Families and children. I’ve been broody just about my entire life.
There’s a part of me, an aspect of my personality, that could have ended up popping out of school, getting an inconsequential job in advertising, marrying an inconsequential man, moving into an inconsequential house. In my very early twenties I would have got down to the extremely consequential and relevant task of reproduction. In all likelihood it would have ended in tears and possibly divorce. But that’s not the way it was meant to be.
What I’m saying is that I’m a born mother. I’ve known people who are born writers but become copywriters in advertising agencies, born artists who work in construction companies, actors who become teachers and doctors who become lawyers. Maybe doing what we dream of doing, what God intended us to do, is just a luxury, or even a great fluke. It’s a shame that so many of us aren’t doing what we believe we should be doing.
For years I enjoyed nurturing and teaching other people’s children. Teaching is a God-given gift, one I relished. I think I did it with such devotion because it incorporated aspects of my own life’s work. Perhaps a modern woman, a Virginia Slims ‘we’ve come a long way baby’ woman, ought to have a higher calling, a bigger, more ambitious dream than motherhood, but there it is. What I want, what I have always wanted, is to be someone’s mother – and I can’t make that dream come true. I can’t seem to manifest that happiness. Maybe I’ve sabotaged it.
During the ‘not-eating phase’ of my first manic episode, my periods stopped. Ignorant youth that I was, I didn’t know or particularly care what had caused this anatomical mishap. I did the maths: no boyfriend + no baby = not a care in the world.
Many years later, after a number of manic episodes and only a few periods in between, a gynaecologist explained that in all likelihood I didn’t need contraception; that, having had anorexia, reproduction would probably be difficult for me. Fanfuckentastic!
When I was about twenty-four and had just met Jason, I remember lying in the bath, my toes playing with the chain hanging from the plug, fretting and crying because I wasn’t getting pregnant. But it didn’t matter too much, so we continued enjoying unprotected sex. (On our second date, when Jason told me he was never getting married and definitely never having children, I knew my gynaecological problems certainly weren’t going to be a deal-breaker.)
Once correctly diagnosed and medicated, my body seemed to right itself. Give or take the odd kilogram here or there, my weight stabilised and my periods normalised. But perfect, pure little beings cannot be conceived or grow in a uterus pumped full of a cocktail of mood stabilisers, anti-epileptics, antidepressants, tranquillisers and sleeping pills. Likewise, precariously balanced potential mothers can’t risk going off those drugs to make babies. I worried, wept, complained, bargained and fretted for weeks, which became months, which became years.
Maybe fantasies are born out of desperation. When life has consistently failed us, our embittered, disappointed minds manifest the fantasy in a desperate last bid to protect us from mediocrity and utter cynicism. And in our fantasies, because we are imagining and not actually wishing, not asking for anything, we’re allowed to make our dreams as outlandish as we please. And so it was that when I’d had my empty, barren womb smashed up against reality for too many years, the idea of Tallulah, my fantasy child, was born.
She gazes up at me through the wondrous big brown eyes she inherited from her father, Jason. I find myself wondering how much she remembers of the other world before she was our little girl, commanding the full attention of our lives. Her pearly face is framed with crazy black curls she inherited from her mother – me. Some days it seems I have to catch her mid-flight, kicking and cavorting, if I’m to get a comb through those wayward, tangled locks. How am I to explain to a frantically busy four-year-old that there’s an unpleasantly fine line between the charm of a defined curl and an unappealing banshee frizz? I want her neatly formed ringlets to protect her from the teasing, taunting and victimisation that plagued my own childhood.
She pirouettes through people, like a fairy apparition. The frayed hems of her long skirt trail behind her, and I pin intricately beaded fairy wings to the back of her frocks daily, as instructed. Always she carries a sense of theatre, of Narnia and The Nutcracker Suite. She seems to step into the light. I can see her aura, silvery and ancient as the moon.
She loves to dress up, loves to wriggle, to disrupt me and play with my crooked toes when I try to write. Most of all, she loves to come onto the film set and watch her father directing movies. She knows the truth about her father, that he is a magician. Sometimes when things are not too hectic, he lets her take a peek through the viewfinder to see the spells he is making.
Often I wish she didn’t have to come on set alone. I wish she weren’t an only child, but we always knew that, medically, we could go through only one pregnancy. All is well in the world, God is in his universe and we are all fulfilled and blissfully happy.
It’s a funny-bunny, crazy-daisy world we’ve created, the three of us. I wonder if she orchestrated it herself. I picture her in heaven, sitting on an old brown leather suitcase surrounded by other unborn souls. God marches in, the register of humanity in his hand. In a gentle voice, he asks, ‘Which of you would like a life less ordinary in Cape Town, South Africa? Your father makes moving pictures that are so sad and beautiful, they can make strangers cry. He works very hard, but he’s kind and funny. He’ll protect and care for you, as he has for his wife, your mother.
‘Your mother,’ continues God, ‘has a huge capacity for love, but sometimes she’s too happy and sometimes she’s too sad. Sometimes she wants too much life, and some days she wants too much to die. She gets a crying germ, a germ of wings and a germ of crazies. Your father had a brother who had the same kind of waywardness in his being. I’m afraid there’s a chance, if you go to this family, that you will inherit it.’
Quick as a flash, Tallulah flings up her hand eagerly, as is her way, and demands, ‘If I’m their child, will I be able to dance?’ God laughs and says, ‘Yes, indeed my child, lots of dancing, lots of laughter and plenty of confusion. Confusion and hard work with feelings, an abundance of feelings.’ And Tallulah just about leaps off her chair in excitement; she chooses unpredictable moods, art and summers in the sun, rainbows dancing over her shadow in winter.
Of course Tallulah didn’t really exist. She wasn’t even conceived, let alone born. But we could dream, couldn’t we?
For a couple of years she was an absolute nonsense, pie-in-the-sky dream. Later, after spending time, tears and money at two fertility clinics, she became a biological factor. Frozen, I imagined her in a kindergarten of sorts in the Cape Fertility Clinic. I wondered with my friends if we couldn’t bring her home, maybe just on weekends, and keep her in a silver ice bucket with a bottle of Moët.