Not a Fairytale (9 page)

Spell for a Baby Girl

1 ovulation kit

1 gold candle

1 red candle

1 silver candle

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 red rose in full bloom with thorns matches

Once you have read and followed the directions on the ovulation kit, and you know it is your most fertile time, prepare each candle carefully. Massage the oil gently into each candle from base to wick.

Next, arrange the three candles in a triangle. The top should be the red candle, the bottom left silver, and the bottom right gold. Prick your thumb with the thorn of the rose and squeeze three drops of blood onto the petals. Place the rose in the centre of the candle triangle.

Chant the following words: “Sweet as rose may be, powerful as thorn, a healthy baby girl from me shall be born.” Picture your child’s spirit rising to meet your body, like the rose germinating in the earth’s rich soil before unfolding to the sky. When you are ready, snuff out the candles and place the rose under your mattress before making love. Remember to remove the rose the next day, because sleeping on a withered flower will make you grow old before your time.

I’
M TWENTY-SIX WEEKS PREGNANT AND ALL
I
DO IS
vomit and think of Ma and Salena and home, until I find myself packing my bags and booking a ticket to Cape Town at 3 am one humid morning.

Jimmy thinks it’s sweet. I want to be near my mommy for the birth of my daughter. But I know it doesn’t make sense, that it’s purely hormonal. Ma only likes me now because I live far away from her and have a wealthy white husband. And Ma’s useless in a crisis. She says she can’t stand the sight of blood. I find this highly suspect. Any woman who says “I faint at the sight of blood” is talking utter crap. I mean, what about all that blood that flows out of your body every month for about forty years?

Of course it makes sense for me to be near Salena. She knows all about babies, and she’s a natural-born mother. Ma made her look after me when she was barely ten. I often speak to Salena on the phone before I fall asleep, as her day is dawning. After these talks my dreams are filled with our imagined adventures together. I wonder if we would have been as close if I had stayed in Cape Town. Maybe the distance has forged a stronger friendship.

Jimmy drops me off at the airport and we have a long lingering goodbye. We’ll be apart for six weeks, and I’m ambivalent about the absence. Part of me wants him to suffer the thrills of my half-hourly trips to the toilet, and another part of me is delighted to be free of his endless talk of foetal development. If he brings home another baby magazine with a happy smiling pregnant woman on the cover I may have to commit mariticide.

As the plane takes off, the sun lights up the cabin, warming it. I feel like a biscuit in an oven, browning to perfection. A gingerbread girl. Is this what my baby feels like, cooking away inside of me? Suddenly the nausea that was supposed to stop at twelve weeks, according to those cheerful magazines, hits me.
OH MY GOD
. I vomit in my sick bag, and then in the bag of the unfortunate soul next to me, and finally I have used up all the bags in my row and the flight attendants have stopped smiling at me. I sleep for a while, until I’m woken up by the smell of airline food and I promptly throw up into the closest thing, my skirt.

Then I’m in Cape Town, so jet-lagged and stinky that I barely recognise myself, let alone Salena, who has come with Ma to fetch me. I’m going to stay with her in her new home in Pinelands, near the hospital. It’s a good distance from Ma’s new Claremont townhouse. I’m not completely hormonally deranged. Me and Ma under one roof? Not a chance. We can chat on the phone.

I sleep for two nights and days, waking up intermittently to pee and drink water and then, five minutes later, to throw it up. Salena’s guest toilet is really clean. Even under the brim. Her toilet could star in one of those advertisements for toilet cleaners – the “After” version.

Salena looks different, and I’m picking up vibes between her and Zain. I start to wonder if I should rather have stayed in a hotel.

Two weeks after my arrival in Cape Town, I begin to get excruciating back pains. I don’t want to bother Salena, so I haul myself off to the obstetrician she’s arranged for me. The
OB-GYN
looks about eleven years old and speaks with a heavy Afrikaans accent. She tells me that my back pain, excruciating as it is, is normal, and once she establishes it’s my first pregnancy, I am dismissed as being a hysterical first-time mommy. She tells me to go for physiotherapy.

So, with my tail between my legs, I slink back to Salena’s. The pain terrorises me all night long. The next morning, after a handful of Panados, I make the appointment with the physiotherapist. Salena arranges for a neighbour to take me there, and the physiotherapist woman tells me I’d know if I was in labour. She proceeds to attach wires to my body, and while I think she plans on electrocuting me, it seems she’s only going to give me electrical jolts. They don’t work. I try to survive that night by rubbing my lower back against the wall and taking more Panado’s. Neither helps. In the middle of the night, Salena and an elderly Peanut Butter keep me company. Salena makes me toast and tea, and we play Snakes & Ladders. I lose, even though I cheat.

The pain is intolerable, and this time Salena calls an ambulance. I feel like a fraud. I keep telling her the doctor said I was a melodramatic first-time mother, and that I should just grin and bear it. But Salena will hear none of it.

I am pushed into an examination room by the ambulance attendant and Salena goes into the waiting room. A nurse begins to examine me, and I am hooked up to a machine. This one spews out paper and beeps contentedly. The nurse is wearing a pale green uniform, and she smiles all the time. I like her. She says, “Mommy, you’re definitely in labour.”

My heart stops. I know, because I can’t hear the machine beeping.

“Okay,” I agree, albeit reluctantly. “Bring on the drugs.”

“You’re nine centimetres dilated,” she tells me. “Just one more centimetre and baby will be ready. It’s too late for drugs.” Now there’s something Jimmy’s pregnancy magazines never mentioned – I thought it was never too late for drugs.

The nurse is serene and explains the procedure to me with gentle words. She stands on my left, cradles my head with her right hand, and cups my left leg under my knee with her left arm. But the baby, who has been letting me know for two weeks that she wants to be born, is pissed off. The monitors start beeping angrily. Baby’s cord is around her neck. A doctor I have never seen before arrives. He chats to me but I can’t hear a word. I see a silvery needle in his hand and notice his manicured nails. Then, casually, like he’s using kitchen scissors to cut the skin off a breast of chicken, he slices my vagina open. My brain reminds me that Jimmy’s magazines called this an episiotomy. What a lyrical word for such an ugly deed. Out pops my child, and they slip her into my left armpit where she nestles in a spot that appears to have been designed with her in mind.

She looks at me vaguely and then, with more interest, at the play of light and shadow on the ceiling made by the cars driving past the window. She makes soundless noises with her mouth. She has no eyebrows, like Ma. Salena comes in, kisses my wet cheeks and whispers the azan in my daughter’s right ear, before the nurse whisks her away. For a moment it feels like they have taken my left arm too.

I phone Jimmy as he’s sitting down to a supper of home-delivered pizza, my favourite pregnancy meal. The line’s bad, our voices echo and bounce against each other. But when he finally understands, his near-silent sniffs are more valuable to me than the most extravagant of his gifts.

Later I get to see her, my baby, Nazma, my star-child. She has a tube up her nose, other tubes are hooked up to her, machines are beeping, but she sleeps as if she invented the act. I cannot believe that outside of this room, this ward, this hospital, there is a spinning earth, with all its joys and horrors, because my world lies in an incubator.

I
FANTASISE ABOUT SLEEP THE WAY MEN ARE SUPPOSED
to think about sex all the time. I crave a night of uninterrupted sleep the way I craved chocolate before my period when I was a teenager. I long for my body to be mine, not to wake up ten times a night to feel little demanding hands clawing at my breasts for sustenance.

Since Nazma’s birth I can’t remember sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time. She’s supposed to be sleeping through the night, according to her doctor and the baby magazines Jimmy still buys. But she doesn’t read the magazines so she doesn’t know she’s falling short of her milestones. Often she screeches hysterically, ear-piercingly, for what seems to be no particular reason. She’s not hungry, she’s not wet, she’s not cold. There is no obvious source to her despair.

Sometimes I dance with her, sometimes I coo lullabies. Sometimes I fantasise about placing a soft feathery pillow over her dewy skin, her eyes like open flowers, and just holding it there until she sleeps for a hundred years.

I’m an unnatural mother. I’ve never heard other moms wishing their children away. Maybe I’m becoming Ma.

When I’m close to despair I break into Jimmy’s snores and he is instantly alert and inexplicably upbeat
.
He hugs her close to his chest and strolls around the room like he was born to the task. If only he could lactate. I leave them to it and find the dark smoothness of the couch and the comforting undemanding bodies of my cats Lily and Raven. All too soon it is time for another feed, and I force my gritty eyes as far open as they can go.

Jimmy gets home-help, Spanish-accented Gregoria, whose voice sounds like she’s permanently on the verge of catching a heavy cold and who wears long dark dresses in a heavy fabric, with long sleeves, even in the Floridian heat, because she wanted to be a nun but her agnostic father wouldn’t allow it. Instead she has made a career out of caring for other people’s children. She says Nazma might be her last baby; she’s searching for a cloister that will accept her although she is approaching her fortieth birthday. Nazma likes her. She naps in a sling against her body for hours, and I am free to sleep, but find it impossible to do so. I’m jealous of Gregoria’s competence. But by the time Nazma turns a year old and Gregoria bakes her a gingerbread house birthday cake from scratch, I am prepared to bow to her domestic agility.

She takes control of the house and it preens under her attention. Even the taps sparkle in a way I never could get them to do. Gregoria hates crowds and goes shopping at midnight when the supermarket is near empty. I get used to her unpacking groceries in the early hours of the morning. She teaches Nazma to talk in English and Spanish. She takes all my favourite recipes and meticulously types them up and has them printed and bound into a book, protected by plastic sheets. Then she learns to cook them better than I ever could. Gradually the bits of my brain that Nazma has not turned to sludge reappear, and I go back to my neglected dissertation. Life is peaceful.

She promised me her firstborn; I’d come to collect. I was happy, I was delighted, I was thrilled. I would have a child of my own to love and nurture, and protect. Some little being who would look up to me even if he outgrew me. I pictured us in front of the fire, him asleep in his crib, me smoking my little pipe, both of us content.

I expected her to kick up a fuss, and was surprised when she didn’t.

“Ah, it’s you. At last you’ve come for the child. Took your time, didn’t you?” She glanced irritably at her wristwatch. “Yes, it’s a girl. You said firstborn. You didn’t specify gender. I don’t suppose you have a wet-nurse yet? No? Well, that’s fine, I have one. This here is Sarah, and her little one, Mimi. What? Well of course they’ll have to go with you. She’s only a few days old, she’ll starve to death otherwise. Mimi? Yes, her too, she’s Sarah’s kid. Wet-nurses always have their own children, otherwise they wouldn’t be wet-nurses. Yes, the babies are noisy. No, you don’t get used to it. At least I haven’t.

“The smell? Just a bit of baby pooh. You’ll stop noticing it soon enough. Besides, she’s breastfed; the smell would be worse if she were on formula. Which reminds me: these three bags contain her nappies. The other ten have her clothes – mostly presents. I haven’t had time to sort them out, I thought you could do that. Then if you’ll look out the window— What’s that? Oh right, let me pick you up. My, you are a heavy fellow, aren’t you? Anyway, that lot downstairs are the toys.

“The crying? Colic. Should go away in three or four months, or so the baby magazines claim. Sarah? No, dear, she’s the wet-nurse, not the parent, you’ll have to deal with all the other aspects: the bathing, the putting to sleep, the entertaining. And of course Sarah doesn’t do the 3 am feed. She expresses breast milk the night before.

“Now, I’ve drawn up a schedule for each day of the week. Let’s begin with Monday. That’s your bowling night? Don’t be ridiculous. No, there’ll be none of that. You’ve got a child now: you need to be responsible. There’ll be no more movie nights, no book club, no AA meetings, no full-moon spell nights. Listen, you wanted the child, now you’ve got to live with your decision. You made me promise. A verbal contract. What? You don’t want the baby anymore? Well, I’m not sure if I do either.”