Baby Lost Page 15

  The cross-examination itself was less charged. The defence barrister was vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t the time for figuring out how we knew one another. He quizzed me on the TomTom GPS system I’d given Rima for Christmas, to help her navigate Melbourne, and that we had been using for the first time on the day of the accident. Had I been looking down? How long was I looking at the GPS for? He seemed to fret over my answers. None of this was helping. I had never appeared in this courtroom, but in that formal space felt more like my lawyer self; able to be clear about what I could and couldn’t remember, and to tune out the emotional static that usually accompanied talking about 27 December.

  It was several weeks later, when Sydney friends were visiting and we’d taken them to a pub, that the prosecutor rang with some surprising news: ‘The driver has pled guilty.’ The next step was sentencing. The prosecutor got in touch with us and let us know that we could prepare victim impact statements. We could decide whether we wanted to read them ourselves during the sentencing hearing or have the prosecutor read them for us.

  Rima decided she didn’t want to be there on the day. She didn’t want to see the defendant, and wasn’t certain how she would react. But if my statement was going to be read out, I wanted to be the person reading it. There was so much in our situation that I had zero control over, so, at the very least, I wanted to tell it in my own words. I wasn’t going to enter into the debates about whether our driver should instead have been charged with dangerous driving causing death. What mattered to me was to make our daughter visible, not as a creepy generic ‘unborn child’ or an object lesson for debates about abortion, but in our relationship with her changeling form: as a long-held hope; as a tiny leap in my belly; as a mysterious, moving bump; and, finally, as a serious-looking but unbreathing baby.

  The sentencing hearing was set for early November.

  •

  Tuesday, 14 September 2010

  I was nearly four years old when Azaria Chamberlain disappeared. The controversy surrounding her mother, Lindy Chamberlain—who was accused of murdering 9-week-old Azaria—formed such an interwoven part of the cultural carpet of growing up in Australia in the 1980s, that it took me a while to realise, first, what an extraordinary woman Lindy Chamberlain is, and second, that I now have several things in common with her. It bothers me that I have some kind of cultural cringe in saying these two things. But when I read her letter, published in the newspaper to mark thirty years since Azaria’s disappearance, it hit me like a tonne of bricks:

  ‘It is hard to believe it is thirty years today since my darling baby was taken.

  ‘For some odd reason everyone says you will soon forget.

  ‘Why is it that people expect me to forget a part of myself? Why would you? Loss of a loved one, particularly a child, is not something you forget any more than you can get out of your mind that you once attended school.

  ‘That does not mean you dwell on it all the time. It is simply there in the fabric of your life and history. In some ways it seems forever and in others it is like yesterday still.’

  For all the movies and telemovies and tabloid newspapers and magazine coverage, I had somehow forgotten that this woman lost her baby—lost her beloved 9-week-old daughter. And suddenly I thought, here is a woman who has survived babyloss—and she seems so functional. Not just losing a daughter (and never having the chance to say goodbye, because her body was never found), but on top of that, being accused of killing your baby as part of some cult ritual, enduring more trials, inquests and royal commissions than have ever been held on the one issue in Australia, being jailed and separated from her living children for over three years, and being at the centre of a media circus for much of two decades. And yet, here she is, self-possessed and able to articulate her position clearly and passionately. I think she deserves some credit for that.

  I also think of Lindy whenever I have one of those awkward moments when I’m out somewhere and I’ve pulled it together and am actually enjoying talking to people, but then I have to tell someone what happened to us, and their natural reaction is shock and sadness. They look at me, and I’m not weeping and falling to pieces, in fact, I want the conversation to move on, and I wonder whether they think I’m some monster who doesn’t care that her baby died. I need a little sign that says, ‘Yes, I do care. This is the saddest thing that has ever happened to me. My grief is huge and voracious and has eaten huge amounts of my time and energy and personality. But right now, I’ve got it on a leash and feel like I’m in control of it. Don’t start poking at it now, or it will chew my leg off before your very eyes. I need my grief to behave in public, for my own sanity and dignity.’

  I wonder—why do I care so much about whether people think I’m grieving ‘enough’ or in the ways that they would expect? What standard am I trying to perform to here? If I don’t fit within one stereotype (‘good grieving mother, tragic, weeping’) does that automatically push me into another stereotype (‘bad, uncaring mother’)? And this is where it comes back to Lindy, and back to the way she was demonised by the media for appearing to be ‘cold’ when she had to give evidence at her trial for her daughter’s murder. We grieve in the shadow of all these myths surrounding Lindy Chamberlain. For me it is a reminder of why we need feminism—to remember the force that stereotypes have over women, the way in which our bodies and stories are so often appropriated for other people’s purposes. That sometimes we need to claw away all the stereotypes and speak for ourselves.

  I have to give evidence tomorrow. Unlike Lindy, I won’t be on trial for killing my daughter (someone else will be, though he’s charged with dangerous driving causing serious injury, not with murder). But I’ll be thinking of Lindy, and wearing sunglasses on the steps of the courthouse in her honour, and in memory of Z and Azaria and all the babies that we wish were here with us.

  On the morning of the sentencing hearing, I wore my babushka brooch over my heart, and slipped Z’s photo into an envelope placed in the pages of my statement, so that I could touch it while I was reading.

  Victim Impact Statement (Nov 2010)

  I found it hard to sit down and write this statement, because it is impossible to fit into words the impact of the defendant’s dangerous driving and the resulting crash on my life. For a long time I really wondered whether I had died and started a new, different life, because everything was so unrecognizable, including my own body and personality.

  Just seeing a car accident on TV grips me with terror and leaves me crying. Big four-wheel drives still frighten me. The sound of ambulances, lying on my back, sitting in a car, putting my right hand to my head—all these things trigger shock and trauma. It is a marathon effort to get dressed, to get to work, to try and bring my mind to a task. The scars on my legs, arm, head and abdomen remind me every day of what it feels like to be crushed by broken metal. But the biggest impact is the least measurable—it is the growing space that our daughter would have had in our lives, had she survived.

  Let me tell you about our daughter. She was conceived in Sydney in May 2009 after nine months of unsuccessful fertility treatments, and several years before that of finding a sperm donor and going through counselling processes and quarantine periods as part of the fertility process. We weren’t going to tell the girls about the pregnancy until we’d had a scan confirming the pregnancy, but they guessed because we were smiling so much.

  At fifteen weeks of pregnancy I first felt her move, like a little goldfish in my belly. We nicknamed her ‘Haloumi’. Soon we were getting lots of kicks, and when she stretched, you could see my whole belly move. Her favourite (or, I was hoping, least favourite) music was Rod Stewart—every time he came on the radio she would kick. I was lucky enough to have a healthy, smooth pregnancy. Each night, Jackie and Jasmin would pat my tummy and say ‘goodnight Haloumi’.

  About a week before the accident we had just moved to Melbourne so that we could be close to my family, and so I could take up a job after my maternity leave finished that wouldn’t re
quire so much commuting. The interstate move combined with both Rima and me preparing to go on leave had made it a busy, stressful time, and we were looking forward to spending Christmas with family, and had booked a holiday house for two weeks in January so we could have some quiet family time before the birth.

  Four days before the accident, I had an ultrasound and Rima and the girls and my mum and sister came along, and we saw her, very squished up by now, but heart beating strongly and headed in the right direction. At my last midwife visit, the midwife showed me how to feel her back, her legs, her little hand, through my belly. On the morning of the accident, we were at a picnic, and she was hiccuping.

  When the four-wheel drive hit our car, and we came to a stop, Rima kept asking, ‘Can you feel Haloumi moving?’ I didn’t answer because I could see what I thought was petrol pouring from the other car and I was scared it would blow up. I told Rima and the girls to get out of the car. I couldn’t get out myself—the car was crushed around my legs.

  Rima and the girls went to different hospitals, so I was left by myself while the doctors tried and tried to find her heartbeat, and when they finally told me she’d died I had to tell Rima over the phone that our baby hadn’t made it. I was induced, and was having six minute long contractions while I was having blood transfusions, while the nurses extracted the glass from my arm, and while my head wound was stapled, re-stapled, and finally stitched because it kept leaving me drenched in blood. Early the next morning, my daughter was born by caesarean section. My dad and mum and sister held her while the surgeons repaired my broken knee. When I came around from the anaesthetic, the first thing I saw was my midwife coming towards me with a photo, saying, ‘You had a little girl.’

  She was 2500g (5 pound 8) and 48cm long—the length I was when I was born. She had dark curly hair and skin softer than rose petals. She looked calm, but with a slightly worried brow.

  I am so sad for Jackie, Jasmin and Mariam who lost their little sister, for my parents, who lost their first grandchild, for my sister and brother, who lost their first niece. Z was so loved and we were all so ready to welcome her.

  We have thirty-six photos of our daughter. This is all we will ever get. We have her hand print in black ink, and her footprints. There is a drop of her blood on a blanket we wrapped her in. We didn’t take a lock of her hair. I wish we’d known at the time to do that.

  What breaks my heart is all the things I can’t tell you about my daughter, the things I will never know—the colour of her eyes, the sound of her voice, the things that help her get to sleep, how her sisters make her laugh. So many things we can only ever hypothesise about—would she be crawling by now? What foods would she have reached for? Would she be keeping us up all night? Would she have enjoyed her granddad’s singing? Would she be comforted by her Oma’s kisses? What kind of little girl might she have been? What kind of young woman?

  It seems so strange that all these possibilities—a whole lifetime’s worth of them—could have disappeared in one stupid moment on Warrigal Road on 27 December last year. I don’t know if I’ll ever get my head around it. To the defendant—I sincerely hope you never have to go through sorrow like this, but I also hope that you never again cause anyone else such sorrow.

  •

  Afterwards, the prosecutor let me know there would be journalists on the steps as we left the court complex, and that I didn’t have to talk to them unless I wanted to. I’d said most of what I needed to in the courtroom. The only point left to make was an obvious one about cars and their capacity to become death-machines.

  Out on the court steps, I resisted the instinctive urge to smile at the camera. I thought about Lindy Chamberlain, and wondered if I’d been naïve choosing to do this. How much grief was enough? What was my face supposed to look like? The grinding grief was suddenly elusive, and instead I felt a strange elation, like the relief when your ears pop as the plane goes up and the pressure equalises in your head. At the very moment my sadness was to be publicly broadcast, I felt lighter—almost fraudulent for making such a fuss. But I held Z’s photo inside the envelope and thought, ‘She’s worth making a fuss over.’

  22

  Close up with hope

  All through 2010, the calendar mocked me. We lived in the shadow of two ghost calendars—the year before, when we’d been unbroken, and the year that might have been. February, the month Haloumi would have been born. June, the birthday that was my first as a mother, but spent without my baby. The June before, I’d just done a pregnancy test and, for the first time ever, encountered that second faint blue line. We went out dancing with friends, and I surreptitiously sipped soft drink, and Rima and I exchanged secret (or probably not so secret) goofy smiles. September 2009, we’d started telling people, and I had trouble doing up my jeans. By November 2009, I was well and truly showing, and my students and colleagues were getting excited for us. November 2010 was a very different story. The criminal proceedings were over and the young man who’d set the billiard balls rolling was in jail, but our daughter was no less dead. We were still having no luck trying to conceive, and the black hole of 27 December was looming.

  And then, two weeks after the media bubble that surrounded the sentencing hearing, I was driving somewhere, and while we were waiting to turn right, a silver four-wheel drive turning left swung wide and nearly hit us, but corrected in time. I saw the driver’s face—he was young, maybe still on his L-plates—his own eyes as scared as mine. In the choking tears that followed, I felt a weird confusion. How could this be as terrifying as the moments leading up to our accident, when there was no impact? I knew I was safe this time, but my body and mind remained tensed for the impact, my jaw locked.

  The days after were panicky, with headaches and jaw pain from grinding my teeth in my sleep. Another trip to Sydney for an insemination left me wiped out and weepy. I had gone back to full-time work within a few months of the accident, but suddenly I couldn’t hold things together anymore. I took sick leave, begged work colleagues to finish some of my marking and cancelled giving a paper at a local conference.

  Thursday, 16 December 2010

  There is a new sensation I’ve discovered in the past few months, which I’ve nicknamed ‘the hard swallow’. It happens when I’m driving, and see a four-wheel drive coming towards me, or when I see a baby and try to estimate—11 or 12 months old? Or when the IVF administrator tells me the dollar amount we have to pay to start IVF. A ball of fear or sadness, or something of a similar texture, rises in my throat and I have the urge to run, scream and hide. But I know I can’t, so instead I swallow it down, and get on with the business of moving through the world.

  I’m not pregnant this time. I didn’t really think I was, but when I got to the 27 day mark, I just started entertaining little thoughts, ‘maybe Christmas would feel good after all’ etc. But no. And while IVF felt like a relatively positive Plan B when I went to visit Dr Lovely last week, it doesn’t feel like such a fun path now.

  I’m a big hippy, you see. I don’t like the idea of doctors taking control of my cycle, forcing my ovaries to blister with artificially stimulated ova, vacuuming out my eggs, and coercing them to germinate with a selected sperm. It all feels a bit too much like high school dancing classes where we were supposed to hold our dancing partner tight enough so that a vinyl record put between us couldn’t fall to the floor. It’s as though doctors are telling my body, ‘Oh, just get out of the way and let us do this properly!’ I know what it feels like to have medical experts take over my most basic bodily functions—I’m lucky they did, otherwise I would be dead, but that doesn’t mean I like it.

  We don’t *have* to do IVF. As a dear friend has pointed out, our lack of luck so far is probably more about timing than anything else. But given our issues with frozen inseminations, and the difficulty and stress involved in travelling interstate every month for fresh inseminations, and ‘advancing maternal age’, it is making sense. What I don’t like most about IVF is that I feel corralled into it by fear—fe
ar that maybe Z will be the only baby I have, that it is all too late, that if Christmas 2011 were to roll around without a pregnancy in sight, I’d lose what scrap of sanity I’ve got left. So it is a pragmatic choice, but a very reluctant, sulky one. And it makes me even sulkier to know how much we have to pay for procedures which I don’t want anyway (or wish I didn’t need). But this is where the hard swallow comes in.

  •

  Christmas in Melbourne minus a pregnancy, however, felt too big and too hard to swallow, so we hatched a plan to run away from the whole thing. Like Max in Maurice Sendak’s picture book, we would sail off to rumpus with the wild things, or at least, with some friendly wombats. We packed up the car with tents, bags and the girls, drove onto the ferry to Tasmania and sailed off to rumpus with the wombats. And what about the small matter of 27 December—the date that had been hovering like a four-wheel drive half a second before impact? I wanted to look into its beady eyes and remember what it felt like on the other side; to feel whole and unharmed and hopeful. I wanted a whole day where we didn’t need to get in the car, preferably with a beach and a big, salty ocean nearby.

  We woke up on Christmas morning in a tiny cabin near Cradle Mountain, and marked the day with small presents, a big walk, and a fancy lunch at the lodge. By 27 December, we were camped near Wineglass Bay. I had been so scared of the day itself, but in the end, it was just an ordinary day—arguments, half-successful pancakes, a picnic lunch, peacemaking. We walked all the way from our campsite to Wineglass Bay and back again (with swimming in between), Rima insisting that we stop at the bar in the lodge for a drink in Z’s honour. A superb blue wren joined us on the balcony.

  It was almost dusk as we walked back to our campsite via the beach, and in the wet sand, the girls drew our family—depicting Z still in my belly. I wrote her name too, with a Zorro-like ‘Z’ right at the edge of the waves, where the sand is not solid or liquid but some other matter. The thought that her name would wash away felt like some kind of anti-memorial. Rather than her name persisting, set in stone, it would merge with the grains of sand, with the gallons of ocean and with the movement between them.