bargaining

On the night my mam dies, a friend — more like a sister — takes a pregnancy test. She waits a week to tell me it’s positive. I wanted to give you some time, she says, as we sit in her flat by the sea. Rarely is a moment so clearly a turning point. If this were a draft of a novel, I imagine editorial notes might say: poetic but a little too obvious, too on the nose.

I don’t know if I believe in fate, but my mam, who was deeply superstitious, would’ve considered it a sign. Throw salt over your left shoulder. No new shoes on the table. Avoid wearing the colour green. These rules always seemed arbitrary to me, but to Mam and her mother Nancy, they were essential.

Nancy, a matriarch in her community, took in friends and neighbours, caring for them when they were sick. Distrustful of doctors and guided by old-fashioned sensibilities, she turned to natural medicine. The hospital was sinister and the home became a place of convalescence. Illness was thinly veiled by the smell of floral disinfectant. Death, a silent lodger.

After over a decade of preparing for loss, I’ve become acutely aware of time passing. As I watch peers reach milestones — weddings, honeymoons, babies — it feels unlikely that I’ll have the same opportunity to follow them. I always knew I wouldn’t settle down with a man. Mam and I both carried grief around that: hers heavy with disappointment, and mine with the unhappiness of pretending, for too much of my life, to be someone I’m not.

Mam loved sharing the story of my birth to anyone who’d listen. Told she couldn’t have children, then misdiagnosed with a stomach bug, her pregnancy was a surprise to everyone. In her own words, a miracle. I was born early, a month premature. I found a photograph recently. I look translucent, startled. Swaddled in blankets and encased in glass.

I remember Nancy as a kind woman, wearing an enveloping coat with ornate fastenings at the collar. She ate glistening jelly sweets and laughed heartily, but she was also troubled by darkness. Occasionally, when we’d visit, I’d get sent upstairs and hear the adults speak in hushed tones. They used euphemisms: a funny turn, just her way. Agoraphobia was never mentioned.

Mam first lost her dad, then her stepdad. She watched as her brother was born on the living room floor, the cord wrapped around his neck, his skin turning blue. She was hit by a car while playing in the street. Her hair fell out. She missed months of school. As a child, she’d run errands for Nancy — crossing, checking, counting her way home. Every night, she’d recite a prayer, repeated like a spell, to keep herself and everyone she loved safe.

Details from Nancy’s funeral stayed with me: the slow crawl of the hearse / an itchy skirt slack at the waist / silence over neat sandwiches / a curtain drawn closed. There’s nothing like the pain of losing your mother, Mam told me, perhaps in a moment of anger. I don’t know what prompted her to say it — only that I was frightened to hear the words aloud; to hear them spoken as fact, to begin to conceive of a future without a mother, without her, in it.

During the last year of Mam’s life, we hardly talked. I visited her on her birthday, reached for her hand across the table. I said my own prayer of sorts, bargained silently with those parts of myself she couldn’t tolerate. The more I tried to meet her expectations, the more I unravelled; it was a painful negotiation, and neither of us yielded. She loved me fiercely, the only way she knew how.

When I hold my friend’s baby for the first time, he is three weeks old, head lolling in the palm of my hand, eyes dancing, taking it all in. I sing him nursery rhymes, jumbled and unrehearsed. He grips the fabric of my t-shirt with tiny fingers, soothed by the softness in my voice. I can’t recall a tune, so whisper the same phrase over and over, repetition sending him, albeit briefly, to sleep.

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