They say self-soothing starts in the womb. As if, bouncing around in a sac of fluid is the most frightening thing that can happen to you. As a child, the soothing repertoire was much wider; – sucking fingers, making up songs, imagining alternate realities, making promises of who we would be when we grew up and who we would not be, and imaginary ghost friends whom you talked to when sad and forgot when happy.
But growing older, brought less self sufficiency and more dependence- on others, on three times distilled ethanol and other self-indulgent pleasures of the body or soul to soothe a distempered mind, a distempered world.
Borrowing books, drawing and colouring white swans with red bricks on still waters, yellow ducks and P.E on Thursdays was an absolutely essential tool now that I look back on it. Maybe these can still do, because rocking around crying just would not do especially if you were pregnant and everything you liked before, you hated in equal measure and especially if your antennae kept picking up on the hushed degrees of snobbery, charades, egos and power games that you were even less equipped to handle then. One clerkship student, who was then already working at the biggest creditor in town once remarked, If I don’t need you, what do I need you for? I look back at that statement, astonished at how aptly he had summarised his cryptic life view.
If I remember correctly, the most difficult thing about labour is that there are no cushions to the pain. Your disintegrate to allow another life to pass through you, intact. Most medical observers can’t handle it, so they give you a few hours to howl, inject you with Oxytocin and quietly wait in their offices for the ‘baby to get tired.’ When the timer runs out- they wheel you out to a more familiar, more controlled scene and slice you right through the epidermis to the subcutaneous fat and across the uterus and stop the pain.
PurplePretoria 