DAVID AND I HAD ALWAYS lived on terraces with trees. The hot brick unit we rented in Bellevue Terrace had a big old gum waving in the bedroom windows, promising breezes. We bought our first apartment in Stanley Terrace because it overlooked a giant fig in the park below. We traded up to our Prospect Terrace townhouse with its child hazards because it overlooked a bushland park.
When Otis came along, we made our townhouse as safe as we could. We had an architect design a retro-balustrade for the open staircase. We put shutters on the mezzanine and fixed a lockable screen to the door leading to the veranda with its low railing onto pavement.
But in the months after I hurt Otis with the stroller clip, I started to think we should move. It began as a vague notion and, over time, it became increasingly important. My body, which I’d always been able to rely on to do what it was told, set out on its own, reclaiming its right to have a say in things.
I would find myself on the floor like the first time, shaking and crying uncontrollably, with no idea what had set me off or what would calm me. I never knew when it would happen, where it came from, or when it would end. It frightened me.
I hadn’t felt at home in my body for years, although I also hadn’t been aware of that fact. Suddenly, now, I knew I wasn’t at home in my body and it was terrifying.
I started to believe that if we moved we would be all right. We were a family. A boy needed a yard and dirt. We should find a real house, a proper home, and I would be all right.
We searched for a house in a terrace. We searched the internet and then, on weekends, we spent hours walking through other people’s houses, finding out what books they read. I decided I wanted an old house because Louise had an old house. Old houses don’t have the poisons of new houses, the formaldehyde and other chemicals that leach out of new building materials, I said to David. Otis will be safe in an old house. There will be other children, and every weekend we’ll wear old business shirts as smocks and paint each other’s noses while we laugh uncontrollably at what fun we’re having.
David was not so sure.
After a year of searching, Brisbane was at the top of a boom and houses were even more expensive than when we started. Our townhouse had sold and we didn’t have enough money to buy a house in the areas where we were looking, let alone one in a terrace with trees. The houses we looked through were not flash or well-to-do, just inner-city. Inner-city had become the place to be, the real estate agents told me. Traffic, they said. People are giving up their outlying mansions so they don’t have to sit in traffic.
When I was pregnant with Otis, I’d been to see a woman named Stace who did pregnancy massage in the kahuna style, a Hawaiian treatment based on movement and breath. I thought it would help me to get ready for labour. After Otis was born, I stopped seeing Stace, but in the week after I hurt him with the stroller clip, she contacted me, out of the blue, to say she had moved. She wanted to give me her new number, her message said.
I have always been a cynic when it comes to spirituality, both the traditional kind that incorporates incense and the sacred host, those small circles of dry bread that stuck to the roof of my mouth in childhood, and the new age kind that leads all sorts of practitioners to tell me the most outrageous things about my irises, auras and past lives. I am the daughter of two journalists. My father schooled me in scepticism. I can laugh with anyone who cares to about crazy therapies. My jokes will probably be funnier than theirs.
I was this cynic until I hurt Otis with the stroller clip and then I was willing to do anything to get my life back. I was not a woman who was running with the wolves. I was limping through life, hoping no one would notice.
Stace broke her back in her life as a circus performer, recovered and studied bodywork. Before I saw her, I’d been deaf to my body, or my body had been mute.
I learned slowly. This is one of the things I learned: if your body needs to cry or make noise or punch the air or roll up in a ball and shiver, and instead you accommodate a small child—watch Play School, read stories, go for a little walk—or otherwise ignore what your body is telling you, your body will not stop trying to tell you. It will make you tired, more tired than you have ever felt. The weight will press down on you all day and into the night. It will make you unreasonable, like a bomb about to go off. The bomb will go off.
In our sessions, while Stace moved over my body, soothing, untying the knots, testing, breathing and singing, I often did nothing but cry. I howled out loud sometimes, tears springing from my eyes, snot falling from my nose to the floor, then shed quieter, saltier tears that brought a measure of relief. At these times, I was nothing but the water of my tears, a long river. I had no idea I had so much crying in me.
Stace had Dr Seuss’s fox in sox tattooed on her arm. I’d see it sometimes as she worked. Her dog Bea, who used to lie on the floor of the massage room, died in the time we were meeting. She got Bea’s pawmark tattooed on her foot and I used to look at that too, through the hole in the massage table.
I learned that my body’s pain often had a message. I started to talk to my body, to my right leg, to my back muscles, to my heart. Tell me, I would say, tell me what the matter is. And my body would speak. It may be that other forms of grief are locked somewhere else in us, but babies are in our bodies. They form there, they emerge from there, they remain connected there our whole lives. It was my body that needed to tell me, to help me learn what I had done.
Although I didn’t know it at first, I had gone into the past to find baby Ruth, the child I gave to strangers. I would come back changed. It would take three years.