‘I think we should try to make a baby.’
‘What?’ I reply from underneath my cagoule’s hood and glance
around at the rain sodden Welsh hillside.
‘Right now?’
‘It’d be a bit chilly,’ my wife of five days says. ‘But maybe in the autumn when we get back
from Vietnam?’
‘Uh-huh,’ I say, remembering a similar conversation and
trying to figure out exactly how I feel.
‘That’s, er, that’s sooner than we’ve previously talked about.’
‘Is it?’
And, actually, I realise that it probably isn’t. It’s just that we weren’t terribly specific
and it’s so easy to wilfully misunderstand things when you want to. My wife continues to talk about our future
and I use the rain as an excuse to sink a little back into myself. I am torn.
I want, so desperately, to please her and yet the idea of having a child
in a little over a year’s time seems ludicrous.
I am just coming to terms with the idea that I am effectively halfway
through life with little literary output to show for it, and I haven’t realised
yet that my work is about to stall as inspiration rushes away from me. I don’t for one second believe I am ready for
the responsibilities of fatherhood.
But it is not solely my choice. And it certainly isn’t my body.
The idea sinks in more as we drop down off Pen Y Fan,
following the bridleway to the ruined buildings overgrown with greenery at the
head of the small dam. It isn’t as
horrifying as I first thought. It grows
and images form in my mind, spreading like tendrils through my life map.
‘I guess I just thought we’d have more time to, you know,
just be husband and wife, before we became mum and dad too.’
She smiles and I can’t not respond.
*
The bathroom door closes and I find myself not sure what I
want the outcome to be. Over the past
couple of months, I have oscillated between excitement and hesitation. There have been moments, sometimes crucial
moments, of doubt. Aside from questions
around my own suitability as a parent, it’s a hard world out there. Growing ecological problems, an economy
latched onto the hope that capitalism is somehow endless, that it is possible
for growth to be infinite, while we live in a society that, occasionally, seems
to embrace hate and aspire to social exclusivity. One that is more than willing to trample
others in its race to the false summit.
Who would want the gift of life in such circumstances?
‘Come and look,’ she calls, so I go upstairs to join her
staring at a soggy piece of card. Slowly
the colour changes to something definite.
She looks so pleased, I can’t help but get swept up in it too, but also
it feels remote. There’s a clear change,
but an abstract one too.
The next day we head to Normandy for a few days
cycling. Immediately, my wife notices a
difference. She has less energy, finds
herself struggling more than she would do normally. She can already feel the changes in her
body. Something is taking shape inside
her. Meanwhile, I feel detached. It is, obviously, happening to me too but I,
simultaneously, am excluded.
*
It is summer by the time of the second scan. Seeing it, hearing its heartbeat for the first
time helped it all to feel real, but during the lull in-between it has started
to disappear over the horizon again. I
can see the physical changes occurring to my wife, but still I struggle to
fully understand them – and consequently to completely understand how I feel
about it. I do want this, I tell myself,
but I worry that it is just me saying it.
I’m worried about how much I am lying to myself: That really I am afraid of what it will do to
my life, that its own life will be as muddled as my own.
I haven’t written a word for weeks. I sit upstairs at the computer, looking at
the white glow on the screen and nothing comes out. There is just the void, barren and
uncaring. I fear that’s what is growing
inside me.
The technician scans the baby several times. No longer just a foetus, it is taking on
humanoid shape. Its profiled head is
luminous and ghostly. A nose, a
forehead, lips and eyelids. It is
beginning to look real. I squeeze my
wife’s hand and feel a knot of nervousness scrunch in my gut as the
technologist returns from her computer and looks again.
‘Where has it gone?’ she mutters to herself.
‘What?’ I ask, immediately assuming something is wrong.
She thinks she has seen something called bright bowel. A brief moment where the bowel glowed like
blood. This, she concedes, could have
been a mistake since she can’t replicate it, but it could also be a soft sign
for all sorts of things. Some relatively
benign. Some significantly more serious.
‘Don’t google it,’ I tell my wife, knowing full well that we
both will do. Cystic fibrosis. Cytomegalovirus. Trisomy 21.
Intrauterine Growth Restriction.
The next few days are tense.
I reappraise the questions I’m asking myself. It becomes no longer about whether I will be
fit to have a child, but whether I will be capable of caring as much as could
be required. I fail to answer myself.
Another scan, this time at the bigger hospital with a
consultant operating the machine.
‘Nothing,’ he says.
‘There is nothing there, nothing to worry about.’
The sense of relief I feel is so great I am giddy on my feet. But the relief is sharpened too. I immediately realise that I do not so much
feel it for myself but for my unborn child.
I care about it more than I do myself.
And that is the moment everything draws into focus. I am not ready to be a Dad – no-one ever,
truly is. I am detached from the process
of growing a baby because I am one body removed, just like everyone else. However, I do care for it, suddenly and
surprisingly strongly.
*
But no words come and wife grows and I feel as though I fail
us.
The air has turned cold tonight for the first time this
year. My breath hangs in the dark two
o’clock air. Someone from our NCT group
gave birth this morning. We are well
and truly in the drop zone. Labour could
commence at any moment and I am hundred miles away, drunk outside a pub. I am a useless excuse for a man, I think,
followed by something more profound I tell myself to remember and write down
later. I plan to use it here, in this
paragraph, but it is gone, fleeting on the winter wind.
My scars itch with guilt and the demons under my skin writhe
around looking for a route out.
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