Birthdays, memory and imagination

a long one after a long time.

Two days ago, my stomach began to ache. I couldn’t work out why, just a dull pain, just right there on the left hand side. When I noticed the date, it felt familiar, but I couldn’t place it, until I remembered, nine years ago I’d gone into early labour with my son. A labour that struck suddenly, manifesting in blood when there should have been none, a labour continued in a silent car journey to the hospital where I played the baby’s name over in my head, thinking how, if…( and I couldn’t think the next part although of course I was) I wouldn’t be able to read any books or essays by the writer I was calling him after again. Every year on the same date the pain returns and every year I try to work out why, as if somehow even nearly a decade later, it is unexpected.

He took nearly three days to be born. When I’m in pain, I don’t speak. This confused the midwives. When I’m in extreme pain, I will focus on reading a book and if there is no book available, I will bite the inside of my bottom lip and try to work out how I will write it down later, already internalising and externalising the experience. In this way I am both there and not there. For nearly three days I observed everything that was happening. The constant sound of his heartbeat, a drum so insistent I heard its phantom for weeks after. The sounds of midwives moving, whispering, doors opening, print outs from machines being analysed, the twilight world of the delivery room. In the hours before he was born, his heartbeat started to play tricks. It would accelerate before swiftly decelerating. Pain and language do not sit well together. How do I tell you how sore it was when I’d never experienced something so painful before. It was not like a headache, it was not like a stomach ache, it was not a burn or a cut or a bruise or a scratch, it was a pulling a breaking a certainty neither of us would survive the night, they collected around the bed, c-section one of them said, I begged them please, I was not strong enough, I said, to continue with this pain but I said it in a level voice because good girls do not make a fuss, they do not shout and they do not get angry and they do not argue for themselves or for their unborn babies and so when the obstetrician said really you just need to be better with the pain, despite that fact I had already birthed two children with minimal pain relief, I nodded and told myself really I just need to be better with the pain, and his heart kept running and slowing as I tried just to be better with the pain and then sometime in the coldest part of the night, two hours short of dawn, there he was, born with his nose in the air, back to back, that must have hurt, the midwife exclaimed, as if I hadn’t already said that part.

I took him in my arms and then it fragments because I am rubbing his back and he has bubbles but no sound coming out his mouth, he is a funny colour and his skin is the not the same temperature his brother’s was and things are happening in the room he is not in my arms anymore and I am not sure where he has gone but he is gone and the midwives are too and so is the doctor and as one leaves they might or might not have said something about blue although he was more grey than anything else; one of them thinks to draw the curtains around the bed and I want to lie down but I need to sit up because if I lie down then I might go to sleep and what sort of mother would do that, waiting for their blue baby to be returned. Instead, I fixate on the shoes. I should have paid more attention, I tell myself, if only I knew what shoes they’d been wearing then I could match them with the feet coming into the room, visible from under the curtain, but I did not pay attention to the shoes so my baby was blue, it was my fault. I do not think at the time how erroneous this logic is. Other times, all I paid attention to was the shoes, and the thing still happened, I should have known what happens, happens, regardless, and afterwards, what has happened is always still happening.

They brought him back. Five minutes, five hours, whatever, later. I don’t know.

They said he was squeezing his umbilical cord, depriving himself of oxygen, in the foetus this manifests as a sort of high, he was having fun with what he had. He is now a child who flings himself around in goals at least twice a week on the football pitch, skins his knees on tennis courts, taught himself to ride a bike, spins on roundabouts until he staggers, laughing, across the park. 34 years before him, I was also born blue. I used to see this as a type of inertia but after him, I was not so sure. Maybe this was a manifestation of my constant need for excitement or motion or activity; I was a child who fidgeted, swung on chairs, could not sleep unless physically worn out. I have not changed much.

Nothing really ever changes much. Nine years later, I am still in that room for three days. The year is pockmarked with dates like these; a feeling of unease settles, something lurks, outside, way back there.

The honey light of September, just as the year begins to pivot, is dangerous. I was seven when my aunt died, I am still unable to contend at the start of every September that she was there at the beginning of the month but by the time it ended, she was dead. This should not seem in anyway difficult to grasp. It is as if in recalling it, I am the child I was, equipped only with the ability to see it as a child, to the extent that when it comes to dates, I am unsure of the specifics of when she died. I tracked down her death certificate a few years ago to try and fix these in my mind. It felt important to know exactly when she died, the thought that my memory didn’t match the facts was terrifying. I pride myself on my memory, extraordinary, people have said when I tell them how far back I can remember, but my inability to correctly remember when my aunt died hints at the possibility my memory is just as fallible as everyone else’s. When the death certificate arrived, the only place I could open it was the car. I could barely look at it. I lost it shortly afterwards. For a long time, I believed it was in the glove compartment but when I looked, it wasn’t there. That was the same year I lost my mother. That year, I lost a lot of things. Not normally careless, I began to drop things, many things broke that autumn. I did not think it was deliberate although I now do. I lost things and broke things and misplaced things to try and rationalise the larger loss. Things leave. Things break. This is the order of things. People are there until they are not. This is what I was trying to rationalise when really there is no rationalising the irrational.

I wonder what ache my grandmother experienced on each of my aunt’s birthdays, a few days after the date of her death. I say a few, because I cannot remember her birthday either. Everyone else’s birthday, indelible in my mind, hers, gone. The blanks we create. The ways we keep ourselves safe. When I think of my aunt, I think of my Grandmother, who lived after her death for nearly as long as my aunt was ever alive. How do you live with a loss like that? Where do you put the love you had? People like to say a thing like that is unimaginable, but that’s only because they don’t want to imagine it. It is a terrible thing to imagine but we must imagine terrible things. I went to a fundraiser recently for the victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria and in that room, we imagined excruciating things because this is what makes and keeps us human.

When they brought him back nine years ago, I became convinced he was not my baby. I thought they had brought the wrong one back. I didn’t tell anyone, because how can you say something like that and still sound vaguely sane. I thought this explained his long nights of crying, when he contorted his little body and wept. I thought it explained why he struggled to feed. I thought this was why he did not sleep. I didn’t realise he was just sore and I was too. I thought he wanted his real mother as much as I wanted my real baby. I realise now and realised then in a way, that I was not well, but when the health visitor came, I smiled and made sure she ticked the right boxes and I passed all the tests because I like getting things right and also because they don’t test for the right things. They don’t ask if the light’s beginning to fragment or show up more brightly than usual, they don’t ask if you’re afraid you might drop, drown, hurt your baby or yourself, and because they don’t ask, you don’t need to tell them. Then one night as it turned to morning and the pink light came through the cream curtains, picking out the fuzz on his head, I sat with him on the edge of my knee, almost too tired to hold him there, knowing his brother, 17 months younger would be awake soon, and he opened his eyes, his pupils widening at me. I knew he was mine, because those eyes were his great grandfather’s eyes, which were also my eyes; all of us, on repeat always.

I made notes when he was little, fevered things I found recently and was too scared to read. I filled notebook upon notebook with them. I write about things I don’t understand as a way of understanding them, but sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes writing about a thing makes it less knowable, when that happens, I write about it more, its unknowability making it even more intriguing. I am writing this today because I still can’t make sense of how dates work and the body holds onto them or how I wilfully make myself forget the things I want to remember or how far away those baby days feel now with children full of their own opinions, obsessions and beliefs littering the house, or how no matter how distant those times become they are only ever a sound or a smell or a date away, they are still there or here, waiting, and nine years later, I am finally writing this about his birth, after trying to and failing to for nearly a decade.