Published by Verity La
What does it mean to be born outside of marriage to a mother who wonders if the bleats of a goat are your first cries?
Birth
I just slipped out she said. Like a slip of the tongue, slipshod, a slip stitch forever unknitted. I was born. Slippery, sibilant, small in the scheme of everyday lives. Nothing stopped. There were no celebrations. I was born and everyone got on with their work in the power station, the briquette factory, the mine, a gaping, brown open-cut.
She hung the nappies and sheets on the line, coal dust settling on the whiter than whites, on the window sills and mantle pieces, on the froth of the men’s beer, in our lungs. I was two-months old. Thin and pale, she shivered, her breasts bulging red and hot above her shoulders, a painful mountain range of igneous rock. Mastitis the doctor said. Milk fever, once a reason for admitting women to the insane asylum.
He laughed with a fat, purple face and said, ‘Keep breastfeeding! Let the baby suck’.
Not having a bar of it, my mother put me straight on the bottle.
She laid me down to sleep, seething ready to explode because my father’s English friend from the Woodcraft Folk was Morris-dancing in the bathroom day and night, until he got a desk job at Maryvale Paper Mills. Then he moved out.
Irene, our neighbour, would throw me around like a football and babysit when my parents went to Hamish Gardner’s house for Communist Party meetings. Dad was a proud member of the Trades and Labour Council, a deputy rep for the Transport Workers Union. He drove the bright-yellow Euclids carting overburden from the coal deposit.
The women went to Party meetings but my mother would rather have been at the picture theatre with its curved façade and big clock embedded into beige bricks. In summer, they turned on the air conditioning. In winter, she could take off her shoes, rest her feet on hot-water warmers and watch Vincent Price murder people in The House of Wax, 3D technicolour on a panoramic screen.
She took me with her once when I was a baby and sat at the back of the auditorium in the soundproofed, glass-fronted, cry room to watch East of Eden. I slept and she cried. My mother would sit in the cry room. Often without me.
In the theatre, she always refused to stand for the national anthem.
At home, she took a failed dish of bread and butter pudding from the oven, cried, splattered it against the kitchen wall.
What does it mean to be born in a town purposely planned and built, then purposely demolished for the coal that lays beneath it?
My birthplace is an ever-expanding, dark and greedy hole in the ground. With heat and oxygen, the coal spontaneously combusts. Lignite dust bursts into flame at the drop of a match, a spark, a welding torch, a yellow flash igniting in mid-air. Volatile, toxic. Giant, cylindrical cooling towers, chimneys, steel girders, high wire fences, power lines.
My birthplace is Brayakaulung land, Gunaikurnai, cleared, windswept, foothills.
What does it mean to be born to land where the ancestors are denied, where they are brutalised? Do they know my footsteps, my birth spirit?
My blood ancestors, Polish, Italian, Scottish, do they know my footsteps, my birth spirit?
Birth
I walk the short corridors of a small hospital, Bamalete Lutheran. I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been. Seventy-four kilos. Twenty-four years old like my mother when she had me.
First baby. My father drove to Melbourne to collect his friend from England.
First baby. My daughter’s father is out with friends.
The walls are green gloss, the floor concrete, painted dark red, polished, worn where I walk.
I walk because the nurses tell me I should. Read the birth records open on the counter in front of me. Stillbirth. Don’t think about it. Float.
The nurses give me an enema, warm and wet, not painful.
Cow bells ring hollow and deep. The land is dry, gold, studded with small trees and shrubs. I’m on my back on the bed. The midwife checks dilation.
‘Don’t hyperventilate. Breathe normally’, she says.
I read about the breathing in a book. Neon light.
The doctor is at the end of the bed. A tall German woman telling me to push. Round pain, rhythmic, I float. From deep within the back of my head I float. My hip bones separate like a spatchcock cut with kitchen scissors, pressed flat on the white sheet, I rip, a goat bleats at the window.
Release.
My baby cries.
Ten fingers. Ten toes. She is big.
A big baby.
Relief.
We wait as my uterus presses down. A balloon shrivelling in on itself, contracting against the placenta, the temporary organ I have harboured, accepted and must now expel. Every process orchestrated by this new child in the room.
The midwife wants to sew the tear that extends from my vagina to my anus.
The placenta is ragged maroon not flat-cake perfect circle. We wait for more contractions. My skin smells damp, of freshly-cut grass, metallic.
The needle in and in and in and in.
Is it curved this needle?
Is it huge, with a big eye?
Black thread pulls through my tenderness. Pulls me back together, hurting. No pain killers.
The nurse tells me to get up and walk to the room.
I lie on my bed. My baby next to me in a Perspex cot. Sleep.
She cries. I take her. Sleep.
A nurse holds her to my breast. She sucks. Sleep.
I wake. It feels like I’m giving birth again. Waves of pain.
I tell the nurse.
She smiles, ‘The uterus contracting back to its pre-birth size. It’s nothing to worry about’.
I can’t float. The nurse brings tablets. They dull the pain. Sleep.
The light bulb hangs from the ceiling, stark and still. I sit up to look at my baby, eyes closed, her chest rising and falling rapidly, small lungs, heart, kidneys learning how to work in this world, outside me.
A spider, light brown and black, with very long front legs speeds across the wall above her cot.
My feet feel the cold of the concrete floor. Trembling, I take her wrapped in pastel yellow, blue and pink softness, and hug her close to my chest.
Indecision and anxiety prickle my skin. The spider waits for my next move. I bend over, clutching my baby with one arm, grab my shoe and throw it. The spider falls. I’m not sure if it’s dead. Part of a spindly leg sticks to the wall.
At home with my baby. I am frightened to hold her in water, to rub her skin with soap. My breast swells, lumpy, the ducts blocked.
The doctor gives me antibiotics for mastitis. I keep feeding.
She cries. Every night she cries.
I pull my hair, fighting the temptation to throw her across the room.
So tired.
We drive dark streets and she sleeps. Drive and cry. I am very thin. Mosetsi.
What does it mean to be born outside of marriage to a mother who wonders if the bleats of a goat are your first cries? What does it mean to be born to land that your mother came to as an adult? That your father’s mother came to as an adult? Bamalete land, Bangwaketsi land where your father and his father and all the fathers going back in time are deeply rooted in the sand, deeper than the roots of the shepherd’s tree?
Who knows the vibrations of your feet on the earth?
Who knows your birth spirit?
Who do you become?
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Gaele Sobott 