Births Deaths Marriages by Georgia Blain

Author:Georgia Blain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2008-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE STORY MY MOTHER TELLS ME

THE STORY MY MOTHER TELLS ME GOES LIKE THIS: I WAS late, not too late, but late enough to make the doctors talk about inducing me. There was a full moon, and she lay in the hospital bed, the silvery light spilling across her. She communed with me, willing me to come out now, before the induction; while the doctors were out of the room, the nurses were busy elsewhere; while it was just her and me.

‘I sent you messages,’ she says, ‘and you listened.’

Because, sure enough, out I came, quickly, easily, slipping out in the moonlight, and she held me up in delight.

The nurses came back first.

‘Doctor will be angry,’ they said, and they looked at my mother in disapproval. ‘Whatever will we tell him?’

I don’t know how they explained the turn of events to Doctor when he arrived the next morning, too late to be of any use. My mother doesn’t take the story any further than my birth. In fact, I don’t think we’ve ever talked about what it was like when she first took me or my brothers home as small babies whom she had to care for. The story is confined to that moment in hospital, and the point is that we did it ourselves, together. We had a special link, a power. We beat the system. And how good was I? Capable of hearing, understanding and obeying my mother even before I’d come out of the womb.

This secret sense of superiority was only reinforced by the tales of my brothers’ births, which went wrong. Jonathan shot out, too fast, after an unnecessary episiotomy, and the doctor didn’t catch him. Slippery quick, he landed straight on the floor, suffering a haemorrhage in the brain. Joshua was almost three months premature. My mother was rolling drunk on a pure alcohol drip when she delivered him. (The alcohol was an experimental technique pioneered by a Danish doctor, she explains now. He thought it would delay contractions.) Their births were problematic. Mine was a breeze.

But when I became pregnant, I found it impossible to shelter in the false hope of a delivery like the one my mother had described, and the reality of childbirth made me afraid. As soon as the pregnancy was confirmed, I bought the books recommended by my doctor. Sitting at the back of the bus, the acrid smell of the vinyl seats making me ill, I flipped straight to the end sections on delivery. I skipped over the parts that dealt with possible complications; this was not what was making me scared. I had a faith that the birth would be normal. I had no faith in my ability to withstand the pain.

This was going to be the first great physical stress I had faced and I became obsessed with confronting the unknown through preparation. It seemed like the only solid handle I could grasp. My anxiety about being a mother (which was real and terrifying) slipped into the background.

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