* * *
I began to notice a problem when Paddy was a year or so old. He was a big baby, who walked quite late, like his sister, so he was often in my arms. And if I’d thought I didn’t get much rest with the first baby – well, this was a new situation altogether. When Alice was a baby and had daytime naps, I’d tried to use one of them to sleep myself. But when Paddy had naps, Russell needed a break and that was when Alice needed me. I lay on the bed and read books to her. Sometimes I’d wake with the book still held above my head and Alice saying, ‘Mum. Mum. Mum.’
The problem was a bulge in my vagina. It didn’t hurt. But it felt odd, and uncomfortable, because it kept reminding me that I had a vagina, when I didn’t want to think about it. It felt as though someone had inserted a small balloon in there, about the size of a plum. I could put my fingers in and push it back up, but it always came back down again.
I didn’t tell many people about it because I was starting to feel ashamed. It was difficult to talk about. I mentioned it to a friend, who said that she’d fixed her ‘problem’ – unidentified – with yoga and running. This silenced me quickly. I had no time for yoga. No inclination to go running. The best thing I could do for sore muscles and an inflexible body was to pour a glass of wine or have a beer. I had a strict rule – I could drink between the hours of five and seven pm, but not before or after. I broke this once and poured a glass of white at three pm, when both children were screaming.
When I tell my friends without children these stories they always wince, as I would too. But it’s hard to explain how major – and minor – these vaginal events have been. If I’d been told as a 25-year-old what could happen to my vagina, I might have resisted it. I might have decided not to have children. Although the chances are I would have thought what I first thought when I was ‘educated’ about these things during pregnancy – something along the lines of Never gonna happen.
In a letter to her sister, Cassandra, Jane Austen called one of their sisters-in-law (after an eleventh or twelfth lying-in) a ‘poor animal’. After two children my vagina seemed not to be doing its job. But what might have happened if I’d had six, or seven, or twelve or thirteen babies? What if I was one of the poor animals that Austen helped to care for after each birth? How did they hide from her that their vaginas might be hurting, or leaking, or bulging? Or did she know, and keep it quiet?
I thought of Edward Lear, who was the sixteenth of seventeen children. I thought of Edward Lear’s mother, who left his upbringing to his sisters, but probably didn’t just faint on the sofa after his birth, because there would have been toddlers, five-year-olds, ten-year-olds for her to take care of. What had happened to her vagina? Was it still robust after all those babies? Could she piss or shit successfully? Was there anyone she could talk to about it?
Of course literature generally pretends that the vagina isn’t there, unless it’s juxtaposed with a penis. The characters are thinking about their marriages, or the deaths of friends or children or parents, or about war, or money. I don’t think I’ve seen any of them sneaking off to bathrooms to push their fingers up their vaginas to relieve the pressure of a prolapsed bowel or rectum. Is this literature anyway? It might be, if I were Knausgaard. Imagine if I wrote the details of my life. Months, years of vaginas and vagina-related thoughts. Would you read it?
Knausgaard tells us that the idea of fiction collapsed for him, that ‘the only genres I saw value in, that still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative…’ But set pen to paper and narrative exists. Maths textbooks, laundry lists – stories all. Even Knausgaard’s writing, diffuse as it may seem, is a way of taking control. What a relief writing is.
My vaginal issues were starting to make me feel as though I was losing control of the narrative of my own life. I could not talk to anyone about this except Russell; I could not make a story out of it. I wonder if other women, other readers, have felt this way.
* * *
Alice started school, and her school was a five-minute walk from our house, but you had to cross the Great Western Highway to reach it. I’d push the pram with Paddy in it up our street, cross at the crossing – and then we had to climb sixty or so steps to the bridge. It was always fun, with mothers and fathers and children catching up on the bridge, talking, skipping, waving to the trucks to get them to honk their horns.
At first I’d turn around as we started up the stairs and pull the pram up with Paddy in it. But this was slow, and before long the pram started to come apart from the crashing on each step. It was easier to carry him, and he liked it too. It wasn’t always my day to go to school; Russell and I took turns. But a couple of days a week I would carry Paddy up the steps and over the bridge, and back again.
I’ve said he was a big baby; he was dense with the kind of muscle that Alice had never seemed to have. He was heavy. And nobody had said to me – or I hadn’t heard – that carrying heavy weights was the worst thing for your pelvic floor. I carried him up and down the steps, across the bridge, and all around the house, and the bulge in my vagina got worse. It was making me feel embarrassed – but worse, frustrated. I felt stupid. I had a stupid vagina. I told Russell about it. Russell persuaded me to go to the GP, and the GP found me a pelvic floor physiotherapist.
* * *
The physio was in her early sixties. She was small and neat and practical, with blonde hair that was greying prettily. She had me lie down on her special bed with my underpants off and a paper apron covering my lap, so that when she had to touch my vagina she slid her hand under the apron. Part of the touching involved two fingers thrusting and pushing inside and the physio looking into the middle distance, like a writer trying to think of the end to a story. The walls of my vagina felt unpleasantly elastic under the vigorous shoving of her fingers; this way, that way, it all seemed to give.
Then she got out a penis-shaped probe attached to a sort of meter by a ringed cord, like the one on the receiver of an old telephone. On went the condom, on went the lube, in went the penis. She looked at the meter. ‘Cough,’ she said. ‘Now contract your pelvic muscles. Hold.’ I did. We went through this a few times and she tapped in some numbers, and then turned away while I slid the paper apron off me, wiped off the lube and put on my pants.
When I turned back she was holding a sheaf of papers with hand-drawn illustrations of different pelvic floor exercises. She showed me how to do them, told me how often to do them, told me my pelvic floor muscles were weak. She said, ‘Your two births have put great strain on your pelvic floor. The long second stage of the first, the quick delivery of the second.’ This went a long way towards explaining things; no-one had ever said this to me before. She told me that the little balloon in my vagina was my bladder; I had a partial prolapse. I should be able to sort that out quite quickly. She told me I had to stop carrying heavy things, which would be interesting. I went home with my exercises and hoped for the best.
Things improved a bit but not a lot. I did manage to get rid of the little balloon, but it came back so easily – if I carried anything heavy, like a toddler, or if I sneezed. Russell carried all the shopping, and Paddy learned to walk up the steps. I kept going back to the physio but the story didn’t change. Once, she was showing me something on her screen and accidentally flicked to a client list. I’m a quick reader; in the half a second before she minimised the screen I read the names of several well-known women. That was one of my more comforting visits.
But a year or more later – by this time Paddy was at school too, and I was taking on more work – I got sick. It started with a sore chest. My chest ached. Interestingly ached. Hotly ached. This developed into a kind of flu during which I blew my nose so many times that it blistered. But then it became pneumonia, and of course I coughed. I coughed for weeks – for more than a month. I coughed so much that I tore a muscle in my stomach and had to hold a hand over it when the next cough came. I coughed during an interview on stage and had to leave. I coughed whi
le teaching, I coughed in bed, I coughed if I walked or sat or had a shower. All this coughing put an extra strain on my pelvic floor muscles and in the end I was wetting myself if I did anything sudden. Like cough. The little balloon made itself known again. And my vagina was starting to feel… odd.
You’ll notice I haven’t said much about sex in all of this. It is essential to this story, but the hardest thing to write about. Sex is important. It’s fun. It helps us sleep. It brings us and keeps us together. But because of sex we had to talk a lot about my failing vagina, and it took me a long time to manage to do this. I was so ashamed. If the subject came up I was angry. I wanted to ignore it; it couldn’t be fixed, so why talk about it? But every time we had sex I was reminded of how elastic – or, let’s say it, loose – my vagina had become. This made me furiously resentful. It was Russell who kept encouraging me to talk, staying calm when I got angry, listening, suggesting, considering.
Out in the world it was still hard to talk about it, although I tried a couple of times. Other women were always sympathetic, but it was rare to find anyone offering their own story. Only my friend whose vagina had been stitched wrongly could talk about it. She’d had an operation a year or so after her baby’s birth to reshape her vagina, to remake it into its old self. It was successful, and she went on to have two more babies, born at home without problems.
3.
There are three formidable women in my life who all look alike – so alike they could be sisters. These are my agent, my children’s Year 3 and 4 teacher, and the gynaecologist I was eventually referred to. They all have the same attractive lion-like quality – a mixture of power, rage and kindness.
The gynaecologist had rooms at the top of a private hospital. She wore a short skirt and high heels; she was heavy-breasted and blonde and not very tall. She stalked around the room talking to me about books and children and my vagina as she found gloves, a gown for me, a lamp to shine between my legs. She put her two fingers in and pushed around, assuming briefly the writer’s middle-distance look as she thought about what was going on in there.
Afterwards we sat at her desk and she drew me some pictures. She talked about surgery. And then she said, ‘Think of a swimming costume. A stretched swimming costume.’ I thought of a swimming costume.
‘Once it’s stretched,’ the gynaecologist went on, ‘you can’t fix it. It doesn’t return to its original elasticity. This is what has happened to your vagina. You can do all the pelvic floor exercises you like for the muscles surrounding it – and you should, they’ll support it – but you can’t change what’s happened to it.’
It was like when the physio told me the births had caused my problems. Finally, the narrative was beginning to make sense. All it took was a metaphor.
‘Look,’ said the gynaecologist, leaning over her paper again. ‘What we need to do is actually remove part of it. See? Make an incision here. Cut some out. Bring the two new edges together.’
I went home and told Russell about it. We decided to leave it, to see if my vagina improved. It didn’t. I went back a second time; and the third time, we went together. The gynaecologist said she’d just discovered that the free surgery list at her hospital was being cancelled. ‘Health cuts,’ she said. She had seven appointments left. ‘You need to choose soon,’ she said. We couldn’t afford to pay for her privately.
We left, caught a bus into the city, had lunch, talked about it some more, and rang her back. ‘I’ve still got a space in June,’ she said. So we took it.
* * *
I’m left with a vagina that works much better. I still don’t run; if I do it leaks. I wear a pad when we play soccer with my brother and sister and nieces and nephews, and I’ve discovered that my sister does the same when she plays netball.
I have another new problem, and I’ve given it a name: the Squawking Vagina. I’ve got time for yoga now and I love it. I need it. But in certain poses – half moon, sometimes downward dog – the two walls of my vagina come together and pull apart with a noise somewhere between a belch and a fart. I was horribly embarrassed the first time this happened at yoga. I said, ‘Sorry,’ as casually as I could and tried to get on with it, but tears of shame and rage were sliding down my face, and it took me weeks to go back.
When I did, the class was small: three other women and a man. Not the usual kind of ropy tense bald man who goes to yoga. This one was a small Scotsman who was a bit overweight and terrible at yoga. Couldn’t touch his toes.
We started our poses. I could feel the Squawking Vagina about to happen – it was another of those mornings – so I straightened up and, blushing and blushing and blushing, said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got this problem. I need to explain it.’
Our teacher paused, did her thing of smiling openly, generously. I’ve always been pretty snooty about the idea of just letting my feelings out, letting the tears flow, and so on. I was grateful for it at that moment.
I told them about the operation as quickly as I could, and the new issue. One of the women looked at her feet, smiling nervously. The Scotsman also blushed, and stayed quiet. The youngest, a woman who looked to be in her thirties, said, ‘It happens for me during sex.’
For me too, sometimes, I said (how difficult this was to admit to, even after my first confession – listen to that qualifying ‘sometimes’!). We compared notes: how many children we’d had, whether or not the problem improved with time. And the third, a pleasant-faced, ordinary-bodied fifty-something woman who’d always been friendly but whose name I didn’t know, said, ‘I wear a tampon. That does the trick.’
The next time I went to yoga I put a tampon in. Since the surgery I’ve been able to wear them again; I don’t ‘walk them out’ anymore. I did half moon. I did downward dog. Not a squawk came out of me. Telling the story made a difference.
* * *
I am three-quarters of the way through my first reading of Halldór Laxness’s masterwork, Independent People. The other day Russell said to me, ‘I’ve never seen you read a book so slowly.’ It’s true – I am finding it hard to get through, partly because of how deeply I feel when I read it. I’ve tried to describe some of the scenes to Russell and have to stop for tears. After all these years, I’m still inhabited by books, still colonised by them, still taken over. It’s hurt me to read about Bjartur Jónsson’s neglected children and wives, their starved lives at the edge of the glacier as he pursues his goal of total independence from others.
Bjartur’s first wife dies alone in childbirth while he roams the hills for days, looking for a lost sheep. And it’s Bjartur we stay with, following him through the unspeakable cold, compelled by his reckless, stupid bravery. He tries to capture a reindeer and, leaping on its back, is dragged by it into the freezing Glacier River. He survives this, and at last finds his way to a lonely farm not unlike his own, ‘roll[ing] in through the doorway armoured from head to foot in ice’.
Meanwhile his wife is dying: labouring, cutting the cord, bleeding. All on her own, and unseen, by writer or reader.
James Wood says, ‘To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself.’ I don’t need you to know about my vagina. But I need my literature to know about it. To know women’s lives – to know their bodies, and not just words like ‘suffering’ or ‘pain’. The story is still not told, on the page, or between women themselves. The detail is missing, and detail is all there is.
Helen Garner
It is a common misperception about writers (sometimes held by writers themselves) that their experience shapes their writing – as in the case of William Burroughs, who claimed he became a writer the minute he accidentally shot his wife dead in a drunken game of William Tell. Experience may give rise to plot, and it certainly gives rise to emotion, or opinion, but I am in agreement with something once said by Annie Dillard: ‘Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.’ Writing fiction is a response to reading fiction – it is an answer, an attempt to be part of a conversation. As a six-year
-old, I wrote to the author of The Wombles, Elisabeth Beresford, and suggested some new plots to her. Even then it was not enough for me to simply read. I had to join in.
I first began my conversation with Helen Garner’s work at fourteen or fifteen, when I found a copy of Monkey Grip on my parents’ bookshelves. My mother later told me that her friends were shocked she had let me read something with such vivid sex scenes in it. I don’t know what to say to this; it seems so stupid. I don’t want to paint my mother as a heroine fighting the good fight against the forces of wowserism, of censorship. She just calmly believed what I believe – that literature is a stepping stone towards life. The more you read, the further you get.
In any case it was not the sex that I found arresting in Monkey Grip. It was the detail.
* * *
Monkey Grip, which was published in 1977, is Garner’s first book in a list of closely autobiographical fiction and nonfiction. It tells the story of Nora and Javo. Nora is a woman in her thirties who is living in a succession of shared households in inner-city Melbourne with her young daughter, Gracie. Her life has a constantly changing shape. She has no single job (rather a series of hazy freelance writing jobs) nor anywhere she must be. She shares the care of Gracie with other mothers – and, occasionally, fathers – with whom she lives. She takes drugs. She has sex with many different men, but she is finally and hopelessly in love with Javo, another middle-class white Australian, but this time a junkie. His addiction spells disaster for their attachment, though disaster never quite, or never completely, arrives. Monkey Grip keeps us in the same limbo experienced by its narrator. Just when we think we have seen the last of Javo he appears again. He comes to tell Nora that he loves her or that he doesn’t; he comes to borrow money for drugs, or to swear that he will never use drugs again. He surges and recedes, surges and recedes.
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