Baby Lost Page 12

  I sought out their stories. I wanted to know how other people survived this, what was ‘normal’. What were you supposed to do when the catastrophic thing—glanced at in all the pregnancy books but never discussed—happened? And what did you do with your days when you’d been all lined up to shush, and wipe bottoms, and barely have a moment to yourself? Conversations with friends and family were mostly about our progress—the girls at school, me getting ready to return to work, settling into our new home and suburb. ‘We’re getting there,’ was my refrain. But where exactly was that? And how could I navigate ‘there’?

  I was diligent in my grief. I sought out my own homework and devoured it. I hunted out baby lost blogs. I wanted a manual. I wanted practice guidelines, some kind of rules to follow. Anything that would tell me there was a solution.

  I wanted to hear other women’s stories, but with those stories came all their pain and trauma. Rima would find me at the laptop, tears falling onto the keys. ‘Habib, don’t,’ she would say. ‘You’ve got enough sadness of your own.’ Indeed, there were points when I had to stop reading, turn away, distract myself with TV or Facebook instead. I could feel something shattering in me. This massive ocean of grief—mine and everyone else’s—was cracking open the small bathtub I’d allowed for sadness in my life and was leaking out in an unstoppable flood. I had thought that the sad, hard bits of life could be contained—that was what optimism and psychiatric hospitals were for.

  I would click away, thinking, ‘This stuff will drown me.’ How could I hang onto my basic beliefs about the world as an essentially fair and good place in the face of all this sadness, injustice and cruelty?

  Yet, a small part of me was relieved to know that it wasn’t just me being picked on, that loss and grief were catastrophically normal and common. Somehow, though, I clung onto the idea that there was some maximum amount of pain any one person could suffer. The bathtub was gone, but I thought a full-length, above-ground plastic pool might do the trick.

  Sunday, 21 March 2010

  We’re getting close to three months since the accident, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I wanted to write a three-month letter to Z. I’m not having a dig at those who write letters to their living children—god knows if she’d lived I would have been right on the bandwagon. It is a beautiful idea, that’s why I just wanted a little taste of it, even though it isn’t quite the same when your baby isn’t here to record all the new amazing things they learned and you learned about them each month. But this is part of my task here, to accept that I don’t get any more time here on earth with her. It could go like this:

  My darling girl,

  I’m trying to work out how big you might be, if this was your three month birthday rather than three months since you died. We saw a baby today on our way back from the market, probably a bit more on the newborn side than you would be by now. You’ll be happy to know that I still haven’t seen any baby that comes near you in the looks department, and we seem to be surrounded by them at the moment. They’re lovely, they’re sweet, but they’re not you.

  I’m hoping that wherever you are, in the non-denominational, vaguely agnostic Good Place where I like to think you might be ‘living the dream’, you are growing and learning. Those little legs would be filling out, and maybe you are giving your godparents some smiles, starting to focus on their faces and grin gummily at them. God, I wish we were there to see you and hold you, my love. I wish I could be feeding you and feeling some pride and amazement in your increasing fatness. Rima would be making faces at you, doing her expert babymama thing, teaching you Arabic.

  But enough about your milestones, let’s talk about mine! I can now bend my knee well over 100 degrees. Woo hoo. And my quadricep muscle now responds when I want to move it. I can get in and out of bed without doing that weird robot-leg move I had to do before. We’re going for big walks, to and from the shops, around the park, with only one crutch—and I won’t need that for much longer. We’re sleeping through the night a lot more than last month. I think I’ll be starting my new job next month—beginning part-time and working my way up to full-time by July.

  Your sisters miss you. They are making friends at their new school, and they’ve freaked them out showing them photos of our wrecked car. They were all geared up to be the best babysitters ever, I hope you know that.

  I won’t write you a letter every month, I hope you’ll understand. But I love you and think about you every day.

  With all my love, Mama

  16

  Scar tissue

  In late February 2010 I had my review appointment with the trauma unit at Royal Melbourne. The doctor who saw me introduced himself as Ganesh, and I immediately thought of images of the elephant-headed god. He talked me gently through the CT scans that had been taken on the night of the accident. There was Z, curled in my womb, her hand up near her face. Oh, my little one. There was no need for any further scans. The liver and spleen damage seemed to be healing up well, and I wouldn’t need to come back.

  At home, I made a sketch of my trauma doctor. Like his namesake deity, he had the head and sad, serious eyes of an elephant, but a human body with two arms: one gesturing towards a CT scan, another holding aloft tweezers gripping a bloodied shard of windscreen glass.

  I had dreams of walking with my one crutch and a heavy backpack, up hills, through endless train stations, around in circles. Somewhere along the way, I realised I’d left the crutch behind and I’d been walking without it—but, instead of being pleased, I was devastated. I woke and walked stiffly to the bathroom, realising how fond I was of this limp and my crutch as visible signals that I was still wounded. I understood now why people wore black for mourning. It is simpler and less confronting than having to continually convey the message, ‘Someone I love has died. I feel irretrievably broken—please go gently with me.’

  Since the accident, I hadn’t been able to lift my left leg from the knee. I would sit there, cajoling my foot to rise, but the best it could do was slide forward. The message to lift seemed to fizzle out somewhere between brain and leg. My physio had brusquely assured me this movement would come back, and had focused on breaking down the scar tissue so that I could bend my knee. One day my stepmum, Debbie, a retired physiotherapist, sat down with me.

  ‘You still can’t lift this leg?’

  ‘Nope; I can’t even remember what it feels like to lift it.’

  She patted the couch, saying, ‘Both legs up here,’ and rolled a towel to prop under my left knee. With a tea towel, she made a little sling for my ankle, so that she could lift my foot.

  ‘Okay. I’m going to help you lift it—but you lift too.’

  She lifted it slowly, giving me time to respond. Move, I told my leg. And, suddenly, my breath caught with a small sob of pain. When I slowed things down, I realised that my brain wasn’t just issuing an unheard ‘Move’ command—it was also receiving a pain message. I had to receive and listen to the pain message before my leg could override it and lift through the pain. Once I did that, and allowed myself to feel the pain, my foot started lifting out of Debbie’s hand.

  ‘Yes; see, you’re doing it now!’

  It was tiny, but it was movement.

  I tried again the next morning, on my own, getting bolder and lifting my whole leg forwards from the knee. It took a few tries, but suddenly my leg was lifting, and I was sobbing—at first with pain, but then from relief, sadness and the effort of it, that such a simple thing could be so hard. In waking up those nerves and calling them into action, I also had to tell them the bad news, and, in doing so, hear their shock and pain from the impact. Even my knee missed her.

  Friday, 26 March 2010

  I’m dreaming again. I’m in a bathroom like the Sydney Law School one—a long grey infinity of tiles with door after door after door. Margaret Atwood is here—eyes wry, her tight curls moving with her gaze. She is advising me right here in the ladies toilets.

  ‘If you want it, you’ll have to get up and do it e
very day. Even on the days you don’t want it. And be honest.’ She gives me a sharp look and I open my mouth to say something.

  ‘No, not pretending to be honest—actually being honest.’

  I feel like she is stripping the husk off me, roughly, but as though there was something there worth un-husking.

  Again, she reads my face, and speaks to me through the mirror this time.

  ‘Yes, indeed—but don’t expect me or anyone else to find it …’, she points at me with a slender writing-calloused finger, ‘… that’s your job.’

  And she pats my hand. Not in a nanna-like way but briskly, reassuringly.

  ‘You’ll get there,’ she quotes my own words back at me, ‘wherever that is.’ She smiles with half-lidded eyes.

  ‘Oh, I know. I’m no writer-goddess. But I am older, and that still counts for something.’

  I don’t know how to address her. ‘Margaret’ could refer to all kinds of women of her age.

  ‘Of her age,’ I hear her tutting under her breath, still in camera with my thoughts.

  ‘Ms Atwood’ isn’t specific enough either. I sense that people who know her call her something else, but I wouldn’t fall into that category of familiars. Peg? Marg? Her eyebrows ratchet higher with each suggestion. And then she looks at her watch, ‘Well, kiddo,’ and here I get the first genuine smile—a glow that rolls out across the space between us and warms me. ‘Enough fairy godmother time. You take care and don’t be a scaredy cat.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am!’ I hadn’t quite planned to say that, but the words click into place and she smirks an approving smirk.

  ‘See? You’ll be fine.’

  •

  With the girls back at school, Rima and I knocked around the house, untethered by work and with a diminishing number of medical appointments. One weekday, we drove down to Somers and found our way to Z’s spot. The ground was still disturbed. It wasn’t that long ago we had knelt here, and tapped the plastic bottom of the container to see if any more ashes would fall out. We stood there—unsure of what to do.

  I’d never done the grave-visiting thing before. We’d wandered through graveyards out of curiosity, boredom, but never to visit anyone. My grandparents’ ashes were somewhere here too, but that grief had been a much neater and more timely affair than the ache to hold our child, to be near her. When we’d chosen this place, I’d thought about the trees, the smell of the beach, the sandy dirt imprinted with our childhood footprints; not about a little hole in the ground. Rima hunted around and found a small chunk of stone to mark the spot. I wanted desperately to fall on the ground, to lay my cheek on the sandy soil, but I was still self-conscious about this grief. We hugged, wept, and, as we left, I patted the strong, curved bough of the gum tree bordering the chapel. Take care of our gorgeous girl.

  •

  Several times a week, I went to the hydrotherapy pool to do the exercises the physio had prescribed. The water was warmer than bath temperature, and I was usually the youngest one in the pool by at least three decades. There was something very comforting about being around the elderly and injured. Stripping down to bathers and exposing my scars was easier around others who were similarly lumpy, limpy and scarred. We had been marked by life in more extreme ways than those in the ‘normal’ pool. Where once we had wounds, now we had scar tissue telling the history of those wounds, and their healing. Mine were no longer raw cut edges, but new, reddish skin—difficult to stretch and unrecognisable as normal skin. Over time, the redness would fade, but the seams remain; reminders of being broken and being mended. In the hydrotherapy pool, no one really looked one another in the eye, or wondered about the repetitive motions and odd contortions we had to perform, or the adult bath toys we needed to perform them. At the same time, I felt a little like a fraud because my disabilities were (I hoped) temporary. Sometime soon, I could turn my back on the hydro pool—at least until age or injury sent me back.

  One day I turned up, and an arthritis aquatherapy class was on in the hydro pool. Reluctantly, I walked back to the lap pool and started doing my exercises in the shallow end. I wasn’t the only refugee from the hydro pool—two older Italian women were marching up and down, talking quietly. I was doing okay, even when a heavily pregnant woman started swimming in the next lane. But when she turned and started doing backstroke, her belly submerging and emerging with each stroke, I had to dive deep and close my eyes.

  •

  At the Preston Market I went to pay for our fruit and vegies. The woman at the cash register turned. There, under her apron, was her broadly pregnant belly. She reciprocated my look at her belly and looked at mine, asking, ‘Are you pregnant?’

  My tongue rolled back in my head. ‘No.’ I wanted to say more but the words could not fit out of my mouth and, instead, I stared down at the net bag she had just put my tomatoes in, willing myself through the fine holes.

  ‘Well, have a nice day,’ she said.

  •

  My mum has a thing for new babies. There’s a photo of her at a cousin’s Christmas party; the usual gathering of my dad’s extended family. It’s not a posed photo—it captures various conversations between cousins, the slight awkwardness of the biannual catch-up. And there, tucked in the middle, is my mother, holding my cousin’s baby son, not quite a week old, locking eyes with him as though no one else existed. A big, raw chunk of intimacy in the midst of the public family–Christmas business.

  You hold a baby differently once you’ve lost one of your own. For my mother, like me, it was her firstborn, a baby girl. Lost, not to stillbirth but to adoption in an era of choicelessness—no reliable information about conception (or contraception); no access to abortion; a family who kicked her out, a boyfriend who didn’t want to know, and social workers who told her the best thing she could do for her child was to permanently remove herself from its life. It is hard to coax my mum to talk about what happened. I know she stayed with a friend in Melbourne, and looked after her friend’s kids in return for board and lodging. When labour began, she walked to the Women’s.

  Things often get shaky in November for my mum. November is the season for quiet concern. For the squeak of vinyl armchairs in the TV room of the mental health unit. A birthday that goes unmarked, that floats unspecified over the entire month. Conversations that peter out, questions left hanging while we divert to other, more concrete topics.

  So much of my mother disappeared into the dark spaces of her unspeakable grief, windows papered over with layers of shame, of silence; not just hers, but that of family members, and the ones who shamed her. I know there are whole rooms there, filled with specific things. We hear noises from in there. Pipes that rumble, appliances that fizzle in the dark, unknowable, inscrutable. I have given up asking. But I knew that for me, the windows had to be wide open on my grief. This was a loss that anyone who loved me had to know, and know well. Nothing matched, for me, the horror of the locked room, the claustrophobia of a sealed-up grief.

  Monday, 3 May 2010

  We’re sick of the house, sick of our own misery and sick of each other’s company. So what is the best remedy for this malcontent? Clearly, wandering around Ikea with legions of pregnant women and parents holding small children lurking behind every Billy bookcase is a fabulous idea.

  Things started badly this morning when I woke early, and read the last few chapters of Northern Lights. Nothing like young adult sci-fi for comfort reading, or so I’d thought. The book had begun with the irresistibly heartening premise that all humans have their own spiritually-connected talking animal companion—leading me to imagine that I could expect a happy ending, or at the very least a Harry Potter-esque happy-and-safe-for-now ending. But no. Apparently author Philip Pullman has other ideas, which don’t include rounding off my escapist bout of children’s sci-fi in a gentle enough way so that I can start my Sunday morning without feeling like Armageddon is around the corner.

  We entered the Ikea play-house with two very simple objectives, and neither of them was to be reminded
that even if we buy all this stuff, our house will never look like an Ikea showroom. I think it must be a genetic thing—either you have the tidy-decluttering-clean-lines-matching-furniture-Ikea gene or you don’t, and Rima and I clearly don’t. We’re not complete grots—we do Make An Effort, and temporarily fight back the jungle on a regular basis—but with three pets and two teenagers, as well as our own messy selves, there is quite a bit of jungle to deal with.

  If you’ve been to one of those water theme parks which has a canal section where everyone floats around the same circular route on giant inflatable donuts, then you may as well have been at Ikea with us, floating along a twisting series of Ikea-ised rooms, bumping up against pregnant tummies and living babies at every turn. I’m not mortally offended by all this evidence of everyone else’s fecundity, but it is hard to concentrate on finding soft furnishings while I’m constantly playing games of ‘Would she have been about that big by now? Or fatter?’

  Eventually, the current brought us along to the cashiers, and we piled our small pieces of pleasantly-smelling wood and Nordic-looking fabric into our tiny reusable carry bags. By then, shopping centre fatigue had set in, and it only took one song to make me weep in the car. From there it was only a short hysterical step to melt-down-land when I got home and realised that there was no tofu in the fridge for the one meal I could imagine making—green Thai curry. It is a sad thing when you feel like you are useless at everything, including feeding your stubbornly vegetarian self some kind of protein on a regular basis.

  Somehow, the lack of tofu, and consequent nutritional failure, was the last straw on top of the giant haystack of things I’m not managing to do very well lately, including finding decent work clothes to wear, cleaning the house, being an academic and being a likeable stepmother. It is the state I’ve come to call Everything is Broken. But, you’ve just lost your child, only four months ago—give yourself a break, as a beloved friend was telling me this morning. Yes, yes. Four months. How long will it take before I can function normally? I was doing it okay two days ago, or at least creating the appearance of it. If things fall apart only every second day, is that progress?