Memoir
It seems I shall never have another baby, but I cannot quite let go of it. Still I have this longing, still this senseless beating in my mind of wishing for what’s impossible; not just my age, though definitely that, but also my partner, his age, the age of his children… It is all just not: not going to be, not going to happen, not possible. I try to concentrate on the child I have, and I am fiercely grateful for him; I remind myself of the choices I made all through my adult life that led to this and precisely not to my having more than one child. Still each month when I am in my fertile phase, never mind that I am forty-four and would be very unlikely to conceive; still I go through this mourning and this almost anger at my body that it still longs for what it can’t have.
I decide to do a ritual to honor this longing properly, yes, but also to put it to rest. It feels so repetitive and undying that I decide on a repeated ritual; I will do it every month at the full moon for three months. I am at a part of the circle that seems perfect: moving into my old nemesis, the North-West, the position I used to dread and still have a healthy respect for. If I do the ritual for three months, it will take the whole downward swing of the wheel: the North-West, West, and South-West.
I go to a toyshop, a place I haven’t visited for a few years since my son grew past that age of wanting wooden animals and craft kits. For him I now visit games shops and search on the Internet for books by obscure authors, but for myself I go into a toy shop and scry along the shelves. I find them eventually in a section of plastic boxes filled with knickknacks: tiny dolls. They are cheap and naked pink plastic but there are few different ones, and I pick out three—not paying much attention to my choice because, after all, when you have a baby you don’t get to choose red hair or brown, boy or girl. I buy them and put them into my pocket; I don’t want them in a bag but close to me.
At home I put two of them on the altar, nestled among other things, not obvious. The third I keep with me in my bra or pocket or under my pillow at night, nearly as close to me as a real baby would be. I don’t feel anything especially as I am doing all this; necessity, perhaps. As if I’ve got on a train and now I’m just watching the scenery go past. I don’t really think of the tiny doll as a baby, even a potential baby or a missed-out-on baby, just a tiny toy I am keeping close. I don’t think of it as having its own life or will or interests, though perhaps I feel it has a part of my longing with it.
The direction I’m in is one of sacrifice: to make sacred with one’s gifts to the gods. Perhaps because I’ve been watching it so closely, even courting it, it doesn’t seem to hold the unpleasant shock or level of surprise I’ve often had in this direction—that kind of surprise where the rug is pulled out from under your feet, the volcano explodes, or there’s a devastating flood. This time I’m pulling the rug out myself and there’s a kind of satisfaction that this might be equal to what the position demands. It feels clear and simple and not the kind of thing to discuss with anyone else.
I find a day when I can drive out to the direction without anyone missing me or wondering where I’ve gone. Since I’m holding this direction for the circle it would be normal to visit it, but I don’t feel like answering questions and certainly not like having anyone else along. As I drive out to the foot of the mountain I’m in a quiet space, an inner zone that allows for recognition of the traffic laws, correct driving and navigation, but not much else. I’m not thinking; I’ve gone into another realm.
I’ve made a little bed for my doll, or I guess you could call it a coffin. It’s a matchbox covered in red paper. I thought about putting fabric in there, like a real coffin, but that seemed suffocating in so small a space and not what I wanted anyway. I’ve folded some fern fronds into it and some tiny feathers, the colored ones from rainbow lorikeets—those birds so noisy at dusk they fill the town with an immensely loud chattering as they settle themselves for the night. Their downy feathers are tipped with red, orange, and yellow. It reminds me of those fairy tales of tiny children—Thumbelina or the Gum Nut Babies—though this baby is even smaller. It’s still resting in my pocket, not yet given over to the box.
I arrive at the car park. It’s always crowded, cars full of walkers determined to reach the top. Almost no one walks along the little side path over the stream and into the forest. The path doesn’t go very far, and before it ends I see a setting of tall trees just above me on the slope. You could call it a grove, if a grove was big enough to hold only one person. When I’m in there, crouched down at the base of the trees—and they have tall, straight trunks with fibrous, reddish bark, with no branches for twenty feet up—I could be one of the tiny children as well, so small am I compared to them.
The trees around are holding me so close—three in front in a tight triangle I am wedged into and two more behind my back—that I almost feel I don’t need to cast a circle; they have cast one for me and cast it long ago and will be holding it long after I leave. A good place to leave my little one guarded, surrounded, and buried in magic. I get out my compass and set it down. I have offerings as well, a flower from the garden and a piece of fruit. I call out silently to each direction, not to their names but to the places.
I call to the small beach with the waves that crash in; the cape with its rocks, fresh air, and dolphins; to the mouth of the river where it meets the sea; to the long beach heading north, lonely except for sea birds and fishermen; to the lookout and that height, much lower than I am now but where—unlike here—you can see everything. Here you can see nothing except itself. I whisper to this place, the one I am in, and then stretch my mind out further again to the lake with the swans, to the bora ring with its mysteries, and to the waterfall endlessly gliding into the round pool within the circle of rock walls.
I call to the center, the labyrinth, that metaphor for the inner realms, and I am in there now, in my own mythic realm. I start to sing a little song; I am making it up—I don’t think about the words, they are simple and there and then gone. I shift forward, still sitting on the ground, and begin to dig a hole with my hands. The soil is soft, not even really soil; it’s shredded bark and leaf mold and debris from all the moist, crumbly things that come before soil. I’m digging between two of the trees, right up close in the North-West of my tiny circle; the North-West of the North-West. I don’t expect to get very far into the ground but I get a hand’s depth or so, dirt packing under my fingernails and into the creases of skin, and then I’m stopped by rootlets.
I take out my matchbox and the tiny doll from my pocket. It’s been traveling with me a few weeks by now, and I feel an attachment that’s more to do with having cared for it, kept track of where it is, and kept it in my mind than any emotion about it or about babies I might want to have or that I’m not going to have. It does seem a little grim—not placing it in the box, where it looks like it belongs, but sliding closed the lid—I don’t like to think of it staring at a piece of cardboard forever and of course its eyes are fixed open. I slide the box out from its casing again and turn the doll sideways so it is facing a piece of fern and feather instead; that seems much better. I fold the springy fern over its body and slide the box shut.
I’m still singing quietly to myself as one might sing to a baby, a baby that was nearly asleep. I wedge the box down into the hole I made and fill it in with light dirt, carcasses of leaves, and odd, hard bits of undecomposed bark or stick. The trees seem more aware of me or I am more aware of them now I have given them a task, involved them in this working, and designated them the guardians of this piece of my spell. They are immense compared to me; compared to the size of that tiny doll, they are planetlike—immense angels, vast and unknowable.
I do think, in an abstract way, of actual babies, but they seem very distant whereas this little buried doll that won’t ever come to life seems much closer. I am supposed to be burying my hopes for a baby, putting an end to them, but here in the forest they don’t feel as if they have an end or particularly need one; they seem just another link on the chain of my life, and this ritual is a part of that link. I think of the doll’s brother and sister waiting for me at home. I’ll spend the rest of this month with no little one in my pocket or by my bed, and then when we turn the wheel again and I move into the West, I’ll pick one of them up and keep it close to me for a few weeks before I take it out to the dam and leave it there with the black swans.
I can’t exactly say what I feel when I leave that place. I don’t release the circle I cast but leave it held by the trees or to sink gradually into the soil surrounding my sacrifice, my little doll, a thread of my life I won’t be having. I am quietened, even quieter than when I drove here. The trees have given me that, with their height and the otherness of their life, with their ability to guard a piece of myself, to stay there watching over my baby who’s buried at their feet among their roots. I think maybe the essence of my gift will pass into them and that little thought of an unborn soul will touch them in some way they might not have known otherwise. It feels safe as well as sacred, and I feel alone as I drive away.