know what happened. By then we barely spoke. If I saw him at all I saw him agitated and drunk, and it was simpler to avoid his company.
Who moves to South Africa in 1962? My aunt, a white English woman. Her husband, a white Dutch man. We did not visit until 1992, when Apartheid was coming at last to an end. White people seemed fitful, afraid. “I’d rather burn my house down than let them have it,” said one, in his pinched accent. I remember only a single instance of crying from this trip. My sister and I, trapped, in our aunt’s backyard pool. The Rottweiler—a pet or a guard dog—circled and circled, growling, would not let us out. Of the few commands he understood, my uncle most often told him to voetsek, Afrikaans for “fuck off.” We were afraid he’d tear us in two.
Early this morning the radio says divers have taken the first photographs of a steamship that sank in 1880, when it was split in two by another ship in heavy fog. Standing in the darkness of the kitchen I understand this as a metaphor for giving birth.
Errol Morris’s documentary about the former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, borrows its title from a Prussian military theorist, who wrote:
Finally, the general unreliability of all information presents a special problem in war: all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.47
Last night the television played endless clips of crying politicians, including one misty-eyed candidate whose impending grandparenthood has pundits predicting her campaign’s emotional weather.
Struck by associations and without pen or paper, I run from the kitchen to search the house for what I need, and when I turn my head for a moment away from the page I’ve begun to scribble, I see the milk I was warming on the stove is about to boil over.
When my baby is born the smell of milk will draw her slowly up to my breast. I’ve seen videos, the newborn inching gradually to the nipple, through the confusion of the brightest light she’s ever known.
People talk about the fog of pregnancy, the forgetfulness, the book neatly put away in the refrigerator. The other week I tried to make a new friend, but became distracted before writing down my phone number’s last two digits.
I prefer to cry with a friend, but these days I am often alone. Exhausted by an argument with Chris, I retreat to the solitude of the bathroom.
Another friend tells me that upon learning she was pregnant she thought, “I’m not alone anymore.”
When I am sobbing on the bathroom floor, what does the baby feel?
Chris knocks on the door and we postpone the argument, but I cannot stop weeping all over the linoleum. The argument is about the cat, whether he will be allowed to sleep in the room with us, with the baby. All I can think of is the cat’s own crying, which I cannot bear. People often mistake the cries of a cat for those of an infant. They say this may be a wise adaptation on the animal’s part. I am crying because I am afraid of losing myself in the fog.
One fog points to another. I can see in my pregnant tears the shape of those shed in other moments. This frightens me. Am I lost already? How far? How far to go?
When I am in the fog of despair I fear I cry too much to be a good partner or parent or person, that something within me is utterly broken, that any reprieve—a day of joy! a poem!—is temporary and somehow false. But that is the fog doing its work, making everything large and grotesque. When the fog lifts I can point up, say Look, it is a cloud.
One of the ways Chris loves me is that he waits while I cry. He tells me it will pass. He does not leave. And when the fog lifts he makes space for me to write.
When the contractions begin, I take a shower. My hair has reached a point of greasiness that makes it difficult for me to concentrate on anything else—even giving birth—and I figure I have some time. But when I get out of the shower the contractions are just four minutes apart. Every time one hits I hand the hair dryer to my sister, who has flown out from New England along with my mother for the occasion. When the pain recedes she passes it back. Eventually I give up, wind the long strands into a bun. Days later, delivered and delirious, when I finally take my hair down again, it will still be wet.
The pain is very bad. I do not shed tears. I moan. I try to find words for myself, an adequate image. I am a giant bear riding a tiny tricycle of pain. I am a brown paper bag with no bottom and the pain is falling through me. It does not diminish the pain, but it gives me something else to hold in my body: the satisfaction of having shaped an accurate description.
After a night of vomiting with every contraction and a day of sucking popsicles through the glorious numbness of an epidural, the doctor tells me it is time for a C-section, and that—as I am at risk for massive hemorrhaging—he may have to remove my uterus along with the baby. I sink into a terrible dry calm, while my sister, who has not slept, begins to cry. I understand she is crying because she is witnessing a difficult and maybe sorrowful event. I understand I am not crying because I am the event.
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