Sawdust

by Deborah Kay

  Even the doctors were concerned. Ironically – Dad, if you’re listening – they put me on a salt-free diet. Maybe it was to annul all the bad genes? To annul all that could have passed through my over-salted blood into my own? I don’t know for sure. But I believe it was because of the fluid I was retaining, giving me such a bloated look. I honestly didn’t care what I looked like, only that I was carrying my own child at last.

  It didn’t matter to me one iota either whether I was having a boy or girl, I just wanted a baby. I really didn’t know all that much about birth or pregnancy, but I read a lot of books and followed the months of my little one’s arrival. I believed in myself, in my impending motherhood, and all I wanted was to physically see this child who resided so heavily in me. Who had resided in me since I was four.

  In the end, Sarah delayed not for days but weeks her presence in the world. Her reluctance to pop out came much at the frustration and chagrin of Mum who was only in Malaysia for a five-week holiday and thought I would come on early, if anything.

  So frustrated did Mum become that she and my knight Chris put me on this exercise bike and made me pedal and pedal and pedal, in the hopes of bringing on labour.

  But it wasn’t happening – nothing was happening. The only thing that happened instead was my sister being rushed into hospital – the “hostie”, as the RAAF hospital was called – in what appeared to be a possible miscarriage.

  The day after this drama was taking place, Chris, Mum and I, along with my little nephew, Samuel, went out for dinner. I’m not sure why, maybe a pre-celebration thing, or sheer frustration, but we “chowed” ourselves fatter than fat on chilli crabs, which was one of my favourite local dishes.

  The date was April 11 and earlier that day I had had my doctor’s check-up. He said if no labour came on soon, I was to go into hospital the day after the next to have myself induced.

  The next morning, the morning after our night of feasting on chilli crabs, I awoke feeling deeply bloated and uncomfortable, and went to the toilet. I went in the hopes of having a bowel motion to settle things.

  Wiping myself, I saw a thin smear of blood, and not sure what was happening, I panicked but laughed, telling Mum, who after all had had four of us: ‘Hey Mum, I think I’m peeing chilli crabs?’

  It certainly was possible, the amount we had eaten, and it certainly was the right colour. She laughed too. And then I explained the bloated feeling and the pain of it – and, I suppose, after four children she was on the money when she made the statement that somehow never sounds like a cliché, ‘I think you’re going into labour.’

  Marge, who had just returned from care at the hostie, foetus still safely tucked in her belly, but totally incapacitated, agreed, ‘Yeah, Debbie, I think this is it.’ She pressed a square smile.

  I bit my nails and held my tummy tight. It felt bad but not urgent. I was in no way afraid, so felt no need to go rushing to the hospital. It was like I had waited so long for this, and if it was finally starting to happen it was better to be cautiously patient than over-optimistically anxious.

  I chose to wait at home for a while. It was eight in the morning, there was time. There always seemed to be time in the mornings – the whole day ahead, when you didn’t really have to go anywhere.

  At eleven am, the pains were coming on about ten to fifteen minutes apart, like real labour, like I was told to expect, and finally I phoned the hospital. They said I should come in – immediately. This was it. It was going to happen. I was going to – Please God. Pleeeease… – see my first.

  They offered me an ambulance, but I refused knowing Mum and Marge would not be allowed to travel with me. It was good to have family, any family. I wanted them to be with me. This was my moment.

  So, the only way was by car. Marge, because of that near miscarriage, was out of action, and well, to be frank, could one really trust Mum? So, guess who was going to be the driver?

  We all climbed into the car, my sister, immovable as she was, her son too young to know the difference, Mum, overweight and almost immovable as well, and me, massive tummy and all, behind the wheel, making myself as comfortable as I could.

  Everybody finally at ease in their seats, I turned the key. It wouldn’t start. A bead of sweat fell on my forehead; I tried again. Same thing. And then I tried again and again with the same result. In the end, we had to crank it. Yes, you heard right. We had to crank it.

  The car was a really old Morris Minor, and Mum, with no choice as the only “fit” one amongst us, in all her overflowing plumpness, had to get out of the car and crank it. Only, huffing and sweating, much as she tried, she couldn’t get the motor to turn.

  So, with Marge sitting frowning and disabled in the backseat, and Samuel too young to do anything, there I found myself again, out on the street this time, looking like a Dr Who TARDIS with this massively obese parcel stuck in the middle of it, taking deep breaths and puffing with contractions as I cranked the car, ready to give birth to Mary Magdalene.

  Mum’s final revenge? Dad’s final intrusion? Who knows? In all seriousness, it was a reiteration for me that we all have to live with what we have. That is to say, as I learnt in those anxious moments of cranking the old Morris, we have to start from where we start. There is no other choice. And then, if necessary, we just have to get out of the car and goddamn crank the engine for ourselves if we need to.

  There’s no use sitting there and bagging or blaming God or anyone else for it. It’s just the way it is. If you want to know how really bad it can get – go and read a romance novel!

  And so there I was, not quite feeling blessed or happy at that precise moment, fat as a TARDIS, madly cranking this old jalopy like I should have had my togs or gym gear on and been working out on the treadmill.

  Holding my back at times, crying silently with the oncoming bursts of Mary Magdalene inside me, while I shifted and rotated the twisted steel shaft with the enthusiasm of a weightlifter, it was like the car didn’t want a bar of it. No matter what I did, nothing worked. The car was uncrankable.

  There was no other choice – we had to go to Plan B. Luckily Chris and I lived on the flat bit of what after a few metres became a downward sloping road, and so the cranking became the only other thing it could be – pushing. Only with Marge the way she was, and me having to drive, Mum was the only one with the strength to push the old hunk of metal so that we could get it ready for its descent.

  She tried, I’ll give it to her, Mum tried. But it was no use. So, bloated like that TARDIS and puffing even heavier now with contractions, I had to help Mum. I did this by pushing from the side of the car. Passers-by probably thought it was one hell of an advert for the circus coming to town, but there we were, fat as a barrel mother and puffing, TARDIS-sized daughter pushing this old heap to the crest of the hill.

  Somehow we managed it. We inched the car to the beginning of the downward slope and got the car off to a good start. Barely hanging onto the door now, half way down the hill I just managed to jump into the old scrapheap, and not to overpraise my incredible driving skills, I was able to clutch start the battered thing and hold it there like some badly rusted old show-ride.

  I revved and revved and revved until Mum, sweating like a KO’d boxer, caught up with the car and managed to jump in, squeezing her barrel-flesh into the front passenger seat.

  I guess she was used to a few clutch-starts in her life, Mum. Just nobody wanted it to be right then. That was the other thing about the car, the brakes weren’t working. The brakes were as good as not there. So the whole way down the hill – and all the way to the hostie – I had to keep the car revving with clutch and accelerator, and using the handbrake.

  If there was one thing that worked well on the car, thank God, it was the handbrake. And well, there was also my immense driving talents – thanks to Dad. Finally, finally... a lesson from Dad had borne fruit.

  There was still a ferry-ride to come, which was part of the journey from Penang Island to the hospital at Butterworth on the
mainland, and I was by now in a great deal of pain.

  But we got there, too, finally we got to the ferry. But even on the ferry I had to keep the car revving lest we had to push again.

  So there I sat on the Penang ferry, surrounded by my invalid sister and near invalid mother, still wildly revving a now dead-still car, my contractions increasing to about five minutes apart. It was hard to think Mary Magdalene would ever be born safe – or sane.

  36.

  It was about two in the afternoon when we finally – and God knows how – safely reached the RAAF Base Hospital at Butterworth. I had done it with my foot on the pedal all the way. I felt a bit like Mum that day she was racing into the drive to beat Dad into the house before he could catch her, but I had made it to the hospital and could now flee the car just before everything ended in a heap.

  At precisely 10.28 that night, with Chris my renewed knight in reinstated armour at my side, and having had exactly what I did not want in my push for a natural birth, an epidural because of the extreme pain, Sarah came spinning out into the world. I say spinning, because, well, they had to spin and drag her out with forceps in the end – and everything in my head and upper body felt like they were swimming and rotating with her.

  But I have to say, the negatives aside, it was amazing. The most astounding episode in my life. Well, let me put that into perspective. She was bloody and purple and I was a little shocked and afraid when I saw that tiny squashed face. At the same time, separating her crimped and bedazzled expression from all that muck and gunk that comes with childbirth, and which I had somehow forgotten about, and she looked beautiful. Absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  Mire and bile, sludge and gall aside, I know how they say you love your child in that moment of first sight as she comes pouring out of the womb, well it’s true. I felt it like a wave. Like love was oxygen speeding from my eyes into her heartbeat. And vice versa: I could feel her miniscule heartbeat on my tongue. We were both tapping absolutely in tune.

  I wanted to cry I was so overcome. That little pattering heartbeat of hers, that little purple body struggling for breath, writhing and hanging in the air waiting to be laid on my stomach, her lips somehow already groping for Mama’s breasts.

  They took her away from me after a short while, to clean her up, and despite the presence of Chris and Marge and Mum, I sat up and then fell back over because of the epidural. I had no control over my body. Life was showing me its ways again. Like at home. One minute everyone laughing and singing and having a grand old time, and the next everyone falling over, Dad kicking me and everyone else in the backside, including all the Japs in the world for what they did to his dad.

  The sanctity of life. The privilege to bring new life into the world. It is sacred. It is still sacrosanct to me. It would be the same for each one of my children to follow – Ruth two years later and Dean five and a half after that.

  But at that time, in those first few days, weeks, months, although I did not know much about child-rearing, it came to me as the most perfectly natural thing – despite the occasional pains of breastfeeding and a baby crying with heat rash because of the unrelenting Malaysian humidity.

  In the end, after the first few harrowing days following Sarah’s harsh birth, she was such a delight, she even started sleeping through at a mere 10 days old... giving me some peace, my little sparkle of light. In fact I used to call her “Sparkle” – because of her striking, luminous blue eyes. Motherhood for me was exactly as I expected it, the most extraordinary thing in the world; I felt privileged in an absolutely human way to finally do something right.

  I often wondered if it was ever like that to Mum. How fatherhood felt to Dad. It is hard to imagine. Sometimes, even through the tears, I look back at them, and see them, Mum and Dad, in the same way I saw Chris and myself in those first anxious, astonishing moments of giving birth. I see them smiling, relieved, happy in a way they never expected to be.

  And then I see Dad inspecting my body like an amateur doctor, like a grubby woodchopper, to make sure I was a girl. That the sawdust was his. That he had his human flesh to sever. And I see Mum, the smile fading, finally disappearing completely, becoming a weight on the world. In front of her, bin-load after bin-load of grey washing hanging on a thin line, the sun beating down on her back until the soil is hard like rock.

  I also knew in my heart I would never trust Chris with our newborn child, or with our children to come. He was a man. He had shown what kind of man. The fear was too great. I knew he could never, would never do what my father had done, but I guess that was how deep it went, my experience, the fear, the absolute fear… of the so-called love between a father and a child.

  After having Sarah, she came everywhere with me; there was no way I was letting my cherished daughter out of my sight. During my sporting days in Malaysia, our maid or amah, whose name was Penata, would be in tow, to take care of her while I was on the field or on the court playing. But always Sarah was there, somewhere near enough for me to see.

  With Sarah safely in my arms, I felt I had something no one could ever take away from me. Except perhaps the hand of that great, inexplicable force that meanders through the universe. I understood that. I also understood its kindness.

  37.

  By the time our second daughter, Ruth, came along – May ‘85 – Chris was stationed at Australia’s well-known Amberley Air Force Base and we were living in Leichhardt, Ipswich. We even soon moved and bought our own home in Bellbird Park, a fresh, newly developing suburb with lots of space and open areas

  Initially, we were so excited to be back in Australia, our marriage once again purring along like an old tabby cat, sort of all furry and cosy... well, it seemed that way to me at any rate. Chris was his fun-loving self and it all seemed so positive.

  Ruth’s birth soon after also reminded me and made me believe in that miracle of life again. Well, in her case, for a short while. She started out with colic, but that seemed to quickly settle until she actually slept right through the night. Then at about six weeks her colic developed into reflux and projectile vomiting and maybe I should have seen it then, as Chris and I nearly climbed the walls with frustration, there was more to come.

  But we somehow lived through that phase, and for most of the rest of that year our new baby was a very contented girl, often sleeping right through and enjoying her food and playing with her big sister, Sarah.

  Then came her first birthday. And our little Ruth became a difficult child. There was no other way to put it: suddenly there was screaming and tantrums and fits of obstinacy that were almost too difficult to bear.

  In retrospect, I think the reason for her trying ways was quite simply the fact that I’d started looking after other people’s children. Doing it too soon – when Ruth was only six months old. She must have sensed there was just not enough time to spend with her like I was able to do with Sarah at the same age. She demanded attention.

  I know, blaming myself again. Well, once again it was my fault, my responsibility, wasn’t it? In this case, I have no doubt. I had a child, I had wanted another child desperately, and there I was taking on the childcare of other people’s children.

  On the other hand, there was also a mortgage hanging over our heads, electricity, food, clothing and other bills, and very little money. The reality was Chris was at base most of the day and sometimes even at night he was out working in a second job as an electrician, at Rosewood, near Ipswich. The result: I was doing it almost all on my own. I don’t want to make excuses, so I have to confess: I felt responsible. And terrible.

  The problems with Ruth continued, it seemed forever. From age one to three, which included the mythological “terrible twos”, which I can say very confidently now are no myth at all, it went on and on. It wasn’t until her third birthday that she returned, almost like a miracle, to her happy, joyful little self.

  From that time, almost as though the sun had come out of the sky for the first time in the history of planet Ear
th, things eased out. Ruth became a pleasure again, my lovable, adorable child. I’m not sure how exactly it happened, but it happened. I am sure there is some psychological/scientific/sociological/paediatric explanation, but for me at the time I was just rain-away happy it happened.

  For Chris, however, it seemed too late. For him, a screaming, crying, obnoxious child combined with the constant nagging to somehow squeeze out extra money, made life too difficult. And even when Ruth returned to normal, it would remain that way for him.

  More and more, he was becoming bleak. And doing his own thing. More and more, I was beginning to know, on a deeper level, what I already knew – Chris was a depressive. With our new baby-rearing burdens combined with his moods, Malaysia was beginning to seem like paradise.

  The elation, the softly whispered words, the laughter were slithering away from us, and in their place a cold and difficult to comprehend vacuum was beginning to suck out all the energy between us.

  Chris could sink so low at times that he would hardly talk to anyone for days. I know I should have felt sorry for him – and I did – only he would never even want to open his mouth and tell me what was going on inside. Not even a clue. I had to surmise it. Had to conjure it out of the chilled air from the stories I had heard along the way about his own harsh upbringing. About his dad literally hanging from the bowing rafters. About his older brother Phillip who, in the nick of time, cut their dad down from the ceiling.

  But in the day-to-day reality, without being willing to open up about anything, Chris became more and more difficult to live with. I think I could safely say, in his moods, he was more difficult to live with than my child Ruth in her most horrible moments of reflux and tantrum throwing.

  Like a child, he demanded things, demanded attention, had sex without saying anything, without whispering a word, merely staring at me with an almost uncaring resentment at how difficult and hollow life had become.