BETWEEN DAVID AND ME WAS the question of children. I asked myself the question and I never knew the answer. I wasn’t sure why. David was ambivalent, he always said, but of course he’d go along if I wanted children; he just couldn’t quite see himself as a father.
And then, at thirty-eight, I wanted a child. I just knew I did, as simple as that.
We tried for several years, doing the things you do, having sex, and when that didn’t work as quickly as expected, undertaking research on the internet, adopting its many helpful suggestions. Having sex at special times of the day, the week, the month; rubbing cervical mucus between one’s fingers to determine an ovulating consistency—egg white being the goal; changing the food I ate; changing the food David ate, the kind of underpants he wore—the looser the better to keep those poor little sperms cool—the position in which we lay with one another. It can become an obsession. It did.
And then I had an early miscarriage—a blighted ovum, it’s called. Dr Tig, who’d been my doctor for twenty years and knew the truth about my earlier life before many people, rang to tell me the blood results. ‘I’m sorry to say it’s bad news,’ she said in her lovely Dr Tig voice, ‘but there’s a silver lining. It means everything is working according to plan. So just keep trying.’
Fine, I thought. We’ll keep trying.
No problem, David said.
The weekend after the blighted ovum was our tenth wedding anniversary. We didn’t normally go to Coolangatta but that was where David had asked me to marry him so we decided to book a unit there.
I was out of sorts, tired beyond belief, a weight behind my heart, muscles aching. I didn’t connect my mood with the miscarriage. I didn’t even think about it. I had no idea the blighted ovum would raise any feelings at all in me. I never connected what had happened to me as a teenager with me as a middle-aged woman. I was in my head not my body where I had been since I was a teenager.
On the way down to the coast, I picked a fight with David about where we were staying. We bickered about the car I rented too. We bickered about bickering. I withdrew from David, went inside myself seeking safety. And then I fell apart.
I was alone in the apartment we’d rented. I’d told David to get out. I remember I was crying, coughing and choking. I couldn’t get air into my lungs for a time. It was very frightening. My body was responding and I had no control.
It was late the same afternoon. David had come back and I had calmed down enough to let him hold me. I said I was sorry for yelling. I didn’t know what was wrong. I had been so afraid. Now I wanted to leave Coolangatta. I needed to be somewhere else.
In the rental car we’d bickered over earlier—a sports car of sorts, a Volvo convertible, which was the opposite of a sports car, as David pointed out—we drove down to Byron Bay for the sunset.
It was like stepping outside after a storm, entering the world after all that emotion, for now everything was peaceful and charged with meaning and filled with beauty. Just for those hours, I was back in my body, back to myself and I felt at home. On the way back to Coolangatta, I had Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night blaring through the Volvo stereo. Even David sang along. He is not normally a fan.
I thought we would be all right. I told David I was giving up on having a child. I stood on the beach and looked out through The Pass. I thought we would be all right.
We bought a new car, a small car. We bought our architect-designed clinker-brick townhouse in St Lucia that had so many child hazards you wouldn’t in all conscience consider bringing children there, not even to visit—a mezzanine floor with a toddler climbable balustrade onto slate tile, stairs with no balustrade over the same slate tile, a veranda with low railings and a drop to paving.
I started a corporate-writing business to supplement my novel-writing income. University colleagues and then government clients started engaging me to write their reports. I discovered I loved researching an issue in as much depth as I could, listening to a single reviewer or group, and coming up with a report. It was intellectually challenging, interesting and great fun.
I started making money. We had a couple’s car and a couple’s house and a couple’s income. I said I would get on with life without children. I didn’t really feel too bad about it; I told myself I didn’t. I thought I wasn’t meant to have children. I think in truth I thought I wasn’t good enough to have children.
And then I was pregnant.
We called him Otis from the start, from the time he was an unblighted ovum, not because we’d intended to name him Otis—we didn’t even know his sex—and not because I was set on having a boy, but because I would not call the baby ‘it’ and as far as I knew Otis was a name a boy or girl might have. I had never met an Otis. I loved Otis Redding’s version of the Sam Cooke song ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. There were the elevators, and the dog and cat movie, but I didn’t think of either of those. It wasn’t as if we were going to name a child Otis. It was just a name for now.
We had bought a Judy Watson etching called Visceral Memory that year. I loved its strength, soft black lines on an ochre background around a core of life. Much later I read that Watson had painted her spine series, including Visceral Memory, when she was heavily pregnant with her son Otis. I later met the artist and told her how we’d come to her work and that our son was named Otis too. What are the chances? we both said.
Visceral Memory was on our bedroom wall when Otis was conceived. It’s on our bedroom wall still.
I didn’t know the writer Kim Wilkins well, but we read together at a writers’ cabaret early in my pregnancy, and I thought she was immensely clever and funny. After the panel, we were talking and realised we would both be on Mount Tamborine, south of Brisbane, one weekend soon. I was house-minding and she and her partner—musician Mirko Ruckels—were visiting friends, so we had lunch together. Kim and Mirko talked about wearing their earth suits. David and I used to say, ‘Imagine the moon.’ We knew we would be friends.
Somehow, although neither of us was supposed to tell anyone we were pregnant, waiting the sixteen weeks, we both stumbled out with it that day on Mount Tamborine. I was further along, almost sixteen weeks. Kim’s baby would be born two months after Otis.
Like almost everyone in my life, I hadn’t told Kim I’d already had a baby, and by the time I was ready to tell her, it was too late. For me, it was a blessing. Kim would be the friend I could be a first-time mother with, could be unsure with, could feel I had a right to be a first-time mother with. I knew it wasn’t honest, but I didn’t know how to tell her the truth, not then.
I was heavily pregnant in the turning of summer into fall, surely the most beautiful few months on the planet. The light is soft, the days short and the air crisp. I remember watching small things in the garden of our townhouse—light on rocks, a baby turkey, a lemon tree next door—and feeling that I was part of everything.
I remember the first night with Otis in the world as if it was yesterday. Louise and Gerard had been up to visit and they had left, and then David left. I was alone with Otis, exhausted and euphoric.
There was a woman in the bed next to me, yet to be delivered of her twins, and she was snoring sporadically and unpeacefully, like a plane taking off. It woke Otis, who woke me with his cry. I had no idea what to do and a kindly midwife came and changed his nappy and put him into bed facing me and left us.
For the rest of the night, we stared at one another in the strange light of a night-time hospital while the woman snored. I looked into his face and had the only glimmer in my life of understanding God. I looked into his face and he looked into mine and I was thinking about him having been inside me not a few hours before and now he was this whole little person in the world. And he was thinking about nothing, just staring at me, just being. I don’t imagine I’ll ever fully appreciate that moment.
We would name him Otis after all. He had a mullet of dark red hair, a cone head on one side from his trip through the birth canal and a lightning strike birthmark between his eyes. We couldn’t give him an ordinary name. He was not an ordinary child, although I suppose there’s no such thing as an ordinary child.
When I was in labour, I’d been unable to accept that I was going to give birth to a baby any time soon. My main midwife, Maureen, who called me Mary-Rose and not an elderly primip, wanted me to get up on the bed so she could do an internal examination to see how far along I was. At first, I wouldn’t do it.
We had only just arrived at the hospital. I had stayed at home as long as I could, the hospital being a place where I knew I wouldn’t feel safe, even if I didn’t know why. Finally, with both Maureen and Louise coaxing, I got up on the bed and Maureen did the examination and said, ‘You’re at ten centimetres,’ which meant I was ready to give birth.
‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘You’re just trying to make me feel better.’ When the obstetrician arrived, I told her what was going to happen. ‘Barbara,’ I said, ‘we haven’t met but let me tell you how it’s going to be. We won’t be doing an epidural. And we won’t be having a caesarean.’
‘You’re about to have your baby,’ Barbara said. ‘There’s no time for any of that. I’m just going to rupture your membranes.’
‘Don’t do that,’ I said in a panic. ‘It will speed up the labour.’
‘The membranes are the only thing holding the baby in,’ she said, exasperated at my failure to grasp the simplicity of the situation. ‘Birth is imminent.’
Otis was born just a few minutes after that. He was lifted up onto my chest, where he stayed for the next hour because nobody had a mind to take him away.
I tell this as a funny story, the story of my labour with Otis, that here I was about to give birth but still not quite sure I was in labour. I tell it as a funny story. But it’s not so funny really.
If my body betrayed me during my labour with Otis, if it lied about what was happening, who could blame it? My body knew, as none of the rest did—not Dr Barbara, not Maureen, not Louise or David, or even me in my mind. My body knew, as no one else knew, that to go on to that place of birth was the most dangerous thing; that birth is where the real pain begins.
Our old townhouse belongs to friends who have their own baby now. When I visit I remember everything. It’s as if my whole body is loose and warm and free again, surely for the first time since baby Ruth was born. A family of butcher-birds raised their young in a tree in our bushland park two, perhaps three years running while were there. We fed them from our veranda, to the chagrin of our greener neighbours. When Otis was tiny, those nightjars, mother and baby, sat in the tree outside his window. They made him safe, I believed, although I’ve since learned that nightjars and owls are dumb not wise—that’s just PR—and could not keep a child safe.
Otis brought baby Ruth back to me, in his way, made me know finally what I’d lost when I handed my child to strangers, what I could never ever get back, and the act for which I cannot atone, the life I must let go of in order to live the life that’s now mine.