Anniversary Labours

Adventures with Average Baby

This spring-and-summer pregnancy is already twice the length of its winter predecessor, and as different, thereby, as two things of the same kind can be.  Not least among these differences was the way in which we passed the first eleven weeks in a kind hopeful lockdown, wary to put too much pressure on the future to carry hope that might yet be redundant again.

The brain, the spine, the beating heart that was our gift before Christmas opened the door to a different kind of experience, territory as unknown as the very notion of being pregnant was the first time around.  The tremendous good fortune whereby my morning sickness (a most inadequate moniker) receded by New Year has given me back my old ability to think about anything other than how terrible I feel (and the accompanying certainty that nobody understands or cares sufficiently) and something of a hopeful forward-gaze.

July is the start of Terra Nullius (or hitherby dragons, as hungrymama so elegantly put it recently), a blank, unscheduled space in which we all try to do the best we can with the resources that we have.  Until then, there is work, family and puppies to which to tend, not to mention the general stretching and expansion of me.  And today we had our anatomy scan, with its miscellany of organs, bones and limbs, all of which were present and average-sized, sweet words to our reasonable ears.  Against, it seems, the proprieties of the general public, we also now know which sex to gender.

Anniversaries

Our winter pregnancy had the due date of Valentine’s Day 2010, which caught my imagination before and after the fetus died.  This may have been the lasting trace of A.S. Byatt’s novel Still Life*, which I read in 1997 and whose tragic mother, Stephanie, bore a daughter on Valentine’s Day.  (The brutal dénouement of that novel changed permanently my relationship with narrative fiction, but that is another story for another post.)  However, it may also have been that as an anniversary baby myself, I liked the idea of having another with a feast day for a birthday.  The approach of this date in this new year has been a hard thing, despite carrying that lost child’s successor, and symbolised in just one or two objects: the first scan that sits in the online file in my name and a toy that the señor bought after the first news and set aside after the second.

We planned our own small memorial at a juvenile family grave , to put aside the toy among the elements as we did my hospital admission bracelets last winter.  This had to be brief by necessity as I was to be on labour watch over Fern, herself drawing closer to her own lying in.  The pressure of being a small dog carrying four whelps intervened, however, and my wee bitch delivered on Saturday, a few days shy of her due date, the first pup succumbing to the still birth of a stuck whelp early in the morning and the remaining three taking post-Caesarean breaths in the early afternoon.  Newborn puppies do not have flip-top heads, but the sight of their breathing inevitably makes me think of that old image, while their lungs inflated with air whose efficient respiration belied their litter-brother’s sad earlier fate.

By these events pups live and dead superseded a lost baby and our attention turned completely and necessarily to the recuperation of Fern and her care of the puppies, who thus far thrive.  The loss of a whelp is a common enough event in the animal world, but does not I think get any easier for those involved in husbandry.  I do not presume to anthropomorphise my dogs (other than in jest), but mammals we all are.  Handling the stillborn pup, including a long attempt at resuscitation, was something like occupational therapy for my next-day anniversary which we did not observe as planned.  What if, I said to the señor, we gave that memorial toy to the surviving puppies when they are a little bigger.  That, he said, is an idea.

The Pregnant Imagination

The estimable Julie has made a recent post at The Hand Mirror discussing which cultural objects, particularly films, might best be avoided during pregnancy.  (This follows her earlier sceptical charting of one MP’s catalogue of a nostalgic utopia in which pregnant women ate all the blue cheese and cold rice salads for which they could wish, and no-one’s fetus, presumably, ever succumbed to listeriosis.)  I have been thinking about this in relation to my own experiences, and the changes in what I do and don’t enjoy in art and culture, since this pregnancy began.

Most notably, I cannot tolerate the gothic and the dark I once so loved.  I say this as someone who once knew most of the words to “O’Malley’s Bar”, and who thought Election 2 the superior of its predecessor precisely because of the abattoir massacre scene that made its lead character so abhorrent.  Can’t, won’t, don’t want to see that anymore.  Along with this, my taste for conceptual art seems also to have receded.  If I go near a gallery, I want the bright colours of modernist abstraction or regionalist plumbing of people and places.  This coincides with a retreat from ambiguity more generally.  Those who have to read my academic prose might say, about time, but I no longer see the perfect performance as one that suggests more than one thing (Billie Holiday’s version of “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” still excepted).

Inevitably, perhaps, my imagination already dwells in a world of bright colours, small objects, and nouns relentlessly appended with diminutive suffixes: here are the puppies nursing Fernie; there are the baby’s leggies on the scan.  I spit demands at the long-suffering señor, who makes toast, cleans the kitchen and keeps calm in the face of a domestic capriciousness that lightly appals me even as I say the words.  (Case in point: we came home from North Otago to find Jaws the featured film of the evening.  I insisted not only that it be turned off, but also that a suitable substitute be found; eventually we located Casablanca.  Having achieved the correct aesthetic balance in the living room, I went to bed, unaware until the señor quietly pointed it out of the fuss made over television I didn’t intend to watch.)  I cannot be ironic with any efficacy, the psyche’s response, I suspect, to the fact of carrying a literal baby.  All this is a remaking of identity, and not a minor one, but to be frank I don’t care.  I’ll wallow in ballads and colours and puppies and look hopefully to things being okay.

Well, I kept thinking about what the weatherman said
And if the voices of the living can be heard by the dead
Well, the day is gonna come when we find out
In some kind of way I take a little comfort from that …

‘Cause people often talk about being scared of change
But for me I’m more afraid of things staying the same
‘Cause the game is never won
By standing in any one place for too long.

*(This volume is one of a tetralogy about the Potter family, which tempted me to call this post “[Harry] Potter and the Pregnant Imagination”. However, even a limited wit should know its limits.)