and a nasty chesty cough. This in turn led to much lying down and feeling sorry for myself.
About three days ago while lying on the couch I started feeling other sorts of movement.
Of the feathery flicking type.
As if a tiny dancing baby had decided it was time to give the uterus a bit of a clean with an equally tiny feather duster.
When I put C’s hand on my abdomen he could feel them too. For a moment we sat like that. Then he grinned at me and said: this is so exciting, I have to ring my mum.
And as he spoke to his mother I lay beside him with my hands down my pants feeling the sweet flick and flutter of someone with their very own tooth buds.
It was a very fine moment.
Half the belongings in our flat, the sturdy square edged half, is packed into cardboard boxes, the other half taunts us with its gamut of weird knobbly unwrappable shapes and thin fragile edges.
I’m doing most of the packing because C is working away on making the Big House habitable. My process is to pack a box, have a cup of tea, pack another box, eat five loaves and half an oxen and on it goes.
The other movements in our life are much smaller, but so much more impressive.
We’re at seventeen weeks now (!) and along with those tooth buds and the pissing-into-your-own-amniotic fluid-and-then-drinking-it-tendencies, apparently, if the Tiny Dancing Baby is a girl she’s growing eggs.
Eggs! I squealed at C. Teeny tiny weeny little eggs in her teeny tiny ovaries! How bizarre is that? And one day, one of those teeny tiny eggs might be half of a new teeny tiny baby. Only teenier! And tinier!
And then I stopped because all that high pitched squealing was hurting my throat and aggravating my mucous membranes.
Surely one of those most attractive and endearing Facet Of Pregnancy must be the cascading waterfall of slime that forms within one’s body.
One moment I could throw out my arms and inhale lustily the warm Sydney morning through my nostrils, the next I was drowning in snot.
Snotty Nose rapidly became Evil Mucous Dripping Down The Back Of The Throat. This led to much hacking. Quite quickly I managed to give myself a throat infection and a nasty chesty cough. This in turn led to much lying down and feeling sorry for myself.
About three days ago while lying on the couch I started feeling other sorts of movement.
Of the feathery flicking type.
As if a tiny dancing baby had decided it was time to give the uterus a bit of a clean with an equally tiny feather duster.
When I put C’s hand on my abdomen he could feel them too. For a moment we sat like that. Then he grinned at me and said: this is so exciting, I have to ring my mum.
And as he spoke to his mother I lay beside him with my hands down my pants feeling the sweet flick and flutter of someone with their very own tooth buds.
It was a very fine moment.
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