13. Chapter 4
Narratives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves
*This book was set the be published by the publisher of my first book, but after years of struggle and many other reasons, I decided to release it on Substack instead. Each week, the 52,000 word book which was tentatively titled “Be A Force” will be dropped here online. The sections will start with number 1 and then progress over the 52 weeks of the next year. The Chapter title will be placed in the post description for clarity.
I am standing above my mother’s shoulder. She’s seated in her wheelchair, a chair she’s used now for over a decade. It smells of sweat, her body and the faint hint of urine that is the norm in nursing homes. I gather a spoonful of her food, a puree of sweet potato and pumpkin mixed with some sort of protein powder to keep her weight up. I spoon the puree into her mouth. I repeat the spooning over and over again. At the time of this occurring I was almost forty, single and still feeding my mother. A thought flashes in my mind, those kinds of thoughts which pierce your consciousness with the subtlety of a billboard when you’re stuck in gridlock traffic: “You are still feeding your mother, when you should be feeding your children.”
The thought hurt me, tears roll down my cheeks, I swallow them because I didn’t want my sadness to wash onto Mum because god knows she’s experienced enough sadness on her own. Like so many moments when your parent become your child, you do what a parents does, you shield the other from your sorrow. You protect their psyche because you know just how fragile they now are. This moment, this thought, was the first time I realised how conflicted I was about the years I spent emotionally and literally caring for my Mum. The experience of leaving my entire life in Dubai, returning to Perth, cleaning Mum’s hoard, and being only 29, all of it had obviously traumatised me so profoundly that these moments trigger my unresolved, I was also resentful that as a woman I was subject to a biological clock which had lost years during the time I was caring for Mum and the many years of therapy after to feel normal again. During this time I had ironically become a geriatric of my own in fertility terms. To fully understand the story I was crafting about this, let me take you back to where this journey began…
It’s the longest Uber ride of my life. My chest is tight, and I am trying to breathe deeply. I am on the brim of bawling. It’s thirty minutes to the beach for me in Perth to ground my feet in the sand, but it feels like thirty hours as my tentative Uber driver wends along the West Coast Highway. The hormones pumping through my blood are making me impatient. I’ve just finished getting my most recent scan for egg freezing. A long phallic probe was lubricated and placed inside me. I look down and can see my stomach dotted with pin pricks and bruises from the needles I have been injecting into myself in preparation to harvest my eggs. The ring of lower-abdomen fat I have always carried looked like a flesh-coloured version of the pin cushions my mother once used while quilting. The nurse pushed and prodded the probe, and I craned my neck over to see the screen the best I could because my neck had been locked into place by then for days from stress. Why had no one warned me how challenging this process was? I did not know it then, but this was likely the closest I will ever get to an ultrasound the way I had watched countless women in movies cry with joy upon seeing their yet-to-be-born baby’s gender revealed on screen.
