Peekaboo

A game for amusing a small child, in which one covers one's face or hides and then returns to view saying "Peekaboo!"

I watched that stupid fly on the wall documentary about a maternity unit last week. The one that I had been planning to avoid. I had just settled Jessica to her night-time bottle and the television remote was on the other side of the room. When the announcer piped up with the title of the next programme, I was just about to get up and switch the channel when he mentioned it would be about 'special care' babies. So I thought I would watch it. Because I really like to poke my own healing wounds with a nice, sharp, pointed stick. I'm just that kind of person.


The documentary followed the journeys of two babies. One of whom was a surviving twin, one of two girls born extremely prematurely. I made it through the first ten minutes then I had to switch it off. The sight and sound of all those familiar machines, the tiny limbs, the alarms beeping, was making it hard to breathe. 


But I simply had to find out what happened. If those babies made it out of the NICU. I suppose the people who make this programme are bargaining on that. So I watched it on-line the following afternoon when I was supposed to be working from home. Very bad I know and not at all like the conscientious employee that I generally am. Honest. Cross my heart and hope to die.


Strange, seeing your own most horrific experiences laid bare for anyone to view. Those parts of you that are bruised, those bones that will never set straight, broadcast into other people's front rooms, to watch on their television, for . . . hmm, I'm not sure. Is it for entertainment that we choose to watch television programmes like this? Or to understand? I'm not sure.It made me feel slightly revolted over all those documentaries I've watched in the past, that I might have cried over but then I simply . . switched off.

But I can't switch this one off. Because this one happened to me. Sadly. It plays across my internal mental screens every single day. My very own phantasmagoria of hospital and tubes and wires and very small human beings. I'm still here, sitting in that spot. The same place I was sitting as her heart stopped beating. I'm still here, taking out these same old memories and holding them up to the light. Turning them this way and that, trying to make sense of them, trying to understand.

What was once an understandable grief is turning and twisting into something knottier, older, more familiar, something which settles in, rearranges the bedclothes over itself and call my brain its home. A worry doll. Something to run my mind over and over until I am sick of it.

I hate myself more lately. The feeling that it was all somehow my fault has come back to sit on my shoulder and whisper in my ears again. Like Sinbad and The Old Man of the Sea. Stupid bag of meat, he says, you would have let them both die. No wonder, look at you.

Other people have long forgotten that anything out of the ordinary happened but I'm still holding it close to my heart, letting it permeate my brain. Still expecting it to be mentioned one day. But it isn't. I would bet that nobody else even thinks about it at all. Except me. And I can't seem to think of anything else. Perhaps I'm overcompensating? Trying to set a lop sided world to rights. Where nobody speaks of unspeakable things. Perhaps that's why I feel I need to think about them all day long to set the world back in balance.

I can hide behind my job, a computer, a book, lose myself in the soft mutterings of the radio, drown out my internal wailing with the tunes on my iPod.
I can hide in my house.
The weather outside is bad. It's cold. It's raining. There is no need to go outside. Not really.
I can sit here in the warm and maintain a virtual farm if I so desire.
I can hide behind Jessica. I've been hiding behind her since the day she was born.
Because if I just stare at her hard enough, my eyes won't drift to the side.
Because if I can make myself grateful enough, it won't hurt.

Those things that were me, rise up and evaporate away.
I can't even remember what they were now.

I am not sure how to step around these memories. To stop hiding.
My life needs to go on.
Jessica's life needs to go on.
My husband's life needs to go on.
Our lives will go on.
Whether I'm ready for that to happen or not.
Georgina's life stopped. It's been stopped for a while now.
Short but complete.
Spooled out in its entirety.
There is no more.
Spent.
Gone.
Over.
A lifetime of wailing and gnashing my teeth won't buy her back a single second.
She doesn't need me to hide her or to hide away because of her.

Maybe it's time to stop hiding. To return to view.