Unravelled: Life as a Mother. Maria Housden
Читать онлайн книгу.
excitement growing in me. Although I had dreamed of this moment for years, envisioned this place many times before, I hadn’t ever truly believed it would happen. Looking around now, I felt as if something new was coming alive in me, a sense without form, poised to take shape.
The idea of a retreat had been planted in my heart in the first months after Hannah’s death. Holding her lifeless body in my arms, part of me had released itself; something in me had irreparably changed. I had known then that I would have to get away, to immerse myself in a silence that was only mine, if I were to ever understand fully what had happened, and to know what I was supposed to do next.
The Hermitage, the centre where I was now staying, had been established years ago by an elderly Mennonite couple who had converted a huge barn into several floors of small bedrooms, libraries and a kitchen/dining room. For a modest fee, guests were given their own room and bath, and encouraged to spend their days quietly on their own, reading, painting, writing or walking in the fields and surrounding woods. All meals, except for breakfast, were prepared by Mary and served to guests around the farm table in silence. It seemed the perfect space for my retreat.
Now, gazing around the room, I felt as if I had been transported into another, timeless place, far from any life I had ever known. The walls were panelled with knotted pine boards that climbed horizontally to the beamed ceiling. Two screened windows on wide hinges were open to the warm summer evening, their white lace curtains catching the breeze. A well-worn plank floor was partially covered by a brown braid rug, and along one wall, facing the largest window, was a double bed with a carved wooden headboard and muted patchwork quilt. A small teddy bear with button eyes and suede paws leaned against the pillow.
I laid my suitcase on the bed and began to unpack. I stacked my folded clothes in the drawers of the simple bureau, placed my new journal alongside a silver pen on the desk that sat beneath the window across from the bed; I slid several photographs of Claude, and our four children, Will, aged 10, Hannah, who would have been 7, Margaret, aged 3, and Madelaine, aged 2, under the edges of the window frame. In the drawers of the desk, I put pages of drawing paper, a few pencils and a deck of cards.
Beneath the second window, next to the dresser, was a small kneeling bench with a wooden shelf nailed to the wall above it. Here, I placed a votive candle and the gold cross I wore around my neck during the last year of Hannah’s life. When I had finished, I slid my suitcase under the bed, and sat down in the large, upholstered reading chair in the corner. From my vantage point, I could see fireflies blinking in the dark outside the windows. I sat quietly, not moving, feeling myself breathe, drinking it all in.
Mary had told me when I checked in that, apart from one other guest who was scheduled to arrive in a day or two, I would be on my own. Having shared a room with two younger sisters until I was 18, and never having lived on my own, the idea of such solitude and silence seemed too good to be true. As a wife and mother, I had become so accustomed to constant interruptions that I couldn’t help thinking, in the quiet of the room, that this peace couldn’t possibly last.
Sitting in the light of the flickering lamp, I heard a rustling noise just outside the window. I felt a shiver up my spine, feeling suddenly frightened of being alone, as if I might be smothered by the room’s unfamiliar silence. Quickly, I stood up and with a running start leaped across the floor onto the bed, just as I had as a little girl, afraid of monsters that lurked in dark corners. Undressing beneath the covers, I dropped my clothes on the floor and burrowed beneath the soft sheets and thick quilt. Closing my eyes against the dark and silence, I fell almost immediately into a deep sleep.
Slip, Sliding Away
My body was not my own; every pore was yawning open. Even the air particles felt charged with anticipation, poised for what was about to happen. The nurse, standing on one side of the bed, was anchoring my foot in the stirrup. Claude, his eyes wild with excitement, was holding one of my outstretched hands in his.
The whole of my life, 25 years, I had known this moment was coming with the same sense of certainty in which we draw our next breath. What I did not know was whether this baby, my first child, was going to be a boy or a girl. Claude and I had chosen to be surprised at the moment of our baby’s birth. I felt grateful, in this breath between contractions, for the sense of excitement I felt, already loving this little person so wholly and completely without knowing for certain whether this baby was a Hannah or a Will.
The next contraction gripped my body, and all my attention was sucked into the sensation as I felt the weight in my pelvis bear down. I imagined the muscles around my cervix expanding and lengthening, the head of the baby, our baby, being pushed through. Dr Menon, a petite Indian woman, smiled encouragingly from between my legs at the foot of the bed.
‘You’re doing great,’ she murmured softly. ‘Once this contraction subsides, I’ll hold the mirror up so you can see the baby’s head.’
I nodded briefly, consumed by the intensity of the crescendo running through my body as I tried to remember to breathe. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the grip of the contraction released and my attention returned to what was happening in the room. Everyone got busy in the pause. The nurse helped the doctor position the mirror between my legs.
Claude asked, ‘Do you want some more ice chips? Is there anything you need?’
‘No, just keep holding my hand. I’m doing fine as long as I know you’re there.’
I had barely exhaled the last word when the next contraction began. It rose like a tsunami from the centre of my body. Relentlessly, it rolled outward into the whole of my awareness, swallowing any separate sense of myself. I gave myself to it – opening, offering and surrendering. Leaning forward, aware of nothing but sensation, I saw in the mirror my swollen, bulging vagina, impossibly stretched around a protruding, dark orb. Dr Menon took my left hand and placed it gently on the wetness between my legs.
‘That,’she whispered, ‘is your baby’s head.’
Some part of me, silently watching, suddenly woke up. As my fingers lightly caressed the slippery softness, the being whom until now had been an inherent part of my self and my body became in this moment its own separate person, touching me with its own, slippery head!
I took a deep breath and bore down again, feeling the burn of my perineum tearing. ‘Breathe,’ the nurse reminded me in a loud voice.
I pulled myself away from the centre of my body just long enough to expand my lungs and inhale another breath. I screwed up my face and bore down again. ‘Relax your face!’ the nurse spoke more loudly. I had never experienced such fullness in any moment; so many things were happening in my body and my awareness that it took everything I had to bring my attention to any single thing.
Then it happened. The intensely concentrated pressure pushing out from the centre of my body shifted slightly and began to slide. As the outer lips of my vagina became an expanding ring of fire around the baby’s head, Dr Menon leaned in, closer to my body, and the nurse lifted the mirror out of the way.
‘One more push, Maria. Make it a strong, good one,’ she said.
Claude gripped my hand more tightly and turned his gaze from my face towards what was happening between my legs. I opened my mouth, inhaled a huge breath, closed my lips around it and bore down. I felt as if my body was being forced through my legs, outside of itself. For months, whenever I had tried to imagine the moment of my baby’s birth, I always imagined my eyes closed as I concentrated on the last push. Now, instead, they remained fully open, allowing everything: the ring of fire, Claude’s anxious face, the sweeping second hand of the clock behind Dr Menon’s head, the relentless pushing, sliding,