The Bath As I Slip Under
1992 — Emotional Development
Having a baby at 18.
I thought I’d be really good at it.
My mum was — she had four.
I just had a pamphlet.
There were some classes I tried,
but everyone was way older.
I attracted the wrong sort of attention.
I stood out when I didn’t want to stand out.
I already stood out.
I was a child with a baby bump.
Always half full, not half empty.
The person I saw in the mirror
was the same as I’d always been —
the child I knew.
I couldn’t do my jeans up,
but I knew once the baby was gone, I’d be able to.
I watched the lines creep up my stomach,
down my legs —
part of a part,
part of pregnancy.
They will come and go.
The pain started.
The panic kicked in.
I held my breath.
I screamed inward.
I had never felt pain like it.
The panic.
Holding my breath.
My mum had four.
I can do this.
It will be easy.
By the time I got to the hospital,
with barely any centimetres,
I was already screaming.
Screaming.
Screaming.
Now help me.
What have I done?
Help me.
Nobody helped me.
I held my breath.
I was prodded.
I was pushed.
I was shoved.
I was carried.
So much was going on around me.
My neurodiverse brain had no idea what was happening.
I tried to listen.
I tried to be positive.
I tried to be focused.
I tried to be anywhere but in the room.
I was above myself, looking down.
They suggested an epidural —
I wasn’t coping well.
I wouldn’t breathe.
“Breathe, breathe,” they said.
Then they said,
“Let’s move her.
She’s frightening the others.
She’s 18.
She’ll just push that baby out.
It’ll be fine.
Youth is on her side.”
Eight pounds and stuck.
He was stuck.
Face down.
He was stuck.
I screamed.
I panicked.
I didn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe.
How could we breathe?
Who was breath?
My mum came.
My mum went.
He came.
He went.
I was still there.
Still in a room.
Blood everywhere.
Screaming silently.
Holding my breath.
They put pain in my leg.
My leg went dead.
Now I’m one leg,
two arms,
still screaming silently.
Nobody came.
Nobody helped.
They suggested a numbing spinal tap.
“We’ll hold you down for a C - Shape
You can’t move.
You could be paralysed.”
I follow the rule.
I’m autism and ADHD.
I want to run.
I follow the rule.
They hold me tight.
I scream.
I scream silently.
I run to the light.
I run to the light.
Around.
Back.
Above myself.
Looking down.
Again.
Again.
Then I wake up in a bed.
The room is empty.
Everyone’s gone.
I feel nothing.
Nothing from the neck down.
I’m laid there, laid out on this bed.
I try to move,
but my body feels like putty.
The weight like trunks.
I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t even lift myself off the bed.
My legs were giant oaks.
My arms, rock.
My body was a mountain —
a mountain that wouldn’t move.
I was afraid.
I was alone.
I could breathe.
I stopped screaming.
No — wait.
They told me it was busy.
They told me I’d be fine.
They told me it’s okay.
They sent them home to get some rest.
They left me there
in my paralysed state.
The pain came back.
Not in a tiny amount —
a full-on flood.
Like I’d been stabbed.
I screamed.
I shouted.
“Be quiet, little girl.
It’s okay.
You have ten more minutes.”
Timed.
Timed it was.
I just remember them giving me a time.
I yelled,
“Get someone!
It hurts!”
Was it a crash team?
Who knows.
White walls.
Red blood.
The scissors.
They cut me.
The forceps.
They squeezed.
They pushed.
They pulled.
My leg from one side to the neck.
The stirrups.
Were they not people all around me?
A tiny little lady held my hand, tight.
She could barely speak English.
Her eyes tried to fix on mine.
She tried to reassure me.
She tried to connect with me.
But all around me,
it felt like a scene
from a serial killer’s basement.
I was exhausted.
I held my breath.
They pulled and pulled.
I felt as if I’d expelled a giant calf.
It slithered out.
My skin was torn.
I heard it — pain.
I heard the snap.
Wet poured out
like a washing machine
emptying a load too big for the door.
Then I saw him.
His face was covered in bruises.
I didn’t care.
He was silent.
Exhausted.
What a way to start life.
I’d perfectly prepared him.
Baked him in my oven.
Only my oven door didn’t open properly,
and the recipe went all wrong.
The shaking.
We cried.
I slumped in the bed.
Let me die now.
I felt like jelly in the bed.
A wobble.
A wall.
Jelly in a bed.
My legs weren’t my own.
My arms couldn’t lift me.
I slumped deeper down the bed.
I was so embarrassed.
I had to be lifted up the bed
because I couldn’t do it myself.
What had they done to me?
Let me die now.
It wasn’t to be.
They washed me.
Prepped me.
My family came back.
Eighteen — springback.
“I’m okay.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.
Cold and shivery,
I tried to stand.
I collapsed.
The cleaner caught me.
Everybody had left to celebrate.
I was supposed to be waiting for the porter
to take me somewhere.
Where?
Who knows.
I couldn’t even move properly.
When I rose again,
she had a cup of tea with sugar in it.
I was on the bed,
way above her pay grade.
She caught me
and put me back
with compassion and care.
I always remember that lady
who hugged me
and made me feel safe.
I wake in the morning
to my first visitor — Derek.
The pack is next to me.
Smurf nappies.
“You stupid girl.
What have you done?”
Eighteen.
Not seen him since I was fifteen.
Hello, Dad.
My next visitor is the family planning nurse.
She can barely rouse me from the bed.
She lays out the leaflets and tells me,
“You can get pregnant straight away again.”
I look at her with venom,
remembering — in later years —
that my body had only known two orgasms
before this poor baby was ripped from my vagina.
Physically torn from my body
when my hips snapped.
My pelvis broke.
The damage was done.
“She’s 18. She’ll be fine.
Her mum delivered four.”
I wasn’t fine.
Five days later,
everyone else has left the hospital.
I’m still there,
caught in the loop:
feed, change, feed, change, feed, change —
repeat.
My head is like a Rolodex.
I didn’t sleep.
I didn’t rest.
Digest.
Change.
Repeat.
The rule follower.
I lose his bangles on his ankles every day.
I have to go through the bins —
the disgusting nappy bins —
to find his bracelets.
Because that’s the rule.
So I follow.
In a drugged-taste dream,
I wake up.
Someone come rescue me.
Someone come take me away from this place.
I had seen so many babies,
but I did not know
how they got to the place.
I go home.
And the vortex rolls.
The vortex swells.
I haven’t slept.
I don’t have enough blood.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
I put on my mask:
Mum.
I can be Mum.
Stitches are infected.
I have piles —
even though I don’t know what they are.
My back is broken.
The veins and stretch marks
have crept all over my body.
I resemble a tree.
My arms hurt.
I try to pull myself away,
but my legs are so numb and heavy,
I hurt myself more.
Just when you think it couldn’t get worse,
I go home.
Home.
My family home.
I guess it was never really a family home.
Everyone talking at me.
Everyone telling me what to do.
Everyone visiting.
The mask on and off.
On and off.
I think I’m getting the hang of it —
the panic of adding the right amount of scoops to the formula.
My brain doesn’t work so well,
so I keep throwing it away and trying again,
because I worry I’ll hurt him.
Making bottles is a traumatic experience.
And then the milk kicks in.
No one told me about this.
I’m so lucky we have a friendly neighbour.
She dashes over with cabbage and hot flannels.
They run me a bath for the pain.
I can’t even imagine.
My stomach is tight.
My breasts are so big
they feel like they’re bursting out of their skin.
I’ve become the Hulk.
Just when I thought there was no more pain —
don’t touch me.
This hurts me.
Hurts me more.
I’m getting in the bath.
I shut the door.
I put my head under the water.
It goes quiet.
Let me sleep.
Let me die quietly.
Take me away from this.
As I slip under the water,
as I feel myself let go of the side of the bath,
my youngest brother knocks on the bathroom door.
He tells me he needs the loo.
He wakes me from my insanity.
I pull myself out.
I put my dressing gown on.
I face the day.
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