Words for a New Beginning

Themes: Memory

I remember the grainy start of a day, the light rotating on the clouds from the bottom-lit night orange to the dirty pink tops and faces, arranged behind the city silhouette somewhere near the origin of Parramatta road: the most primeval of Australian ways, the first of our journeys. Leaving for the hospital at 6:30am. Arriving 10minutes early. The sense of social impropriety strangely powerful, considering.

I remember the fear in Emma’s voice in the room in the Birth Centre. We’re left alone. We have the justification to do anything, but we don’t know what to do. She has a shower. I go to park the car.

I remember the predawn footpaths of Camperdown, the razor topped wall of the Chinese Embassy facing off a childcare centre. Sand spilled across the path from the sandpit. Terrace houses with their arms about each others shoulders, leaning together in sleep. The scarifying gray light.

I remember the deep bath, the french midwife named Emilie ran it but left. It began to overflow. I contemplated flooding the hospital. It sort of felt right. A different midwife came: Heather? Helen? Older, serious. I remember sitting alongside that bath in the dark. The intensely loud ticking of a clock. Dark. Facing me across the bath is Heather/Helen. We don’t make conversation. We sit and occasionally look at each other. Strangers in the most intimate space. Between us is a woman sunk utterly into herself, almost childlike. The pain has drawn down every curtain on her senses. And in a sense she is not there. I am there, the clock reminds me.

Contraction. One Minute. Here we go. You’re going to make it. Breath on my arm, grip my hand. I’ve got you. For one minute she is a fury, an elemental, she rises with the pain, she matches it, she owns it, she drives it before her, she brings the child forward. And then she’s gone again. And I’m sitting alone with strangers in the dark lone waiting clock place.

I remember the hurried ride from the Birth Centre to the Delivery Ward. The baby’s heart rate dropping during contractions. “It’s time to get him out dear.” “You’ve done so well, you just need some help”.
Suddenly there’s a crowded room, bright lights, multiple conversations. A female Asian doctor is at the centre, an Aussie asian, like the kids I work with. Speaking soothingly, explaining. But she’s not the boss, another doctor is hovering at the back somewhere, but she is the silent authority watching. A British anaesthetist. Another midwife, British too. Lots of others, I don’t know what they’re doing. Everyone’s talking at once: soothing, encouraging, explaining, instructing. I exchange a look with Helen/Heather over the row of heads. She’s been shunted to the back of the room. Now we share something: the knowledge that chatter isn’t going to reach into what is happening here.

They decide to suck him out. A Ventouse delivery (I just looked that up… I’ve been calling it a Von Toose. Imagining a crazy German doctor with a plumber’s plunger). The suction cap is attached to the top of his head.

And then he is born.

I remember the weird mushroom cloud on the top of his head from the suction. I thought that mushroom was his head, but then more head kept coming. This child had lived in an imaginary space, only millimetres away from my fingers, pushing back occasionally, but still only potentiality, fiction, of infinite dimensions, impossibly large or small. An unborn child has no dimensions, and then suddenly he does. He is much larger and much smaller than imagined.

I remember realising at that moment that no one else would ever remember this. The doctors don’t remember it, any more than I remember the faces of those I shared a train carriage with this afternoon. Ghostly shadows only hours later, gone irretrievably tomorrow. His coming was background, not event, to their memories. Emma doesn’t remember it, she was it, she couldn’t observe. Nathaniel (he was only named about 10 hrs later, already there are anachronisms) won’t remember, he may imagine it, try to reconstruct it from the stories we tell him. But his birth will be as much imaginary for him as his antenatal existence was for me.

Words matter to me as they didn’t before. When my words fail so, in a small way, does the memory of this beginning.
And as a result… and I’m struggling to express this… I matter to me more than I did before. I am his witness, his story-teller. We have already begun to weave each other out of words (all of us, friends). But I will speak him this beginning.

Is this the progress of life: to know oneself as another… and then Another’s… and another’s father?

He snores unconsciously on my lap while I write to him.

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Camping with Others

Themes: Memory, Society

I never really understood the attraction of camping in a caravan park. When I was a kid my family would go camping every year for two weeks from Boxing Day. We’d pack the Kombie full to the roof (which is even more impressive when you know that the middle seats were taken out). Then Dad and one of us kids would hop in while everyone else piled into our other car (Mitsubishi Nimbus, most gutless people-mover ever invented). All set, we’d head up into the Snowy Mountains to pitch our tents beside the Goobragandra River. It’s only about an hour trip but for me it was a journey across the borders of society and into the wilderness. For the entire time we camped we wouldn’t see another soul – except perhaps friends from Church that would drop by and camp with us for a while.

I loved those times. I was a little hermit right throughout my early teenage years, actually. We lived about 7kms out of Tumut and we didn’t exactly have close neighbours, but I couldn’t wait to get up into those mountains, away from people. I had this deep, semi-articulate hatred for society.

On reflection it was probably an emotional defence against the feeling that our family were outsiders in our community. We were poor (my parents were faith-missioners at the time) but much more highly educated than our peers (both my parents had been to Uni in a town where most people worked at the Timber Mill). We stood out morally as Christians: we didn’t watch the same TV shows, speak the same vernacular, drink at the pub, play sport because it clashed with Church, etc. It was very difficult for a kid to understand or articulate this sense of not belonging. An adult, with his or her wider experience of the world, is able to draw upon the comforting knowledge of a world which includes spectacular human diversity and mentally invokes this as a buttress against the conformist pressures of a small community. An adult Christian is also able to orient him or herself to an unseen community of unrivalled temporal and physical extent which is well equipped with narratives designed precisely to fortify the isolated. A grown-up Christian might feel all alone but is comforted by the knowledge that he or she is really part of the something big. But a little baby offspring-of-Christians is sadly pink and helpless.

It really is so very worthwhile to send teenage Christians away on Christian youth camps. Emma and I have been up at CMS Summer School for the last week and heard a number of times how significant the youth programme has been for helping Christian teenagers grow into Christian adults. A friend who teaches at a large Sydney school even told us that he started bringing his family to Summer School after seeing the difference that it made to the lives of Christian kids at his school.

This week we are camping in Ulladulla. We’ve got a really pretty spot on the headland looking out over Ulladulla harbour. The hammock is set, books are being read, there will be snorkelling.
Oh yeah, It’s in a Caravan Park…

We’re still different. But now I know that it’s not so much about me not belonging in this society, as us belonging to a different one.

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