During The Turning Point
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For some reason, we call it a turning point. The word ‘point’ implies before and after. It suggests suddenness, a moment, an instant, immediacy. It doesn’t capture the time in between. There is before. Then there is during; the turning, the inexorable, unstoppable, regrettable process of no return. And only when the process is complete, no matter how long it takes, only then will after begin.
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BEFORE
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You are at that age when toddlers are described in numbers (twenty-one months old, taller than the 95th’ percentile, twelve and a half kilograms, ninety-five centimetres). I measure you by words spoken (more than fifty single words, multi-word phrases), ideas shared, sounds articulated (all of them, even the consonant clusters). You talk to me in sentences, you ask questions (so many questions, what have we created here, there will never be enough answers). We are inseparable.
It is also that time when new measurements come into our world. Fundal height. Gestation period. Circumference. Comparatives like ‘eldest,’ ‘first’ sibling, the ‘big kid’ bed for the baby is going to need the cot. Grow! Grow into the big kid’s car seat. Try to wear big kid undies. Ah, toilet training. You’re ready. I’m certainly ready! I am determined I will only have one child in nappies. Despite my belly (thirty-five weeks) I carry a plastic potty everywhere and you wee in it (at the park, on the side of the road). We high-five one another in triumph every time.
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You’re weighed at the child health clinic and I’m surprised. You’ve lost nearly two kilograms. I’m exasperated. Three weeks until you need to be sitting in the big kid’s car seat. You have to be over the minimum weight, you were nearly there last time we looked. It must be another growth spurt so I let you drink a milkshake. That should fill you up and put some meat on your bones. I’ve heard that dairy can be a possible trigger for the awful allergies and asthma your dad suffers from, so you haven’t had much of it. You’ve been breastfed for the first year of your life and not a smidgen of milk or cheese passed your lips until after your birthday. We are always together and I know this for a fact. Ironic, considering I gorged myself on litres of milk and blocks of cheese every day while you were the one in my belly. Now you love cheese, but milk drinks are something new for you. After the infection you had a week ago, I think you deserve something a bit special. You adore the chocolate flavour, such a treat! You promptly throw it up all over my shoes. I can’t see my feet below my belly but my sense of smell is pregnantly acute. The nurse is quick to bustle us into another room, clean away the mess, disinfect the smell.
“Too much sugar?” She asks brightly. Perhaps.
I get another milkshake for you at the next midwife appointment. It’s the only thing I can think of to keep you occupied while I am examined (low in the pelvis, engaged, head down, not long now). Out on the footpath you vomit again. Milkshakes are not going to be the solution to distraction.
I am thrilled when you become ravenously hungry. Finally. I cannot keep up with your appetite. You eat as much as, more than, your dad. At this rate you will reach that weight (14kg) in time to be the big kid (fingers crossed). Toilet training makes me sob with frustration. I am enormous. Taking myself to the loo is hard enough, squatting down beside you and encouraging you to wee makes my own bladder release and I’m powerless to stop it. I’m ashamed and so short-tempered. I’m tired. And you seem to be wetting the bed every single night. And then twice. And in the morning. It feels like a protest. Maybe you aren’t as excited about being the big kid after all? I wish you would just use your words to tell me. I am hauling wet laundry to the washing line, more sheets, the bed liner, three pairs of pyjamas. You fairly dance along beside me, innocent to the way I drag my own feet. We sing as we walk.
Humpty Dumpty… You do a somersault on the grass when Humpty Dumpty falls.
“More!” You can’t get enough of this song.
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It’s that time when gestation is complete (forty weeks) and the measurements tell us nothing other than this baby is big. Every day it just grows a bit more and I am done. I am doing four loads of washing every day. I call my mum. She is so far away down south and I am proudly independent but I have to concede defeat.
“The baby is ready to come and the toilet training is not working and I can’t keep up. I need help.”
“I would come if I could, love, but your sister needs me. Her father-in-law died.”
“Of course. That’s more important. I’m so sorry. Tell them I love them.”
I turn on the washing machine and make up the bed with a sleeping bag.
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The next day, Nanny drives in. She looks fresh as a daisy despite the ten hours in the car. She walks inside and wrinkles her nose at the smell. Eau de urine, our signature scent. Your dad looks at her beseechingly and she moves into action. I sit on the rocker with my feet up and a cup of tea. She makes it look so easy. Your room is clean and so are you and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Let’s have this baby.”
The night before the baby is due (39+6) we change your bed together, three times. I’m measuring time by litres of water drunk, Braxton Hicks, number of sheets, pyjama pants, nappies in the bin. Your nan has trained herself to keep quiet about me as a parent but this, this she cannot allow to pass without comment.
“There’s something more happening here.”
She’s right to leave me to it. I’m already questioning my competence; I don’t need her to do it as well. I snap.
“We’re FINE!”
In the morning I pack my bag for the Birth Centre. I tell your dad that we should get you checked out before we go. I haven’t got time to be worrying about you when in labour or when I’m bringing our baby home with a sore body and leaking boobs. How disorganised that would be! He takes a urine sample (there’s plenty of wee, we collected bags full of it) to the pathology lab on his way to work. He calls me.
“They did a quick dipstick. It’s full of ketones, probably because of all the vomit. They said to get Hydralite and lemonade and keep the fluids up.”
If only I knew then what I know now. You love the lemonade icy poles and that day I let you have as many as you can eat.
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THE TURNING
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I can’t do it anymore. The cleaning and the feeding and bed making. When your dad gets home I ask him to take us to the clinic. You’re not just wetting everything you are vomiting. I think you probably need rehydrating. When we get to the doctor it is time to measure minutes in heartbeats and moments pass while breath is drawn and I lose all track of it. You have your very first finger prick (an ignominious but portentous moment I should have captured in a Polaroid). I don’t know (then) what the numbers mean. We walk across the carpark to the Emergency Department. Your dad carries you, you are more tired than I am. Time is no longer linear. You don’t remember the faces, the nurses, the doctor. I remember the ambulance, climbing in beside you (we are inseparable). I remember the alarm on the faces of the paramedics when they see my belly. I hold their gaze mutinously until they look away. They don’t say anything. They just drive.
You’re rolled into another ED and I stumble clumsily behind the stretcher. That’s when ‘she’ says it. Throws the words over her shoulder in my direction. She doesn’t know how sharp they are or see how they find their target.
“You know this is diabetes, don’t you?”
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It’s that time when sound goes silent and breath stops and I realize with shock that I am still standing upright. They’re bustling around you and I can hear you talking to them. You’re fascinated by everything they do, even when they prick you with needles and insert a cannula you watch closely and ask them all about it. Your capacity to speak disconcerts them and even then, even when I’m no longer breathing, I swell with pride. You’re so clever! I don’t know where your dad is and so I follow your stretcher mutely, smile at you encouragingly when you seek reassurance, nod when someone in white says something to me. I don’t know what language they use.
I sleep on a camp stretcher beside you in the High Dependency Unit. My belly hangs over the edge all taut and shiny. The paediatric nurses gape as well as my shirt. When you are awake we talk, I snack when you eat your meal. I avert my eyes when you have injections. I’m scared of needles. In my exhaustion, I believe that this disease that needs multiple daily injections was sent to make my life difficult. We have lessons and I have to handle a syringe. It makes me want to vomit just looking at it, but your dad and I, we grit our teeth and we draw up that insulin, squirt the bubble. I avert my eyes, but I see tears in his when he plunges it into the orange. The educator smiles brightly and goes through her familiar routine. You are one of nearly a dozen kids diagnosed in that fortnight and her spiel is smooth and practiced.
“It’s just like taking home a new baby,” she warns. She has the grace to falter, stare at my belly. “Well. Two babies I suppose. It’s lucky you aren’t working at the moment.”
It really doesn’t feel lucky. She doesn’t want to hear that.
I bring you water to drink but the nurse gives you cordial when I nap. I’m angry with her. She didn’t ask me. She just assumed you would need something sweet. You still are addicted to sugary drinks and I blame her. It feels good to have someone to blame for something. The midwife examines me on that stretcher with a screen pulled around us. Three centimetres, 40+1, but I refuse to give birth. My baby needs me. You need me.
Your dad is there all the time. I know he is there but I only have eyes for you. Nan stays with him and Nana arrives as well. Pop isn’t far behind. We sit together in the paediatric ward and hear that you are stable. So I breathe in and give birth.
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It is that time when I measure things by left or right, full or depleted, letdown or engorged. I still don’t sleep. Your little sister is in the NICU until her airways clear and I am alone in a bed on the maternity ward. I am a guest and not a patient, they don’t make me go home and away from you. In the morning they bring me my baby. Today you will meet your sister. Today we will finally be a family. It is before I have a mobile phone that I would text you on, before we have a family chat, before we could use devices in the hospital without worrying we would interfere with a heart monitor or a breathing machine. I have to wait and wonder. Your dad arrives dressed in a white hospital gown.
His eyes are bloodshot but he smiles determinedly. “It will be ok. They think it’s a rotavirus, we probably picked it up on the equipment in the hospital playground. It’s lucky we’re already here.”
When you were little I didn’t swear like I do now. That would have been a perfect time to swear, don’t you think? I’ve read that swearing actually works like a pain killer but only for people who don’t use those words often, who aren’t already desensitized to the effect that swear words can have. When I let myself remember this moment I add the appropriate descriptors and allow myself some belated satisfaction.
Your dad can’t bear my sadness. Don’t tell the nurses but he sneaks you across to the maternity ward and I hug you and you hug your baby and your dad hugs all of us together. When he sneaks you back to the ward you go into isolation and I go into breastfeeding. I cry at home in bed that night. We were inseparable and you’re not here. It is a failure. I have failed. Your little sister is in my arms and she is glorious. I’m a mum who has failed and triumphed all in one day. I have no idea what to do with that achievement but I hope it involves sleep.
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It is that time when we measure days in the number of nappies changed, in the number of minutes a feed takes (twenty-five, not forty-five like you needed), in hours of sleep (not enough), in taking turns (I got up last time!). Your dad drives to the hospital every day. I don’t get to see you. The calendar tells me nine days have passed. You come home in the big kid car seat even though you aren’t quite fourteen kilos yet. Dad brings you home and you snuggle on the couch with me and your baby. We read books together. Spot, our favourite board book. Your skin is translucent and your eyes wide but you are you and I am me and finally we are together. Unseparated.
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You are sitting quietly in the waiting room chair beside me. Your eyes are still so huge in your face (putting on weight, blood sugar levels balancing, twenty-two months old) and your baby sister is snuggled into my arms (putting on weight, sleeping 60 minutes, feeding 30, ten days old). The woman glances at me across the pram. She gives me that enquiring look and smiles.
“You’ve had your baby! How are you? How’s your child?”
“We’re all fine,” I smile.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
I don’t. I’m too tired to be curious. She tells me her name and still I don’t know her.
“I will never forget you. I was there. In the ED with you. I helped you to the ambulance. Do you remember? You were so stunned (so pregnant, so bewildered), I’ll never forget it. I couldn’t forget you. When I went home I hugged my son.” She nods across at the teenager sitting opposite us. He looks solemnly back at us with the same huge-eyed gaze you lay on him. “And I realised. He was showing the same symptoms. I put him in the car and followed you down the Parkway to the Emergency department. He was diagnosed on the same day.” She’s shaking her head and my thoughts are so slow to catch up. It’s her. The doctor. The one who put her hand on my shoulder. The one who spoke so urgently and moved so quickly and sent us away to the hospital with the kids ward. Without her title and her white coat we are equals. We are mothers.
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AFTER
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Life begins again. It is that time when toddlers are measured by how many carbohydrates they eat, by when they had their last meal, how long until the next food is due, by how many finger pricks they have had and by what their BSL reading is. You count how many treats you are denied (all of them). You know how to count backwards from thirty to zero, none of the other kids can do that, and I am so proud of your intelligence.
You fear the dawn and the dusk. That’s when I hold you down and pin you between my legs and weep as I inject you. I have to do it. I am the beloved abuser. We hold each other tightly and we do not talk about it. We are together.
And you turn two. You’re a big kid now. I inject you in the morning in a warped coming of age celebration and instead of cake we eat fruit salad. There are candles to blow out and presents to unwrap. You dance to the Hooley-Dooleys with your cousin. Your dad gets the bus home so I don’t have to get you into the car. I feed your sister and pour a glass of wine with my dinner.
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Melinda Charlesworth is a writer, coach, parent of three (one of each) and resident of country Victoria (Australia) on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung peoples. She is a recovering health professional, greedy reader and curious observer of people and the strange things they get up to. Melinda writes about community, belonging and human doings. She blogs at http://komunikas.com.au/