Extraordinary Ends

There have been some great documentaries on TV lately. Michelle Hussein presented one about Ghandi, a three-parter that was quite riveting, throwing an initially sceptical light on the ‘father of modern India’; last night began a new Andrew Marr series, The Making of Modern Britain, and then there has been the wonderful David Attenborough series, Life, which has taken over my Monday nights. All of them remind me to stop being so self obsessed about my own little world because they make me feel a part of something much, much bigger: the universal fight to survive and flourish.

Life has particular resonance for me as I write about motherhood and survival in my memoir. I have written elsewhere that there is nothing I wouldn't have done to help my baby live. It was pure instinct; I didn't question it until later. It is so insightful to watch this fight through the lens of mothers in nature, and witness the lengths they will go to in order to protect their young and increase their offsprings’ chances of survival. I was struck by two creatures in particular: a sprawling octopus lumbering across the sea floor, looking for a cave in which her eggs could safely hatch, and the strawberry frog who meticulously places one tadpole at a time in a watery bromeliad cradle high above the ground, well away from her usual home.

The strawberry frog climbs up and down every day to feed its young, which doesn’t sound all that difficult until you realise the frog is only about a centimetre long in adulthood. She seeks out food and does this mammoth trek daily for a month until the tadpoles turn into little froglets; after which, mum takes them home. This total dedication to increasing their life chances is amazing, but what really blows my mind is the octopus. She lays her eggs and nurtures them with her own body’s resources. When their time comes to hatch, she makes the ultimate sacrifice: she dies. Now you’d think that was a pretty stupid thing to do, just when the tiny wee babies are about to enter the world. But she’s hedged her bets. She’s let loose about 100,000 little octopi.

(Online snapshots taken from bbc.co.uk's iplayer here:)

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.