a better woman by Susan Johnson

Author:Susan Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC035000
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: 1999-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

8 A Good Pair of Hands

A body cupping a body does not make two that would be an error too grave to be borne given your season.

MEENA ALEXANDER, YOUNG SNAIL

From the first this new pregnancy went badly. I felt sick all the time, sicker than I ever had with Caspar, and tired to the bone. I could hardly move from the bed or the chair where I sat down and only the need of a toilet bowl in which to vomit propelled me into action.

Caspar’s needs compelled me to keep standing upright when I preferred to lie prone, to keep preparing his dinners when the smell of food nauseated me, to wash his clothes and hang them out to dry lest the washing assume the shape of a mountain impossible to conquer.

Although I was depressed at the thought of another baby, my mind reared back from the idea of abortion: I was still too close to Caspar’s ruddy birth, the smell of vernix and amniotic fluid and blood was still fresh in my nostrils. My skin remembered the first sweet slap of new flesh against it.

I wondered how this baby had come to us. Oh, I knew all right the practical details of egg meeting sperm, but I wondered why it had taken months of careful planning to fall pregnant with Caspar while this new baby had conceived himself almost despite us. I hadn’t even had a proper period.

It tempts every parent to look back on a pregnancy and imbue the born child’s personality upon it. Elliot is like a force of nature, unpreventable, like weather.

For weeks I felt as if a great weight was pressing down on me. I couldn’t conjure up any enthusiasm for the coming baby. All I could think of was my head going under again, of that long, deep dive I would have to take beneath the water. It was as if I knew I would have to walk out into the ocean with no alternative but to drown.

I couldn’t even manage to summon up the anxiety about Down’s Syndrome which had so obsessed me during Caspar’s pregnancy, and which I knew must be an even greater risk now because I was a year and a bit older. I was too depressed to bother worrying.

It seemed to me that I had only recently grown used to managing one child, and would find myself completely incapable of managing two.

Two children was beginning to look suspiciously like a proper family. I didn’t know whether I could see myself in this picture.

At eleven weeks I had an ultrasound. There he was (for I could not help feeling it was a boy even though I surprised myself by finding a small, growing hope that I would have a girl).

He was alive all right, a pulsing, flailing creature represented on a screen above my head. ‘Look, Cappy, there’s a bubba,’ I said to Caspar who was also in the room.

‘Bubba,’ he answered, barely glancing at the screen.

‘Bubba,’ I said and somewhere inside myself I opened a door.

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