The Mother-in-Law(49)

I nod. “Listen, I’m sorry about Christmas. I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know how much you want a baby, darling.”

Her eyes fill up with tears. “It feels like we’ve been trying forever. And I’m nearly forty, Mum. Our time is running out, at least mine is. Patrick has all the time in the world. It’s not fair.”

I put a hand on her back and pat gently. “How is everything with Patrick?”

She sniffs. “Fine.”

I wonder, yet again, if I should tell her what I know about Patrick. Or at least, what I heard about Patrick. I could tell her to do her own investigations and see if there is any truth to it. I could just be the messenger, and stand true to the fact that it’s none of my business. I can tell her that whatever she decides to do about it is fine by me. But I don’t do this. Perhaps it’s the fact that I know if I told Nettie what I’d heard . . . I’d lose her. She is proud, my daughter. I’ve already lost a lot of her—to adulthood, to Patrick. I want to hold on to the little bit I have left.

“Have you ever had a miscarriage, Mum?”

“No,” I admit. “I never have. But I understand that it must be—”

Nettie presses her hands into her face and lets out a sob. “No you don’t understand. You have no idea what it’s like to have a baby inside you, to pray and beg and bargain that one day you will get to hold it and love it and raise it and be its mother.”

It’s funny, what the younger generation assumes we don’t know. They assume we couldn’t possibly understand the agony of heartbreak, or the pressure of buying a house. We couldn’t understand infertility or depression or the fight for equality. If we have experienced any of these things, they were milder, softer versions, played out in sepia, not experiences that could compare to theirs. You have no idea what I know, I want to tell her. Instead I open my arms and let her lie against my shoulder and cry.





30: DIANA


THE PAST . . .

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” Ghezala asks me. She’s nursing her baby girl while her serious little boy Aarash wanders around my house, looking at everything with wonderment but touching nothing. Ghezala pops by from time to time now, with kahwah, or biscuits or cakes, and I enjoy her visits immensely.

“Go ahead,” I say.

“Why do you help pregnant women? I see that you do not need to work.”

Usually when someone asks me this I tell them I do it to keep myself busy, or that I like to give something back to the community. But Ghezala and I have been through too much for me to give her the standard response. The funny thing is, sometimes I find myself telling her things that I don’t tell anyone . . . my friends, Nettie, even Tom.

“Because I was young and pregnant once, with no money and no one to help me. I was twenty years old, unmarried. My parents sent me away.”

“I am sorry.” Ghezala sits forward and places her russet hand over my own. “Where did they send you?”

I shake my head. “Oh, it wasn’t that far away, even if it did feel a little like another planet. I went to a home for unwed pregnant girls, where you go to live until your baby is born.”

Ghezala keeps her hand on mine. Understanding comes to her eyes. “And what happens to your baby after it is born?”

I’m not sure why, but I decide to tell her the truth.

1970

When I turned up on my father’s cousin’s doorstep after escaping from Orchard House, Meredith wasn’t overjoyed to see me. I still remember her giving me the once-over from the doorway. Her gaze had lingered for a long time on my belly.

“So,” she’d said finally, “you’ve been exiled too.”

I almost hadn’t recognized her. In a previous life, whenever I’d seen Meredith her shoulder-length hair was teased and full, her clothes freshly pressed. Now, her hair was cut stylelessly short and her clothes were rumpled, shapeless and practical.

“Well,” she said after a world-weary sigh. “I suppose you’d better come in.”

As it turned out, Meredith didn’t only just look different, she was different. As I watched her whizz about the tiny house—making me a fried egg on toast, getting out towels and sheets—I wondered if she was the same woman. The Meredith I knew was overwhelmed by guests when she lived at her magnificent home in Hawthorn, and I recall Mother saying she often had to ‘take to her bed’ to recover from even a small afternoon tea at her house. To the contrary, now she seemed more than capable. She made me up a bed in what amounted to not much more than a shed in the backyard of her rental. The main house wasn’t much more than a shed: four rooms—a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living.

“You can stay until you’ve had the baby and you’re back on your feet,” she said. “After that, you’ll have to be on your way, I’m afraid. I can’t afford to feed two more mouths.”

I spent the next two weeks doing what I could to earn my keep—scrubbing Meredith’s floors, fetching groceries from the store, doing the laundry. I made my way through a large pile of Meredith’s clothes that needed mending, sewing on buttons or fixing hems. I organized her pantry, I mowed the lawn. If Meredith noticed any of it, she never commented. But it least it kept me busy and kept my mind off what was coming.

I still had no idea what to expect in terms of the birth, although the moans I’d heard in the hallways at Orchard House from girls in early labor did nothing to reassure me. In another life—a life in which I was married and had friends who were married—I could have asked my friends about it. A lot of the friends who had been away would be returning from Europe around now, perhaps wondering where I was. I imagined getting in touch with them, all big-bellied or with a newborn in my arms. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that it wouldn’t end well. Even my dearest friends—even Cynthia—would not have been able to find a place for me in her life under these circumstances. We came from a tight-knit neighborhood, Catholic no less. It was problematic enough to give up your baby and return to your old life, but to return to it with your baby wasn’t an option.