It was the first time in twelve years I’d ever seen him cry. Even after his mother died he’d remained dry eyed, only becoming quieter than usual (and he was already mostly silent on a good day anyway), but still presentable to the general public as the stoic, capable man. In those first days after our baby was born silent and still, as my body folded in on itself, as I lived life from what felt like the bottom of a well looking up to a pin prick of light, it was his tears I remember most vividly. The odd way his face twisted, it was like that of a stranger. As he sat in the chair beside the hospital bed and wept, I lay in shock. His tears disturbed me in the way that a toddler is disturbed to see his parent cry, seeing the shifting of the way that things should be, a change in the natural order of things. Only in those two days after she died, after her little warm body came to us but never moved, did he cry. After two days that window into him closed up and I never saw it open again. So I alone was left to publicly carry our grief, to show to the world the pain we felt, to answer the well meaning but awkward questions at BBQs and school pick ups about how we were coping, and did we want the frozen lasagne Carly Wood from next door had for us? He withdrew, went on autopilot while I felt raw and exposed to the world. My post partum body without the baby, my engorged breasts and sagging stomach – was a physical reminder of what we didn’t have. But he was determined to carry on, back to regular life.

So this heavy darkness became mine to endure alone. He continued to work, go to his job five days a week, bath Josh and Luke when he got home, mow the lawn, wash the car. He invited friends around every weekend and poured them large glasses of cheap wine and talked about his theories on things – ethics in sport, public vs private education, Donald Trump. He skirted away from any question of how he was, refused any form of counselling, slept like a log beside my chronic insomnia. Despite his mask of normalcy, I knew that he was also shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. I knew because of those two days of tears, that moment when the guard was down. Because I knew this inescapable truth of his, I could never forgive him for the role he made me play in those months and years after she died, for he made me bear that cross alone.

‘Look Daddy’, Luke said to him one morning a few months after it happened, proudly showing off his costume for the end of year kinder concert that I’d spent half the night sewing and gluing together (I couldn’t sleep anyway, so why not scald my fingers with a hot glue gun?). ‘Look daddy’, he persisted when he received no response, face beaming with hope, his still slightly rotund belly for a four year old straining against the sequined sash around it. ‘Yes mate, you look great’ he said. But his eyes, which before would’ve lit up at Luke’s proud little stance, stayed blank. For what I saw was this – he was no longer there.

To me at least there was still magic in our little family, in our two children who were still in those preschool years where their parents were their world. Others constantly reminded me that I was ‘lucky’ I already had children, that it must make it ‘easier’. They didn’t understand that nothing makes all those small little horrors you experience every day after loosing a child – of taking apart a cot never slept in, of meeting a the friend in the street who wonders where the baby is – easier. But still, I saw magic in Luke and Josh’s small hands slipping into ours when we walked to the park and their sleeping faces that I snuck in and kissed when they were tucked up in bed at night. And in my intense grief, I could still see it. But I knew he couldn’t. He had became a ghost in our house.

Coming out of the water my feet felt like blocks. They held me up, but I couldn’t feel the sand beneath them and my grip on the earth felt tenuous. They were a curious, bloodless blue/white colour where the wetsuit ended. My hands were similar. Claws protruding from the sleeves of the suit. There was no sensation, though I could make them move. Using them to take off my goggles and multiple caps was a challenge.

As we walked up the beach I wanted to share my excitement with the swimmer beside me. “HI, I’m Jen. That was amazing, wasn’t it?” But my lips were incapable of forming the words coherently. Together we stumbled out of the water, up the beach and into the clubrooms. My signature, as I signed myself in to show that I had returned safely to shore, was an illegible scrawl in the book, bearing little resemblance to the marks I’d made just 45 minutes earlier on our way out to the water.  In that time, I’d lost the ability to identify myself in both written and spoken words!

In the showers, it was such blessed relief to get under the hot running water – possible damage to the expensive wetsuit be buggered! My whole body had begun to shake uncontrollably, and I had to clamp my teeth to stop them from chattering. I needed to lean against the shower wall to balance myself to laboriously peel off the wetsuit, but I wanted it off so that that the hot water could better reach my skin. We were 6 women in together, jostling for space and water under 4 shower heads.

And then, as the circulation began to return to my extremities so too did sensation – a fierce burning, itchiness and a lobster red colour with swelling at the abrupt edges where my wetsuit had ended. It was all I could do to stop from tearing into myself with my fingernails.

“Chillblains”, I was told. “Don’t worry. It will pass.”

What hasn’t passed, however, is the drive to do it again and again.  Swimming in the cold, winter water has pushed me to new places within myself. It’s difficult to explain, but I have felt both physically and mentally clearer for subjecting myself to this challenge each week. And I haven’t had a cold in over a year!

Like a virgin, touched for the very first time …

Niamh sang in the bathroom. I remember. The intermittent clanging of the various bathroom bits, the pressure of the water streaming through the pipes. The stereo, muffled by the echo-y surrounds of tiles and water and glass. I remember. I remember Madonna, and I remember my sister.

…

Outside ‘the temple’ in the unwaveringly harsh January Hamilton sun, it was difficult to seek shade. The building in front of me acted as a reflector; a beacon of white and concrete, welcoming the light and casting it fiercely onto those around it. I looked on as people started to gather, cameras in hand, like they’d done it before, like they knew what was happening. Elderly in various items of cultural dress, children with suit shirts with elastic-necked ties, pretty dresses and prescribed futures. The odd stranger, like me, standing awkwardly, trying to treat it like a regular wedding. I don’t belong here. Neither does she. My parents arrived, separately, and my mother approached me. What happens now? I wasn’t sure. I thought I knew, from what I’d read, but that’s part of it: the secrecy.

…

Look! I told her, as we scrambled to the top of the statement piece of the playground, a rocket ship with a staircase up the guts. We lived in a new area; one that was slowly becoming dotted with new houses, new schools, new doctors’ surgeries, new fish and chip shops. We’d come from a smaller, older neighbourhood, so to be amongst all this shiny new stuff, new concrete, new life, it was brilliant. 

We sat at the top of the rocket. The breeze whispered through the little circle windows and the sun had warmed the fibreglass. No dicks were drawn on the walls (not yet). No one had melted holes anywhere. No bongs on the ground. Just new. I took a pair of yellow handled school scissors from my little backpack. Wanna cut my hair?

…

The spirit was so strong in the temple today. I am so grateful for Heavenly Father’s plan and for eternal marriage. 

This is bananas (!!!). Niamh and I smoked weed together in our garage when our parents were asleep. I covered for her when she snuck out to go and get busy with whatshisface in year eleven. She got a tattoo on her forearm when our mother thought she was at a uni orientation (mum’s reaction was brilliant). She was really nice and really welcoming to my first girlfriend when my parents thought it was a bit weird that I was a homo.

And now she’s a Mormon.

——–

I chose this, moving to Melbourne, being myself, asserting myself, choosing what I love, who I love. It’s been a bit of an unravelling; maybe a coming out of its own. I am not anything or anywhere because my parents or their parents chose it (except for all of the parts that are that way, of course). I’m here because I chose it. Maybe we all are, yet I’m still taken by the idea that all it would have taken is for someone sneeze on my partner’s nan on the bus home from work to give her a cold and cancel a date with the tall handsome fella who wanted court her, and I’d have never had our little house with our forty house plants, our too-many bikes, our squabbles about whether pegs belong on the line or in the peg bag (they obviously belong in the peg bag). 

What did I decide, and what was decided for me?

Far better off, far worse. My stepdad is insistent about relativity. He doesn’t approve of my mum’s wishes to redecorate because there’s someone (some millions) with dirt floors in Africa.

I’m somewhere in the middle, I think. I teach a boy who was born in Syria; who came to Australia as a refugee. He loves Australia for its sunshine and its railway system and its safety. 

I’ve experienced an unfair share too, in this sunshine-y, railway-d, safe home. But I’m not from Syria. I haven’t been terrified of terrorism.  

I dance around, back and forth, between gratitude and envy. I’m envious, surely, of the kids who went on holidays or the kids who went to school with beautiful blazers and ironed shirts; of the kids who lived in houses with staircases, or whose parents didn’t stash a Gatorade bottle bong under the bathroom sink, or whose only positive childhood memory of her father is that one early morning pancake breakfast at the the home of the Canberra Raiders. I’m envious, no doubt, of the kids whose parents had the headspace or the wherewithal to recognise trauma-induced angst, or the kids who didn’t wear too-small boots to school, or who didn’t have to meet their dad in the Dickson McDonald’s carpark on Christmas morning only to catch a Greyhound bus to Melbourne with the man who had no more than 10 dollars to feed three kids on an overnight bus ride (a piece buttered toast at a road stop in Albury for your Christmas dinner leaves a bit to be desired, I have to say). I’m envious of any ten year old child who only knows about sex in abstract terms, like ewwww or mum and dad need some adult time. 

Maybe it’s not envy. Maybe it’s more like if only you knew. 

But how dare I complain. No gassing, no suicide bombers, no dirt floors. Just regular Aussie white bread and margarine misery. 

I’m perhaps some kind of invisible inbetweener. One with a tough-ish, poor-ish, abuse-ish, broken-ish childhood. To make sense of it, what do I hold on to? What do I abandon? What do I use to fuel empathy, and what do I humble myself with?

This is choosing it.

My great love is short but mighty. He’s not technically here anymore; he died in 2013 from cancer. Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma also known as DIPG. He was only sick for twelve weeks from the time of diagnosis until he took his last breath. He was five years old.

When you have a great love, it doesn’t matter if you loved for a day, a month or five years. Time has no place where love lives. Love takes up all the oxygen, all the heart and head space and swallows you whole. My son was a special little human. He collected hearts. Considered an ‘old soul’ by many, everybody he met felt connected to him and he attracted more love in his short life than anyone I have ever known. Unfortunately he couldn’t collect my heart. Mine doesn’t work properly anymore. It broke when he left. I’m waiting to give it back to him.

You see, I believe in the soul. I’ve seen it. It’s like stardust. It exited my child’s  forehead in a little puff of iridescent blue light as he exhaled his last breath. It was like a Hollywood special effect; I saw something unearthly with my Earthly human eyes. It was this thing that ultimately saved me many times when I felt I couldn’t survive this loss. The feeling that there was more after death was now replaced with just a little knowing. I don’t know what more there is precisely, but I know enough.

From my place beside him where I had dozed off sometime during the last hour of his life, I had suddenly awoken. It seemed like someone had shouted my name or given me a push. I jolted awake and felt deeply that my son wanted and needed to leave his body. We had run out of time. The tumour that started somewhere in the Pons, a part of the brainstem had infiltrated enough of his brain that over the twelve weeks he had lost the ability to talk, walk, feed himself and eventually to breathe. All whilst remaining conscious and having full emotional understanding and awareness of what was happening to him.

I cradled his body in my left arm, face to face with our noses nearly touching.  His breathing was like a newborn kitten’s small pants and his eyes were closed but not all the way. I put my right hand to his fragile five year old chest and felt his pounding heart. He had been in what we called his Odin sleep for seven hours; a state of unmovable unconsciousness. I whispered, knowing these were the last words I would say to the perfect human I had created and birthed five years earlier. “Let go”, I said. And he did. He exhaled

Hours upon hours of superhero play had occurred in his room. He didn’t want to leave his room much and preferred only my company. It was a great honour to nurture my fourth and last child to his death. And also my most terrible and greatest sadness. Upon my own death the heart that now beats within my chest, broken but more beautiful by the torment of great love and loss will be handed back to my son. He can mend it like Kintsugi.