Code Green

Code Green.

Code Green.

Code Green.

The announcement echoes through the corridors from a tinny, crackling speaker. Masked nurses and orderlies, with their backs to the wall and concern in their eyes, rush to let my gurney through.

Time has stopped.

“Your heartbeat is dropping.”

Our heartbeats are dropping.

This liminal space. The in-between.

Together we stand on the edge of the light.

We glimpse the portal into darkness.

On the precipice of nothingness.

Out of the silence the electronic beeps return.

Your light is just too bright.

You are here.

Incised through seven layers of tissue, you have made your entry into the world.

You are screaming, covered in shit.

The midwives clean you. The thick sinewy cord, connecting the two of us is hacked with some blunt instrument by your shaking, crying father, but this doesn’t separate us for long.

On my chest, skin to skin, your tiny, gaping mouth crawls to my breast and you latch.

It is a perfect fit.

I breathe you in and with a contented sigh, all the carnage from the last 24 hours floats away into the fluorescently lit room.

It’s just you and me. Me and you.

It took all my life to meet you.

Was there ever a time before?

* * * * * *

In between teaching classes, I find a moment to go to the bathroom. I’m sitting on the toilet, when a sizeable bloody, blobby mass plops into the water.  I stare at it. Without hesitation, I plunge my bare hands into the bowl and hold it.

Just days ago, this had a heartbeat.

I consider wrapping it in toilet paper and taking it home with me, but I’m at school. I stand in the cubicle, holding this bloodied bundle, at a complete and total loss of what to do next.

An undetermined amount of time passes, and I unceremoniously plop it back into the toilet water.

I flush it down. Flushing my feelings down with it. I wash my hands, splash some cold water onto my stunned face and head back to class.

There is a scream-cry at the bottom of my throat, with nowhere to go.

In a daze, I teach my final class for the day. Pack up my desk in slow motion. Hop into my car and the scream-cry releases.

It is high-pitched and fervent. Ancient and ancestral. It disappears into the parking lot. This gravelled road of family-vans and sudden family-loss.

The tears flow. They don’t stop.

The sounds spitting from my mouth are primal and terrifying.

Ten weeks into this pregnancy, I have lost my baby.

I am a wild animal.

* * * * * *

Another season turns.

The fiery leaves of Autumn turn a darker shade of brown, urgently ushering in the bleak cold of winter. This will be our fourth winter but together we’ve weaved in and out of so many seasons.

I think back to before I knew you. Before I dreamed you into existence.

But the truth is I’ve always known you.

I think back to the loss.

Countless pregnancy tests.

Collecting them like treasure – two lines, one line, two lines…I think it’s two lines? Is that one line? No, it’s two lines!

As the days rolled into weeks rolled into months, rolled into trimesters.

One trimester down.

Two trimesters down.

Here comes the third Trimester.

Every bathroom visit, is an excursion in anxiety.

And breathe. Just breathe.

I think maybe everything will be fine.

Don’t get too excited.

Don’t get too attached.

Oh silly, silly girl, it’s far too late for that.

We’re in trouble now.

But maybe it will be fine?

The first kick inside.

It propelled poor Peggy right off my lap.

Oh, we are in deep, deep trouble now.

I chat to you every day. Especially in the car. Sing to you. On that long drive home through the ring of steel. Can you believe we were in the middle of a global pandemic?

The first time I heard your heartbeat, I was alone with the sonographer. I called your dad straight after the appointment, crying with joy as he sat in the car park anxiously waiting for me.

The rhythmic beat of your tiny strong heart was the best sound I had ever heard.

160 beats per minute.

160 beats per minute.

160 beats per minute.

And breathe. Just breathe.

* * * * * *

We rise with the birds.

It’s too early for me,

Still dark and icy cold.

You wake me with a kiss,

Eyelash to eyelash.

Cheek to cheek.

Just a little too sloppy,

Your warm milk-breath so sweet,

And a tiny bit sour.

I strap you into your highchair,

You point enthusiastically, as if on cue,

To the closed blind next to the kitchen table.

And just like the curtain rising in the theatre

Seconds before it starts –

The anticipation,

The excitement,

The collective breathlessness of this silent shared experience –

I slowly pull up the blind.

You clap and squeal,

Tiny speckles of saliva

Form droplets on your chin.

And there they are –

Our tiny, feathered friends,

Singing sweetly to one another under the concrete carport on this wet, weary, winter’s day.

Their grey, completely unremarkable feathers puffing and fluffing and warming up from the cold.

But this is far from unremarkable.

It is the ordinary, extraordinary.

The mundane and magic of mothering –

Sitting comfortably, side-by-side, of every minute of every long, sometimes relentless day,

To make up the years, that are just far too short.

I hold this birdsong in my heart; this quiet morning ritual and I wonder when your wonderment will pass.

It’s only a matter of time,

But I hope it’s no time soon.

* * * * * *

I cannot get out of bed. It is my husband’s birthday. We are travelling to central Victoria to see his family.

The night before I called a friend who served me stale platitudes offering little solace:

‘At least you know you can fall pregnant. You know everything works.’

‘You’ll fall pregnant again.’

‘Be strong!’

‘It could be worse. You could’ve been further along.’

I hang up the phone and sob. A primal, guttural sob.

I want the world to know of my loss. I want to wail in the streets.

But somehow, I feel shame.

After the phone call with my friend, I don’t tell another soul.

I sit with my sorrow until it passes. It doesn’t pass until I fall pregnant again, many months later.

So afraid of another loss, I temper my happiness, initially.

But the joy is too great.

It took all my life to meet you.

And I know, in the deepest core of my bones, that this time I am going to meet you.

And I cannot fucking wait.

* * * * * *

When you first heard my voice, earthside, you simply smiled. A small, all-knowing smile. I met you for the first time, yet I’ve always known you.

It took all my life to meet you.

You travelled across years and years, from womb to womb.

My mother’s womb, my grandmother’s womb.

Before finally making your home in my womb.

It took all my life to meet you.

Was there ever a time before?

As we settle in for winter, I can’t remember who I used to be. She was so many seasons ago.

I don’t mourn her, actually,

I’m happy to let her go.

Motherhood.

Time goes so quickly.

Brutally so.

But thankfully, sometimes,

like in the quiet dark of winter,

it can also go so beautifully slow.

* * * * * *

I read an article from the Middle East Eye. The cry that exits my throat is subhuman. Israeli helicopters have begun playing the sounds of crying infants and women, so that when Palestinians run to save them, they’re shot.

I hold my hand over my mouth, gag, and wonder if I will be sick.

With a worrisome look, Thelma cups a concerned chubby hand over my cheek.

‘Mama? Mama, OK?’

I sit and silently cry. Convulsing intermittently as I try to stifle the sobs escaping from my throat.

I take her tiny chubby hands, still sticky from her morning honey toast, cradle them in my hands, pull her close to me and squeeze her tightly.

I have a song lyric on loop in my head.

‘If we tolerate this, then our children will be next.’

‘If we tolerate this, then our children will be next.’

Thelma starts to whimper, so I fumble for the remote control and try to put on something to distract her from my devastation.

The familiar Playschool theme plays as her whimpering subsides.

I run to the bathroom to wash my face. As the faucet runs, I hear phantom crying like I used to in early postpartum. I rush back to Thelma, but she is safe.

She is safe.

She is safe.

And I count my lucky stars that we are here.