4. “You need to be useful.”
(Part 4 of 5 of the “Mirror, mirror” series)
“Pierce” (2020); drypoint print and ink on paper
Eventually, like all good fairy tales, the girl met someone who treated her as his equal, who loved her bare-faced, morning-breathed, spiky-legged. Who never made her feel less, instead doing his best to lift her and make her feel strong, capable, clever. By then, she was in her mid-30s, and she felt her clock ticking, gonging in fact – a constant pulse in her mind counting down to a likely "use-by" date for her ovaries. They tried naturally for a child, but she was diagnosed with PCOS and told it would be unlikely. So, she started IVF. Her heart was so full of want during the early sessions – it was swollen right at the surface of her skin and ripe for scarring. At first, there were blood tests every few days. Then internal scans. "Strip off, lie down, legs in the stirrups" She began to feel like meat on a packing line. She couldn't help the flashbacks from occurring. And every time, every time, it would be a new male doctor, one who hadn't read her notes, and she would have to explain again and again about her condition, about her treatment plan – her reminding them. She felt under immense pressure to get it right.
The medication was too much for her body. Her ovaries became over-stimulated. By the time she lay down for the operation to have the eggs removed, she had 18 fully ripened in her abdomen, each the size of a large grape. She was swollen, sick. She sat on her backstep the night before, breathing in the winter air, feeling suffocated by her own body, reduced to a walking womb, a robot coded with one instruction, "I must have a child."
Months later, when she had recovered, the first embryo was inserted back into her body, and lo, she was pregnant! She yelled and jumped and cried and walked on air for weeks, imagining her child in her arms. But at her first scan, she was told there was something wrong; the embryo had stopped growing. She didn't say a word when her husband bundled her in her coat and guided her out of the door. She didn't say a word on the walk back to the car. She didn't say a word until they had been driving for ten minutes or so. And then she screamed. A primal scream, her fists clenched, knuckles white.
Loss and grief and disappointment.
Her body had failed her child.
She had been unable to sustain its life.
Months later, a second embryo was implanted, and this time she felt it needling its way into the lining of her womb. This one made itself known from the moment it was given a home. A girl. She knew before the doctors. This time the connection was powerful, unstoppable. But it didn't stop the fear. She had failed her child once. What if I happened again? How could she go on living? And so, she did everything she could to help her body. She read every book, every blog. She changed her diet, stopped dying her hair, she exercised… but not too much. And there was the rub. For every helpful titbit, she collected another was advising her to do the opposite. Should she eat eggs or not? Should she eat more calories or less? Was a hot bath safe? Was it ok to do the vacuuming, hang washing, sit in the sun? And alongside the guidance for maintaining her baby's health, there were all the articles about "snapping back", so her husband would barely know she had given birth. If she used this cream, she wouldn't have stretch marks; if she wore this bra, she wouldn't have droopy tits; if she took this vitamin, she would lose less hair. Her body felt less and less her own. Everything was focussed on knowing the cargo was safe and the vessel could be returned ship-shape to its “owner” – so little thought was given to the wellbeing of the captain.
Scans of the baby showed she couldn't give birth naturally; the placenta - the placenta her body had created - was in the way. So, she was booked in for a C-section. The swab was cold as her back was cleaned, and the needle of the spinal block was barely noticeable over the jittering of her teeth and knees as she sat on the bed in the pristine theatre. It was so white it glowed, and she wondered if this was what heaven was supposed to be like. When she lay back, a sheet was hung below her neck, so she couldn’t see them cut her open. She hadn't expected the tugging and it lasted forever. Then there was a lifetime of silence. Then…the baby cried. She will remember that sound forever. The child was beautiful and healthy, but things went wrong for the girl. They couldn’t stop her bleeding - it covered the sheets and pooled under her inert body. She screamed, and everything went black.
“Your scream was adrenaline to my soul” (2021); graphite and pastel on paper
The girl woke in intensive care. Her throat was sore from the intubation, and her mouth was dry. She had seven cannulas spread across both hands. She could hear the beeps and boops of the monitoring of her vital signs. She asked for her husband - the baby was well. He had been feeding her formula from a cup so as not to disturb her latching instinct. When the girl met her at last, she gazed at her child. But her mind was hazy. She was on morphine and had a balloon inside her uterus to stop the bleeding. It was pressing on her spinal cord, causing intense and unbearable shooting pains down her legs.
She thought “I’m losing my mind.”
She slept on and off until the early hours of the morning when something disturbed her. She turned to see her husband stretched awkwardly on a chair and stool, his eyes closed. Her child looked blissful, swaddled in linen in a hospital cot beside her...
It took a moment to register the nurse squeezing her bare nipple rhythmically, trying to encourage the colostrum to flow.
You were such a sweet baby. I remember the drive home from the hospital. It was dark outside, the wintery depths of January. I took each step to the car tentatively, terrified of opening the gash in my abdomen that they had pulled you from. Your father carried you in the car seat. I sat next to you in the back. I watched the streetlights stream through the sunroof and flash across your face in bands of orange. After all that had passed, I couldn’t believe we were on our way home together, you outside me, me next to you.
I will pass eternity next to you, my love. You, who finally taught me the miracle of my own body, after 36 years of living in it. It took almost dying to realise how precious this body was. Five pints of someone else’s blood, as my own pooled on the bed, your cot beside me. Looking back, it feels right that to meet you I had to undertake my own resurrection. I had to let go of my preconceived notions of the girl that I was so that I could be a mother to you. Years of feeling my value was in my plasticised pore-less face, in my hairless, fluid-less body, in expensive clothing and picture-perfect make-up. In an image, an object looking back at me in the mirror.
“I birthed my beating heart when I had you” (2021); drypoint print on paper
Of course, you were with me the whole time. One of a million eggs that I have carried around day after day. You were even with me in my own mother’s womb because, unlike males who produce their sperm from the onset of puberty and replace each in the space of two months[1], we females are born with all the eggs we shall carry[2]. If you have a child, I will have carried it also, when you were inside my womb. How glorious. An unbroken connection along the female line. You have your father’s green eyes, but the rest is me or mine – the single dimple in your cheek is the same as my mother’s, and her mother’s before.
Did you know that when a woman is pregnant the cells of the baby migrate into the mother’s bloodstream and then circle back into the baby, a process called “microchimerism[3]”? They leave an imprint in the mother's tissues, bones, brain and skin, that can persist for decades. Researchers have identified foetal cells in healed c-section scars suggesting that they migrate to the site of damage to become involved in tissue repair. And that is what you did, my love, you mended a heart crushed by the weight of trying to live up to the standard assigned to women. Of trying to stay in a box too confined for me. Of trying to live in a body that I thought was only worth the appreciation a man was willing to bestow. I refuse to raise you to think of yourself like that. So, I try to see the ways in which you may be coached in those ideas. And I reject them – for you and for me. I reject them, I reject them, I reject them.
So now I hold you in my arms and I thank you. Although you don’t understand why, yet. And you frequently try to wriggle out of my grasp.
I birthed my beating heart when I had you.
Footnotes
[1] From a “Healthline” article: “Your testicles are constantly producing new sperm in spermatogenesis. The full process takes about 64 days.”
https://www.healthline.com/health/mens-health/how-long-does-it-take-for-sperm-to-regenerate#TOC_TITLE_HDR_1
[2] From the Society for Endocrinology: “A female baby is born with all the eggs that she will ever have.” https://www.yourhormones.info/glands/ovaries/#:~:text=A%20female%20baby%20is%20born,eggs%20stored%20in%20her%20ovaries.&text=The%20ovarian%20phases%20of%20a,Ovulation%20occurs%20mid%2Dcycle.
[3] “Microchimerism is the presence of cells from one individual in another genetically distinct individual. Pregnancy is the main cause of natural microchimerism.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6714269/#:~:text=Microchimerism%20is%20the%20presence%20of,trafficking%20between%20mother%20and%20fetus.
The bibliography can be found here
