Bindweed
[Content warning: maternal mental health]
It’s been so many years, now, that sometimes Gina doesn’t fully clock what month it is, until the dream returns. It cycles back like a weather pattern, a relapse. In the dream, she has left a small baby out on a summery back lawn. The daisy-starred grass soon swoops with shadow in a wild southerly change. Raindrops leave clear pock marks on the child’s face, as if its skin is made of soft brown sand. The rain is as cold and bitter as winter sea spray. The baby is a girl; strangely, always a girl. Gina wakes in shock, sobs stuffed into her mouth like sour, balled-up paper. Then comes the rise of shame, because how could she have forgotten the date?
Later in the day, as she moves around ordinary tasks (morning staff meetings; ordering sushi for lunch; finding a birthday card for her nephew, keen now on astronomy), the question itself is upsetting, confusing. It’s never that she’s forgotten. It’s more as if sharpened realisation is exposed under thin, peeling layers of time. She sees another woman’s baby through a bus window, or in a side-on glimpse as it naps in a stroller, and something opaque, milky, pulls free from her mind, with the shiver of old sunburn.
When her cousin and her best friend had both independently told her about the anxiety dreams they had when they became new mothers, Gina thought forewarned is forearmed. I bet I don’t have them now. Or, if she did, she thought she wouldn’t be unnerved. She’d be able to say, this is just like tummy cramps; this is just like the sting of rock hard, engorged breasts. Yes, it’s difficult, it’s painful, but it’s normal. I’ll plough on, through this uphill terrain, because it’s mapped, it’s known.
Gina’s cousin, Katy, when she was living in Germany, said on the phone that she dreamed again and again of putting her baby in a baggage trolley at an airport, rushing to get the last flight before bombs fell on her city. As she buckled herself in to her seat, each time the click of the belt was followed by her husband’s accusatory, ‘But where’s the baby?’ She’d wake up nauseated, heartbeat erratic as a shorting signal light. She’d have to check for her son, even though the suburban skies were a quiet, glassy black, and she was already so exhausted she experienced mild hallucinations during the daytime. (A strange little man in a suit coat capered on all fours along the footpath. Mournful monkey skulls bunched together on green stems in a florist’s bucket. A footpath bollard was a malevolent, giant pawn escaped from a chess game. )
Gina’s best friend, Marama, had recurring dreams, too, when her daughter was born. In Marama’s dreams, she would be at work, squeezed by deadlines, then remember with a jolt that her baby was alone, still sleeping at home, but her boss kept saying, ‘You can’t go, you don’t have any more maternity leave.’ Marama would wake, each time, as if a fist beat at her door. She would roll over, find the baby stolidly, placidly sleeping right next to her in its own braided flax pod. Marama was too afraid to close her eyes without reaching in to hold a small fist, curled tight as a moon-pale caterpillar.
Then, later, Gina heard about mothers who genuinely forgot their babies. A workmate told her own story with great, belly-deep chuckles: tears of happy relief pooling behind her glasses as she confessed to the time she’d driven towards the daycare center, but then gone right past it, chatting to her oldest child, who’d had a long speech therapist appointment after school. It was only when she got home to their seaside suburb at the very edge of the city limits, and went to swing out the car seat, that she realized she’d never even stopped at the creche. There were six missed calls on her cellphone, from the day care manager, who was the last staff member left at the center after closing time.
Gina wished she could join in her colleague’s laughter, find it as catchy as bright, bubbling song, but some connection was down. An inner dial spun, landing only on silence.
There was a story in the news, about a nurse practitioner who left her baby in the car seat in the sun while she went in to work her shift at a private geriatric hospital. A nightmare walking out of the mind and into the world, a nightmare you almost wished the paper hadn’t published. Did they print it to warn other parents, was it something that could happen commonly, could it happen to anyone, the sleep deficit and undue, inescapable work stress (sick patients, their families depending on you) unknitting even the most conscientious, compassionate memory?
Gina never said, aloud, How... For she knew how the horror crawled, the thoughts hauling themselves up from roots like white nerves, along the brain stem, tendrils sinuous and snakelike, bindweed smothering. Yet part of her did freeze involuntarily, uncomprehending, for the very reason that she couldn’t forget. She didn’t drive away with her baby on the car roof, like in Raising Arizona. She didn’t, in dreams at night, constantly leave her two-month-old at the bus stop, to wake gasping at the terror of even the idea of the child slipping from her thoughts like an anklet coming loose in the sea, drifting unnoticed, then sinking. Not after Natasha.
‘I never really wanted children,’ was the lie she told the gauche, the too-inquisitive. To conceal the lie more convincingly, she’d wrap a truth around it. ‘I’ve had so much to do with my nephew, I’ve never felt I missed out.’
Her older sister, Tasha, had a son when she was nearly forty. So longed for, waited for, striven for, fought for, treatments paid for, be careful what you wish for, Tasha said to baby Jono, as she joggled him on her knee, as she slung him on her hip, as she held him belly down across her forearm to try to relieve colic, as she held him over her shoulder, as she patted his back, as she shushed and swayed and swaddled and the cries powered on like he was a perfect little factory of every kind of misery. His sleeps were thin, tattered things. Like skeletal leaves, holey, crocheted blankets, like old sleeps, sleeps that are rotting and need to be thrown out, sleeps worn through, no good any more, they shouldn’t have been given to anyone. Are they even sleeps, when they are sleeps that make you long for death, Tasha said. Her husband, Keith, laughed when Gina repeated this: a cool, dry laugh, she’s a riot, so sardonic. Always pushes the boundaries.
Gina wants fiercely, adamantly, to blame him, but she can’t, because he was working punishing hours; he, too, had been haggard with sleep deficit. He was trying like a boatman in a crummy skiff to row his wife through the storm.
Tasha didn’t have the forgetting dreams. Her nerves were run with her son, entangled with him, she was alive with him the way a wire is live. Keith didn’t really understand, Gina thinks. None of us did. It is so hard to listen deeply, when the person you love is so very there: all the tiny, detailed now of them. They speak, but at the same time, you notice the speckle in one eye, the tiny gold chip that sits in the brown, and you wonder, have I always known about that? It’s enchanting; just as the new but dear lines beside their lips are enchanting; the scoop and sweep of how quickly they pin up their hair. The crazy tales they tell about friends in common, from way back in high school, or grody student dives, make you forget the hour, even when the stories are told in scraps through the grunts and wails of a fractious, unsettled baby. What runs through every thought, every offer of help you give, is a tenor of feeling that barely has words, it is more like the flow of light through open doors. Perhaps, if you had to translate, it would be best to use language as simple as lovely, funny, here, mine.
But the thoughts that Tasha had weren’t so. The long blue call of the late summer sky thinned and tightened, corollary of her distress. She could never relax: instead, she thought ahead, growing dangerously high on the idea of release.
Gina found her sister’s weekly diary, afterwards. It was filled with shopping lists, reminders, appointments, little quotations Tasha found helpful, meaningful, but surely never helpful or meaningful enough: not in the right way. She had noted Keith’s dates for flying overseas for back-to-back conferences, and under these, in small capital letters, a self-exhortation, action it, with a list, too awful, stuck in Gina’s head even now like a protest chant, from which Tasha chose two things: prescription pills, a notorious beach. These (should Gina say thankfully, thank christfully, thank fuckfully?) — came after something not on the list nor in the planner. That was baby Jono in his car seat, tucked under blankets, bottle of formula made up, the milk cold by the time Gina opened her front door to the sound of his dawn cries, Gina immediately expecting to see Tasha there too, teary and needing help and never unwelcome for it. Gina scouted up and down the street, but no car, no Tashie, no clue what the hell was going on, until she found the note slipped in under the bunny rug.
Gina.
Keith due back on the tenth. Letters for him and baby J. at home. I can honestly say I hope you never understand. Love you always, love you always, love you always. Natasha.
When Gina wakes from the summer lawn baby dream, sometimes she goes to find the note again. It sits in a clothes drawer, in a small jewellery box that also contains a locket and a ring Tasha was given, each one from a different grandmother. Gina knows, even before she opens the paper like the tiniest of fans, what a cold, unseasonal draft will rise from it, like the pale ether that lifts from ice brought into warm air. Perhaps she opens it in ritual for Tasha: a holding to a promise, a fulfilment of her wish, because it is true, that year on year, she still can not comprehend.
Emma Neale (tauiwi, she/her) is the author of six novels, six collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories.
A former editor of Landfall, Emma has received a number of literary fellowships, residencies and awards, including the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020.
Emma’s novel Fosterling (Penguin Random House, 2011) is currently in script development with Sandy Lane Productions, under the title ‘Skin’.
Her sixth novel, Billy Bird (2016) was short-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award.
Her first collection of short stories, The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021) was also long-listed for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her short story ‘My Salamander’, from that collection, was performed as part of the Happiness Delayed project in the Netherlands, at the Leeuwarden City of Literature in 2022. ‘My Salamander’ has also been selected for both a Frisian and a Dutch language edition of the anthology Uitgesteld Geluk, to be published by Leeuwarden publisher Afûk. Her recent short story, ‘Hitch’, was one of the top ten winners in the Fish International Short Story Prize 2023.
Emma lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin where she works as a freelance editor and — with her husband, physicist and keen runner Danny Baillie — raises their youngest, high school aged son.