Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: motherhood

  • the littlest love

    I lost a baby last year, after a long time trying to conceive. It died inside me early without my knowing about it, so I carried the tiny corpse in my womb a few days, and was its grave. We had chosen our names, for a boy, for a girl. Every child is a girl at this stage. The doctor made his seven-week scan. I strained over his head, trying to see on the dark screen the tiny bean-shaped body for the first time. There was no heartbeat, only my own. The doctor pulled out his dildo-shaped scanner and wiped the condom off it with one movement. The condom he flung over his shoulder into the trash. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be taking home a baby this time,” he said.

    Later in his office, when I was dressed, he said airily, “Oh yes – one in two pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Didn’t you know?” I didn’t know. It occurs to me now this is just another way we brush aside the sorrows which affect women. We don’t talk about the griefs women carry. Miscarry. Give stillbirth to. Find dead in the cot. Incest, rape, infertility, assault.

    We were so excited going in for the scan. The first glimpse of the most important person in our adult lives; her first communication with us, through the tiny pounding of her heart. I had been watching the daily progress of this infinite darling in the form of diagrams showing the little heart finding its way, the spine beginning to form. These drawings seemed to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen on paper. On the screen I could not see anything, however tiny; I looked and looked. My partner held my hand. A sickened feeling of confusion very faintly took hold. The gynaecologist put out both his hands to pull me upright, as though I were an invalid. In such ways do insensitive people convey their empathy. This doctor liked to tell salacious jokes during intimate examination: we were already looking for another doctor, a better doctor, a woman. Earlier he had said, as he reefed the condom over his scanner, “I’m a mountain man. I like mountain women.” I had only just worked out, with a dull, sick feeling, that this was a pun, when he thrust the machine inside me and the scan started and the quiet unmoving bad news came in to rest. It has thus rested ever since. We are still not parents and our child is still unborn. I had not known before this how many of my friends had also suffered miscarriage and the loss of a child. How many still grieved. I had even felt intolerant, judgmental of the seeming sentimentality of these remembrances when they did appear, the candles, the flowers, the bears. Now I found myself applying this same non-compassion to my own grief. This piercing loneliness seared me from the first: after all I am hollow, I am alone in here. Oh how can you mourn something so early, barely a child. With its whole life ahead of it, just growing spine. Meanwhile the little cardboard box with its clot of bloodied fragments that I knelt over on the floor of the shower and howled, that I scooped up and wrapped in tissue paper then could not bring myself to bury, all alone in the cold dark ground, sits on my desk untouched, more than a year later. I have not been ready to let go.

     

     

  • Mothers Day

    Want to know why I dislike Mothers Day? We were in a cafe, crowded against the wall by a spreading table of one family, all hunched over in their chairs: grandfather, husband, brother, wife, and two small blonde girl children. Mother sat between her two children. Their demand on her attention was constant. “Oh, that’s lovely, now why don’t you draw me a great big house where all those people can live?” The men talked amongst themselves, playing a game of cards.

    Mother was not engaged with the card game, she was busy mothering.

    Lunch arrived. A plate was set down before each adult: big breakfast, steak and chips, eggs benedict, big breakfast. The mother divided her breakfast in three. Clean white plates were set either side of her for the girls and she had to ask the smaller daughter to keep her fingers out of the eggs as she parsed and divided a great mound of bacon. Her enormously fat husband and groovy dad and quiet, spare-spoken brother tucked in. Just as the mother had finished dividing her breakfast the littler girl wanted the toilet. All three females got up and headed out back.

    We had finished our coffees. We got up to go. At the doorway I doubled back. Three men, oblivious, satisfied, stuffing their faces. “Guys,” I said, spreading my hands, striving for humour. “How come Mum is doing all the parenting – even on Mothers Day?”

    They crouched into chuckles. A knowing guffaw from the husband, who looked up and said, “Aw, but…. she had two hours lying in bed this morning, the kids brought her a cuppa tea.” I lit my fury with the fat of his land. He just looked so pleased with himself, so well-fed. His wife had stayed slender and groomed herself, even as she produced offspring for his lineage. “Oho!” I said. “Two whole hours! Out of 365 days! You’re right, you’re not sexist at all. But hey, better watch out she doesn’t get used to that, right.”

    He smirked. He knows the world tilts his way. I put my hand on his plump shoulder. “Take care of your lovely lady, dude.” To no avail, no doubt. I wish I had spoken to the mother instead. I wish I didn’t live in a consuming culture where we can just buy things to make up for all we don’t do, make room for, allow, feed, feel. Mothers Day – like Earth Day – if you’re serious, why not make it every day.

  • the human scenery

    the human scenery

    On my last day in Berlin I visited at last the Museuminsel, Island of Museums. It feels strange to ride an arched bridge onto an island on your bike. The island being castled with stately buildings filled with treasures only makes it the stranger. My favourite was the first, which holds treasures rescued or stolen from ancient cultures around the world, many of them excavated and painstakingly reconstructed by Berlin historians. Bits are still missing. You walk into a temple rebuilt under a soaring roof and begin to feature on a hundred fellow tourists’ documentary records. So few people were examining the faulted relief work with their eyes. They carried screens, like bashful eighteenth-century ladies shading their virtue with fans.

    I was wearing a comical and very old beanie bought in a bead shop in Copenhagen. The lady who sold it to me bought it in Cameroon: she wanted a good price, saying, I am too old now to go back there and find more of them. “Kings wear them,” she told me, and showed me a photo of several kings standing about splendidly wearing hats like mine – it is woven out of navy and soiled cream yarn, and has all over little inch-long prongs sticking out like a fully occupied pincushion, a sea anemone. I went back to the shop three times and every time I put it on my head I felt a warmth and powerful groundedness rise down in me. In the third chamber of the museum a vast and mighty gate became the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was clad in tiles in marine blue, sea green, round white daisies plopped one by one along the base of each wall. So beautiful, so moving, when my companion who had been reading the signs sidled up to me and whispered, Babylon, all at once I understood and my eyes filled with hot tears. I stood in front of the giant gate with my head tilted back, lost in that world, feeling some shard or fragment of how it might feel to live in a city of Babylon. I could feel the song in my blood, you know the song you have as a child and that revisits at odd occasions. Like lying face down in the hot sun watching the insects burrow among grass-stalk forests. Like half-waking, half-sleeping. Like sliding into a lake. When I turned there was a scampering behind me as a small tableau dissolved. Three Japanese ladies, elbow-height to me, were posed less than two feet from me as their friend, holding a camera and shooing them together like school children, took their picture using me, the giant with sprouting head, as colourful blue background.

    Sure, we all do it. At least, I do. But I try not to hurt or molest or offend people. I either ask permission with a lift of the brows or if discovered, make a laughing confession out of it and offer to show the picture. Sometimes if I happen to take a beautiful photo that has someone in it, a stranger, I’ll go up to them with it and ask if they’d like me to send them a copy. These women’s refusal to meet my eye was irritating and unnerving. I spoke to them, gently enough: Excuse me. It’s not very comfortable for you to use me as human scenery. They put their heads down and scurried away, whispering to each other as though an animal had spoken. I wanted to be heard, to be human. I went over to the lady who was packing up her camera. “Excuse me, do you speak any English? I really wish you wouldn’t use me for your pictures without acknowledgement. It’s unkind.” She too ducked her head and backed, holding up both hands and waving them flat to ward me off, an invisible windshield. I could imagine the stories accompanying this picture in the slide show: And then ~ she attacked us~! I saw a security guard look up and went over to him, feeling assailed and dismissed, wanting to talk to someone. “I just had a kind of upsetting experience,” I told him, in German, “those ladies used me as human scenery in their photos and then when I spoke to them, they wouldn’t answer me.”

    The expression on his face changed minimally. “Lord,” I said, “this must happen to you, like, 57 times a minute!” He said, “I hide in the corner there sometimes to get away from it. They look past me like I’m not even there.” “How awful!” I said. We were smiled by now, we kind of loved each other. “And don’t you feel… it’s as if, if I photograph everything instead of seeing it directly… am I really actually here?”

    Leaving the museum hours later I waved to the guard and he waved back. “Danke!” On the way in his colleague who’d collected our tickets had said, pointing at my head, “Tolle Mütze!” “Danke!” I said. The old man who snatched a photograph when he thought I couldn’t see him I followed around the corner til he stopped, then raised my own camera and took his picture, expressionless. That felt better. But mostly my bones and my blood were immersed in the sacred, cool atmosphere of the place, a whiff of many places, the ‘first megacity’ Uruk which was one of the seats of writing. They had small clay tablets like gingerbreads propped on clear plastic feet and telling how many fish had been provided for the workers, how to repel the evil left behind by an expected eclipse of the moon. Afterwards we walked to the Bodenmuseum where people had carved marble into lace. Many many Marys and many small Christs, the repetition struck me as humidity does when you return home to a tropical climate. “I finally get it!” I whispered to my friend, on tiptoe (he is 6’8″). “The Mary worship – it’s about motherhood!” “Yes,” he said, shrugging, raised on the stories. “Mother and son. And the son becomes king. And is murdered for love.” I think that’s what he said, I was in a daze with the old, perfect works, the high wooden ceilings, the light lapping over them when you tilt your head back reflected from the green canal lying outside the Museum’s windows. At the top of the Bodenmuseum is a tea rooms with lovely long windows and not, when we visited, a single customer to absorb and be blessed by its splendid, gently-urging, lace-stitching music.