A Complicated Regard: Five Cantos on Trust and Birthing
She bristles when I bring up the question of vaccines. she is young and sharp, or she is an exhausted matron, but I know this catch in the breath and steady gaze that signals danger. Her belly swells with a baby who knows nothing yet of politics and I would rather lunge for the place where we are on the same side, both wanting a healthy pregnancy, a safe delivery, a thriving infant. I say only, We recommend the COVID vaccine in pregnancy, and move along quickly.
You could call this focusing on the therapeutic alliance. Or even harm reduction, if a pregnant woman alienated by conversations with caregivers stops coming for care. Or you could call it cowardice. We are only 300 km from Coutts, where people protesting vaccine mandates are tying up a border crossing into Montana and have stockpiled guns, body armour, and a pipe bomb. A colleague takes people on when they signal vaccine hesitancy. One day she left the clinic to find a threatening pamphlet tucked under her windshield wiper: her windshield wiper and no others in the parking lot.
The SARS-CoV-2 is a strain of human coronavirus. The human coronavirus was first discovered in 1965 by a virologist working in the Common Cold Unit in Wiltshire. It is the year that Malcom X is assassinated, that American combat troops move into Vietnam, the year of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, the year that Canada swaps the Red Ensign for the maple leaf, Che Guevara leaves Cuba, Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe. The coronavirus wears a crown of proteins that fit like porcupine quills into the soft muzzle of a host cell. One thousand coronaviruses standing cheek to jowl would span the thickness of a single sheet of paper. Six hundred quadrillion coronaviruses sitting on a scale would balance the weight of a single fruit fly. The words we began using to describe the upheavals it rained down upon us sit like cold round stones in the mouth: essential, uncertain, unprecedented.
I am skilled at sensing danger.
Canto II: The time of need
We work through her list of questions. It is long, organized in a file on her phone. Her baby dozes in the car seat, his fingers twitching in dreams of soft places and strange colours. Her questions—when, how, why—have multiplied and grown virulent in the long hours of sleeplessness and fertile darkness. She has had many visits, but no one has yet explained satisfactorily why her body feels the way it does. She employs Cartesian methodical doubt, wanting to demolish everything in favour of first undisputed principles. No amount of Latin, nor the plain proof of her sleeping baby, not her own pink and pulsing body, will reassure her. She places her trust in matter, not the spirit. She believes we have failed the upkeep of her matter. She believes her matter has failed.
In her 2023 novel Held, Anne Michaels places British mathematician Hertha Ayrton with her friend Marie Curie, Nobel Prize-winner in both physics and chemistry, in Hampshire, England in 1912. Curie has escaped France for respite in England following the scandal of her leaked affair with a married man. They had ravaged her, Hertha thought, stripped her friend clean, left only this skeleton behind, asleep at last on a blanket beside her while the non-repeating, non-terminating sea came in and in. Science can never determine if there is something beyond flesh and bone, Hertha thinks, because that inquiry is inadmissible.
Here in this small clinic on a work-a-day Wednesday, a woman ravaged by birth asks me for the blueprint to pain. Her questions are arrows pointing to the only one she will not ask: Will I ever be okay? We expect our flesh and bone to fail, but not our spirit. We are both flayed by unknowing.
Canto III: When three become two
They are here for results. They have longed for this pregnancy and they have done the tests, will use the tests to make a decision. I open the digital file.
I read out the numbers. As keeper of the numbers, I must trust the numbers, must use the numbers to paint a picture of the future, though the future is always a fiction. I wonder how many times the numbers have been wrong, whether I have ever smilingly sold a fake. I try to intuit the path they will take, ready myself to set them off on it. They too have seen the small possible in a grey cloud on a screen, felt suddenly the presence of another.
Already three are becoming two. For her perhaps not a night alone in a hotel, a phone call, a note, a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape beside the narcotics. A groggy morning train ride and the long walk to work where she will ache and ache and ache.
Canto IV: The time of revelation
She feared intention in all the faces and took her baby up the mountain to pray. Wrapped her in knitting, showed her a leaf in the park, played the music of the spheres. An accident stole the music. Her own mother needed her to atone and she atoned. Later she filed her name in the phone book and arrived in an envelope, announcing herself in a picture of a spaghetti dinner. She heard sap running in the trees. So many things feel real but there is never a way to ask, and a peace must be made with that because there are countless ways to break a heart. An idea lost is a miscarriage, but a baby is not an idea.
In time she will sing to her baby, by then a grown woman with her own children, a song. Her voice will be unused and hoarse and it will sound like a hymn. There will be stars on her hospital gown and hospital dietary will come to clear away her uneaten lunch, leave a plastic cup of peaches. She carried her baby up the mountain to pray. I’m happy to see you’re free.
Canto V: The time of witness
You set aside the waves of pain in your beginning-to-swell belly—you would be no complainer in this pregnancy and there was so much time to go. A friend put you in her car and drove you herself. You sat bewildered in a hospital bed with a white sheet pulled up to your chest.
Your cervix was already nearly gone by then. The doctors came to tell you the odds, ask you what you wanted. By some miracle the baby might live. You would wait to see. What other choice was there?
The baby slipped wet and soundless into the world, her skin more water than hide, oceanic. Maybe her fingers moved, maybe the ‘O’ of her lips began to flatten into a cry—then stopped. You held her bundled in a white blanket, now a shroud, and felt the small warmth of her body escape into the entropy from which she surely came. Pragmatist William James, 1907: To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after.
You are unreadable in your grief. There is nothing to say in this moment. Your trust is in a larger plan. I see no plan, only what we are given and what we do with it. Words are empty things before the magnitude of this small, nearly, eternal life.
Photo graciously provided by Ömürden Cengiz from Unsplash.
