Mum@large

 

It was always that clear, peaceful morning. And, at Spring Hill, the sun rose over tall, thin houses splayed cartoon-like around the curve of a hill. For me, Spring Hill was always the morning Rachel was made.

Made might seem a bit dramatic. You might think this is a love story. Well, it is and it isn’t.  Rachel was made in a test tube, or a Petri dish, or whatever it is they use in IVF.

 

We don’t say much as the Hilux makes it way along Fairfield Road to Spring Hill. What is there to say?

“Don’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t work,” says David.

There is a silence for a while.

“I’m not expecting anything,” I say.

It’s true. I’m expecting nothing. We have a long history of nothing. Nothing time number 1. Nothing time number 2. Nothing times number 3, 4, 5. No expectation of this time, time number 6, five years later.

“What if it works?” I ask.

“Don’t think about that,” he says. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just get this done.”

Okay. Let’s just get this done.

It is, as I said before, an amazing morning. We find the hospital quite simply, despite expecting our usual bungling and arguing over street names and directions, find the waiting room, put on the hospital outfits that do nothing for our dignity, sit with the other men and women trying to look as if they are waiting for advice on a nagging cough. I’m not looking closely at them, but despite that, the room is stiff with long-term anxiety.

It has been years since we went through this last time. Somehow, that makes me, and I think David, able to look at these other people with some pity and an understanding of the awfulness of this process. It should be the most natural thing in the world, and it isn’t.

It seems a long wait. Perfectly well people in their hospital gowns drinking tea.

And then the room. Well, I can’t really remember the room, or the hospital, just the view. It’s Spring Hill. I’ve always felt a connection with Spring Hill. There was a first boyfriend and a bit of an embarrassing, but memorable night. How young and serious we were. Later there were some of the early nights with David at the Astor and our hand-in-hand coffees as we delayed going back to our houses.

This is with me as I look out that high window. How can part of a city look like that? There is not a person, not a dog, not a sleeping cat. All the houses are gold. All shades of gold. They are lying in the folds of the fabric of the hill.

If it has to happen like this, maybe this isn’t so bad.

David is discussing racing with the doctor. It’s Saturday, and today’s preparations had to be negotiated around the scratchings.

“Well, it’s gotta be a certainty,” he says, nervously shifting about while he decides whether it’s bloke etiquette to hold my hand.

“But it’s back from a spell,” says the doctor.

This is my show, isn’t it? Am I here with my legs spread to play second fiddle to a horse?

“This will just take a minute,” the doctor says.

It does take just a minute. All that pomp and ceremony, that dressing for the occasion, sitting around trying to be in the right frame of mind, yoga etc and etc, for just one minute. One minute that, one way or another, will change everything.

On the way home, we buy a pie for breakfast. I’m trying to spend as little time standing up as possible. Despite all the science, it seems the little miracles can just drop right back out.

 

This time we’re resolved to tell no one. No one. So I tell my friend Lou at the gym a few days before we go in to the hospital. Just one friend.

She is suitably excited.

I’ve cried a lot in public places over this stuff, stopping short of howling following the loud policy discussion of “artificial insemination” at the MBF claims desk. Tell one person, answer just one question.

 

A week later I have a dream. I am at a market. There are stalls dotted about the place. It isn’t a big market – the stalls are few and spread about under the trees.

A little bit away from the other stalls there is a woman with a table in front of her. There isn’t much on it. I take a look over what is there, and the woman – she isn’t old, but not young, and she is wearing a scarf – leans towards me with her hand stretched out.

“This is for you,” she says, and opens her palm. On it is a very small seed.

“What is it?” I say.

“A mustard seed.”

In my mind, I can see that small seed growing. It is a small, green, green sapling.

I wake up. It is the most vivid dream I have ever had. After letting it rest behind my eyes for a while, I take a look in my dream book. A seed. Pregnancy.

“And,” says my friend Ruth when I tell her about the dream – well maybe I told two friends about the IVF – “what about the parable of the mustard seed?”

That’s right. The parable of the mustard seed. It’s a bit far back in my Catholic upbringing, so I dig out the Bible I bought to find a suitable bit for our wedding. And the other version I bought when I couldn’t find a bit in the first one I liked.

The parable of the mustard seed. The smallest seed will grow into the biggest tree, and it will shelter all the animals and plants of the forest. At least that’s how I remember it now.

Some of the worry eases.

And another thing, there was only one seed. Two embryos, but only one seed.

 

There isn’t room in our house for a baby. The rooms are crammed with files and furniture and pictures and all the things 15 years together brings you. You can’t walk from the kitchen to the table without hitting your hip on something.

There isn’t enough money for a baby. There is no logic in it. I can just admit to myself I’m not even sure that’s what I want. What if it doesn’t work?

What if it does?

Are we strong enough for this? Who is going to look after it? How will we pay the bills? Will people understand when a couple safe from this sort of thing become a nuclear family? Where will we put it? What about David’s older kids? Will it look alright? Will it be alright? Am I too old? Will my kid look at me and wonder what right I had to leave it so late?

 

There are plenty of things to do in two weeks. Go to work and back on the train. Do the groceries, clean the toilet, clean the bathroom. During these things, I reach nervously for my luck. Take a good look at the river as you go over on the train. Put your shoes and socks on in the right order, right sock, right shoe, left sock, left shoe.

Try not to let the person sitting opposite notice you’re mumbling to yourself and craning to get a last glimpse of the water past their head. They might have troubles of their own.

The chant isn’t for this to happen. I’m too scared for that. The chant is please let the right thing happen.

It is running through my head as I walk – ridiculously carefully – on the paths near our house, get the right kind of bread, drive home from the train station. Please let the right thing happen and, while you’re at it, don’t let me fall, don’t let me eat the wrong thing, don’t let me stress too much. If this goes wrong, don’t let it be my fault.

There could be something happening inside there. Is there a buzzing? I swear I felt a buzzing one time. Best not to think about it. All those people that tell you they know straight away, it must be crap.

We avoid personal conversations. It is safer to talk about car problems and what’s on TV. What is on TV is show after show about babies. Babies being born, babies dying, babies having massive abnormalities, people having multiple babies. I really know nothing about babies.

David is 58. He is bewildered, but I can’t think about that. We no longer have time left to agonise over this. We have been through this five times. Five times I have felt stupid. Five times David has not known what to do.

We have bought nothing, made no plans.

 

The month before, it is our 10-year wedding anniversary and David’s birthday. We go to Cairns where we lived together for 10 years. We have a party in a pub in the middle of a cane paddock, the cane toads watching in the pools of light at the open doors and insects swarming around the lights.

The humidity is like a pair of moist arms.

I love this place. I love waking in the morning to the old timber doors open to the verandah, the tops of the banana and palm trees moving gently, the sound of Doug the publican knocking a broom about in the bar downstairs.

We already know that in a month’s time, we will be giving this one last try. I can’t explain the secret, warm feeling this gives me while we celebrate loudly with the people who know us so well. There seems a whole history of our sorry IVF tale in this room. The people who have carefully not talked about it when that was what we needed, the friend who picked me up from the day clinic when I was distraught, the one who organised a few days off for us when it all got a bit much. The ones who looked the other way when I’d clearly spent the morning before my shift crying on a park bench in front of the casino, sitting bolt upright and trying to be as silent as I could. The ones who weren’t that interested or were just plain embarrassed and helped put it back into perspective.

We’re not telling them. Any of them.

I know they’re not thinking about this. I know their minds are on how they’re getting home, what’s on tomorrow, whether or not David and I have aged, who the good-looking sort is in the corner.

 I know David isn’t even thinking about this. There is probably nothing further from his mind as he has another rum with his racing mates and tells the same stories they have told each other countless times. Telling people isn’t a decision with him, it just doesn’t cross his mind. Knowing our differences so well, it doesn’t matter.

This has come from something other than myself. There is more at work here than me.

A public work disaster is fresh in everyone else’s mind.

“That was so unfair what they did to you,” my friend Milly says. “I couldn’t believe it. I’ve told everyone you’re the most honest person I know. I don’t think you could tell a white lie to your mother-in-law.”

We laugh.

“Are you alright?” Jen asks. “You feeling okay about it?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve got a job. Life’s okay.”

What can I say? I can’t say I’m feeling great about it, but I am. Because exactly when I was feeling a doubt to shake the years of knowing myself, I remembered two frozen embryos, sitting 1000km away.  Two things too small to see. And it didn’t seem impossible. In fact, it seemed incredible that we had just left them there.

Twice we had both signed and had witnessed the “defrosting” forms to save paying the fee every year. Twice I hadn’t sent it, although I couldn’t have said why. Not until that minute did I think we would use them. And, as this possibility sat there unfolding, the postman arrived.

He handed me a bill for the frozen embryos – the first in more than a year.

Sappy, I know, but that’s how it happened.

How clear can you make it? I asked, looking up, although I’m not sure at what. It was the same physical jolt when someone seems to give you a boot to say “get up” in the morning and boom, all of a sudden you’re with the program and in the day.

“What do you think about it?” I asked David.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that lately, and I think we should give it another try.” He’d been to the pub. Even to my over-heated ears this sounded like rubbish. Welcome rubbish. It sounds even more so now. Thinking about it? David? Anyway, it suited the moment.

You might think it would be complicated to hook up with an IVF doctor. I did. I went about it as quickly as I could before I lost my nerve. But when I opened the phone book, there they were. One name stuck out more than the others. One phone call. One appointment. No delays. How soon would you like that, Madam?

So it is this boot up the bum I am nursing as I sit in a pub near Cairns and look at the friends who have stuck with us when our tragedy started to get tedious.

What if? I think.

 

Never do I get much past the “what if”. I haven’t allowed myself to look at my friends – my sister’s children – and imagine. It isn’t helpful. I had selected birthday and Christmas presents, keeping each child’s face and personality firmly in front of me.

There were always sideways looks as I stood at the bedside of a friend and nursed her new-born baby. Maybe I imagined it. That was never a problem. It was too far removed. My thinking had never got that far.

But there were the small children at the supermarket. Small, grubby fists reaching for chocolate bars, fat little legs, round cheeks and tired, cross mothers, who hadn’t had reason to look on every tantrum as good fortune. Just one child, the thought would sneak in, any one. Just one would do.

When that thought started to creep in, I knew it was time to stop.

 

David can’t hold back his excitement the night Mum and Dad come to visit. He has had a good talk with his own father and, somehow, years of untidy resentment on both sides has just gone. Fifty years earlier, he would have felt this way about a new slingshot. I can see the skinny, excited kid looking at me now.

He can’t wait to share this larger-than-life, panoramic day, this brief number of hours that will colour family occasions from here on.

We are both happy. Dangerously happy. The French doors are open onto the cool air of the verandah and - is it jasmine time? There seems to be a drift of jasmine about the house. We make a pact not to say anything to Mum and Dad about either the IVF or David’s Dad offering to help us in the future. That’s how far this “talk” has gone. David has no doubt he is firmly back in the family.

Mum and Dad have not even made it into the house before we have told them both bits of news. The four of us mill about excitedly, Mum, in her pink caftan, letting out periodic shrieks of excitement and waving her ringed fingers about.

Dad is suspiciously misty.

Then, as I knew it would, the fear descends. The looks are coming, furtively. There’s a lot of pain there I hadn’t suspected before, having firmly shut my eyes to any thought our – my - decisions were hurting anyone else. I’m sure they think I’m dancing on a tightrope on the edge of sanity. It has never really been like that. I cared more – and less – than other people thought.

“Every Mother’s Day, I don’t know whether to ring you,” my Dad says. That makes me cry. I’ve never even thought about that on Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is about Mum. I never wanted my Dad to be carrying that around.

“We hope for the best, Dad,” I say quietly.

We all laugh. This is our family motto. Not “Reach for the stars” or “Death before dishonour”. Our unambitious ancestors had “We hope for the best” emblazoned on the family shield.

“Vee hope for da best,” Mum repeats, in her best Dutch accent. Her family too have made this their motto. She grips me tightly.

 

Over and over in my dreams I am back at Spring Hill. I am in that room, looking out that window.

 

You get a pregnancy test along with your pessaries when you check out of the day hospital. It’s one of those things you don’t really know what to do with in the meantime. You can’t put it on display. You don’t want to put it anywhere too meaningless or too meaningful. If you are sensible, you put it where you can’t see it. On top of the fridge (will the heat affect it?), in the drawer beside the bed, in the pantry cupboard? What if you stuff it up – should you get another kit just in case?

I still know the feel of that kit through the brown paper packet.

I know they are very accurate. I know that even though you use two and then go out and buy another brand, they are not likely to tell you different stories.

 

More trains, more bridges, more shoes and socks. I can well remember this two weeks. The two weeks was always the hardest part of the deal.

 

Just one night to go. Maybe it won’t be accurate that early in the piece. I know that’s unlikely – why else would you be given that day to do the test? Why else have you reminded yourself daily for the past two weeks that yes, you might have heard stories home pregnancy tests can be accurate as early as the day after conception, but do it and you are setting yourself up for a fall. Don’t jinx it.

I can’t sleep. David is snoring and restless. I wish he couldn’t sleep either. Shouldn’t we be worrying about this together? I’m not sure he even remembers tomorrow is the day. I can’t bear for there to be four hours between me and the earliest possible time I could do this test.

We haven’t made any reference to this day. I am irritated by the weight of David’s leg flung across me, his toenail digging into the bottom of my right foot.

Then it is Saturday again. Radio TAB starts early and David is reading the paper, making his usual ruckus about turning the pages and fidgeting with his legs. The two cats are dozing at the bottom of my side of the bed. It is barely light.

I wait vaguely for the phone to ring. Doesn’t the phone always ring with someone wanting a chat when you are about the embark on something? It doesn’t ring.

I open the bedside drawer and go to the toilet.

I try to take a small, solid piece of that Spring Hill morning with me. I think maybe when I get to open this kit, a bit of that view will be in there. Somehow, the edge of Willie Wonka’s golden ticket will be showing.

I do the business and sit the stick on the floor, trying to think of nothing. It’s undignified, sitting there with your pants around your ankles, waiting for your luck to change. The floor needs a clean. There are bits of fluff and dirt on the white tiles. There’s a long crack where I had too many red wines and fell into the wall two years before.

There’s nothing on the stick. No second line.

Oh well.

That’s exactly what I feel. Not grief. Not despair, not sadness. Just, oh well.

I guess the last five years have done some seasoning.

I get up and go back into the bedroom.

“Well?” David asks nervously over the top of the newspaper. He is clearly waiting for me to bawl.

I go to hand him the stick. I take another look.

“Does that look like a line to you?” I ask.

 

From time to time, I work at an office at Spring Hill in a high, quiet room overlooking the thin buildings marching up and down the hills. I don’t see much sign of the city – I have to crane my neck to see the people below. The view is still. It is so still that if I reached forward and threw a smooth stone, I would see the ripples extending out one ring after another across the buildings to the sky. Of course the window is sealed, so I can’t try.

I’ve never yet been there early enough to watch that particular brand of gold creep across the planes and secret corners of all those buildings.

A week ago, though, looking up from the document I was working on, I looked across at the apartments opposite. Each of the square compartments, tidily  presented to this window, holds its own set of lives. Each identical balcony has a Sesame Street point of difference – one has outdoor furniture, one has clothes drying racks. This one has a bicycle and mother-in-law tongues in ugly pots along the edge, that one has two old sofas. One or two have nothing. That’s not a sign there’s no one there, I tell myself. Some people like to live with nothing.

Sometimes you can see a cleaner silently at work. Sometimes it’s a child playing the other side of balcony railings, or a couple having breakfast.

On this morning, a woman walked out onto a balcony a few floors below – but still clearly visible from my desk. She walked slowly, uncomfortably. She wore a long, loose, blue dress. Her Indian-black hair slid in a fat plait along her back. In her arms, she carried a baby not more than a few days old. A very small baby looking blindly about. Even at this distance, I could see a tiny red face, a piece of pink clothing, a shock of black hair.

A drying rack behind her held a row of hot pink singlets and white nappies.

She carried this girl as tenderly as the head of a dandelion, the small length of the baby pressed to her front.

A man followed her out – past 40, a paunch under his singlet, one hand on his hips and the other scratching thinning hair. He too looked at the child, following the woman around as she held her bundle this way and that. He did not touch either of them. The woman invited him to look, and look again, and eventually, he darted one of his hands out in a gesture of ownership. He flicked a hand over the tiny face.

After a while, he walked back through the sliding doors to the rest of his life – a television flickering in the background, a fan in the corner of the room.

The woman continued to sit in the very corner of the balcony.

She sat alone with her child.

Beneath – I was standing by this time - I noticed the traffic building at a light, two men hurrying, people having coffee.

The woman, though, was alone. She crooned soundlessly to the baby, touching her continually, rocking her.

She held her upright and looked into the baby’s face, buried her head in the soft dark hair - stayed perfectly still.

How clearly I remember.

The sun always came up over Spring Hill. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.