Inertia

I feel as though I have ground to a halt. Whatever pale fumes I was running on up to this point seem to have been exhausted and, with a splutter and a cough, I've simply stopped.
I think I was relying so heavily on a new pregnancy to push me forward, to give me an impetus. I don't have a back-up plan. Or even the beginnings of one.
Stasis. Too frightened to try again. Too frightened not to try again.
Losing faith in the notion that my body can ever, ever do this terrible and amazing thing, the one thing it was designed to do.

Sometimes, as I sit in front of my computer at work, I can almost feel the words rising in my throat. Forming a palpable clot in my mouth. The word 'Georgina' seems to have grown edges, manifested itself as a physical presence lodged between my jaws. An aching tooth, an inflamed taste bud, that I sit and prod at for hours at a time.

Calculate, calculate, type, type, mail, phone, prod, prod. Georgina, Georgina, Georgina.
I go and sit on the bench I sat on to eat my lunch when I was pregnant, prod, prod, Georgina, Georgina.

She was here. In this office. In the grim multi-storey car park where I park my car. On the street, past the Job Centre. She lived. She existed. In these unlikely places.

I even sit and think about her in the office toilets. I spent a lot of time there whilst I was pregnant as I was so sick. Sometimes I just go and lock myself in a cubicle and sit. Try to conjure her up. Prod.

I am so desperate to talk about her. To talk about the whole experience.
But there is nobody in the office to talk to. Or even to talk at. I'm not fussy.

All those mundane conversations about children, birth, babies, families.
They all feel closed off to me.
Marked with a 'do not enter' sign.

No freaky low birth weight children in this conversation please.
Not to mention the dead child. Please leave your dead children at the door.
We are discussing childbirth with K here. She has just had a normal, healthy baby boy. K here knows what we are talking about. This little boy has suffered the trauma of having an NG tube inserted for two whole days. This conversation is falling oddly silent because it is not for you C. Why are you trying to join in? Your surviving child simply fell from the sky into an incubator don't you know.
We are trying to have an enjoyable chat about J's pregnancy, which is obviously well into the third trimester, and we do not appreciate you, C, hovering around the edges of the staff kitchen like a bird of ill omen.

Hell, part of me feels that I will curse poor J if I hang around her too much.
My eyes snag on her all the time though. She must surely see my surreptitious glances at her belly, my desperate wish that it was me, that it was my girls.

I'm sure that nobody actually thinks of me as bad luck. Well, not consciously perhaps.
I'm sure most people aren't avoiding me. I'm probably just being paranoid and more than a little bitter. Or remembering relationships that were always professional in the past illuminated with the warm glow of the excitement of pregnancy. It's twins! Really?

I'm sure most people have forgotten. Perhaps forgotten that I have even been on maternity leave.
Some people just aren't interested in the exterior lives of their work colleagues. I certainly can't pretend to know the inner workings of many of mine, the hidden tragedies or triumphs of their lives, the secrets they walk around holding pressed close to their souls. An office environment isn't conducive to such exchanges.

I'm sure I have inadvertently hurt many of them. Just as they now hurt me. What goes around, comes around.

Couldn't tell you if N was married.
Couldn't say for the life of them whether O had children or not.
And C? C? Has she any children? Was she pregnant at one point? Didn't something go awry there?
Or maybe not even that. C. I need some figures and I need them now. I'll ask C. She knows about that sort of thing.

And as ever. I would prefer it that way. Except when I don't.


But sometimes, in the midst of all this, I find a breathing space. I find someone who, despite my blathering and trying to laugh and pretending and keeping it together and make-up application and work identity badge carrying and calculation performing and functional functioning, hears me.
Hears what I am actually saying.
Sees that brief glimpse of my interior before the blinds flicker downwards and the truth is covered up.

Who knows that, underneath all my words, even the most stupid and mundane things I say (and I say more stupid and mundane things than most believe me) is that experience. The end of August 2008.
My two tiny, tiny children.
My Georgina, so briefly alive and now dead.
My Jessica, so small and frail, grown so healthy and alert.
All my words resonate with them. With my children. Because they are at my foundation, at my roots.
I can't see the world at all anymore, except refracted through them.

And in that moment. In that presence. If that presence is in a letter or via computer wires or in person.
I can lay that stone that usually resides in my mouth on the table. I might not be discussing it directly, although I can harp on upon the subject of the birth of my children for hours, but it is there. It is acknowledged and I don't have to smash my teeth to pieces on it every time I try to speak. And for these brief pauses I am so very grateful.

I've been thinking about this beautiful post of Kate's at Glow In The Woods.

I trust Kate. I've never met her but I would trust her to the ends of this earth.
I know that, one day in the possibly not too distant future, I will have my very own 'one day at suppertime' moment. When the room will spin and I will think 'I haven't thought of it today', I sat and calculated and calculated and mailed and called and filed and cleaned and cooked and ate and drank and played with Jessica and kissed my husband goodnight. All day and I didn't think of it. Not once.
But that day is not today. Not yet.

My letting go is only very tentative.
But Georgina. One day. One day I will say 'have-a-safe-journey, wear-your-mittens, don't-forget-to-eat-a-good-snack' my darling. Last touch, my sweet girl. Last touch.

But not today. Not yet.