Affairs of the Heart

I was 37 weeks pregnant when he told me. The children were sitting either end of the dinner table. I had not put the flaps out. Everything was unmade. The pan in my hand felt instantly heavier. It was summer. I wore hippy cheesecloth. My legs were mottled. My ankles were swollen.

I do not recall his exact words, just that they took all the air out of me. I was tired anyway. And sweating. I remember a vague crumple, as if my heart had been ripped out of my body through my anus. There was confusion and a nauseous sensation. Dirt on the floor stuck to the soles of my feet. Flat feet. Flat head. Flat thoughts.

“Who is she?”
“That's not important.” It bloody well was to me. “You don't know her.”
“How do you know her?”
“From the internet.”
I was unfamiliar with the internet. I understood that it provided a system of communication. He spent hours at his computer, writing his thesis, or so I thought. “Are you sleeping with her?”
“No, but we want to.”
'We', they had become a unit, with a common purpose.

The desire to slip my shoes on and waltz out of the door almost overwhelmed me, but I was the size of a tank and would not get very far. I had nowhere to go. Matt looked strange all of a sudden. I thought I knew his face, the way his eyes moved about in their lizard sockets and how his bottom lip always stuck out slightly. I realised I had no idea who he was or what he was doing.

He complicated the issue by being sensitive. Did I want a cup of tea. “Yes, that would be nice,” but tea does not fix anything. Apparently I needed to sit down. That was not true. I wanted to lie on the floor and feel the wood at my back, at least it could provide some solidity. If you are on the floor then there is no further to fall.

I do not recall the exact order of the events that followed. I remember asking to see their correspondence. He opened his e-mail account and another new message was waiting. One of the attachments was entitled 'Not for the children'. I presume this was because she was on her bed, legs spread, big, red gash smiling at the camera. She had long blonde hair. There was a video as well, of her waking up and walking around her bedroom naked. The duvet cover was crisp white linen with embroidery anglaise detail. She had big breasts. I hated her.

He signed an e-mail “More tomorrow, lover”.
She said “We must find a balance or it will die – MG”.
He replied “We will, it won't”.

I could not comprehend. I thought he loved me. I believed in that. I did not know he was going to take it away, like mother, like father. I never expected he would find another and leave me alone. He had and he did.

I trawled and trawled, digging up shit from the sea bed. I begged with words. I wrote to him.

“I see the words cascade down the page, beatifying a relationship far removed from our days of coffeeless mornings and warm bed feet on cold, broken tiled floors. I sense you slipping gently into love, caressing each other with whispers across the airwaves. I see your mounting excitement, your desperate desire, your devouring audience, and I know that this wasn't about what I wouldn't provide but about what I couldn't provide, and I wonder where I am now, where we are now in this shadowy time, and I cry for your touch. Please be with me. I feel so heavy, so lost. I want to find big words, striking words, words that stretch and sear, but I am tired, oh so very tired.”

We talked. I needed to understand how I had managed to lose the only thing that I had ever wanted to keep. He explained things. I listened to him. At times incoherency took over. I wrote to her. I do not think she expected that. Although it was perfectly acceptable for her to make an intervention into my relationship, she was not prepared to allow me the same right in their relationship. My husband, seeing me struggle to understand, knowing I was trying not judging, found her dismission unpalatable. Up until that point she had been a seductive wordsmith. All of a sudden she became the typical, manipulative woman, jealous and possessive. He lost interest immediately. I proved myself because I did not revert to form. He worships sluts and whores, not bitches. I won.

I changed my name. Morrigan, the goddess of lust and death, seemed appropriate.

Three weeks past in the stinking heat of August. My advanced pregnancy stuck out of me like an overinflated football. I was worried about the birthing. Doctors had told me that I could run into problems. I did not care. There was simply no way that I felt safe enough, given my previous experiences, to go into hospital to have the baby. Preparations were made at home. The community midwife delivered boxes of cotton wadding, clear, plastic tubing, etc.

Towards the end of August I became bored. Matt was struggling to finish his MA, as he had to hand it in on 1 September. He did not have much time for me. I went out with the friend, into town. Walking down Sidney Street, past the comic shops and really really expensive florist. Looking in the jewellers window. There, right in the middle, resting on a piece of black velvet, a big silver ring, oval, a baby in utero, all curled up, legs at the chest, arms folded in. I did not have the £65, but my friend lent it to me.

Matt thought it was beautiful. When I looked at it I imagined the baby inside me and the thesis inside him. Both would be coming out soon. Complete. Totally cooked. Done. He planned to go on and do a PhD. I planned to stay at home as a full time mother.

Just twinges at first. A dull, low back ache. I was watching a sit-com on TV, laughing, it was funny. In bed I could not settle. We had sex/made love. By 1.00am I was in agony. Into the bath. No, that did not seem to help. Sitting on the sofa. “Phone the midwife,” I said. He seemed to hesitate. “Phone the fucking midwife now, the baby's coming.”

I watched the African masks on the wall. They are big. A man and a woman, carved out of some hard wood. They were a gift to father when we were living in Nigeria. Their heavy lidded eyes stared at me, calmly. Their mouths arranged themselves into knowing smiles. The man's face is wider and flatter than the woman's. Her chin and forehead are more delicately shaped. She told me it would be all right and breathed a cooling air onto my face. I felt bird wings around my head. I could hear them in my ears, not fast, like a little bird, flapping urgently, rather big, strong strokes, black and well muscled. I breathed in time to their beating.

My stomach swelled and relaxed, hardened and softened. I put my hand down and felt my vagina. You were wrong mother, it is like a flower, it was coming all open in my hand. I thought of the jasmine in the garden, how the tiny, white petals bunch up together in the cold and then spread out in the warm. I like the smell of jasmine.

The midwife arrived. Matt hauled me into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed. She needed to examine me, but there did not seem to be any space between the contractions. When she finally managed to insert her fingers, she confirmed that I was fully dilated.

I struggled into the t-shirt, the one Ness had worn having her babies, and Clare had worn having her babies. It was white and on the front said 'Women celebrate'. I could still feel the big, black wings. They were growing out of my back. Clare's baby, Rowan, had been born only three weeks earlier, barely enough time for the t-shirt to be washed, dried, posted and received. She had told me “It's better on your knees, if you kneel up gravity does most of the work for you”. I could hear her in my head and the pain ripped through my belly. I could feel both women holding me and supporting me. Black wings, two of them, either side.

Grabbing hold of the headboard, I pulled myself up. I found myself face to face with a huge poster of Matisse's 'blue nude'. She is so loose. Her body so open. There is space between her limbs. I relaxed into that thought and felt myself spread, as if I was a blanket, fluttering in a summer's wind. All rigidity left me.

“You can feel the baby's head if you want to”. I did not want to. My knuckles gripping the headboard were turning white. Inside me, a growing sense of impension. The baby's head moving down and down, into a place that I had never known before. Pain had previously been two dimensional. Sensation described by external appearance. I had not travelled to the cavity between my hips and found its deep, red glow, its pulsing. It had always been superficial, but then I was there, suspended inside myself, right at the core of my being.

That space makes a noise, it has its own melody, low and growling. I felt it fill me up, reverberating like a mumbling earthquake. The sound came out of my mouth and when it did it was hot. 'This is the voice of life,' I thought, 'This is how it sings, tunelessly, wordlessly, grunting'.

She moved from me. Reaching between my own legs I caught her and pulled her through, immediately holding her to my breast. I wrapped my hands and arms around her. No air or other would get to her. She was all mine. I kissed the top of her slimy head. Her legs moved. A moment of silence cut through the air before the midwife asked if she could take a look. Everything was fine. I knew everything was fine. The afterbirth was delivered. Matt cut the umbilical cord. I was snuggled into bed and Raven, she of the great. Black wings, who rhymes with Rowan, was placed into my arms.

Mild confusion followed. Tea and toast with honey was provided. Baby was weighed. Matt's father arrived, with his camera kit. He had missed the birth. It did not matter. He said he could hear me from the bottom of the street, strange noises under his feet, rumbling through the earth. Baby was washed by her father. She cried. She did not like it. I fed her. The eldest of our children was woken to greet her new sister. Forgetting how to dress she ended up with her feet through the arm holes of her gown. We all laughed. I did not need any stitches.

Later that day Matt printed off his finished thesis. We had both birthed our load at the same time. Life felt complete for an instant. Family came round. I was wrapped in a quilt and moved to the big armchair in the lounge. I dozed and/or chatted. Raven was almost entirely silent. She lay in Matt's Dad's arms for hours. He stared down at her. He had missed the births of his own children. More tea. More toast. Matt kissing me over and over again. I felt whole, in my little basement, with the beautiful wooden floor and the softly singing fire. We were a family. I was acknowledged as the creator. And I finally understood what a goddess was, because in that moment of birth, when I brought forth life, I had been a goddess – Matt told me that.

Read more!