The birth of light
By: Lauren Cain
Tags: Birth, Grief, Death, Motherhood, Parenting

The path of becoming a mother, without a mother.

Let me inside you

Into your room

I’ve heard it’s lined

With the things you don’t show

I meet your face.

I’ve seen it before, but only in black and white, and always behind your hand. I’ve waited

a long time for you,

ached not for maternal pastels or

the softening deafening

moment of motherhood,

but for You,

for kismet, karma, destiny, our fate and

samsara of You.

What I now realise

is that you are born with the secrets of us,

you’re bound up with cords

of our past and your history,

you’ll spend your whole life relearning and trying to remember

all this wisdom as you grow.

Those who remember succeed,

and those who never find their footsteps

trace a map to grow into and follow next time,

I guess.

These secrets will fade as you grow, like mum, who didn’t fade,

but died a tragedy on a hot day in

December, 2003.

I learn more

about the land of her heart and ventures

in the days that follow,

the shadows that she lived beneath.

The invisibility cloak she suffered long before Harry Potter,

before the dove against a cross,

before before.

She broke curses, my mother, with her own family that didn’t talk about trauma or abuse or power.

She lived perfectly crippled

in the role set out for a woman,

it was nursing or teaching and she did

both for a while. It was never her turn with the television, and

perhaps a decade passed when she wasn’t heard.

She cooks while the cows are milked in the afternoon,

the same ones she milked before school in the morning.

She wins prizes for baking at the country show. She dances

Scottish Highland and hates it,

and we uncover a plastic velvet-covered board with dozens of medals and ribbons pinned to it.

Be good,

not outspoken

or outdo.

Lay me beside you

Down on the floor

I’ve been your lover

From the womb to the tomb

I love my mum.

I always have, and remember the long days of love

when I’d write her tender letters and

draw pictures and ask her to give me maths sums to do.

She loved our reading time, or so she allowed me to believe.

I loved my readers. I loved the contact she’d put

on my books, every year, and the reader folder name labels.

It smelt like powder and devotion, and

every book she contacted, reluctantly,

(dad was better at it than she was)

had her film of protection layered on top.

She was always with me in my books, and

the more mistakes she made, leaving air bubbles and wrinkles in the plastic, the more

I loved it.

She loved me so much.

I was her miracle.

From the womb I was unexpected,

a twin that survived without the other.

A young mum, she didn’t question doctors, especially when her newborn came out

of an operating theatre with

third degree burns from

accidental electrocution.

The womb was close to the tomb, or at least I was,

but I grew and survived,

and she went on to have my two brothers…

But never got over her traumatic birth and welcome-to-motherhood with me.

The trauma froze into her bones,

and poked out at me as a teenager in angry icicles,

and a generational ice age,

as was tradition, broke through for perhaps a decade when I wasn’t heard. History was present,

and we have that in common,

along with my grandmother before that.

Survivors of ice ages,

they walked the same talk

that they’d never meant to repeat.

I dress as your daughter

When the moon becomes round

You be my mother

When everything’s gone

I wore the gypsy clothes she did in the 1970s, and the Dr Martens of her youth, and she loved it.

Pa called them clodhoppers, and Nana tsk tsk tsk’d at my longing to get my nose pierced.

They have both gone now

They never got over Mum’s death when what really should have happened

was for her to be cured,

and celebrated,

that love wins at all costs, that life if for the living.

But we know it’s not.

It’s for the lucky,

not for the winners or losers or believers or worthy.

When she went, I went too

When she died, I did too

When I came back up, she did not

When I wake, she’s not there.

She never will be.

She died.

Faith is important, a spiritual life is helpful.

Denial isn’t. She isn’t in the next room. She isn’t a prayer away.

She didn’t see my first marriage,

which is either lucky or sad, I’m not sure,

but she never was on board with him anyway.

She didn’t see my second marriage, or

the life I lived to get away from the last terrible one, to the next,

the current beautiful one.

Part of the beautiful one is my Rumi. Born in a hurry, she came six week early, with a full head of hair matted up into a mohawk,

her fist raised and clenched,

a black eye from my pelvis and the forceps, she rose up and out of me, looking confused and quiet, wondering where the revolution was.

My darling, you are the revolution.

A low agpar score at first — well lower than we wanted it to be — your first cry was The Last Post, at last.

The bugle call to the end of my such a very long dark night.

No soul was left, just a body wracked with stretch marks

Stretch marks that formed a map of your contented growing, and memories of retching through the hours of such a long pregnancy. Between 2am and 6am was the reveille, when there was nothing left to purge,

but still the middle slice of me writhed with wanting to get out.

I dream long dreams. They’re restless and raw.

I’m in the bath, our big huge beige bath, with rusty spa jets that have never worked. Its loaded with epsom salts, anything to try and get away from the pain, dehydrated muscles cramp and clench, and sweat matted in deep that all I can ever smell is sour milk all over me, even after showering three times a day. There’s a pull to the bottom of the bath, to feel the pressure of the water down and soften the panic of armageddon, which I’m pretty sure is coming. I see the surface of the water, like a cats eye marble, the floating down and deep and dulling and deafening.

They say silence is deafening.

And she will always carry on

Something is lost

But something is found

They will keep on speaking her name

Some things change

Some stay the same

I lose my breath at the portrait gallery in Canberra.

I don’t get it back until the moment she’s born.

I don’t sleep for 33 hours straight from her arrival,even though I’ve had enough fentanyl to make any dealer rich.

I dreamed in the darkest hours of grief that she would bring back my heart that had been buried with Mum. Unfair of me to put this on her, and I think over the hundreds of hours spent alone in bed that this has all been

a dreadful mistake.

My wife deserves better.

She could do better, have better, be bigger and brilliant without me

I’m a fat lumpy sack of ice.

I don’t deserve her love.

She’d be better off.

I don’t go.

I know this road, this landscape and space. It’s not real but it feels real. I tell her, she loves me harder.

I tell the doctor I can’t do it, but don’t ask for a solution. She says it’s too late to do anything anyway

anyway

that is fine as we fought so hard to get here.

I go to the psychologist, who says this is pregnancy

not the birth or the baby

It helps.

Keep beckoning to me

From behind that closed door

The maid and the mother

And the crone thats grown old

I’m rocking on all fours at two in the morning.

I’ve stopped being able to walk not just from the vomiting, but now physical pain too.

I rock rhythmically

to ease the ache

that pulls from the back to the front along my legs to my feet.

I’m not dreaming anymore, but I’m always in the dark.

I haven’t worked in so many months that I can’t imagine I’ll be able to again.

I wake up angry, vomit, and get in the car to go to births deaths and marriages.

I pick her up from her work,

and park opposite my old one, out the front of the office of lists of love and loss.

JOSIE

JOSIE

Don’t put money in the fucking meter

My waters broke…

What a waste of money. Am i just wetting myself?

I did that a few weeks back. On the way home from hospital after being on a drip to rehydrate

She is an anxious driver and I’m shouting at her

stop

now

here

fuck the roundabout

I open the door while we are moving and vomit, continuously for about 10 minutes on me,

the seat,

the road

the door

my bladder releases

I wet me

the seat

the road

the floor

I cry.

I cry now too, but I’m starting to feel better, already, as I know this is the end

And three hours later, the wedding is cancelled,

She has called it off

At 6 weeks early she now calls the shots

I look at her and I can’t believe it.

I look at her mother and I can’t believe her.

I don’t feel the rush of love, there are no motherly endorphins, but i will protect her above all else

forever.

I hear your voice

Coming out of that hole

I listen to you

And I want some more

I listen to you

And I want some more

It happened so slowly

the grief

and then so fast

years have flown by

and mostly I can’t believe how long it has been since I’ve seen my mother’s face -

or how long will it be until I do again.

I am always wondering, if in the midst of labour,

in the thick of pain and pushing

would reality fade out around me, and would I get moments with her again?In states of ecstasy, adrenaline, tragedy, pain

our souls rise up and out of our shells

chest first, arms out

we fly into the ether and meet our other selves there

the selves we once were, and will be, or could be

we reconnect with crazy whacked out dreams

with parents we’ve lost, lovers we never met.

I find pain dizzying.

Migraines and heartbreak, sometimes at the same time

the lightening bolts shoot colours

and finger prints blow up into textures that dent bones.

But I listen out for you

in migraine and heartbreak and labour

And all I hear back

is an echo of every grief I ever had.

Rumi and I dance

American Pie, Don McLean

And it happens -

Our lounge room is full of Rumi’s laugh

and your grace

and, it’s amazing.

Rumi’s little eyes can barely keep up with our spinning,

they roll up to the top of her head,

readjust,

and refocus on me

properly laughing for the first time.

I have my mothers eyes, and my daughter has mine.

At 2am feeds,

the romantic light of the iPhone

Rumi sucks a bottle of milk

and stares so deeply into my eyes i don’t know if it is her doing the staring,

or my mother

or me

or all of us.

She will always carry on

Something is lost

But something is found

They will keep on speaking her name

Somethings change, some stay the same

I read the eulogy at my mother’s funeral, and it started with,

How cool was my Mum

I can’t remember how it ended, or how it even went

or how she went.

But I will never forget how she loved us so fiercely,

my brothers and dad and me,

and how empty and awful life was when she died.

I spent my 20s trying to fast track through grief

by committing to everyone and everything

and jump into an adulting life so to end the temporary-ness of life i was drowning in

by trying to skip to the end

I wanted my own new family, i think, to rebirth our family

to replace the trauma and grief and loss

with love and light and new.

I wanted a replacement mother.

I wanted to have fights with her on the phone

to get texts from her

for someone to think I was amazing,

even though at best we are usually pretty average.

I wanted love and guidance and appreciation and rules and warmth,

to know which laundry detergent to use, and when,

and for someone to remember our family’s story, our folklore and weird relatives in old photos.

I wanted a replacement mother,

for the one I was deprived of, that I was owed, that I deserved.

The best way to burn through people is to put this on them,

to drain them

like a lake

looking for a body that died long ago.

But like meeting our heroes

it is fraught with promise and usually disappointment

and the eventual realisation,

you really do only have one mum,

or in Rumi’s case, two.

Rumi’s job isn’t to heal me of this,

I wisely tell myself, patting myself on the back for being so wise and sage.

But I can’t help but hope she does, and love that she already has, so much.

As weeks pass, and slowly days end and the months fly,

I realise that I love Rumi more than I thought possible,

and I don’t worry about the endorphins, the maternal pastels, and just love my little companion.

I love how she looks like me and has eyes like Mum,

She has my feet and I have my Dad’s toes.

And she will always carry on,

something is lost,

but something is found

And they will keep on speaking her name,

Some things change, some stay the same.