The Miracle of Love

by Ondine Sherman

  And then, Jasmine. She was born on 22 August at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Randwick. She was long, pale, thin, soft, pretty and delicious. I was a late-night Thai takeaway noodle addict, so Noodle became her nickname. Spring arrived a week later and I put a twig of the new blossoming jasmine flowers by her heart. I kissed her creamy neck with a fierce new kind of love. I was shocked. It was even more powerful, this love, so different to what I had with Winnie. Jasmine slept next to me in a wicker basket on the dining room table as I assessed the grants applications and planned our first awards event to celebrate animal advocates.

  A few months later a million people saw our work through Australian Story on ABC television. I looked bloated and sleep-deprived and had forgotten to do my hair. Jasmine was four months old and featured, in all her beauty, for about two seconds. Juggling running an organisation and raising a child made me worried about becoming Mr Rush. I didn’t want that for Jasmine.

  I aspired to be a perfect mother, nurturing her with time and focused attention while inspiring her to achieve her dreams through my own example. I would encourage all her emotions, hold her tight when she cried and, when content, sit quietly with her, not doing, just being. We would watch the river, so to speak, just like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. No rushing, no whooshing, no fiddling hands.

  But guilt slowly made its way into my life: constant self-flagellation. I wasn’t giving her enough of me, my time, energy, soul. To be the perfect mother, must I give up my other dreams? No. I fought back. I could do it all.

  The morning after Australian Story was aired the Voiceless email account was inundated with one thousand messages.With the help of our small team, Dad and I spent weeks writing back to each person, using the opportunity to build up supporters and raise awareness of our goals. People who shared our concern for animals offered their help. Designers, lawyers, artists, students, writers, veterinarians, farmers . . .Young and old, male and female, urban and rural, Labor and Liberal. Caring about animals clearly shredded traditional labels and demographics. The factory farmers pricked their ears and drafted defensive media releases. Meat industry groups called us ‘more dangerous’ than US animal-rights organisation PETA because we ‘appear rational’. It was a great honour.

  ‘This is a war,’ my dad said as we walked the dogs in Centennial Park one Sunday. I looked at him, and through his long, slightly matted hair noticed his cheeky smile. ‘And we’re going to win because we have the truth on our side.’ It was great to have him back and by my side.

  Jasmine was twelve months old and a textbook baby. Mum had fallen in love with her and morphed into the ideal grandmother. She openly admitted surprise at her new-found joy. Playing. Slowing down. Being. It was exactly what I had wanted from her as a child. But I didn’t begrudge Jasmine; after all, I’d had my Gran.

  Life was near perfect, and there were no more unexplained tears. All my inner desires had been met.

  Found my soulmate: tick.

  Helping animals: tick.

  A beautiful baby girl: tick.

  And still adventure bubbled. I wanted to travel to Africa, volunteer in a wildlife orphanage; adopt a second child, someone really needy like the children I had seen in Morocco; and see concrete success in freeing animals from factory farming. Everything was in reach.

  And then, ‘I really want to go back to Israel again,’ Dror said as we made our way down the hill from Macpherson Street to Bronte Beach.

  It was eight in the evening and the sun was slowly losing its force. Pink clouds made giant frangipanis above the Pacific Ocean. Winnie and Tigger ran in front, tails erect, sniffing the dandelions.

  ‘Winnie! No! Off the road!’ I screamed as I saw her step off the footpath. We had spent seven years training her to be road-safe and off-leash.

  I grabbed her collar and walked across the street with her.

  Winnie had fallen in love with Tigger at the local pound. Dror and I had wanted a friend for Winnie, and Tigger was her chosen mate. He was more of a flatmate than my pet. He was impossible to catch once off the leash and had such a wild, spirited nature that Dror and I didn’t have the heart to leash him permanently. So he followed us everywhere, walking a few metres behind and expertly crossing roads like a street cat.

  He was suspiciously similar to a dingo. He howled rather than barked, climbed trees, opened doors, jumped high fences and communicated his needs to me, I was certain, through telepathy. He could escape any captive situation, chewing through leashes in seconds, and soon earned the nickname Houdini. He didn’t quite trust us, which made sense: the pound volunteer had told us that as a puppy Tigger had been rejected from four homes and probably treated unkindly. Later, in his old age, he would finally find in one of my sons a human he loved with great depth.

  ‘Seriously?’ I said to Dror, the distraction over. ‘But isn’t Sydney beautiful?’ I gestured with my hands to the scene before us. ‘You have good friends here and . . . and Voiceless is only two. What will my dad do without me? And you know how close Jasmine and my mum are . . .’

  ‘I think about Israel every day. Every day. It’s my home,’ he said resolutely. ‘Australia is your home and we have been here seven years now. We . . . you have to compromise.’

  ‘I know,’ I said quietly, already accepting the inevitable. After all, he had lived with me in Australia, far from his homeland or close family in the US. He had never planned to move to Australia, he’d come for me. Sure he loved me, but Israel was his heart and soul. This would be a small bump in the road. Then again, Africa’s lions were just a few thousand kilometres south; we could make a detour. Maybe a few months in a wildlife orphanage? Great education for Jasmine.

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘As soon as possible,’ he said.

  ‘Okay. Let’s plan for March . . . once the summer’s ended.’ I gazed forlornly at the stretch of ocean before me. Winnie and Tigger would have to come with us across the Pacific. My parents would visit regularly, I was sure. But I imagined prising my mother’s hands off Jasmine, breaking their newly formed connection.Would my father be lost without me? What would happen to Voiceless? I would have to say goodbye to Milo, my brother and his wife Caroline’s first child, still a newborn. I wouldn’t see his first years.

  We made a pact: two years in Israel with an option to extend if I was happy. Hearing the news, Mum argued, negotiated, pleaded until finally she shed tears. Jasmine, she said, was her soulmate. She was devastated.

  Dad also tried to negotiate with Dror but met his match in stubbornness. He was disappointed, sad, stoic, but always supportive of my decisions, and he assured me that he would hold the fort with Voiceless until I returned.

  ‘I’ll be on email every day, it will be just like I’m here,’ I promised him. ‘Lots of people work remotely.Voiceless can be like a multinational!’

  I registered Voiceless in Israel as ‘Lelo Kol’ (without a voice) and researched the local animal organisations. I read Hebrew like a five-year-old and it was difficult to get information about who was doing what. I was scared, felt guilty about abandoning Voiceless and full of trepidation.

  ‘Voiceless Middle East!’ I brightly announced to the growing team, four staff and a legal volunteer. ‘Nice ring to it, right?’

  There was a trade in live sheep between Australia and the Middle East that was infamous for being terribly cruel. Tens of thousands of animals suffered gruelling deaths along the way, their bodies thrown overboard. Those who survived met with horrific ends in slaughterhouses. Eilat, in southern Israel, was one of the ports where animals were unloaded. Ending this would be a good start, I thought. Maybe I can achieve something after all.

  SIX

  Tel Aviv’s spring arrived and, newly pregnant, I was hormonal and already drenched in the oppressive humidity. I dragged myself away from the toilet bowl, wiped up the vomit, brushed my teeth and shouted down the stairs to our bomb-shelter basement office for Dror to call a cab. It was time for my twelve-week scan. The pregnancy had been unpla
nned but not unwanted; I was loving the experience of watching Jasmine grow, and the idea of adopting an older child as I had planned, although still appealing in many ways, had somehow diminished in importance.

  I tried not to vomit again as the taxi swerved through the small winding streets of our neighbourhood, Neve Tzedek, and into Tel Aviv. We had chosen to live in Neve Tzedek for its village atmosphere. Its small cobbled streets dated back to the nineteenth century, before Tel Aviv or even the State of Israel was founded. Tel Aviv was lauded for its Bauhaus architecture and protected under UNESCO, but I found the city drab and grey, relishing instead the unusual character of our tiny neighbourhood. Neve Tzedek had been a rundown neighbourhood mostly populated with poor Jews, Mizrahis who had fled persecution in Syria, Yemen, Iran and Iraq. But over the past ten years its demographic had changed. Now it was a mixture of old and new: in alleyways elderly men sat on milk crates and drank black coffee, and in cafés Israeli writers, designers and fashionistas sat sipping lattes next to European tourists looking for a boutique Israel experience.

  Tel Aviv’s open-air market was on my right. Usually I loved the explosion of food and colour but today I held my breath as the smell of raw meat, blue cheese and cat urine wafted towards me. The taxi pulled to a stop at a traffic light next to a middle-aged couple screaming at each other on the kerb. People had no qualms about airing their private issues in public; their apartments were too small to contain their passion. Luckily our building was calm. We had made friends with our neighbours, a lovely British couple, Debbie and Simon, with three children themselves. Slowly I was building up a network, including my old university friend Sara, who had become religious. Although Dror’s parents and sister lived in LA, he had many cousins in Israel and we were warmly welcomed into family gatherings for holidays and Friday dinners.

  The light changed to green and when the car in front didn’t move, our driver honked his horn three times and screamed out the window. He jolted the taxi forward suddenly and I grasped my belly. My clammy palm stuck to Dror’s as we wove around a small playground, where two kids chased each other around a wilted fig tree. A woman sat on the bench and puffed her cigarette. A vivid fuchsia wall of bougainvillea hid a dusty abandoned lot.

  At the medical clinic the vaseline was refreshingly cold as the nurse spread it over my already bulging pale belly. Dror and I stared into the monitor at the foot of the bed.

  ‘I am sure you already know . . .’ the nurse said over the beeping machine. I held my breath, hoping that the baby was okay, ‘. . . that there are two heartbeats?’

  ‘What? You’re kidding,’ I said.

  ‘Shteim?’ Dror asked in Hebrew, hoping her English was so bad she thought two meant one. ‘Twins?’ he said.

  ‘Ken . . . yes. Teomim . . . twins,’ she replied bluntly in both languages.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Twins! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We had seen an obstetrician at six weeks for confirmation of the pregnancy. He had located the healthy heartbeat of a baby. One single baby.

  The nurse put some paper towel on my belly and left the room.

  ‘How are we going to do this?’

  I wiped the rough paper over the vaseline and pulled up my pants. Jasmine was only twenty months old. How would I cope with wrangling two more of her, simultaneously, in Israel, without close family or trusty friends in reach? Her terrible-two tantrums often made me stop to watch in awe as she screamed red-faced at the injustice of not getting another ‘baby yoghurt’ or made her naked body rigid as a steel pole in protest at ‘pyjama time’.

  Outside the clinic, Dror and I sat on the kerb and tried to process the information. I whacked his big marathon-man thigh and started to laugh hysterically. ‘This is your bloody fault.’

  ‘No way, it’s yours,’ he replied, catching my laugh. Our giggles subsided and a long moment passed.

  ‘I don’t have any twins in my family.You?’ I asked seriously.

  ‘Nope, none.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ we said in perfect unison.

  Sitting there on the kerb, I called my parents and brother. My mother promised to come and help; Dad was shocked but happy, and Emile thought I was joking. Milo was four months and he knew just what hard work babies were.

  Given that my first obstetrician couldn’t seem to count babies, I switched to a different doctor. At my next check-up the new one said that the twins were either ‘boy and girl’ or ‘girl and girl’ and boasted that he was right in ninety-eight percent of cases. I was happy that I wasn’t having two boys as I feared wild testosterone-fuelled toddlers.

  A month later I switched for a third time to an obstetrician who specialised in twins. It was this svelte man, with his flat-screen TV and well-decorated office, who finally told me the facts—identical twin boys. I raised the point that there were no twins in either of our families and learned that only fraternal twins (non-identical) were hereditary from the mother. Identical ones were not. Just luck then. A one in ten thousand chance.

  Dror, always the scientist, decided that this was a good opportunity to conduct an experiment. His premise was simple: given that the twins had identical DNA and the same environment—parents, sister, dogs, etc—the nature versus nurture debate was irrelevant and their personalities should be the same. The premise sounded silly to me. But Dror argued that souls had never been scientifically proven. According to science we were comprised of only our DNA, our brains, chemical impulses and such. If the twins turned out to be different to each other, he surmised, it would indicate that something divine, mysterious, unknown played a part in our lives. He would have the proof he needed to strengthen his own faith.

  While Dror was developing theories, I was just plain scared. How was I going to manage chasing after two children at the same time? And boys too, who in my experience were way more physical and boisterous than my gentle, reasonable angel Jasmine (conveniently forgetting the baby yoghurt)?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dror reassured me happily. ‘I’ll look after them when they’re old enough to play soccer. With two sons, I can have my own team.’

  I became a little obsessed that my twins were going to chase ducks at the park with sticks and I would find myself mortified, apologising to everyone and unable to stop them. Where I had got this stick-bashing image from was unclear.

  I ordered books from Amazon on the psychology of identical twins, and my fear about ducks and sticks morphed into another worry. How would we ensure their individuality was fostered and thus avoid their mimicking each other’s every life move, communicating psychically, finishing each other’s sentences and not being able to form separate romantic relationships or individual lives? Reading conscientiously, I vowed never to dress them in identical clothes or call them ‘the twins’; to speak to them as individuals and spend time alone with each of them daily to form our individual bonds. The US reality-TV series The Bachelor was on nightly and fortune had it the bachelors were identical twins; good-looking, successful and smart. Huh! Surely a good sign, I told myself.

  Our small neighbourhood had become interested in Dror, Jasmine and me; an Australian and an American-Israeli moving back to Israel was fascinating for many of the locals, who saw the US and particularly Australia as promised lands, the ‘Gan-Eden’, Garden of Eden of abundance. Jasmine was bilingual and her fair skin, polite manners and confused accent made her the local sweetheart. ‘Ezeh motek,’ the neighbours would say. ‘What a sweetie.’

  Once the morning sickness had faded, Dror and I would stroll the European-style boulevards at 11 pm, amid the humidity and dirt, relieved to leave Jasmine asleep with a babysitter. We watched fathers walking with prams, laughing into mobile phones, and long-legged single women walking their dogs, stopping to flirt and flick their glossy black curls. All Israeli women seemed to have long, thick wavy hair. What conditioner do they use? I wondered as I ran my fingers through my mouse-brown mop, frizzy with the humidity.

  Cafés were cr
owded with fashionable twenty- and thirty-somethings drinking late-night espressos, talking politics with cigarettes in hand. It wasn’t hard to have an interesting political discussion, I soon realised, as Dror chit-chatted about the day’s affairs with people he had come to know. I stood feebly by, as words like ‘Falastinyam’ (Palestinian), ‘Hezbollah’, ‘Hamas’, ‘Aza’ (Gaza), ‘pitzuz’ (explosion) and ‘Artzot Habrit’ (USA) peppered conversations.

  I felt guilty confessing that I didn’t really care what was happening in the wider world. In my own world with Jasmine and a growing belly, I just wanted to make some friends, find decent maternity clothes, eat croissants—ideally toasted ones with cheese—and keep safe.

  The newspaper was full of terrorist threats, impending war, imminent peace plans, corrupt politicians, religious zealots and immigration scandals. Sometimes I checked out the Sydney Morning Herald online but the contrast was too great. I couldn’t read inane articles about tax and badly behaved rugby players when the Middle East was clearly falling apart.

  Soon my gigantic belly became a magnet for discussion among neighbours, shopkeepers and waiters. Locals loved to guess that I was having twins as the shape of my belly stretched and contorted into an internal double stroller.