The Middlepause by Marina Benjamin

Author:Marina Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2016-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

I am not generally sentimental, being of the firm opinion that sentiment blunts the intellect. But I am sentimental about my daughter: she is, as they say in the Arabic dialect of my Iraqi family, my gulbi—my heart.

When she was newborn, I felt an animal protectiveness over her future. I shed pay-it-forward tears for all the hurt she would inevitably experience over the course of her life. To my febrile postpartum brain, its entire course looked to be concertinaed into a series of worrying spikes: her first disappointment, her first bust up with a friend, her first heartbreak, her first loss—a whole world of pain that I had selfishly ushered her into. I put this maudlin cast of mind down to erratic hormones, but the sentimentality persisted.

Exhibit A: in my cupboard there is a shoebox in which I’ve stowed one representative of each of her early pairs of shoes, from the soft-soled, elasticized chamois she once toddled about in, to her first velcroed school shoes.

Exhibit B: in a tiny black-lacquered box with folding red-satin lining, I’ve kept the desiccated remains of the living cord that once bound us together. It was tied in a knot at her navel before she was handed to me, like a gift, at the birthing clinic, then it fell off, starved of blood supply, a couple of weeks later.

Exhibit C: another box—one I intend to return to her someday—of recreational work from her first ten years, contains choice drawings and painterly daubings, spy tales, mermaid diaries, notebooks filled with hilarious lists, and a card she made for my forty-eighth birthday, picturing a cake and candles, and captioned, “Mummy, we are all ageing!”

These days, I am practically infected with sentiment. But it has taken a new form—a nostalgia in which my own remembered (and now lost) youth has become entangled.

At its most insistent this nostalgia can floor me. I remember a particular afternoon in Paris, a few seasons back, during a short break with my husband and daughter. Basking in the spring sunshine and unseasonable April warmth, we had wandered through the staunchly bourgeois streets of Montparnasse, admiring the houses and fantasizing about inhabiting them, only to find that we had managed to wend our way to the Musée Rodin. Because of the conspiratorial magic we’d worked up among us, we felt as if it had somehow come to us, and that a visit was meant.

Inside the museum, an intimate space that had once been the sculptor’s home, we split up, not deliberately, but each of us was absorbed in his or her own journey and intoxicated by different artworks that played on our different moods. Brilliant sunlight streamed into all the rooms, and the museum keepers had opened the tall windows, causing the light white voile curtains to dance on the breeze like triumphal banners. Upstairs, hardly a soul was around, and I ambled without aim from one room to the next, caught up in the joy of experiencing the tactile sculptures—the extraordinary rough sensuality

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