A. M. K

He walked up to me in the open waiting room in his lab coat. He looked both apprehensive and relieved to have found me before I left. I could see that he was a man who usually kept to himself behind the glass screen peeping through glass microscopes.

“He will help you”, he said to me. “He helps the animals in the wilderness.. It will all go well.” On the day I had insisted someone else, other than the obviously flustered attendant on duty draw my blood, he had been kind. He had treated me as if he knew, as if he knew that I had come in a piñata of emotions. But he didn’t know. I nodded – because I saw how much it had taken for him to tell me. “Oh, I’m coming back. It’s not yet time,” I mumbled.

…

He is being reintroduced to me. They all are. He doesn’t know who I am ever since he heard the news. His intention, of course was good, very good, just like me- too good, too cowardly, too sensitive, too serious, too introverted. This morning, he does not know where to begin. His hesitation and awkwardness as he walks towards me lying in the hospital bed, catching my eye in a hiccup of a glance, feigning rejection because the nurse told them that I, we, needed at least fours before outside contact. One of us has just arrived and the other has just transitioned through a death and resurrection.

Transition was like being between four walls of pain with no where to turn. I tugged, pulled, hit. Then, I reached out to the one place in my memory which had saved me once, the shores of the Atlantic below Table Mountain.

“Do you know where you are? Do you know where you are?” the nurse had asked me frantically as she searched my eyes and shook me gently.

I stood in the sand and looked at the water, the ice cold blue water flowing endlessly and waited for relief but it was all a blurry picture. I went inward, to a place of nothingness; but every time I thought I would hide and get lost, the pain shook me back to life. There was nothing left. Screaming is for shallower pains.

I had just gazed at her, unblinking. I commanded my hijacked accomplice to give me the only physical pain relief I could get that I had managed to get free off YouTube. I commanded my body to make the last maneouvres I could. It was cold. The hypnobirthing instructor had advised not to have cold feet and I had wondered when, in our weather I would ever have cold feet. These days every time my feet get cold I remember that cold Monday morning. Only the earth knows what it feels like, tectonic movements creating fault lines in my hips, the bones in my back, once again, realigning.

9 hours later, the one who had shifted high and low, side to side, slurping, scratching, shoving his foot or hand against my ribs throughout the night started pushing out. On Åsa Holsteins’ podcast where the clear image of my birth’s soul had first taken form, they had said it sounded like an animal. For me, it sounded like a bellow. I had known that with every push, the mountain of emotion that had piled up inside of me would come out and nothing else would matter.

He was slapped onto my chest – bloody and corded to me; immediately he looked up and smiled. I knew then what I had found out before, when had been on a quiet descent to the bottom. Alone with a newborn in a chair, sore breasts, staring ahead at nothing in particular, I had momentarily looked down. His brother had stopped feeding, tilted his face towards me and smiled. It was a real smile, an intentional smile, just like this one. There was a real person in there, not just a baby; had known from then on, that I would be okay.

3cm dilated and the pain had started setting up its tools, my heart dared someone to bind me up. I wanted someone to try and hold me down, someone to try and hold me back. I just wanted one more person to tell me who to be, to tell me who I was and what I could not do. It has never been clearer to me, exactly what I wanted or rather what I did not want, more than it had those past nine months. I had never been more certain of exactly what I did not want as I did that night. Only once before, only that time, for another life decision. I just needed a tap on the shoulder. I was ready for a fight. I had been preparing for this for three years.

He hadn’t seen me for who I was, only for who he is- his anti thesis. A life of pleasing had left me watered down and contained- but this, this force within me… It begged to come out, draped itself over me and overwhelmed me. I knew then, that it would not come out through a surgical knife under fluorescent tubes. It would come out like an avalanche.

…

“Do you remember that moment when I looked at you and you believed me?”

“I do.”

When I had mouthed, over the doctor’s reprimand and wagging finger, over the nurse’s crossed arms and armored pose. “Help me. Don’t let me go through this nightmare again.“

It was all procedure. I had to do it or else.

“What are these?” I asked as the nurse shoved a number of papers in my face. I read it. She had not thought I would. My years of reading documents had come in handy. It was a consent to all necessary procedures.

“If you refuse to sign this, then you have to sign that you have refused to listen to medical advice and if anything happens to your baby…”

In the file, the doctor had listed a number of cautions and explanations that he had supposedly taken us through before our stubborn refusal.

“Nothing will happen,” I cut in as I signed the declaration of refusal to accept. It was 3:00 a.m. on the morning of my baby’s delivery and I was racing out of the specialist women’s hospital touted for its life saving procedures not sure of where we were going to next. I was only sure of one thing, that I have been sure of a few things in my life, and that nobody was going to hold me down again, not again and not this time.

…jasmine oil, spinning babies, sarah devall, bridget teyler, åsa holstein, forward leaning inversions, side lying release, hypnobirthing by anja, dr. anne akello, hip dips, acupressure massages in the night, crying out in despair- asking for a sign- meet me half way, meet me half way, a small cloud in the sky- give me a sign- visions of faith...

you will not labour in vain.

Scovid or Scovida, as the child had named her, walked in through the front door; head bowed like someone who had been caught red-handed being herself. Although her name was Scovia, she had come at a time when the word COVID was ever present around the house and, the little boy learnt new words by rhyming them with old ones he already knew. We found her new name hilarious. I thought it was by chance that I had heard him connect some words this way before but it really came to me, this technique of his, when I found out one of his first friends at school was not called Bathroom but Jethro [-om].

The braids that Scovid chose were just like mine. I knew they would be similar because she had asked me what my hairstyle was called. I thought a pencil Kiswahili would suit her, since she spent most of her time in the house cleaning it or within the compound walls running after the child or gossiping with the other maid.

She did try to make hers a little bit distinctive from mine; with light brown streaks running through the off-black fibre in a shoulder length and wavy fashion. The last time I had suggested that my house-help should go to the salon and have her hair plaited, she had left within a month. Something told me to just watch and see.

That very night, I heard her, for the first time, hurl an insult. I think she had probably hurled insults at me before or at least at the runaway father of her child but she always spoke in her language when she was on the phone. This time, I was walking past the counter on my way out of the kitchen when she re-entered, after an intense phone call to a village mate and said with an unusual forcefulness, in an accent that made the word sound a little less English and a little more African, “Nonsense!”

After that, I saw a small red hand-mirror with melted flowery plastic petals glued onto the round edges lying by her bag. I had not known that she owned a mirror within the only one cloth bag that held all her belongings.

She regards me with suspicion every time I tell her to do something. She observes me with a focused gaze to see whether I will treat her differently now that I can see that we are both women. It is for this same reason that I don’t tell her my age, because it might be hard for her to accept that we are the same age but we were born in different lives. It reminds me of my first maid Carrot. For her, it had not been because she felt we were equals, it had been because she had judged herself better but that life had dealt her a bad hand.

Becoming a mother for the first time was like getting a new hairstyle. While I had feared that it would diminish me, and in a way it did because I have little time to be my ‘self’, it had instead broken me down into pieces and rebuilt a more resilient version of me. I finally understood the meaning of time, how it slipped through the cracks, how to measure it- in blocks- the time when the baby was sleeping, the time when baby was awake- the time to drink water so I could pump milk- the time to pump- the time to eat- time when the house was quiet. Time.

It no longer went unnoticed. Now, I would know the pain of stagnation, the pain of waste.

When I came here, I had just turned 23. It was two months after University and the memories of my quiet life between my residence and the University lecture halls were still fresh. The law building was all glass. They said it was because they wanted to show that the law was just and transparent. I think I have always felt safe just focusing on the current, what I could see, what I could do. I hadn’t thought about what would I do when I left Hatfield, so he had thought for me. I would go to an internship in a nice country, and after that, work in a community organisation. I was after all, malleable, soft, kind, peaceable. I didn’t go.

A haggard insecurity haunts this place. The discomfort brought forth by my presence alters something in the atmosphere. I’m not a disrupter. I had always been content to flow behind the wind that blows the curtains. I suffer under its gaze, this expectation, this fury, this separation, this isolation, this fight.

Today, as I walked out onto the greyish parking lot of the mall where I had taken refuge, it dawned on me, in the hot heavy undertone of the air before a storm falls, that the most difficult part is, I had wanted to stay. I had wanted it to be the one. I had accepted any kind of treatment because, I would be the one who did not stir trouble. I would be the one who dwelt overburdened and unseen- like a sea creature under still water. I had wanted to be the one who stayed.

Author: A. M. K

TRANSITION

The power of a new hairstyle