BirSaNN Posted December 17, 2022 Posted December 17, 2022 As I lay in the maternity ward, I learned my mother was gravely ill. What followed was a year full of love, rage, resentment – and a strange cocktail of new life and imminent death Morwenna Ferrier Morwenna Ferrier Sat 17 Dec 2022 10.00 GMT At the top of my fridge is a small ceramic jar of stilton, and every time I open the door I can smell it. Recently, it’s started contaminating other food. This morning I binned some butter after it took on the same scent. The stilton went off in July 2019 but I can’t bring myself to throw it away. It was a flat-warming gift from my mother, even though my boyfriend, Oscar, hates strong cheese and I was then six months pregnant, so unable to eat it. When she produced it from a calligraphed paper bag, wrapped in green tissue, we didn’t tell her this. Instead, we thanked her and put the cheese in the fridge. When we moved flats two years later, the cheese came with us. The stilton had been a mistake, one of many she made before she died a year later. They began when she forgot to refrigerate the turkey at Christmas, and ended when she failed to register I was in labour. Both were symptomatic of an illness that was already fogging her mind, but because it’s easier to remember the bad things over the good – it makes the loss less gaping – now, every time I open my fridge and smell that cheese, I thank God she’s not here. A week before I was due to give birth, I realised my mother was going to die. It was late May and she had rung me at the office, repeating what a doctor had just told her – that there was a “blockage” around her liver. The vindication in her voice was palpable after feeling “not quite right” for a while. I had been doing my pelvic floor exercises at my desk and took her call in the stairwell. Down the line, I could hear her sucking her teeth, which was the sound she made when she was scratching. I had spoken to my mother every day since I left home aged 18. People were often surprised when I told them this, their raised eyebrows suggesting that a reasonable relationship with their own parents relied on more limited contact. But we were best friends and uncommonly close – the idea of going to bed without an update on her septic tank was unthinkable. On the day I found out I was having a boy, I actually felt disappointed because we wouldn’t be able to replicate the relationship. I grew rounder and happier, while my mother got thinner and sadder – the same person, just shrunk in the wash But I also rang her to check she was still alive. My mother was young, even when she died, at 69, but she had been party to her fair share of ordinary disappointment. Her father died when she was a child and, by the time she was my age, she was divorced with two young daughters. When she was 50, her second husband died (I was 18). And by 60, she’d had a heart attack, calling me with brisk alacrity right after it happened, still sitting on the kitchen floor, holding a scourer (she had been cleaning the oven). For this reason, I spoke to her little and often. The last time I had seen her was in late April, the week before Easter, in the West Country house where she, my sister and I had once lived. She looked thin, and I could tell she was secretly pleased about that. She had started to feel nauseous, first at night, then all the time, and would eat raw ginger after every meal. When she was out, she’d carry it foil-wrapped in her handbag and produce it like Canderel. Then came the itching, which consumed the whole weekend. I spent that Good Friday rubbing aqueous cream over the small lines that spooled across her back at intervals, but by Monday I’d rubbed enough. My enormous belly was itchy too, but, I yelled – and I really did yell – because I was pregnant, I couldn’t use the creams. Permanently on the lookout for a heart attack, we were blindsided when she woke up one morning in early June the colour of mustard. Her GP suspected a liver issue but, recalling her monthly whisky and soda, we all thought otherwise. Except he was right. Like most pernicious cancers, this one didn’t reveal itself until it was too late, dragging an anthology of nasty symptoms along with it. We actually never called it cancer – because of the tumour’s size and location, it wasn’t diagnosed until after she died – but like someone lost at sea, this always gave her illness an unwelcome lick of ambiguity. In the days leading up to the birth, I grew rounder and happier, while my mother got thinner and sadder – the same person, just shrunk in the wash. I cooked soups for the freezer and swam in cold ponds, the baby heaving itself around as I entered the water. In bed, I read books about motherhood by Penelope Leach and, for balance, Rachel Cusk, studying their methods like syllabuses. I still rang her every day, but the calls got shorter. The last time we spoke before the birth, I was killing time at the zoo and we had a row, this time about whether my sister would visit me in hospital, or stay with her. She won. I always knew I’d have a baby, but it wasn’t until I got together with Oscar that I actually wanted one. Then, one night, I cornered him in the shower of our old flat and gave him an ultimatum, even though (as he often reminds me) he felt the same way. To start, we played a sort of roulette, but nothing happened. Two weeks later, not pregnant and on holiday in Exmoor, I stood in a field and told him I was barren, actually using that word. By autumn, I was pregnant. I went into labour on the first Saturday in June. It was one of those days when London pretends to be another city, windless and warm, and no one knows how to dress, so they simply don’t. I was woken at around 5am by my first contraction and immediately downloaded an app to time them. In between contractions, we ate toast, and Oscar bleached the kitchen. Afternoon became night, and night became morning. By Monday, 5.30am, still contracting every 12 minutes and unslept for 48 hours, I sat on the edge of my bed watching a thin ribbon of light come through our curtains. I deleted the app. On the day I was to be discharged from the maternity ward, my mother was moved to intensive care Finally, that evening, we were in a cab to the hospital, thunder clapping across the night, pain dancing across my belly. The baby had become lodged on my pubic bone, so the following day, at 9cm, I started to push him out. This was when I got scared. But just as his head began to emerge, I was told we had to push him back up using a foetal pillow, a recent invention that is supposed to make the whole process less traumatic. There was a slim chance the baby had haemophilia so we couldn’t use forceps. There is nothing poetic about an emergency C-section – he was ejected like a cassette – and I was too wobbly to hold him. The whole thing took 60 hours, and I thought of my mother once, at 8cm, when apparently I called out for her. My sister was electric on text throughout, but I didn’t hear a peep from my mother. The weekend I went into labour, she began deteriorating at speed. I found out later that my sister (herself seven months pregnant) had driven to her house to scoop her up off the bathroom floor and take her to hospital. I also found out later that on the day I was to be discharged from the maternity ward, she was moved to intensive care. I had been too spooked to ring the hospital, but when I finally did, from the labour ward, the nurse answered her phone. There had been extensive internal bleeding, she said plainly, as if giving me directions. I handed the phone to Oscar and felt myself lurch forward. The baby shifted in its plastic box, turning towards my voice. Back home, in bed with him, that first day was unique in the way it always is: agony to ecstasy, compounded by a fast, private transformation. It was hot. Outside my window the elms had turned brown, and over the next two days I watched their bark come off in strips like banana peel while the baby foraged among the sheets for my nipples. I found the connection I shared with him so astonishing, I didn’t think it could possibly last. Four days after the birth, my sister rang and told me to catch the next train. I was at that post-op stage where you approach peeing and stairs with similar trepidation, and took her call on the loo. link: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/dec/17/losing-my-mother-as-my-baby-was-born
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