What terrified me the most about my mother dying was that I might not be able to survive without her. I’d be marooned with all my blood-relatives half a world away. Abandoned in the adopted country. It didn’t matter that I was 31. These digits could easily have been reversed.
Mum and I would mooch in a café, drinking tea and conjuring up what kind of life I might lead as a mother. What would I do? What would my partner look like? There was always uneasiness when I imagined giving birth. When I was 17 and we lived in Canberra (Mum had to move there for a full-time job in government) I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). My menstrual cycle had staggered into a half-life when I was 14, and though at the time we figured the low fat content of my ballet and gym body was the cause, it wasn’t.
PCOS is a shitty thing for a woman to have. Think of it as a spectrum disorder with the left side being manageable but the extreme end on the right being downright nasty. In brief, my ovaries were sensitive and overly stimulated. They produced excessive amounts of androgens through the release of too much luteinising hormone (LH) or insulin in the blood. In the menstrual cycle your LH does her thing, preparing the ovarian follicles to grow big enough for an egg to pop into them. The follicle later bursts and the egg goes down the fallopian tube. However, if the follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) sheila at this critical egg-popping point gets all shy and doesn’t yell out loud enough for the LH to hear her shouting the words, Work with me over here, then your eggs don’t ripen.
What? says LH. I can’t hear you.
The sad thing was that my LH and FSH didn’t work well together. In some women LH has a hearing aid and gets what FSH wants and makes contact; in others they never connect. If your LH and FSH never speak to one another then you remain infertile.
At 17 PCOS scared the hell out of me. I did two things with the verdict: ignored its existence, and silently feared like hell that hair would spring up in unwomanly places on my body. I was on the left-hand side of the spectrum and didn’t suffer terribly with PCOS, but if you were on the extreme end you were obese, suffered from acne and hirsutism, with diabetes thrown into the mix, and you were likely infertile. Basically it was anti-beauty material, everything a developing girl would not want. It permanently fixed in me the idea that I wasn’t normal like other girls.
As an adolescent I had the vanity of Narcissus. PCOS didn’t do much for my entry into female adulthood. It destroyed the joy of a developing body in some ways, though in others not so – like my first sexual experience, which was easy, filled with lust (midnight cycles across town) and liberation. Despite that, because of PCOS traits I assumed I was somehow more masculine.
What really worried me was the infertility question. I figured nature’s joke would be that I’d have to adopt, after having a mother who was adopted, and it would be some sort of learn this lesson life experience for both of us.
My mother told me many times the story of my drug-free birth. A 24-hour labour of agony, which split my mother right down to her perineum thanks to forceps. I was also a month overdue. I’d been due on 1 April.
My narrow hips made me think I’d suffer a screamer of a labour like my mother. Plus, I could never imagine giving birth. I know, I know … no woman can until she’s in the throes of it. But in my life I’ve had visions of things I could do, a sense of my capacity, and I could never see myself giving birth. When I did have daydreams about it something dramatic would happen, like I’d haemorrhage afterwards (as I ended up doing) and appear to be dying, as in an Irish drama piece about a good Catholic girl giving birth in a cow shed on piles of hay. My husband would wipe his bloody hands on his work pants and lean his dark, curling head close to mine, crying, Don’t leave me, I love you so.
I also had waking dreams about my future ‘husband’. He’d appeared to me with a scarred face. B was in a serious car accident as an 18-year-old and sports a Harry Potter gash across his forehead. Maybe I did get these visions right?
As I was rendered menopausal by hormonal treatment, the issue of my PCOS seemed to have disappeared. Result. I didn’t have to worry about hormonal imbalances of high oestrogen and progesterone; my chemical romance had put paid to these. I only had to wax body hair from my armpits or my legs every few months. Thanks to plastic surgery, I had the exact breasts of my choosing and I didn’t have to wear a bra under dresses or backless tops. Plus, I would never pancake. How good was this for a 36-year-old mother?
When my mother’s body was killing her, our roles reversed. I was mother to my mother. When I walked behind her flower-strewn coffin with a native Australian bouquet in my arms, tears streaming down my face and my chest heaving, I was her daughter again. Four years after her death when I was thrown by my own breast cancer diagnosis, I had Celso.
I bargained with some external power that I would be satisfied if I had the gift of life fully return after cancer treatment and that my reparation for that gift would be unfailing, uncomplaining motherhood. Prior to the diagnosis I’d taken it for granted that mothering a baby would be an intense phase of my adult life, and a situation that would
