Another Time, Another Place
BY MARY ROTHERY
Photo Courtesy | Mary Rothery
I sit at our kitchen table to write, surrounded by the detritus of a childhood lived all about me. Your colouring pencils, discarded snack wrappers, papers strewn with brightly-coloured big-eyed people. Clinging to a brief slice of quiet where I have the space to think, I am thrown outside of myself to another time, another place. It is a mere second, a breath of time in which I am drawn out from the cloud of my mothering, taken to a place where I am no longer surrounded by mess, by noisy chatter and snack demands, or by stickered, peeling walls which bounce your voice around and around the room as though there is more than just one of you.
In another time, another place, the walls are cold as if hewn from ice. His eyes are stone as they impart the news, news which cleaves me in two. When I look at you now telling me all about the school dramas, animated in describing the intricacies of your playground adventures, it is hard to reconcile this time, this place, this me, with the one of twenty years ago. The one who sat in front of an old white male doctor as he told her, a quivering young woman barely a step from her own childhood, that she would never carry a child.
The weight of his words that day, and the years that came after, fell on me like a landslide. I saw all that I wasn’t, and all that I had lost. The loss of something so intangible was great, and came at a time in my life when my only thoughts should have been of love and dancing, joy and study. Bursts of life, of all my youth, diminished in that instant, a screen fading to black. I wreaked havoc in my own life and my own body, punishing it for all the things it could not do. I tore through myself, pursuing my own destruction, challenging my heart to give up. For if I could never give life, if I could never grow to birth a child, what was all of it for?
Those darkest of days were a lifetime ago, but they are buried in my bones.
You look up at me with eyes of the ocean, not knowing the place where I have just been, or all the places I have been lost. I’ve told you of my sadness when you’ve asked about a baby brother or sister. I speak of it in calm words. I tell you how Mummy cannot carry another, just as I couldn’t carry you. But I don’t show you the howls of my pain, the etchings of my grief. I say only that the sadness is in my past, and that you are my present, my future. My happiness. You lay your little hand in mine, small inquisitive fingers which search the life lines of my palm for all traces of me, and I am brought suddenly, thankfully, back to myself.
The tears come at bedtime, at mealtimes, or when I ask you over and over to do something and your strong little will bucks against my words. As the lava of frustration and exhaustion threatens to erupt from within, I try to remember the tears I cried for the You I thought I’d never know. I close my eyes and inhale you, the burning little ball of your rage, the salt of your sadness. You curl up in my arms, in the hollow where you fit but didn’t grow, and I am entwined in all the possibilities of your life, and the magic of how you are – somehow – here.
In another time, another place, in the room with the cold walls and the doctor’s eyes of stone, he muttered the word, threw it at me as though it was a scrap of meat and I was a starving dog. Surrogacy. I didn’t know then what the word meant, I didn’t understand the love it would need, the humbling depths to which it would take me. But when I saw your face I knew you as I know the lines underneath my eyes, as I know the curve of my own hip and the arch of my brow. You were written into me, wired into my blood from that first spark on a screen. Mine to hold, brought to life by the love of another woman. You arrived with a scream, a wail that announced you lived before you were even pulled from your aunt’s belly, as if you knew that I clung to my anxiety like a coat in a storm. It was my companion, my bed partner, my closest friend. I feared the loss of you through every scan, every bleed. But still you held on. My stubborn little one. Your auntie grew you inside her, the smallest flash of light burst forth from my egg. She lent me her body so that I could know what it was to be a mother.
A debt of love I can never repay.
My worlds collide over the dinner table. The twenty years fall away as I recall that day, the shiver of my grief. And then I blink, you smile at me, and they are gone, faded into cracks in the kitchen walls, the silver lines in my hair, the gaps between your teeth. The ghost of my sorrow is dwarfed by your joyful chatter, your laugh, your endless questions which push at my sanity and tug at the last strings of my patience.
Often my gratitude can find itself buried under the chaos of mothering, lost beneath the whirlwind of life with a small child. But it is always there, the bedrock of my existence and your miraculous presence. It rises from the mess around me like the seeds of a dandelion, scattered hopefully into the wind.
I didn’t know then, in another time, another place, that this would all come to be. That this was, perhaps, how it was always meant to be. I often wonder, if I could go back to that room, would I tell that young woman? Would I tell her that her sadness will one day ease, that she will one day yet have all she dreamed? I could tell her that she will hold her child in her arms and feel the earth solidify beneath her feet once more, that she will love all she has lost and even forgive her body. As I watch you dance around the kitchen, blowing rainbow bubbles in the sun, the other time, the other place shatters into dust. The light falls on your face and I see that it’s because of all that has passed between that day and this, the heartache, tears and all that was stolen, that I am the mother I am today. Your mother. For without the sorrow I would not feel so keenly the joy. And without all the scattered breadcrumbs which led me to you, you would not be the same burst of starlight you are.
And so, as the light fades against your cheek and you descend into sleep, I know that I would not change a thing.
MARY ROTHERY is a writer of stories about women. She writes with a focus on motherhood and infertility and loss, trauma, hope and love. She is currently working on her first novel and has recently had a short story published in the Friendship Anthology by Pure Slush Books. A mother of one and a Content Manager by day, Mary writes from her home on the Sussex Coast of England, where she lives with her daughter, her husband and her dog.