I am from the streets of Queen[s]land, Australia

I’ve emerged from the last fourteen weeks as if from a haze of nausea-induced amnesia, homicidal crankiness receding as the passenger within shifts its focus to consuming all the calories I ingest.  This bilious mélange of ailments has given me some insight as to why earlier societies might think women were cursed by god or gods.  As someone who has lived a brain-in-a-jar existence for much of her adult life, it has been a rude shock to be thrown back into continual consciousness of the body in this way.  You’ve read enough of these pages to infer what it did to my mental health as well.

However.  The first trimester is laid to rest, its reward the permanently arresting images on the scan, and my midwife, with the wisdom of a warrior-princess, has set me on a better course with iron (as opposed to ironic) supplements and all that must also be taken with them.  This has helped a week-long transition into feeling a bit better.  I had not thought since childhood illnesses of the pleasure that inheres in no longer feeling like rubbish.  Walking around, eating, digesting, waking up without panicking are restored to the status of pleasure.

This is not before time.  I go back to work on Monday and there is a lot — too much, perhaps — for me to do.  Thanks to the offices of my brideswoman Mrs. K., who knows how to frisk a shopping rack while I stand and watch, I also have suitably comfortably-fitting duds in which to make my return.  Some switch in identity has happened in shifting to clothes cut for the gravid body.  I feel the passenger’s existence in a way I didn’t when it’s presence had me retching and sleeping and grizzling as s/he may one day do.  The fact that its home is now rising above my pelvic bones like a solid, slow-moving satellite, no doubt contributes too.

Still, my erstwhile fragility stalks me with the persistence of memory.  A short visit to Brisbane at the end of November, intended for work and rest, was probably the worst time.  Steamed in the city heat after the dry, bushfire-scented air of Toowoomba, the señor and I staggered round museums and art galleries as our energy flagged and my nausea churned.  Stories of all kinds emerged from the museum exhibits (the most engaging perhaps the evidence of indigenous revivals, both cultural and economic, in the interior).  Popular culture was there too, however, most notably in the young brothers Gibb, recording a single as a trio of boys.  Their fame elsewhere was a retrospective light on their gawky, toothy faces.

When last night I sat on the couch in front of the television, still feeling the narcotic effects of seeing the layette harvestmother is collecting (tiny little socks!  Little jumpers!) I was reminded twice over of the Queensland vacation and what was exhibited therein by this SNL parody.  Brittle, moody, quick to anger, the two surviving brothers are given voice by Fallon and Timberlake that is applied with a kind of cruel love.  And there she is in Fallon’s parody, my first trimester self, mad, hurt and demanding attention, here signalled through a filter out of time and place but with the right notes of dis-ease, paranoia and dislocation. “I once gave a kangaroo a heart attack just by staring at it!” There is no relief for the ego.

I look forward to analogising for you the mental shenanigans of the next three months.

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