|
page-60
There was nowhere for us to live and nothing for us to eat. Statistically speaking, I was more vulnerable to burglary and violent assault. I knew I couldn't bring it into my miserable life. I know it's not like this for every woman who has a child. I allowed myself to feel what it would have been like to be a mother. There were a couple of women sitting next to me on a bus talking about babies. I imagined them and their support. I thought, I can do it! I would make a good parent. They got off two stops before mine, and I stumbled home on my own, vomiting into the gutter. At other times I pretended that I had swallowed something that was slowly poisoning me, and treated it like an illness. I did that mostly. I was very sick from the lounge to the bed and the fridge to the toilet, while you clung on for your dear life. You had no choice. You just did what you had to do and then I did what I had to do. They call it a termination. I don't know what I call it. I don't know where my body ends and yours begins. It was one of my worst nightmares come true. But the world is hard, it's pretty damn hard. To you existence is already a nightmare and your cradle is a hostile vessel. Yet you clung inside me like a cosmonaut. At other times I knew you were a child, perhaps my daughter, the son in my dreams. I was a toddler leading you to the front yard grass by the chubby hand, showing you my collection of plastic animals amongst the hose and flowers. This was the childhood that you would never have and the closest I got to motherhood.
So goodbye to the pinhead when they knocked me out at the clinic. I enjoyed the sensation of non-being. I answered a question, then nothing. Later I woke up, clinging to something like the side of a building as if I had already jumped. It was the only thing I knew. Apart from that I knew nothing. It had been good being part of the procedure. I struggled into consciousness and put on my shoes and trousers. Your body was in the trash. It was easier than I had thought. All the Right-To-Lifers were praying for the demise of evil women whilst kneeling on the footpath. If I could have handed my pregnancy over to them I wouldn't have. They were fanatical fools respected by no one. Whilst pregnant I was as sick as a dog. I had no food and no way of getting it. The hormones were running wild through my weaker frame, firing up my face and throwing out my guts. I thought, this is a funny way of helping a mother to let her child live. It seemed that no one wanted to support me. Even my own body did not support me. I thought that it would have been a friendlier warmer feeling, that I would feel like a goose that laid the golden egg. Instead I crawled and was too weak to bathe and feed myself. I looked at my watch, waiting for midday, or the time when the 'morning sickness' would stop. But it didn't. I was shocked when it lasted six weeks with no intermission. I was disappointed about everything, such as my inability to successfully feel like an earth mother while I was gagging, and the knowledge that I had reached my limits, and that I couldn't really do anything I wanted to do. I was just so tired.
After all, you can resign from a job that isn't working for you or throw away a book that's not worth reading, but you can't do that with a child. I turned to my lover, who said he felt nothing. He mumbled, 'It's causing a lot of trouble for a pinhead.' He had two children but he wasn't allowed access. He said that his daughter's girlfriend had turned him on. A fortnight after that conversation I saw him for the last time. I said, 'I killed it, so you couldn't fuck it.' It is ironic that I spend my life trying to nurture life, but I had to murder the pinhead. It is ironic that I was unwanted by my mother and now my own child is unwanted by me. With a bulldozer heart I end its life before it has begun. It does nothing but cling like a cosmonaut, making my body grow sicker and sicker. My bones have grown soft. I am made vulnerable and ready for utilising, yet I am expected to be invincible. I never thought I would feel like this. Or that this pinhead who was simply ravenous for existence would hook on and consume me. We are now two bodies. I am the old skin of the snake being shed. I didn't mean to share my body with someone else and one of us has to go. I thought that there would be this connection between us, the warm glow of knowing. But it feels like vicious sickness. I was so sick, I could have shot him in the back, just to get him out of my fucking bed, where he complained of being a little bit tired. What could I offer my daughter or my son? Apart from the same empty days that my mother gave to me, until I thought that the day was my mother, the cold winter sun shining down. I tried to extract warmth from all days in all seasons. I surrounded myself with anything that would have me, including light and warmth. It was never enough. I went to the place where time is lost. I lost my child in that land. It was the end of time. It was my son. It was my decision to take his hand and lead him there. Then I left him standing alone, in a field of long dry grass. It was golden yellow like wheat. I turned and left. He was crying after me like a featherless chick. I didn't turn back. I knew that he grew smaller and fainter. I killed my son before he began. I did to him what my mother had done to me. Was this all inevitable? I woke up in the termination clinic surrounded by bright lights and gentle voices and my own blood and nausea. Suddenly I was back again, just one of many, in a room of groaning, sobbing women. I tried to drift back into sleep, but I was all drawn out like a long day of suffering. There was nothing left of me but what I have always been, which is childless now and motherless then. |
