Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  The words I’d wanted to say now seemed impossibly distant.

  ‘Why couldn’t you clean the kitchen? It’s almost four o’clock.’

  He moved me aside. ‘I’m cleaning,’ he said, without looking in my direction.

  I sat on the couch and looked out the window. Our flat was on the top floor, the rooftops of Bondi were spread out around us. The late afternoon sun shone in, golden. In the distance I heard a bus go past, the cupboard doors rattled, the front door shuddered, and I bit on my bottom lip, wondering how we’d managed to go wrong again.

  ‘So what did she say to you?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Who?’ I said, feeling wounded despite knowing he hadn’t realised I’d come home with love in my heart.

  ‘The clairvoyant.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘What did you want to say to me?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I was silent for a moment. ‘I just didn’t want to fight any more.’

  He stood at the kitchen door and looked at me. ‘Well, you did a good job of trying not to.’

  I turned back to the window and the afternoon sky. ‘She told me that if I left you I would never have another relationship.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Did you pay her?’ I asked. ‘To say that?’ I tried not to smile back as I looked across at him.

  He shook his head. ‘Well, there you go,’ and there was a certain satisfaction in the look he gave me.

  He turned in the direction of the kitchen. ‘All clean now.’ He waved his hand behind him. ‘Not such a drama after all.’ He glanced at his watch. We had to go and get Odessa from daycare. We were meant to be going out to dinner with friends. I asked him if he had packed some food for her and he told me he hadn’t.

  ‘It won’t take a second,’ he said. ‘You can do it while I pick her up. I’ll meet you out the front.’

  He left and the flat was empty, quiet. The kitchen was, as he had said, clean. Everything was put away. I packed a small container of food and gathered together some warmer clothes for Odessa. Standing at the front door, I looked back at the peacefulness of the five rooms in which we lived. I liked these moments on my own. I always had. I tried to imagine, for one brief instant, what it would be like if this were how it always was. What if I was not going downstairs to head out with Andrew and Odessa but if he was, in fact, dropping her back after his week? What if I was now in my sixth, seventh year without a relationship?

  But he was beeping the horn, and as I shut the front door behind me and went down to meet them, I knew that if the future I had envisaged were to eventuate, I would remember this moment. I would return to it with the romanticism we all give to the past, making it seem sweeter in retrospect than it did as the present. And I looked down the stairs to where they had pulled up, Andrew in the front, Odessa in the back, the car running as they waited for me to join them.

  THE STORY MY MOTHER TELLS ME

  THE STORY MY MOTHER TELLS ME GOES LIKE THIS: I WAS late, not too late, but late enough to make the doctors talk about inducing me. There was a full moon, and she lay in the hospital bed, the silvery light spilling across her. She communed with me, willing me to come out now, before the induction; while the doctors were out of the room, the nurses were busy elsewhere; while it was just her and me.

  ‘I sent you messages,’ she says, ‘and you listened.’

  Because, sure enough, out I came, quickly, easily, slipping out in the moonlight, and she held me up in delight.

  The nurses came back first.

  ‘Doctor will be angry,’ they said, and they looked at my mother in disapproval. ‘Whatever will we tell him?’

  I don’t know how they explained the turn of events to Doctor when he arrived the next morning, too late to be of any use. My mother doesn’t take the story any further than my birth. In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever talked about what it was like when she first took me or my brothers home as small babies whom she had to care for. The story is confined to that moment in hospital, and the point is that we did it ourselves, together. We had a special link, a power. We beat the system. And how good was I? Capable of hearing, understanding and obeying my mother even before I’d come out of the womb.

  This secret sense of superiority was only reinforced by the tales of my brothers’ births, which went wrong. Jonathan shot out, too fast, after an unnecessary episiotomy, and the doctor didn’t catch him. Slippery quick, he landed straight on the floor, suffering a haemorrhage in the brain. Joshua was almost three months premature. My mother was rolling drunk on a pure alcohol drip when she delivered him. (The alcohol was an experimental technique pioneered by a Danish doctor, she explains now. He thought it would delay contractions.) Their births were problematic. Mine was a breeze.

  But when I became pregnant, I found it impossible to shelter in the false hope of a delivery like the one my mother had described, and the reality of childbirth made me afraid. As soon as the pregnancy was confirmed, I bought the books recommended by my doctor. Sitting at the back of the bus, the acrid smell of the vinyl seats making me ill, I flipped straight to the end sections on delivery. I skipped over the parts that dealt with possible complications; this was not what was making me scared. I had a faith that the birth would be normal. I had no faith in my ability to withstand the pain.

  This was going to be the first great physical stress I had faced and I became obsessed with confronting the unknown through preparation. It seemed like the only solid handle I could grasp. My anxiety about being a mother (which was real and terrifying) slipped into the background. I could not even bring myself to contemplate it. I would deal with that after I had the baby. The immediate matter at hand was how to make sure I coped with the birth.

  The first thing I did was book Andrew and myself in for a tour of the hospital. We had a choice: the birth centre or the labour ward. Most people I knew opted for the birth centre. They wanted drug-free births. They wanted minimum intervention. I agreed with them in theory, but now that I was the one who had to deliver, I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t believe I was capable of doing it on my own, despite the fact that so many women had and did, and I wanted to know that medical assistance was right there, should I need it.

  We went to the labour ward first. The room smelt of soap and the bed and chairs looked like they had been bought at Ikea. There was even a beanbag in a corner, and a shower. Any hospital contraptions were safely hidden away, out of sight, but they were there, revealed to us by the midwife as she opened doors, pulled down levers and slid back fake walls.

  ‘This looks fine,’ I said to Andrew.

  He suggested that we should just have a quick glance at the alternative but I wasn’t interested.

  ‘I want to go here,’ I said.

  ‘But how can you know this is right unless you see the other one?’ Andrew asked.

  I just did.

  Yet I still felt embarrassed every time I corrected friends who made the assumption that I would, of course, be going to the birth centre. I hastened to justify my choice, each time emphasising the beanbag and the presence of the midwives, who had assured me of their primary role in delivery.

  Next we booked into classes. There were thirteen of us: five other couples and me, Andrew and my friend, Virginia. We had lived together when I had first started seeing Andrew. I had asked her to be our support person and I wanted to include her in everything. I had also just assumed that support people came to classes.

  As we went around the room and introduced ourselves, I could see everyone waiting for an explanation for why there were three of us. I was a surrogate, carrying their child. I had been having an affair with Andrew and fallen pregnant. Virginia would only take him back if he owned up to his mistake, and she was there to see that he did. Virginia and I were having the baby, Andrew had simply supplied the sperm. The permutations multiplied. The truth was infinitely more dull.

  ‘Good, good,’ Carolyn said, smiling all-inclusively at Virginia as she explained why she was there.

  Next w
e had to talk about how we felt about the pregnancy. I looked at Virginia helplessly, apologetically, but in her spirit of inclusiveness, Carolyn altered the question for her – she could tell the class how she felt about being a support person, and then she turned back to the first person in the circle, waiting for her answer.

  Everyone saw this time in their lives as a momentous experience, wonderful, blissful, joyous; the men were perhaps a little less effusive but their responses were still primarily positive. I wished I could say the same. I wanted to lie. But deciding to have a child felt too large, too important to lie about. I needed to speak the truth.

  I was ambivalent, I said, aware that I wasn’t being as honest as I would have liked. I had wanted to be pregnant, I continued, but now that it had happened … and I found myself unable to complete the sentence. The truth was I feared that it was just my body, my hormones, that had wanted this, and now that this desire had been satisfied, my head could take over again. I was not only afraid, I could not think of a single intellectually satisfying reason why anyone would want to have a child. I looked at the ground. I didn’t dare say all that I really felt out loud.

  It was Andrew’s turn next, and I waited for him to compensate for my lack of joy with something that was a little more akin to the other responses we’d heard.

  ‘I feel sad,’ he confessed.

  Carolyn waited; her eyes were kind.

  ‘Sad to say goodbye to my old life, I guess.’ He searched for a better explanation. ‘I’ve been going through a kind of grieving. For who I was, I suppose.’

  I knew this. But I didn’t want to hear it uttered in front of others.

  ‘And I find Georgia difficult,’ he added.

  I could only look at him, mouth open, and will him to shut up.

  ‘She’s just been so negative about it all.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Carolyn said. Her eyes met mine and she quickly looked away again. ‘No, it’s good you said it all.’

  It was Virginia’s turn next. She was excited, she told the class. And a little bit afraid, she added, ‘about how I’ll cope with the blood and everything.’

  I wished we’d never come.

  On the way home, Andrew and I fought. It was inevitable. It had been fine for me to speak the truth, so why hadn’t it been fine for him? I had no rational answer. I just would have liked one of us to have created the fiction that I wanted to be the reality. I stared at the darkness of the street as he backed the car into the kerb. He wound the window down to see how close he was, and I had to hold my nose to block out the heavy exhaust fumes. The ignition off, we sat in silence. We wanted this, I thought, and I looked at him sitting next to me. ‘They were just all so bloody rapturous.’ I could see the outline of his profile illuminated by the street light. ‘I didn’t believe them.’

  He opened his door, glancing across at me for a moment. ‘Maybe they were happy,’ he answered.

  Maybe, I conceded, but not as happy as they were saying, and I reached for his arm, wanting reassurance as he stopped to check the mailbox. He flicked through the envelopes, tossing the junk into the bin, while I waited.

  As my pregnancy progressed, I visited the hospital more regularly. I had endless tests, and most of the time I had no idea what they were for. The check-ups seemed pointless, irrelevant; I was not concerned about the pregnancy itself. It was the birth that worried me, and I barely listened to anything the midwife had to say, unless it concerned the end event.

  A few months in, she told me I had placenta previa. ‘Which basically means you may be looking at a Caesarean. We won’t know until you’re closer to full-term,’ she reassured me. ‘And more often than not, you find that everything has moved around to its proper place.’

  When I got home, I rang my mother. My pregnancy was the same, she said, but got into the right position. Just before the birth.

  I sat on the couch and read. (I had bought all of Tolstoy’s and Dostoyevsky’s novels as soon as I heard I was pregnant, certain that this would be the last period in my life in which I would be able to cope with such large books.) I felt uncomfortable. I walked around the flat, wondering whether I, too, could commune with this child inside me. And if I could, would I tell her to move down to the bottom of my womb? I wasn’t sure. There was a part of me that welcomed the possible escape from the potential horror of hours of pain.

  Carolyn soon closed the door on that one.

  As I told the class my news, she listened sympathetically. Then, choosing her words carefully so as not to imply that there was any right or wrong way of giving birth, she talked about the difficulties of Caesareans, about the pain that can follow, the problems women face in sitting, driving, breastfeeding after the operation.

  ‘It can make the recovery from the birth process harder,’ she said, and as she spoke I began to feel truly sorry for myself. There was, it seemed, no way out.

  She had a couple of videos for us that night. One showing a birth in a spa tub, the other where ‘everything went wrong’.

  She dimmed the lights and we sat in a circle on the nylon mat covering the linoleum floor.

  The first was the water birth. Ambient music played in the background as an entire family gathered around a woman who rocked and sang in the tub. Even her groans sounded relatively peaceful. Nevertheless, I closed my eyes as she actually delivered the baby, only opening them again when she held her child in her arms.

  Carolyn turned on the lights. What did we all think? How did we feel?

  ‘Amazing,’ one woman said.

  Beautiful, erotic, incredible; I listened to their adjectives, and once again found myself unable to lie. I had hated watching it. I hated the blood. It disturbed me, it only made me anxious about what I was about to face. ‘I just don’t see anything constructive in watching someone else’s pain. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Carolyn responded.

  The second birth took place in a labour ward. Pethidine had slowed down the woman’s dilation, the foetus was in distress, doctors and nurses rushed back and forth, forceps were used, the woman screamed in agony, and the blood was everywhere.

  This time we were asked to talk about the two experiences in comparison to each other. Of course, the second was more disturbing. I had barely opened my eyes. But I had also hated the water birth and the terrible ambient music. I didn’t like either, I said.

  It was Andrew’s turn to comment next. He thought the comparison between the two films was unfair. ‘I mean, the production values in the second video were so much worse than the first. The lighting, the music, the whole lot.’

  The class laughed. I looked at Andrew and wondered how we managed to turn ourselves into the evening’s amusement each time we came.

  ‘Putting that aside, what about the actual birth experience?’ Carolyn’s patience never seemed to waver.

  ‘Well, it’s just pain,’ Andrew said. ‘You go through it and then it’s over.’ He turned to me. ‘But then I have a high threshold for pain. Georgia doesn’t.’

  ‘What about when you had kidney stones?’ I asked him on the way home, remembering the night I had rushed him to hospital after waking to find him on the floor, screaming and crying.

  ‘But that was agony,’ he said.

  ‘And childbirth isn’t?’

  Of course it was. He just knew I didn’t cope well. He wasn’t criticising me, he hastened to add. It was just the way it was.

  I started going to yoga classes, in the hope that the physical preparation would make the birth a little easier. I spent a lot of time watching the other women, the new arrivals who barely showed any sign of pregnancy, lying next to the old hands who only had a matter of days to go. We were like lemmings walking towards the edge of the cliff. I was somewhere in the middle, and that was where I wanted to stay, but there was no way of halting this horrible progression towards being the most pregnant one, the one who didn’t turn up next week, the one who just disappeared.

  ‘What’s the pain like?’ I ask
ed a friend who had a two-year-old.

  ‘Incredible,’ she said.

  ‘No. What’s it like? What kind of pain? Like knives, like being kicked, like what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. It’s like being on the bow of a ship riding through the storm, crashing through the waves, and all you can do is go through it.’

  In classes, we got a little more technical. We discussed the three stages: pre-labour, transition and third stage.

  Pre-labour can go for days, Carolyn warned us. It was common for first-time mothers to rush to the hospital at the first signs only to be sent home. She told us about timing our contractions; about ringing the hospital if we were at all anxious; about staying at home for as long as we could; about having our bags packed, taking food and drink for the support people.

  ‘And music, aromatherapy oils, whatever you want.’

  ‘None of them,’ I hissed to Andrew, who I knew would feel the same.

  We talked about the dilation of the cervix, how far it needed to go before delivery was possible, how close our contractions would be, and about moving into transition.

  ‘That’s when it’s hard,’ she said. ‘When it comes on like the clappers. When you feel all at sea. That’s usually when women scream for some kind of pain relief, for anything to get them out of the agony.’

  And then there was the third stage, the pushing.

  She gave us a demonstration, a run through of the sounds we would find ourselves making. As an actor, and a mother of two, she knew how to give a performance. I listened, fascinated and vaguely embarrassed, as she moved from the occasional groan to screams of agony that were so close together they might have been one, shifting finally into a deep, guttural grunt.

  At the end, Andrew clapped.

  Meanwhile at yoga, I had suddenly become the second most pregnant woman in the room. In the final stages of our class, the one woman who was closer to the edge of the cliff than I was bent over in pain. The teacher asked her if she was all right.