THERE WAS A STORY IN the newspaper a while back about a mother who was out jogging with her baby in a stroller. She stopped along a riverside track because her phone rang.
When the woman finished her call and turned, the baby was gone. She searched the track, the roadway and then called the police. ‘My baby has been taken!’ she screamed into the phone. The police found the child, the stroller, in the river twenty minutes later. The child was dead.
My friends were critical of the woman. ‘She didn’t put on the brake, you know,’ one said, with anger in her eyes. ‘How could you walk away from a stroller?’ another said. Still another friend said: ‘Oh, please. The first thing you’d do would be to check the stroller hadn’t slipped; you wouldn’t think someone had stolen your baby.’ (The woman was well known. It was not out of the question that someone would take her baby.)
I am floored by their hatred, their damnation of the woman. I understand it too. We all wish we had a foot on that stroller brake, a hand on the strap, an arm around the child. We see him slip away into the river and think, No, no, this must not be. I understand these women want to save a child.
But I am not with them. I think of the mother with sadness, for whatever she says on national television afterwards, I know her life will not be the life it would have been. It will not resemble that other life in any way. She is already someone new. She has grown a different skin.
I look at the photograph of Otis and me on the beach, the one David took at Byron. On that weekend, for the first time since Otis was small, I started to believe I might be all right. We would walk along the beach in the evening and the sea and wind would take my tears and make them less important, part of the afternoon rather than something to be revered or feared. Otis would run and look for shells and jellyfish. David was taking photographs again.
I can look at that photo of Otis and me and place us in a context, understand that I might have been the woman who gave her baby to strangers, but that I was also this other woman who had a child she could love and care for.
I spent a long wasted time wishing this hadn’t happened, wishing I’d been more self-preserving, self-respecting or whatever other girls were. I never quite knew how other girls managed their lives so well. I have never been able to manage my life well. I did wish I could have done something differently to stop what happened to me from happening.
My right leg used to give me messages. It took a long time for me to hear them. I listen to my body now, the pain behind my heart that tells me to let go, the ache in my jaw that tells me I am angry.
I have learned, too, to say sorry to Otis, to tell him I was wrong, unfair. I have had to say sorry a lot these past few years. I am getting quite good at it.
I would say to him as often as I’d think to, When I am sad, it is nothing to do with you. It is not your fault.
One day, when David found me crying, Otis came up behind him and said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, it’s nothing to do with you. It is not your fault.’
David has put meaning to the phrases we never included in our marriage vows: ‘in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad’. He has taken the weight of our family onto his slight shoulders and continued walking down the road, with me, with Otis. He has been with me over twenty years and says he doesn’t look like going anywhere else. At times I have told him to leave. I have said to get out of the house. I have told him that he doesn’t understand me, for he doesn’t, and how could he? How could anyone who wasn’t there? He stays with me and waits out the storm, tells me I’m right, he doesn’t understand, but he’ll do anything he can to help.
Sometimes still it is too much to have him near me. My teeth chatter. My body shudders with fear. I cannot abide another being beside me. But eventually, mostly, I can bear him nearby and then his hand on my back, him holding me in his arms. I take comfort in his touch. It is another kind of surrender, this finding my lover again.
I have nothing to offer women whose children are gone, not even that loss passes. This has not been my experience. It has not passed. I wrote in a letter to my daughter that while facing great pain has brought many more tears, it also brings the beauty of the world more sharply into focus. And while this might be true, some days it is not enough.
I have been on the internet to google women like me. They are crazy, most of them, crazy like me. They list the crimes against themselves, take governments and churches to court, write theses, invent terms like ‘unresolved grief’. They cycle on the bikeway listening to ‘The Long Road’ and yell and cry along.
I have learned less than I would have liked given how long I have been here in the past with baby Ruth. I have learned this: at those times when I can look at my life without guilt or blame or anger, when I can even be kind, I have found a measure of my power. The hardest thing for me has been to face that at some level this was a choice, a choice I made. Perhaps it wasn’t for others, who were coerced, threatened, frightened into complying. They are welcome to the high moral ground. I am not among them there.
After we moved out of Thomas Street, we rented a brick townhouse that looked towards the city. At that time, we were still planning to build a new house on the Thomas Street site. Once we moved into the rental and I saw how much happier it was, we put Thomas Street on the market. When it sold, I started looking for a new house.
I hadn’t planned even to look at the house we eventually bought because it faced west at the back—hot in Brisbane—and was on the southern side of a hill, so wouldn’t get the predominant north-easterly breezes. I was only in the street because I was looking at the house opposite. The house we bought was open at the time so I went to look.
I spent five minutes in the house, drove home so that David could look while it was still open, called the agent that night, met him at the house on Monday morning with Otis so Otis could give his vote and then made an offer.
The agent hadn’t known David was my husband when David had gone through the house, so when I said that since my five-year-old son wanted to buy the house, I wanted the agent to take my offer to the owners, he asked me, casually, did my husband know I was offering on a house? I think he wondered about my sanity.
We love our little house. It is a house you can come home to.