Lola Can Do It!

Reliving Parenting's Early Days

I’ve been reading Edward Humes’ Baby ER, which is all about life (and death) in a Newborn Intensive Care Unit. The book was written in 2000, around the same time Maia was born, and it has brought back a lot of memories, nearly nine years after her death, making me realise the extent of what I’ve done by embarking on this writing task. Nine years of grieving, and the raw bouts of emotion I used to live by are quiet and still, like sleeping lions. Occasionally they rear their fearful heads, but reading that book is an ambush. It’s all so very familiar: there’s the drug addict baby, the meconium baby, the IVF triplets, and the equivalent to our baby, with the bloated stomach and the twisted intestines, though no NEC (necrotizing enterocolitis), the disease that killed Maia. Humes writes only briefly about NEC, noting that the Greek word for death is embedded in the name, and my gut twists in response as I read, the sadness infiltrating my bones.

I also finished Rachel Cusk’s book, A Life’s Work, her memoir of motherhood from a few years back, and that was a reminder of how gruelling parenting really is. Not that I need any outsider to tell me that; I have daily proof, but when Maia died, I not only grieved my daughter, but I grieved motherhood, too. It didn’t seem gruelling to me, then. I was desperate for it. People seemed to forget that I was still a mother, and that was an unspeakable wound to me. I idealised the state of motherhood, so that when I gave birth to a healthy child, I was ready to enter a perfect world, and just like Cusk, I was utterly shocked when it stuck its tongue out at me. I must have been fucked up by it, because I really felt that parenting a healthy child was, at times, harder than parenting an ill one – in the sense that, in the hospital, there are many people caring for your child, and you are never alone. Cusk’s loneliness seeps from every page; only poetry and literature are her friends. Her book is testament to how very, very estranged you can feel, when the “happiest day of your life” comes – and goes. 

Lucky Henry Allingham

Today came news that Henry Allingham, at 113 the world's oldest man, has died. The BBC announced his death saying, “His life spanned three centuries and six monarchs and he had five grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, 14 great-great grandchildren and one great-great-great grandchild.” They even published a timeline of world events, since his birth in 1896, which bizarrely neglects to mention the Second World War, but includes the death of Elvis Presley. It is, of course, a very public record of what this man has lived through: I don’t know anything about his private life (though it turns out a book about his life was published last year.) I can’t help but think, despite the fact that this man has seen the cruelty of war, he was a lucky, lucky bloke. For what about those people, who have died young, and barely had a chance to make an imprint on the world?

Now I know as well as anybody that luck is in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure Henry didn’t feel lucky, ooh, around 1914-18. But this is a man, given the evidence of his large family, who has surely known love, laughter, friendship and success, as much as pain, horror and sadness. I know I’m making a lot of assumptions, but most of them are pretty universal. He’s a man who has experienced the full pelt of life: had a childhood, whether rich or poor, easy or difficult; made decisions, some bad, some good; made mistakes and hopefully learnt from them, and grew up to be a man. Not just that, though. He grew up to be a man the whole country is mourning.

What a plentiful store-cupboard of memories Henry’s family will have to draw upon. When they feel sorrow in their hearts they’ll be able to dry their tears with an old family anecdote, or maybe by sharing one of Henry’s old jokes. By and by, the pain of his loss will be lessened by the familiar but comforting platitude, “he had a good life”. A long and active life and a legacy to leave behind has to be among many people’s dearest hopes and dreams. The contrast of Henry’s long life, however, with my daughter’s pitifully short one of nine weeks, is poignant. It’s not only the fact that Maia’s dead and our time with her was so short and tumultuous, that there are few happy memories to mine. Stephen Levine has written: “the death of a child is a fire in the mind. The mind burns with alternatives that never come to pass, with fantasies of remarkable recuperations, with dreams of adult accomplishment.” Maia will never grow up to be a woman. It’s the adult accomplishments we’ll never see that I miss today.