Stretch

The elusive state of 'heavily' pregnant, that I seem to have been chasing for such a long time, makes me feel like a balloon.
A void with a thin scraping of me over the surface.
A hole filled with mysterious, shifting flesh. Digesting, fluttering, breathing, expanding.
Muscles that move and twitch without being directly instructed.
And another consciousness flickering. Those same fleshy processes repeating themselves inside.
Only a duplicate this time. Forget the initial over ambitious triplicate process and the other that never even got off the ground. Goodbye to all that.
As I get bigger, as this baby grows, I feel as though I am shrinking, thinning.
Nobody wants to know what I am thinking, not really. To admit to any doubt or fear at this point would be somewhat impolite. Shocking. Ungrateful. So I stretch my lips into a smile and discuss names, age gaps, Jessica's likely reaction. My mouth is not quite stretchy enough to wrap round the words 'birth plan' or 'everything will be fine this time', not quite yet.
Sometimes I feel that I have been stretching my lips upwards for so long that my smile might even be genuine.
If a little taut.

I'm not even sure that I feel frightened any longer, it all feels so very far beyond my control.
I hold my belly and I can feel this baby's movements. New and strange. I barely felt movement from the twins before they were born. My scrabbling fingers reach to try and hold him here, to stop him slipping away from me. But, despite only being separated by skin, he feels as distant as his sisters. One with her own existence, one without.
His limbs stretch. My skin stretches to accommodate them.
We both stretch together.

***

I was worried that when I became a mother, particularly a mother of twins, that I would forget who I was. I was very concerned that I would lose the things that defined me, that I was proud of.
I was worried that I would lose (in no particular order). . . . friends who did not have any children, my husband, my figure, my career, my ability to walk in five inch heels, time to apply an entire face full of make-up, time to read books and watch films, the time and place to drink myself into a semi-silly state, my ability to concentrate, my ability to earn money. . . .the list goes on. All of these seem fairly stupid and trivial in the light of what I did lose, which was all of the above and then some.

To be honest, people who had children used to irritate me. They seemed smug, with their 'oh you'll feel differently when you have your own' and their 'you can't understand x, y or z until you've had children of your own' as though, by failing to reproduce myself, I had also failed some test of emotional intelligence or humanity. That I couldn't possible understand them with their mighty depths and their wondrous insights into the inner workings of the universe. Because they'd managed to do something as mundane and everyday as have children? Hrrumph. As I said. Irritating. I didn't appreciate being told that I simply couldn't understand them with their children. It hurt my pride.

But, as it turns out, there are a huge number of things that I cannot understand. Higher maths, other people, religion, the meaning of life, biology, death. If it is any consolation to me, at least I can say I'm not the only one.

I still don't understand those wise parents who told me that everything would become clear when I had children of my own. That I would be glad I hadn't taken that promotion, or a risk with a larger mortgage, or gone back to university. Because, at last, I would understand.

But, when my children were born, I understood less than I ever did. Big gaps opened up in the meagre little pile o' knowledge that I believed I had accumulated.
I became less like those parents I knew, less like anyone that I knew.
Other people's motivations and lives became even more incoherent and strange, not less.
An experience I thought would bond me to people, to my family . . . didn't. It just left me stranded, in a weird no man's land, where the only people I feel understand live inside my computer.

Sometimes when I look at Jessica, I am not entirely sure which one of us is, in fact, me. Perhaps it comes of trying to anticipate her, trying to understand her, spending so much time with someone who I can't really communicate a great deal with by way of the spoken word. Spending so long staring into those eyes and listening to those sounds. I press my nose into the back of her neck and, momentarily, want to merge us back together. Part of me wants to be her. I feel consumed. Perhaps all parents feel this way? All her life, I have watched Jessica. From outside an incubator, from across our living room floor. Watching. I spent hours every day for months simply watching Jessica because it was all I could do.

But, another part of me, is desperately trying to maintain a similar relationship with a child who is dead. Georgina consumes me just as much. It is hard to try and inhabit the consciousness of someone who is dead, who hardly lived, who I scarcely know. To understand my other daughter. To try and forge something from such a short space of time, without the feedback that we get from the living. Georgina will never smile or stamp her feet at me.
But I can't bring myself to let go of the threads that stretch between us. Be they all in my imagination or not. Perhaps they don't stretch to anywhere at all, simply loop towards me and bury themselves in my back.
But I know where I want them to go. To my child.

Antenatal

We stand in the hospital car park, collapsing into one another.
I sag, my belly pulling me forward, my head bowed.

A thin voice from somewhere very far away says, "I just want my little girls back. I just want my girls."
The thin voice is mine.
I think.

The sunshine is frail, the air is cold and it burns the mixture of salt and phlegm in my throat and around my eyes.

He looks at me, confused.
He says, "It's still like yesterday to you, isn't it?"

Perhaps it is the proximity to the building. My daughters were born there. This baby will be born there. I'm worried I'll have to go back into that same room on the tour of the delivery ward to be held after this break is over.

It is not a pretty building. Squatting squarely on the horizon in grey concrete.
Sometime I can walk past and not even notice that it is there.
Sometimes I walk past and remark cheerily to Jessica, "Do you remember that building? You used to live there on your own when you were a baby. There's your room, behind that window. Mummy and Daddy used to come and visit you everyday? You and your sister were born there my darling. Do you remember?"
Sometimes it is just a place, just a building, tuned out alongside the rest of the surroundings.

But sometimes I feel like I can reach back through concertinaed folds of time and tap my former self on the shoulder. I trudge down the stairs. I once jumped down these same stairs, trying to persuade twin 1 to turn around for an ultrasound. Another spring. Tantalisingly close, just out of reach.
It's only been a year,
two years,
three years.

It isn't far away.
Perhaps not quite yesterday but . . . close.
I feel as though I've failed. Because I don't know how to fix myself, how to stop myself returning to this same worn out spot. To a memory that is so fuzzy that it is probably now half a fiction.

Perhaps it is because I'm still hoping to find a few more memories of that little girl.
Another image, another glimpse.
Perhaps I don't, in truth, want to stop going back.
I want to hang out in August 2008 forever, that month that held out so much happiness, that held my little girl's entire life. Why would I want to leave it?

Except for the fact that trying to stay there is ruining me.
And everyone else seems to be under the impression that it is 2011.

We go on the tour. We correctly identify forceps, ventouse, hospital gown, drip. We discuss the merits of TENS machines and epidurals. We count up the number of people who will be present if you have an emergency C section. Doctor, health care assistant, anaesthetist, midwife. One of the men is told to lie on the floor and he is then surrounded by people to illustrate how intimidating we might find this.

We are the only couple in the class with an older child. Nobody seems to think this odd. The beautiful young girl next to me is worried. I smile and say, "I wouldn't be doing it again if it were that bad would I now? Please don't worry."

I could never begin to explain the complex tangle of reasons, some of them surely dubious, that have brought me back to this building. I could certainly never tell her that I was also expecting a baby girl, born in this hospital, who died.

I feel so sure I could fix this, if only I knew how.
That I could leave it alone, pretend it never happened, that I could put it in one of those mental 'boxes' so beloved of my husband, so easy for him to open and shut at will. Never grasped that trick myself.
Or that I could just remember my dear little girl's short life and how much I loved her. Leave the rest to dust.

Walking up the stairs of the multi-storey car park after work, I catch myself thinking idly how pleasant it will be this summer.
When Georgina comes home.

Sometimes I wonder if I am now irreparably screwed up.

Protection

I dreamt about Georgina last night. I don't dream about her very often so it was a little unsettling but nice, all at once.

The Georgina of my dreams is generally herself, as she was in life, an extremely premature baby. Red, thin and bruised. Either that or a strange near-facsimile of her twin sister.

In the dream, Georgina was wading in a stream. It didn't seem unusual to the 'me of the dream' that Georgina could walk, let alone wade. The stream must have been extremely shallow as she was very small. I was concerned that she would slip and fall down in the water. There was a sinister looking fish lurking off to one side and I was worried that he might try to eat her or inadvertently knock her down.

But I didn't pick her out of the water. She seemed to be enjoying herself with the paddling.  So I just leant down and looked her in the face. Her face was so familiar. I thought, I'll just keep an eye on her to check that no good fish doesn't approach her and to make sure that the water stays under her chin.

A thought crossed my dream mind,  'Well Georgina, here you are happily wading in the stream. I thought you were dead all this time.'

Then I woke up.
And I realised that she is dead.
Still takes me by surprise some mornings.

***

30 weeks pregnant. A gestation in double figures that starts with a 3. Unknown and unexpected territory although still, as I don't need to tell you, no guarantee of anything.

It makes me feel so tender and protective of this little one inside and of his big sisters. They never really stood a chance, they were so under prepared. I never wanted my daughters to be born into an ethical and economic shit storm where so many seem to have an opinion on those little lives, on the validity of those bodies, those people.
On how much they cost.
On whether their chances of disability rendered them a poor investment.
On whether I am one of the selfish parents that pushes medical technology further into the outer realms than is appropriate.
I know there is only so much to go around but . . . it is hard to hear people speak about your own children in that way. Particularly when you consider the resources expended on patching up drunks every weekend of the year.

As a healthy 29 year old, I decided to start a family.
I didn't smoke, drink or take drugs during my pregnancy.
I took my vitamins and attended all my antenatal appointments.
I didn't expect anything to go awry.
In fact, I thought that my twin pregnancy was auspicious. A sign that my body could manage two babies. (Laughs heartily at former stupidity)
I thought my body was a fortress, that I could monitor what went in and what was going on inside.
That nothing could harm my children, that I could protect them.
As it turned out, once they were born, I could do absolutely nothing.
Not even make the decision as to whether they would receive treatment or not.

I wish I could blow myself up like some giant inflatable and throw myself around the whole damn situation. Puff up like a bull frog and absorb the impact of all the blows that land on my family as a result of a something that we didn't ask for. Become an ever expanding roll of human bubble wrap and spin myself out around my family. Protect Jessica from the consequences of her prematurity and the judgements that others will make about her worth and her prospects, protect Georgina from myself and perhaps even from the doctors. Wrap myself around her and just let her die in peace. But it's too late.

I always liked this song. But I always wondered why the singer sounded so sad. I thought it was a triumphant song, about a person standing in front of someone that they loved, taking the force of the blow for that person.

But now I think I understand. You can't protect anyone.
I've never felt as protective of anybody as I did over my daughters. Those two tiny, fragile beings.
But you can't fight biology.
Love can't defeat broken kidneys.
Caring can't cure sepsis.
I couldn't overrule those tiny broken bodies simply because I wanted to or felt as though I could.
But those bodies belonged to my children and I loved them. Those people, those bodies.
Not merely collections of disabilities or expense. Not to me.

Love, luck, prayer or hope. None of these things can guarantee a future for their brother either.
It's all a horrible, horrible game of chance.
One in which most people will never even know that they have been a participant.

But the standing in front of them regardless, perhaps that is the trick of it all?
The brave, foolhardy, crazy and futile attempt. Just to say that I tried to protect them.
So I stand here. In front of Jessica and this baby and Georgina's memory.
I stand here uselessly. Watching.
But not running away.

Tongue Tied

I seem to have lost my voice. Probably temporary. I'm sure I'll be jibber jabbering away again soon.

I also seem to have lost one of my daughters. Permanently. I think. Although my mind always creates a nagging doubt that this might, just might, not be the case. That I can snag her back if I could figure out how.

Those days.

Interleaved amidst my days and hours that trudge along in their mean, unflinching way.
Sometimes in glaring bursts of colour, with sound and light.
Sometimes like thin, thin tracing paper with only the merest impression on it, accompanied by silence.

Different.
But.
There they are again.

Interposed between my eyes and the things that pass before them.
In odd flashes of the extraordinary.

Sometimes unexpectedly, causing me to catch my breath.
But at other times I know that I have sought them out deliberately.
Like flicking an enlarged taste bud over the edge of my teeth or peeling at a strip of skin by my fingernail.
An irresistible urge.
Pick, pick, pick.
Jab, jab, jab.
Fiddling about with this messy stuff because I can't seem to leave it alone.
All bodily fluids and salt.

Attempting to make the ending different.
Attempting to bring you back to me.
Still.

Wishing that I could remember.
Wishing that I could stop remembering.

In my car.
In the bath tub.
In front of the computer.
At night, as I go to sleep.

That time. It never quite seems to end.
Or perhaps I simply do not want those days to let me be.
Because they are all you left behind for me to keep.
That short little stretch of time now worn to unravelling by my anxious fingers.

My dear child.
I do miss you.

Crosspatch

*So I published this.
Then I felt ashamed of myself and deleted it.
Now I'm publishing it again.
Because, although I'm not particularly proud of this post, I do feel this way.
Angry and cross-patchy and kind of mean. Grinchy in fact.
With very little reason.

One more time.

26 weeks. The most pregnant I've ever been.
I am excited and filled with regret all at once.

I did not expect to feel so very angry.
I am tired of being angry.
Yet knowing it for the useless waste of energy it is, doesn't necessarily make the anger disappear. Frustratingly.
In a situation where there is nobody and nothing to be angry with, nobody to blame, nobody to curse. My anger is like a fight or flight response, a biological feedback loop gone awry.
Building and building a completely inappropriate response to the situation I find myself in.

I am at the age where it feels as though every other couple is having a baby.
Bump pictures and ultrasound scans abound.
Nobody else I know, in real life, of my own age, has anything other than the traditional happy ending.
Just me.
Only me.
Who sits in the corner, trying to hide behind my hair and chewing my lip whilst babies and pregnancy are discussed.

One of my colleagues laughingly says that he thought his baby had every congenital anomaly in the book as he couldn't make any sense of the picture at the ultrasound.
I want to howl.
Because it isn't funny. Not really. If he thought about it.
But nobody does. Because babies with congenital anomalies, dead babies only happen to other people. People like me who sit at the desk opposite.
But he's probably forgotten.

Most people just don't remember. Or they don't want to make any kind of allowance. Or they just don't care.
Or they aren't interested in my life. Why would they be? It is not as though I remember every detail of their lives.
But.
They think I love having discussions about the validity of screening records belonging to babies who died before they were eight days old.
They seem to think I relish opportunities to query whether any babies would STILL be in hospital 72 hours after birth. Erm . . .try four MONTHS. Or just maybe they might have died by that point.
Why in hell would you ask me this question?

That stupid, whining voice in my head persists, "Why couldn't it be me? Why did my baby die? I wanted it so badly and I was so close. I just wanted the normal run of things goddamnit. Why couldn't I do it? Why?"

I know that question is futile.
There isn't an answer.
Or not one that will quiet my internal temper tantrum.

Sometimes pregnancies do not end happily.
Sometimes babies die.
In this instance, it was my own pregnancy that did not end happily.
And it was Georgina who died.
It isn't something that other people are going to remember.
It isn't something that other people are going to care about.
I am expecting too much. I know I am.
My husband is always telling me that I expect too much of other people.
That there are only two people who are going to carry on remembering, who are going to carry on hurting.
And that's us.

There is nothing to be angry about. Not really.
I just need to remember that.

No reply

It rained all morning, heavy drops from a gray sky.
At lunch time, I went out of the office and hid in the book shop.
I looked at the books for longer than I intended.
The ladies behind the counter were talking about one of their daughters (granddaughters?) who is currently expecting her first child. They thought she was a good age, twenty five.
I felt suddenly haggard and self conscious.
I ducked into the children's section.
I recovered myself and took my selection to the cash register, feeling like the prow of a strange, luminous ship in my bright purple maternity coat.

The lady working in the shop took my money and said, "You'd better read whilst you have time dear."
Her eyes flicking down to my belly and back up.
I felt, momentarily, confused and suspicious. Why would I not have time to read? Oh yes, the seemingly impending baby.
Would I be too busy grieving? My eyes too red and sore to read? Did she know something that I didn't?
Then I came to myself, realised what she meant and smiled. I hope she didn't see that panicky pause pass across my face.
"Oh, this is my third so I know how to make time."

I felt a thrill of bravado saying that, that third. 
A very, very small punch landed on Death's shoulder. I waved my puny fists about and reclaimed her, just for an instant.
Because she's still mine. Still my child. Even if she doesn't stop me reading novels. At least, not these days.

I don't want to go back to the bookshop now though. Just in case the lady behind the counter asks me any more questions.


I wonder about this child. He is nearly as old as his sisters when they were born now.
I try not to think too much about this flicker of a person although his small, precise jabs and pokes make me aware of this presence. Yet I cannot deny him, my little red shiny frog-child, a half person in hidden in the strange twilight of my belly that makes the very young appear older than all of us, older than time and so very wise. He is one of those small, thin beings that I know for children of mine.

He seems so palpable to others, so real. A child whose arrival is only a matter of time.

But to his mother, he is merely another ghost.
I'm waiting. I'm waiting for both my ghosts.
The return of one seems as much a possibility as the safe arrival of another, although I know that this is not the case.

I wonder what the future holds. I try to second guess, to ask. But there is no reply.
I guess I'll just have to wait a little longer still. I should be getting good at it by now.

How terribly strange to be seventy

I've never dared to re-read many of the old posts on this blog. As I've said before, it seems to be quite a cyclical old thing. I know there are some pre-occupations that I keep returning to. One of these is the passing of time.

When Georgina died, something strange seemed to happened to time. Or at least to my perception of it.
It truly seemed to fall out of joint, askew. No longer neat sections of 24 hours, 365 days, one after the other.
Time seemed to stop when she died. Or at least part of that flow stopped dead. As though it were held back behind a dam.

Part of me is convinced that those three small days are still being played out somewhere, away out of my sight, by pale versions of me and my daughter.

Subsequent time seems to pass in fits and starts, achingly slowly or running past me so quickly that I can't keep up. I look at the physical evidence in Jessica, who grows according to the conventions of time, and can hardly believe my eyes, hardly believe the weight in my arms when I pick her up, hardly believe the small snatches of conversation that we can have. How can all that time have passed?

Before Georgina died, my own old age seemed terribly distant. When I was twenty nine, I could not imagine seventy years superimposed on my body. Now I am thirty one, seventy seems achingly close. Or as close as something I really have no conception of could ever be. Just a little slip away, a trip and a stumble and I'll be there.My Ouma always used to say, "Catherine my dear, old age has nothing to recommend it." I can still hear her voice saying that so clearly, although she has been dead for longer than Georgina has. I'll let you know if she was right when I get there, I'll probably still be wittering on here when I am seventy!

I am sometimes shocked to see my own face in the mirror. It seems, at once, older than I expect and younger. I feel mild surprise and shock that when Georgina died my hair did not turn white over night, that deep lines were not instantly carved into my face, that my bones did not immediately start to crumble. It felt as if all of those things should have happened. But she was born and she died and I just carried on getting older at the conventional rate.

When I am seventy, if I am lucky or unlucky enough to make it that far, I know I will still be thinking of my little baby. My child who tried so very hard. Who lived so very well. I hope that I will never lose that memory, it feels as though it should be one of the last to depart from me. Although maybe they don't leave in order of importance? Perhaps I'll only be left with memories of dresses that I wore as a four year old or something equally useless.

When I am seventy, Georgina might have been forty one. Jessica, if she lives, will be forty one. Strange that I have no idea what that forty one year old Jessica will be like but I feel that I have already spent hours in attempted conversation with my imagined forty one year old Georgina. She has already been all ages to me over the past two years. Probably because she will only ever truly be three days old. And where else can I go from there?

I have to use these imaginings to bind us together, to force a relationship from nothing, to make Georgina my daughter, my own. All those invisible filaments that extend between me and my own mother, joining us, those years, the shared experiences, the misunderstandings, arguments, reconciliations, bewilderments, the interest and love we share in my father, my own younger sister, Jessica. Those will never exist for me and Georgina. As though a mighty pair of scissors came down and went snip, snip, snip between us. Death will do that kind of thing to you. There is love and yearning and wanting and grief, grief, grief. On my side.

So I try to coax new growth from those snapped little lines that joined us. Those threads that dangle and that I so much want to attach a daughter to. My daughter. Georgina. Who knows if I have any success or if I am just anchoring myself more firmly to somebody that I have dreamt up?

Last night, Jessica wouldn't go to sleep. She cried and cried. When I tried to put her down, she extended her claws into what I fondly call 'the monkey death grip' which means I have to either rip my clothes or hair or pick her up. Very unusual for her. In despair, I finally took her to my own bed and we lay there, in the dark. I recited my rather limited selection of poems that I know off by heart. She looked at me. Her blue eyes looked dark and her hot little hand twisted bits of my hair around.
I thought, I know everything about her.
I thought, I know absolutely nothing about her.
Perhaps it isn't that different?
I felt that there might be another pair of dark eyes watching. But no.