This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  During the break they compared notes on strollers and car seats. One woman said her husband didn’t want her driving the Volvo anymore because of the possibility of the airbags inflating and knocking her in the stomach. I actually rolled my eyes.

  And then I started crying. I had spent the day on a ladder priming an oil-painted ceiling. I hated these women for their petty preoccupations. I hated these women because I should have been one of them. I hated them most of all for being loved.

  I was a toxic cloud. For their sake and my own, I couldn’t go back into that room.

  Vibika instead hired a private instructor to guide us through three classes at my house. I kept Vibika and Heidi’s glasses topped up with wine, while we played with a doll and a plastic uterus. We contemplated the impossibility of getting that through that. I joked with Vibika that she might have to massage my perineum. “Sure,” she said. “What is it?”

  10

  By mid-June I was beginning to feel the strain of my pregnancy—a compressed sciatic nerve and an umbilical hernia. And then the basement flooded. I was lucky a friend was over for dinner the night it happened. I knelt down in a puddle in the basement among all the sodden boxes of books I had yet to unpack. The water was a foot deep where the concrete floor sloped toward the door. My friend bailed water out the basement door by the bucketful. The boxes were too big and heavy for me to shift. I broke down, feeling defeated and sorry for myself. I started tearing into the boxes and hurling damaged books at the wall.

  I was suddenly conscious of, then self-conscious about, the drama. I saw myself in a scene from a movie. And then I saw my mother, years ago, kneeling beside the bathtub, pliers in hand, crying.

  I was standing behind her, eleven years old. “What’s the matter?” I asked, and not kindly.

  “I can’t turn it,” she said. She was trying to replace a washer, fix a persistent drip.

  I still didn’t understand why this would be cause for tears. I didn’t understand why a drip was such a problem, why it mattered.

  I remember the story of my birth: me, a purple baby in an incubator, my mother in a ward with thirty other women and their newborns, one bath shared between them all. For ten days. She couldn’t stand the surroundings and she certainly couldn’t stomach the food. My father had felt helpless and asked what he could bring. I’d love a piece of chicken, she said, imagining thin white slices of breast meat. He roasted a whole chicken and brought it to her the next day in a brown paper bag. It’s the closest she’s ever come to telling me anything like a love story between them.

  She took one look at the congealed grease on that brown paper and told him he’d have to take it away.

  A metaphor, perhaps. For years, she was a single mother doing her best to make us a good home. There was no one to help change a washer. She did not spare me: when I was eighteen she told me straight out that we are all alone in the world. For a time, I hadn’t believed her.

  I had become my mother, bucket in hand instead of pliers.

  Stand up, I willed myself. Stand. The fuck. Up.

  A week later, Anna and I met with our lawyers to negotiate the details of our separation. It was the same week that would have seen us celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary. I was seven months pregnant, not sleeping, anxious as hell.

  She wanted to co-parent. She said this plainly, as did her lawyer.

  It had been easy, in her absence, in the virtual silence between us those past few months, to tell myself she didn’t want anything to do with the baby. Yet there she was, stating plainly that she did.

  But we were not separate, this baby and I: we were one. The only way this could make sense to me was if she were coming home.

  We settled things financially and agreed to go and see a parenting mediator.

  Anna would find her way. I just had to be patient. I had to show her that I was competent and strong. I could do this. I could be the rock for us all.

  11

  I suddenly heard from my brother, whom I hadn’t heard from in years. He sent a text: “Holy shit, Min, you’re having a baby! That’s fucking awesome!”

  I suppose everyone in my family was incredulous. Perhaps my mother recognized the unlikelihood early on; she never exerted any pressure, never even expressed a desire for grandchildren. And yet, when I did become pregnant, she began to unearth clothes, a bassinet, a hairbrush, blankets, cups, bowls and spoons—things she’d carried across an ocean and held on to for more than forty years.

  Micah and I had never talked about having kids. But then we hadn’t really talked as adults.

  Fourteen summers before, when I gave up my apartment in the city and took up residence in my brother’s trailer, the bond between us, a bond I had believed to be unbreakable, had been shattered.

  One weekend my brother came up with his then girlfriend, a troubled, quiet girl with white face paint and pierced black lips. My brother is a canvas of tattoos—her look was not unfamiliar in his world, but out there, in the woods, it was startling. She looked like she’d never seen the sun, and yet they spent the weekends engaged in the all-Canadian summer pastimes of boating, fishing, jet skiing, barbecuing large slabs of meat and drinking beer.

  He went off one night to fix a pipe in a neighbouring trailer, and I was forced to be polite and make conversation with the girlfriend. She opened up a bit, talking about her family. An hour later Micah came home, found us talking in the trailer and asked us what the fuck we were up to. He was so angry his hands were shaking. I’d never seen him like this and it scared me. I retreated to the tent but couldn’t shut out the sounds of their fighting.

  It was the middle of the night when I woke up startled, a flashlight shining in my face. My brother started ranting, shouting profanities so extreme I can’t repeat them to this day. I started to cry. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong. For fuck’s sake—he’d left me with the damaged goth girl, I’d just been doing my best to find some point of connection.

  He growled and barked at me. Seeing me scared, huddling inside the tent, only fuelled him. I was thirteen years old again, night had fallen. I found myself shrinking in the corner of my brother’s tent.

  But wait—I wasn’t thirteen anymore. I tried to push past him to get out, but he blocked me. He abruptly left, but moved his truck so that it hemmed in the tent and my car. I was trapped for the night. I left early the next day. I returned to the trailer on Monday morning. I stayed during the week and slept in my car on the weekends. I had nowhere else to go.

  We hadn’t spent time together as a family since; not a Christmas dinner in fourteen years. I never did get an explanation or an apology. Several years after this incident, he started calling me in the middle of the night to tell me he didn’t want me to be afraid of him anymore. I stopped picking up the phone. A few years later I learned he had a serious drug problem. That explained his rage and paranoia, but it did not absolve him. It made me feel so sad for the lovely boy he had once been, so guilty that I should have survived the mess of my father where he had not. But I was no less afraid of him.

  Hence my total surprise at this text. My situation had moved him to make contact. He told me he’d been clean for a year and a half and he asked if there was anything he could do to help. He had stepped up just when I needed him most. A giant wave of forgiveness swept over the past fourteen years.

  “Build me a deck?” I said, my nesting instinct now extending to the world outside.

  “You got it,” he replied.

  It took him a month to turn up, but when he did, he arrived with tools in hand, ready to work. I heaved the bulk of myself into the cabin of his big stencilled pickup with its overflowing ashtray, sagging seats, gun rack and littered floor, and he flipped open the engine lid to connect the battery to start the truck, jerked it into neutral (which is actually first), cranked the heavy metal, rolled the windows down for some relief in the stifling heat and drove us to the lumber yard, chain-smoking the whole way.

  This was not how I pictured sp
ending the last week of my pregnancy. It was not, I imagined, where a woman in her last week of pregnancy should be.

  And yet, I soon had a beautiful cedar deck under way as well as plans for a flower bed and a water feature. More importantly, I had a brother for the first time in years.

  12

  My house was finally in order. There were newly painted rooms upstairs: an office and two bedrooms. One of those was for my baby and me, one of them for a nanny.

  A nanny had never occurred to me before an acquaintance, a writer himself, had raised the issue a few months earlier. He and his wife had employed a nanny for years. As he reminded me, I had a book to launch that September, just a few weeks after I would give birth, followed by a book tour. How was I going to do all that on my own?

  Considering a nanny was possible only because Anna and I had agreed to this in our legal negotiations. I was fortunate in this regard, at least; I wouldn’t have had the same choices otherwise.

  Tita, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old Filipina, arrived a week before my due date, while my brother was finishing work outdoors. She brought very little with her, all of it contained in a knapsack.

  I’d never employed anyone before. The prospect made me nervous; I didn’t know how to be, how to ask someone to do something for me, how to assume any authority. I wanted her to feel at home. I’d painted her room a buttery white, put a lock on the door, bought an armoire and a night table and a chest of drawers and a television and a DVD player for her room. I’d cleared off a shelf in the bathroom cupboard for her, but she didn’t use it. She didn’t leave her shoes on the shoe rack either, or hang her jacket in the front hall.

  She was quiet. She was thoughtful and diligent. Perhaps she was wondering what she had just signed up for. I had been crying solidly for eight months; the tears didn’t stop with Tita’s arrival.

  After meeting a succession of my male friends, Tita asked me straight out which one the father was. “Well,” I hesitated, “it’s complicated.” Anna’s name and mine were on her employment contract, but I’d avoided giving Tita the explicit details of the situation. I had assumed a certain conservatism based on religion and culture, and I feared she would judge me and flee before she even knew me. It was time for the facts.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she almost shouted. “I may have bad English but I have a very open mind!”

  I liked her spirit. And it hadn’t taken long to see evidence of it. A baby is a baby, however it is conceived, and it was the baby that would define our relationship to each other.

  The only problem was that the baby was refusing to come out. My due date had passed. A week, ten days. It was nearing the middle of September. I had been pregnant every day of 2010. I would have to forgo breathing if she insisted on taking up any more room.

  I’d been eating Thai soups and Pakistani curries, all manner of spicy food in the hopes of getting things moving. I’d had acupuncture and massage, eaten my weight in pineapple (prostaglandins, apparently), run up and down the stairs, done all the things people say you might to bring on labour, with the exception of having vigorous, penetrative sex. It just didn’t seem like the right moment to be recruiting a stranger into the mix.

  Ten days past my due date, feeling restless and housebound, I went to a Saturday farmers’ market with a friend. It was a beautiful day—clear blue sky relieved of summer’s humidity, an exciting sense of back-to-school in the air. As we entered the market, we were both immediately drawn to a brown-skinned man with magnetic blue eyes and snow-white hair standing alone at a stall past the late-summer blueberries and tomatoes.

  He was selling tea, from his home—Ceylon, he said, not Sri Lanka. After a brief conversation about his hillside plantation, my friend bought some exorbitantly priced leaves simply because of the man’s beauty. The man then held out a small tinfoil square of tea leaves for me, saying: “This will help bring on your labour.”

  I was grateful to him for recognizing the overdueness of the situation and for his kind gesture of help. At that point I would have eaten a hornets’ nest if someone suggested it. “I’ll name my child after you if it works,” I said. He told me his name was Norbert. It was lucky I was having a girl.

  That night, I sat on the couch and watched the first half of season 1 of True Blood. The blood and sex of it struck me as entirely appropriate. I drank a cup of this man’s induction tea. It was probably coincidental, but five hours later the contractions started.

  They didn’t feel urgent. I didn’t call anyone. I spent the night alone because I wanted to be alone with my imminent daughter. I felt as if I hadn’t yet just been still with her. Talked enough to her. Spent enough time with her. So much of me had been disengaged from this pregnancy, necrotized by grief, trying to distract myself by keeping occupied. But suddenly a baby was about to be born.

  I found myself crying and apologizing for all that was not as I wished it to be for her. I had wept for hours every single day of this pregnancy. I didn’t want her to have a sad mother, a single mother, an old mother. I didn’t want to be sad, single and old. And yet.

  On Sunday morning, Vibika and Heidi said goodbye to their men and their dogs and came over with wine and chips. We got through the rest of season 1, pausing for contractions, and a good way into season 2. Vibika and Heidi took turns napping. Tita brought us endless cups of tea.

  Vibika drove me across town twice to the midwifery clinic for fetal heart monitoring. I had never experienced anything comparable to the pain of bouncing over streetcar tracks while having contractions, my fingernails embedded in the roof of a VW Bug.

  The baby was fine, but we were all exhausted. By Tuesday afternoon we gave up and went to the hospital. Vibika pushed me down the hall in a wheelchair and into an elevator. I felt both giant and tiny, completely exposed in my nightgown, all these people upright and moving intact, their bodies familiar to them, doing predictable things.

  I was relieved to see the midwife. She ushered us straight into the delivery room even though we had hours to go. After more than sixty hours in labour, I was still only five centimetres dilated.

  My mother arrived after work. I was relieved to see her as well. She was the only one in this room who had given birth before. They didn’t have epidurals in her day, but although I’m not too proud for them, I lean toward less intervention rather than more. I had had no way of imagining the pain or what I might be capable of withstanding; I had left it open to consider the options in the moment, aware that there can be a moment too late. I realized, though, that after all this time in labour I was just not going to have any strength left for the main event. I think this was what I told my midwife, though Vibika would later tell me I wasn’t quite so polite.

  An anaesthetist came to administer an epidural. A second anaesthetist repeated the process a couple of hours later, when the first epidural refused to take. The midwife broke my water with something that looked like a knitting needle. Nothing was like it is in the movies. The contractions began to slow down because of the epidural. The midwife inserted an IV into my arm and began to administer oxytocin. By this point, I was disappointed in myself. I hadn’t wanted this much intervention. A catheter was the final insult.

  The moment for pushing had finally arrived. My mother made no move to leave as we’d both expected she would. I asked her if she was okay, if she really wanted to stay. Her bottom lip trembled; she couldn’t speak. I felt closer to her in this moment than I had ever felt or will likely ever feel again. She held my head, curved it upright. She was the top of the C, Vibika and Heidi, with a leg each, the bottom.

  I lost all sense of time and place. Voices became disembodied, and lights faded in and out as if I was underwater. I didn’t know if this was pain. This was determination in the face of impossibility. I heard the baby’s heartbeat underwater. And then there was a baby. There was a baby in my arms. Bloody and bruise-lipped with black hair. Mine.

  Is it real? I asked Vibika. Is it real? I repeated this over and over until I reali
zed I was repeating it over and over.

  Yes, she’s real, Vibika kept saying. She.

  But it didn’t feel real. Where was the overwhelming swell of love I’d been promised I would feel in this instant? Why didn’t I feel anything other than shock? And where was everyone going? Their work done, they were all quickly fading away. But wait—I felt such panic. You cannot go: this is where the real work begins.

  And then Anna. I hadn’t wanted her there for the birth, but she wanted to see the baby, so at the end of it all Anna came into the room.

  I couldn’t walk because of the epidural. The midwife had promised that I’d be free to leave soon after the birth, she would provide the aftercare, there was no need to remain in hospital, but they wouldn’t let me leave until my legs thawed. I was going to have to be wheeled upstairs and remain in a hospital bed until then.

  I asked Anna to stay. I was terrified of being alone. I wanted to be home, but I didn’t even know where that was. She was the closest thing I had ever known to home. Incapacitated and afraid, I would take whatever remnant or reminder of home that I could get.

  It was two in the morning, and I asked Anna to lie down beside me in the hospital bed. We lay rigid, not touching, the baby quiet.

  13

  Tita, bathed in weak sunlight, was waiting for us on the front porch in flip-flops, leggings and an old T-shirt of mine. Tita, whom I barely knew and who barely knew me.

  “You blow, Mum?” she asked.

  The baby and I were still covered in blood; her hair caked with it, my cheeks, chest and thighs streaked red.

  Yes, I told her, I blew.

  She thinks I am strong. The women she worked for in Hong Kong and Singapore all had C-sections. They all had husbands as well. Tita held out her arms toward this long-awaited baby. I still couldn’t quite believe there was a baby. She was a sweet, quiet, little egg of a thing, but a near-complete stranger. Who are you? I wanted to ask. I had known her on the inside. Her restless feet and hiccups. Her flips, punches and rolls. But now, outside my body, she was alien to me.