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—fear 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.
•
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Recently, I’ve started feeling queasy about my own hope in the same way that I do with really corny advertising. It doesn’t feel true. I know from experience that hopes can be shattered, even when you are being cagey, trying not to hope too much. I know at some level, that was why I hadn’t finalised a name for Haloumi before she was born, why I hadn’t found out her sex. I was trying to arm myself against hope. But I still believed in it—and attempting to guard against it was really just replacing overt hope with secret hope.
I’ve gone through life with a naïve idea that things will work out, that if I’m calm and careful, it will all be okay. In that moment when the car stopped moving after the impact, when people had arrived on the scene and were helping us, when I’d been able to wriggle my toes, and didn’t feel any pain in my uterus, I was so certain that Haloumi would be okay. I was good, I stayed calm, I did everything I could to cooperate with the paramedics and firefighters. I didn’t even let the idea that she’d died enter my head—I kept my hand there, on my belly, inconveniencing all the doctors and nurses wielding Dopplers and ultrasound wands, because I was trying to keep her alive by hope alone.
And I was so so wrong—she was so so dead, even by the time they got me in the ambulance. That doesn’t mean that screaming and losing it would have been a better response—but it has taken me a long time to try to get my head around my own broken hope. I know it makes no sense, but I’m so sad that my hope wasn’t strong enough to save her, that it failed when put to the test.
So, I’m exploring a bit about hope, and Pema Chödrön’s suggestion—‘if we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation’.1 That sounds quite stark, but I know very well now that there are no guarantees, that the ground can fall out from under you at any moment. This approach is realistic at least—there really is no hope that you could live your life with nothing bad ever happening to you. But is it a healthy approach to take? Wouldn’t it be morbid and negative to be continually mindful of your complete lack of any security? It seems counter-instinctive that you could be both thinking about your ‘groundlessness’ and ‘relaxing’ at the same time. So far, though, trying out this groundlessness has been calming in an odd way. It is helping me drive the panics back a bit—or rather to acknowledge them and sit with them rather than run around looking for something I hope might ‘make it better’.
But I still find it very hard to embrace the idea that giving up hope is a good thing to do—or that it is a part of appreciating that life is full of impermanence and change. I like hope! I’m always hoping this, hoping that—for myself and for others I care about. So much of the culture I have grown up in is based on the idea that ‘things will get better’, that the good life is normal. But there is also a big sense of relief in accepting that what happened to us wasn’t an aberration from the happy life that everyone else gets—that as sad as it was, loss, injury and grief are part of the human condition. Yes, there are heart-achingly beautiful, good things in the world, but they don’t last forever, and death and cancer, and embarrassment and disappointment are just as normal and as common.
This bit especially made sense to me: ‘Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold onto hope, and hope robs us of the present moment … Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look …’2
Now that I’ve started giving myself the tiny injections of the IVF drugs every morning, like DIY acupuncture, I know that we’re getting close to the extreme hope-dance that is an egg pick-up, an embryo-transfer. I haven’t coped very well with hope for the last three cycles of inseminations. So I’m going to try this groundlessness—to sit with the complete uncertainty at the heart of baby-making and do a bit less grabbing onto the hope of some other future moment making things better. Of course I want it to work. But I’m curious about how different things might feel if I just take each moment for the groundless, uncertain thing that it is.
Fear is the other one I’ve been experimenting with, trying to get close up with. On the first day of our holiday, we went white water rafting, and half an hour in, our guide pulled into a deep, still corner of the river, and pointed up. ‘See that little cliff?’ he said, grinning. ‘You’re going to jump off that.’ And we did. I felt the panic grip me and tell me to turn around, and I hesitated once, well, twice. But then I jumped, and the panic jumped with me and I screamed like a big girl and flapped my arms all the way down. The girls laughed their heads off. And I got to know my fear a little better.