Proof
Things are moving towards ‘normal’. We are all home from hospital, I’m walking unassisted, there is talk of returning to work. One day, we grab the mail on our way out of the house to have coffee with an old friend. I tear an envelope open and can tell from the feel of the paper that it is not a bill. This is thicker, watermarked paper, like that of a bank cheque or a passport page. When I stare at it, I can’t tell whether it is just my eyes or whether the colour of the paper changes softly towards the centre—from creamy white to pinky cream.
Here is my name, and Rima’s; here is the name we chose for her and her date of birth. This paper certifies me as a ‘mother’, and certifies Z’s birth; that she was here, a human child, even if she never drew breath. Part of me wonders why they produce these certificates. Is she ever going to need it to get a passport? To get her driver’s licence? Will we ever need it to enrol her in school? No, this certificate is for us, to make us feel better, to offer administrative proof of our child’s existence. A child was here. She must be recorded.
On paper, I am a mother, but there is no pram here; no noisy, squirming baby. I feel like one of those flat felt figures we had at kinder. You can peel me off this situation and stick me onto another. It makes a soft ripping sound as you do it, quieter than velcro. Here is my picture-baby, here is my piece of paper. I love her so much, but she’s now my two-dimensional child—stilled, flattened out on the page like a rare flower. I didn’t dream her three-dimensional little life, she was definitely here (right here), moving and being. But all the remaining evidence I have of that fact is unsatisfying.
The next envelope I open is an overdue fine from the library: Sheila Kitzinger, Rediscovering Birth. We have to go, to move on; we’ll be late for coffee with Aron. I fold these pieces of mail together, and worry that I’ll mix them up or lose them—confuse the proof of my daughter’s existence with a library fine.
•
About a month after I’d been released from hospital, my dad and stepmum decided to take me to see the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra because, as my dad put it, ‘music is good for the soul’. They could tell my soul needed all the help it could get. In some strange cosmic joke, the first piece was Fauré’s Pavane—one of the pieces we’d played at Z’s funeral. It was on a classical music CD that Rima liked to play to my pregnant tummy.
After the funeral, the CD player had stayed with me in intensive care and then in the trauma ward, and I played that CD over and over. It drowned out the sound of my weeping, and somehow the weeping felt less pathetic with a majestic orchestral backing track. There in the concert hall, shiny program on my lap, the same notes from the trauma ward came flooding back at me, live and properly oceanic. Silent tears wet my cheeks, and my dad squeezed my hand.
•
Reinstating ‘normal’ meant we needed to buy a new death-machine (ahem, car), and get it insured. We’d received a ‘Bereavement Payment’ from the government—they don’t call it the ‘Baby Bonus’ when your baby dies. With that, and the money from the insurance payout from the old car, we could afford a much newer and safer car, with enough airbags to demand their own collective noun. A cloud of airbags? A reassurance of airbags? I was sulky about paying good money for another car when the last one had stolen our child from us. I was less angry with the human error and thoughtlessness that had caused our accident than I was with these dangerous machines, and the extent to which we were reliant on them and complacent about their propensity to kill us.
Still, in order to see family, and get to and from the shops and various medical appointments, we needed a car. Back in the trauma ward, I had made a rule for myself: that my decisions would be led by what my family and I needed to heal and recover, not by fear or shame. So, even though the thought of driving still gave me the shakes, we started shopping for a new car.
My dad took us on expeditions to inspect cars, carefully navigating so that we didn’t need to travel along the road that had been the scene of our accident. We avoided the car yards full of four-wheel drives and the sense of queasy doom they gave me. And, finally, we found something—a creamy-white station wagon with plenty of airbags; auto emergency braking; and, best of all, a GPS system with a calm and reassuring voice. We called her Pearl, as though having a humanised name for our car could somehow immunise us against the risk of another accident.
Each person I spoke to as I called around getting insurance quotes had to ask whether we’d had any previous accidents in the past three years, ‘regardless of fault’. I would tell them, ‘Yes, we had a serious crash, just in December. A four-wheel drive came onto the wrong side of the road and hit us head-on. Yes, the car was written off.’ Inevitably, they said something like, ‘That sounds awful. I hope everyone was all right?’
I didn’t know what to say to that, so would usually just say, ‘Mostly,’ in a tone that (I hope) firmly communicated ‘Do not ask me any more about this’. If they did ask more, I blathered on a bit about broken knees, ribs, spleens, liver, etc etc. That made them uncomfortable enough.
I didn’t say, ‘No, we are not all right. My baby daughter died.’ I wanted to be correct and accurate and honest, and I wanted our loss acknowledged, but I had to make a number of these phone calls, get a number of quotes. My composure was stretched thinly enough already. I had functions I needed to perform before disintegrating into a weepy pulp. I couldn’t go there; not for a flipping insurance quote, not with someone who would only know me as a voice from a call-centre shift. I couldn’t risk the random responses the truth might evoke.
It felt ridiculous, shopping around for insurance when something like this had happened. Everything felt ridiculous, flippant. To continue to live and breathe was a mean joke. I didn’t realise I could become so bitter. I didn’t really know the meaning of it. But bitter and interesting I could handle, maybe; bitter and boring—trapped in this repetitive, ongoing grief—was much harder.
Even with our new car in the driveway, I hadn’t yet brought myself to drive again, let alone lay my hands on a steering wheel. A week later, my brother came to visit, and I asked if he wanted to see our new car. We got in, and he shifted the passenger seat back to make room for his long legs and reclined the seat. I laughed. When he was still living at home, you could always tell when Jeremy had borrowed my dad’s car by the ultra-relaxed seat. I got into the driver’s seat so I could turn on the stereo and show him the GPS, and, somehow, just like that, I drove him around the block.
•
In the heady, queasy days after that positive pregnancy test in June 2009, I’d started a blog, calling it ‘Sesame seed sized dreams’. Rima and I had lain in bed and looked up images of a five-week embryo. At that stage, it was just three layers of cells forming into a neural tube and, all up, approximately the size of a sesame seed. I liked the tangential connection with Lebanese food. Tahini (sesame seed paste) is a basic ingredient of many dishes, and sesame seeds appear whole in many other recipes, particularly in zaatar, a mix used on the pizza-like manoushe, which was one of our favourite weekend breakfasts. I knew that we still faced about a 25 per cent miscarriage rate, so I wasn’t about to start building big dreams on this tiny wisp of life within me. Or maybe I was, but I wanted to hedge my bets.
The blog documented the slightly nervous, ridiculous and exciting aspects of being pregnant: having a sizeable bust for the first time in my life, and having to find maternity bras to contain it; strange pregnancy dreams; the frankly bizarre, but wonderful, sensation of feeling someone else’s hiccups within your belly. The blog also enabled me to connect with other ‘rainbow’ families—mainly, lesbian mums—across Australia, the US and UK. Those of us at a similar stage of pregnancy gravitated to one another, wanting to hear how others were faring with the discomforts, dilemmas and delights of building a new human being within your entrails. Knowing that each week of pregnancy was moving us closer, not just to the birth, but also to our move interstate, I was also delighted to discover online a thriving community of Melbourne rainbow families, some of whom would become long-term friends online and in real life.
When I put up my ‘what happened’ post telling the awful news of our accident, my demographic shifted within days. My post had been linked to on ‘Lost and Found Connections Abound’, a blog aggregator for those experiencing infertility and pregnancy loss. Some of my regular commenters on the blog left their shocked condolences, never to be heard from again. I was sad but I sympathised. If I had been the one who was still pregnant, I would probably have felt awkward and unsure of what to say. Others moved closer, hearing, empathising, and sharing their own experiences of grief. Of those local to Melbourne, a few offered practical support, creating a depth of friendship that I am still grateful for, nearly eight years on. And in my new demographic, I found a whole ‘baby lost’ community struggling to make sense of babies dying, and of their own role as bereaved parents.
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.
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