Comfort herself

I remember my mother describing marriage to me as a Little Ease.

Little Ease - the name of a prison cell too small to allow the prisoner to stand upright, or to lie down, or to assume any other position of ease.

No matter how hard you try, muscles will cramp, bones will start to ache. 
Turn and turn about, you will never find ease. 
No wonder. It was designed that way.

I don't think this is a reflection upon love, only upon the state of marriage. An acknowledgement of the constraints and compromises that marriage brings with it. Particularly to women of my mother's generation.

I don't view my own marriage in the same light.
But, when Georgina died, I wound up in my very own Little Ease.

I am not an ascetic type.
When I was younger, this troubled me.
There seemed something so terribly unromantic about being overly concerned with where your next meal was coming from and what it would consist of.
With fussing about being too cold or too hot.
With giving any recognition at all to your own comfort.

So I attempted to feign disinterest.
To pretend I had no appetite for anything other than cigarettes and diet drinks.
To pretend that the icy wind didn't chill me, that I didn't want to rush back inside from an extra jumper.
To pretend that I didn't want to cry when boyfriends cheated on me.

But anyone who knows the real me and my love of cake, knows that for precisely what it is. A pretence.


When Georgina died, I longed for comfort. Something, anything.

I tried many things. Some worked. Temporarily.

Outside the NICU was a vending machine. 
I posted in my coins and took icy silver can after icy silver can out. So cold it hurt my teeth. 
And I used to think, if I can just keep standing until the next can. 
Until the next ice cold stream of caffeine and sweetener pours down my throat. 
Then I'll be fine.

Bar after bar of chocolate. Biscuit after biscuit with hot, sweet tea. Sugar and fat to coat the edge of a pain that was so very, very sharp.

Big, fat books. Page after page of imagined worlds. I always had a book with me. So that during hand over times in the NICU, when you usually were asked to leave, I had something to distract my mind with. Because I couldn't bear to think.

When I went into labour that night, it was painful and I was so frightened that I was losing my girls. I really had no idea that they would be born the next morning. I think I imagined that I would start to bleed and that their bodies would somehow vanish.

I started reading Vanity Fair as I sat in the cooling bath water and wished it would all go away. I carried on reading over the next few days, as Georgina died by degrees. 
I don't think I will ever read Vanity Fair again. A shame as it's one of my favourite books. 
I had even considered naming Jessica, Amelia, until I remembered that nobody wants to be Amelia. Everyone wants to be Becky.

Volumes of words. Trollope's 'The Way We Live Now' and Barsetshire chronicles. Jilly Cooper novels. The Twilight series. Anything. Anything where the good get their reward and the bad get their comeuppances. Anything where the world seems to work out satisfactorily in the end.

Cold, white wine. Tepid, red wine.

Hot, hot bathwater. So hot that my skin turned red as I sat and studied my new stomach as it flattened. 
Just an empty void where all those hopes had once resided, those small shards of people, those tiny glimmers of life.

Tiny, white pills. Slightly larger, white pills. Pills that might as well have been sugar. Pills that worked in synergy, in concert. Pills that gave me strange twitches.

I sought comfort in old standbys. Religion. Music. 
But, suddenly and strangely, I felt nothing. Those options had been cut adrift overnight without a word of notice, without so much as a 'by your leave.'

Talking, talking, talking. Talking until I was sick of the sound of my own voice. Talking until I couldn't talk any more. Only cry.

Trying to tune everything out with crosswords, sudoku puzzles, word games, anagrams, computer games. Anything that could be completed and completed correctly. Where I could look down in satisfaction on something finished, all the boxes tidily filled out.

My husband. Who needed comfort himself. We collapsed into one another, not quite managing to hold the other up but folding into one another in such a way that we didn't quite hit the floor.

A pink and white crochet blanket that I fell asleep holding every night. 
Because I thought it might have the last tiny scent of Georgina.

A paper towel stained with Jessica's blood after a bad heel prick. A younger doctor took it and seemed to be having trouble. Finally, she walked off leaving Jessica uncovered and kicking a bloody foot in the air. I'm sure she'd have been crying if her mouth hadn't been full of ventilator. 
My pathetic gratitude to that inexperienced doctor, for giving me a brief opportunity to mother my daughter. To staunch the blood. To remake the bed and tidy the incubator.

Purchasing piles and piles of patterned muslins. Choosing fabric for tiny sheets. To decorate the incubator of my tiny daughter.

Selecting, buying, washing and ironing tiny clothes. Clothes with a size of up to 2lbs with velcro and little hooks to allow wires to snake in and around and out again. Clothes that couldn't be worn because they would hide the skin that could start to turn grey at any minute.

Selecting, buying, washing and ironing larger clothes. Clothes that looked enormous. If I could buy enough, surely I could anchor her to the earth, stop her following her twin into the dark. I felt she couldn't leave if I had all of this ready, that I could buy death off with the sheer weight of my purchases.

Sitting, still and silent, with a frail child tucked inside my clothes. 
The tiny, candle like warmth of her. 
The fragile curve of her skull.
The pump and click of the ventilator.
The hiss of the CPAP machine.
The regular peaks and troughs on the monitors.
The numbers flicking up and down.
Making their own strange music, where I would lose myself. 
Push everything away except my own skin and that tiny warm body, with its miraculous assisted breath, and the points where we connected.
Hoping that if I stayed silent and still enough, we could remain like that forever. 

But this is the thing about a Little Ease. 
Parts of you can find comfort. 
You might be able to stretch out an arm or a leg. 
But it will be to the detriment of another limb.

Just like the pain I feel over Georgina's death.
Sometimes it eases a little. I can find consolation. 
I can hold the facts in my mind and they remain legible, static.
That Georgina was my daughter, beloved, cherished.
That her life meant something, that her life was still beautiful even though it was short.
That there was a meaningful exchange between us, that I knew something, anything, about her.
That she was more than just a tiny, failing body. 
That she was something more than a small frame with organs that gave out on her, one by one. 
That she was something suffused with light.
That it wasn't just a piece of randomly cruel biology that meant her entire life was done with in only three days.

But then my limbs start to seize up. 
The peace I had slips out of my grasp. 
The meaning that I imbued her life with slides away. 
I have to change my position in my cramped cell. 

Suddenly
There is no ease.
There is no consolation.
Just yearning.
Just aching.
A wanting, a needing, a wishing. One that is destined never to be requited, can never reach fulfilment.
An endless shifting, an endless casting about for comfort.