No, I know I’ve woken from surgery but I heard a baby.
Oh yes, that’s from a C-section.
Oh!
Why do they put the happy, happy post-C-section new parents with women out of gyn-oncology surgery? I’d just had my womb removed at 37 and the woman next to me just had issue from hers. What if I was childless and woke up to this?
In recovery I attached myself to a rapid-fire conversation with an African nurse, and told her how brilliant the consulting surgeon was. I held her gloved hand tight. My eyelids were heavy. I could barely see her. At intervals I peered over at the woman opposite me, who remained unconscious. Her blood pressure was dropping: 60/40. A flurry of blue-backed and white-backed nurses did something, and the unconscious woman regained consciousness briefly then was out again. Her cheekbones were angular but well padded. A relieving nurse sat slumped next to her, keeping an eye on her blood pressure. The woman looked seriously unwell. I wanted her to open her eyes.
A strutting father walked past the end of my gurney. He was followed by a new C-section mum holding their tiny baby against her chest. She appeared oblivious to the porters pushing her bed. The baby’s head of hair was a swirl of red and black.
The father had walked in and out of recovery to tell relatives about the baby. His repeated knocking to be allowed back in had annoyed the staff. He had a mouth full of methadone teeth: half-rotted stumps wrought by a major addiction and its recovery. What looked like scars on his neck were scrawled tattoos. His fingers were ringed with cheap silver. He was happy. His healthy child was born. A pure moment for him and his girlfriend.
New life and the end of my capacity to nurture it.
Now: what’s current in the breast cancer arena?
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
Your schemes, politics, fail – lines give way – substances mock and elude me;
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess’d soul, eludes not;
One’s-self must never give way – that is the final substance – that out of all is sure;
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life – what at last finally remains?
When shows break up, what but One’s-Self is sure?
Walt Whitman, ‘Quicksand Years’
In 2016, seven years after my breast cancer diagnosis, I returned to the Motherland. The last time my feet had touched British soil my mother was alive, I lived in France, my relationship with B was new and delicious, and there was no baby and no cancer in my breast. It had been 13 years. The time before javelins and arrows rained down.
I stepped onto British soil motherless, but not orphaned. I was back in the country where I was born and lived my early years. All my relatives were here. So too my oldest memories. At four trying to tie my own shoelaces on the steep stairs that led up to our second storey where our two bedrooms were: my mother’s and mine. My mother had purchased our attached home when buying houses as a single mother in Brighton in the United Kingdom was possible. It was one among many row houses on Baxter Street. Mum had received the down payment on our property from her boyfriend at the time, Tony. He’d generously donated one month’s interest from his trust fund to Mum to secure a home for us. Tony was the son of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family who’d made their fortune in the cotton industry. I still have all the hats from around the world that he gave me (a collapsible top hat to go under church pews, an original pith helmet from South Africa, a public schoolboy’s woollen striped hat for cricket …). Early in their relationship he’d taken her to New York to meet some of his friends. She told me that she’d been so blanketed by her own insecurities as the working-class girl from Eastbourne, and by her sense of inadequacy among his connected friends, that she’d failed to enjoy herself or be herself.
A sense of connection was always present with England. It took until I was 22 to feel Australian. Up until that point I felt English-Australian. Then I’d return to England to visit family and feel Australian-English. Never quite two feet on the soil where I was standing. Identifying as Australian took a while, but it was a relief when it finally arrived.
I’d reconnected with my grandmother by reaching out through email. She’d responded and we renewed a dead relationship. Like many adoptee stories my mother’s relationship with her birth mother wasn’t simple: a cellular fear of further rejection, of not being ‘enough’, the complexities of intense familial connection without the lived years to back it up. The fallout from their rupture in communication was that I too was disconnected from my grandmother. The second wounding for my mother of a failed relationship with her birth mother was laid to rest, before her own body was, in an exchange of letters and forgiveness the year my mother was dying.
My mother’s mother stood in the entranceway of her 18th-century cottage, her pure white hair stark against the stone wall. It was a Welsh day: damp, sky dark with rain, with a strange muted green light, like reeds under water.
My grandmother stepped into her home, with its antique furniture and raging fire. It was a visitation from another world. I burst into tears. Sorry, it’s just I hadn’t thought about how much you looked like her, I said. It was another sliding-doors moment. This is the face my mother could have had. If she’d lived.
My grandmother didn’t raise my mother but she’d developed the same purse of the lips, a similar expression in the eyes.
I’ll make a cup of tea, my grandmother said. I’ve got cake. Chocolate, like you like.
I was so grateful. At the end of a world journey I’d returned to a place of
