Separation

It’s been so long since I’ve written anything. I’ve eradicated all familiar points of reference and, as such, I’ve not given myself a great deal to write against, or towards.

When I moved to this country five years ago, I didn’t imagine that one day I’d remain here to orbit the uninhabitable planet of my old life, where my errant genes - my own heart that multiplied and grew around it an entire person - would need me to circulate for the foreseeable future. I am here for my son. On the margins of that relationship, I am building a life of my own out of new and untested materials, out of people and places and experiences born from my own, small initiative.

When I find that I’m plumping for a more substantial intersection between the old and the new, I remind myself that the union will take some time to resolve, that it will be one of substance over symmetry, of perspective rather than location.

My old life is a fishing rod cast into the sea of my day. As the hours tick over, I am reeled in by my heartstrings, and by dinnertime I am kissing and bathing my tiny boy. I’m putting him to bed and I’m slipping out the door into the dark matter of this new self who does none of these things, in a home that is, for the time being, insulated by objects instead of memories.

I used to worry that I would disappear without the props and settings and characters that helped to define who I was. Who wouldn’t be? But it was easily done, to put the book down and leave the room - frighteningly so. To walk like Gulliver through the landscapes of my history, brushing the clinging, miniature ghosts of identity from my arms and torso and thighs, until all that remained was myself.

All that ever remains is a self, and then one day, that self disperses, like a ghost, or like fog over an infinite, roiling sea, and is gone.

Behind the scenes

This afternoon my friend’s nine-month-old daughter may or may not have swallowed a thumbnail-sized sunglasses detail she may or may not have chewed off the arm of a pair of sunglasses. The point is, the mother was up like a shot, banging her kid’s head against the rug in a frenzied attempt to determine if she was choking, then hanging her upside-down whilst gagging her with a finger to try and bring up the offending ornament as she screamed like a baby that was probably going to shit out a foreign object sometime in the next 24 hours.

Then on the phone to a friend with five children of her own: I mean, what do I do – do I take her to the doctor, get her x-rayed, have them open her up, what? By then the child is breastfeeding calmly and Hartley has stopped crying because he’s back to being the centre of my universe. We’re all waiting for an answer because none of us have been through this before, though we’ve definitely reached an unspoken consensus that probably she is fine, and anyway, the friend’s children have never swallowed anything they’re not supposed to.

This past week has been difficult. There are many things about being a new parent that I simply cannot think about too much or I would spend the bulk of my time crying instead of inventing new games for him to play and trying to remember the words to picture books so that I don’t have to keep turning them away from him to read what they say.

The bond I formed with him in order to survive the experience is the very thing that now makes it impossible to even fathom being away from him for more than an hour at a time. Every first-time mother goes through it I guess, but I don’t trust the world or anyone in it at the moment, not with Hartley, and if I could spend the next eighteen years with him strapped to my front without being crippled by the weight of him, well. Don’t tempt me.

Next week Bruce and I are celebrating our second-year anniversary and will leave Hartley with someone else while we catch a film and go out for an early dinner. This woman has known Bruce for a very long time, is practically like a second mother to him and has two children of her own. She was the first person outside the family to meet Hartley, having driven us home from hospital after everyone else resigned themselves to the fact that we were probably never getting out. She will make a very good babysitter, and will not call us to come home early at the first sign of trouble.

No, the point is, everyone keeps trying to get me to feed Hartley a breadstick, a baby cookie, you know, whatever. Leave him for an evening, a night, a whole weekend – take a break! These are just suggestions, and what’s the harm in a bit of food? It’s symbolic, see. I not only feel obliged to intercept the offer – sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who would. And I simply cannot follow Hartley around for his entire life fending off the well-meaning gestures of others.

I don’t want a break, or a breadstick, or to reclaim my life. I just want to stop feeling so afraid.