The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown - H P Lovecraft
Frida Sima turned two this summer and I read back over what I wrote about becoming a mother, when she turned one. I wonder why I didn't write about the health scare and emergency room stay my mum had 2 weeks after Frida was born, the hours when we didn't know whether or not we'd see her again. I didn't want to acknowledge the relevance of being unexpectedly confronted with the impermanence of my own mum, not long after becoming one myself. I wanted it to exist less, be less real. Despite our efforts, ultimately the health and death of ourselves and our loved ones escapes our control, held firm by the unknown. At the start of 2022 I wrote:
'In the paediatricians waiting room before a check-up for Frida. There's a big cartoon scene on the wall showing a farm in the sunshine, all grass greens and sunshine yellows and sky blues and tractor reds. With it's smiling, apparently care-free mum, dad, children, animals, she's throwing corn. And I think, that's a lie, life isn't like that. It's not sunny and simple and happy and smiling. It's fear and suffering and stress and death. And I long for the days when that cartoon scene felt like the truth. What has happened since then. Why does it feel all downhill from here. A friend from college, my age, just died of a heart attack, having survived a stroke a few years before. His dad died last year. How will his surviving family continue to live? He was due to get married. Is, this, life. Sickness, suffering, death. How do people continue? I long for the ignorant optimism of my safe, privileged, happy childhood. If this is grown up life I don't know how to do it.'
I don't feel like that now, or, it's there, but it's not everywhere. The pendulum has swung. The heavy cloud of fear and dread that hung around and sometimes consumed me in the earlier months of parenthood, has dissipated, or, I found a way out the other side. And I wonder why things felt sometimes so bleak when objectively, my circumstances aren't so different now. How did I get out and why do some people get stuck there. My mum got better. Frida got older, we don't have to be so constantly hyper-vigilant just to keep her alive. The unknowns of new-parenthood have turned more into knowns. She runs and talks and feeds herself. She makes us laugh so much, we chat, she finds the beautiful, curious, ordinary stuff that we don't always notice. It's the joy, and the joy, and the joy. It's her cheek pressed against mine. It's the phrase, 'no worries!' being one of her first few joinings of words, and the simple, shrugging way that she says it. It's her standing on her chair, looking up out of the window at the moon and shouting, 'MOON, COME 'ERE!!'
Having a child breaks you, and it heals you.
It's feeling my body in contact with the hulking, suspended rock that is planet Earth. It's knowing that everything that my body is made from came from this Earth and will one day entirely break apart back into it, and become something else. It's being made from the same stuff as the asparagus plants and the beetle and the hill and the puddle and the pavement and the storm, one way or another. It's rubbing my hands together and thinking about the natural, daily breakdown of skin, the breakdown of the surface of me. Or running my finger down my arm and thinking of the microscopic creatures that live on my body. Where does the boundary of 'me' end and 'other' begin? If my body is constantly breaking down and renewing, where am I? We are all the time becoming something else, dying in one form to relive in another.
It's some astronauts talking about how they thought they'd feel complete after travelling into space. When in fact, out there, surrounded by an in-hospitable vastness they longed for that little fragile ball of Earth, of perfect life. The unlikely miracle of a hospitable planet and the unlikely miracle of our alive bodies.
It's the free and fault-less ecstasy of resting in my senses. Breath, life, an extraordinary gift.
It's belonging. To here, Earth, to each other.
It is that, and this, not one without the other. Death feeds life, we break down in order to renew. We know happiness because we know sadness. The known and the unknown. Everything finds balance, the pendulum swings. Where we put our attention helps.
