15. Memory Work
This memory work makes me an unreliable witness. Fragmented memory in technicolour, incomplete intrusions that mix the days and decades.
My first love rupturing my insides, flowing into my stomach on a river of blood, the emergency room, the deep, dark pain of loss. Babies crying in the dark, but not mine, not for a while yet.
My first time in bed with a man, but in and out of consciousness, unknown chemicals rippling through my blood, against my clouded will. Something I maybe wanted earlier in the night, but not like this.
I like to make sense of it by worming my way silently through late-night internet rabbit holes. My face gleaming blue in the darkness, I read behavioural theory in scientific journals and cognitive philosophy on unverified Medium blogs that are temptingly titled something like ‘Unravelling the Mysteries of the Mind’. Scott Barry Kaufman tells me in a podcast, or in a bolded quote on a website – I can’t really remember – that “imagination is the ability to perceive what could be”. All these things that happened to me, all these things that could have been. One in two hundred and fifty women experience a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, one in five sexually assaulted. Numbers, numbers. Did I manufacture them in my mind? Why else do they seem like a dream?
They’re called ‘flashbulb memories’: fragmented or impaired memories that rarely present themselves in a linear manner. Don’t worry, I’ve researched it all for you. Cognitive models highlight the nature of the traumatic memory, the internet told me. Another late-night, blue-light black hole. And now I’m telling you, because I can’t really tell this story without it. Keep up, there’s a lot of cognitive-theory bullshit coming.
Fragmented, associated with intense arousal, readily primed and triggered, and poorly contextualised into memory. As a result, memories of traumatic events such as a sexual assault can be fragmentary… During a threatening event, the brain focuses on what is central to survival so it does not focus on insignificant and peripheral details, so it does not encode them.
This twisted recollection of memory, intense and visceral in some moments, completely blank in others. A sexual assault victim is not a tape recorder, relaying perfect recollections of traumatic events that happened while every nerve ending, cerebral function, and synapse snapped into survival mode. Add alcohol or a dose of a common date-rape drug, and you’re primed to be ushered into a cold room with a single Junior Suit, and told in hushed tones of faux concern that pursuing conviction is probably not worth it.
So, when it comes to writing about what really happened, I can only write about my truth. These personal experiences, and the lingering trauma, have hampered my ability to write something explicitly objective, or even clear in its subjectiveness. It’s all obtuse, hard to access, and blocked by denial – or my unreliable amygdala.
We hold on to our interpretation of events with a white knuckled grip; we take our version to the grave, never admitting we are fallible. That our brain fills in memory with imagination. But not me – I welcome the death of infallible memory. I stand on the brink of the cliff, pushing it over, happily seeing its limbs torn apart by wild Tasman waves.
Better it than me.
* * *
Unexpected elation.
A positive test. A booking for a few weeks time, to check everything is ok, to check that the positive was actually a positive. But I’m positive – I can feel my body change, my mind change. I keep thinking about how one little white stick has transformed me into a mother, and how protective I feel about this little gumnut growing inside me, waiting to expand into a majestic eucalypt, waiting to extend its limbs beyond the confines of my body.
Then loss.
An explosion in my side, followed by intense pain. Then intense fear. Fading into the backseat of a car, trying to coach a friend to drive a stick for the first time in her life as I weave in and out of consciousness. I’m in some far-flung medical centre – I don’t remember what it looked like – and I’m being dragged by the shoulders to a wary receptionist who has seen her fair share of drug overdoses. Vomiting on myself, black, white again, a worried doctor’s face.
Ambulance lights, siren. Ask the question. The baby? A kind female EMT assuring me the baby is ok, even though she knows. She knows before I do what has happened inside my stomach. A rush of paperwork, signatures, hurry, crying as I touch foreheads with my husband, hoping it’s not the last time. Desperate expressions of love, followed by yawning black nothingness.
And now, a lengthy hospital stay in post-natal surrounded by the babies I didn’t have. The doctors repeat my previous pregnancies on rote, say them out loud in front of my family, like it’s nothing, a statistic on the spreadsheet in front of them, on the way to another patient. One abortion, one ruptured ectopic. Two failures now – was it my fault because I chose the first?
Another’s blood drips in staccato, enters my greedy veins – a gory accompaniment to the machine’s mimicry of my heartbeat. I hear a baby crying in the dark, in the distance. A tortured, muffled scream breaking through thin walls. The trauma of cheating death pushes my grief down the line to another day, and a deep, pulsating set of scars reminds me that I only have half my insides now. Does that mean I’m still a whole woman?
Live baby, lost baby, all in the same ward. It’s under twelve weeks, and it wasn’t technically a miscarriage, so it doesn’t count according to the men at FairWork. It’s traumatic, but it’s 2019, so it’s not traumatic enough for bereavement leave, according to their website. Here in Australia we don’t even collect data on miscarriage. We don’t even know how many women we’re failing.
* * *
One time, years later, I was admitted to hospital for Hyperemesis Gravidarum – the technical term for a life-threatening pregnancy condition that doctors like to dismissively label as ‘bad morning sickness’. As I laid on the stretcher, lolling away manic minutes on a drip in emergency, dry heaving the final drops of water I had been unable to keep down for weeks, I heard a woman next to me crying softly. She had lost her own.
The nurses walked by my curtained cell, rolling their eyes at her. It’s just part of life, they whisper. She needs to go home now, can’t she just get over it and leave?
Just another weak woman to admonish in the break room.
* * *
After my loss, I’m enveloped into the industry of pregnancy – the business of birth. I like to call it The IVF Industrial Complex, capitals necessary, patent pending. You see, I was down for the count – I’d lost half my baby making gear in the event that shall not be named, and I was now in my late 30s. I was, I’ll have you know, solidly situated in that terribly flattering stage they officially term as a ‘geriatric mother’.
I was determined to force my maternal monster parts into cobbling together a baby, so I spent hours researching which IVF clinics in Melbourne had the highest success rates. I Googled the best and most highly recommended fertility doctors. I found one and was calmed by her unemotional approach to procuring a screamy thingy of my very own.
IVF as a sex metaphor: clinical, gloved, no courtship, no intimacy. You’re supposed to hide your most intimate corners, until you find yourself splayed out in front of strangers, a faceless vagina to be manipulated into a good statistic to be sold the next morning for marketing on Sunrise. The business of baby making.
No trigger warning. Invaded with instruments, raped again, but paid for in different ways. Last time the haze of drugs slipped into my drink unknowingly to dull the mind, to dull the fight, but this time I’m fed a cocktail in the stark light of an operating room. An unwanted audience, but at least I have proof. At least this time I wanted it.
A number in a for-profit system, a business that pits women’s dreams against manipulated statistics that instead deliver heartbreak, strained relationships, financial hardship. Stories of patronising doctors telling women their ovaries had ‘given up’. A cold industry that feels more like a baby factory than the personalised, incredibly expensive healthcare it should be.
But I had money; $11,000 of it, to be precise, paid in two instalments. And for my exorbitant fee, I was coddled into a successful, stress-free outcome. A baby! A real, live baby!
* * *
January 2020. Blood again, but 29 weeks later than the last. So much blood, the fear came back. Another ambulance, another stretcher, another room surrounded by wailing babies. This time I stayed longer, this time we stayed together.
The prison of the final weeks of my pregnancy. Thick, red bushfire smoke telling me it’s dangerous outside – a hazy foreboding, a lazy metaphor of what was to come when the pandemic would take hold. Pacing the room, I wait for another bleed, my mental health declining for the sake of a few more days gestation. I think about the birth, looming over me like a threat. I think about the harrowing stories of friends – doctor on woman violence, the lasting effects of birth trauma, trauma not considered as significant as other trauma, war trauma, men’s trauma. But wasn’t that war? Didn’t we go into battle, sustain our own life changing wounds, exit the fray, irreparable forever?
I advocate for myself, I speak as loud as I can. They listen, reluctantly.
Whisked into another white room, lucid, calm, waiting to meet my tiny parasite. My stomach is sliced into seven separate layers. A weight is removed from my body behind the curtain, and suddenly I feel lighter. The weight is instead thrown onto my chest, a mouth placed on my breast, aggressive and hungry. My agency taken away again.
Breastfeeding was easy for me. I had no choice really, as I said, because my first was like a vampire – sucking the life out of me, never waiting to be taught. But that’s not really a reason to do it, is it? Just because it’s easy? I’m a feminist, after all – I have a choice, I have agency in this days-old, life-long relationship. My baby rearing book doesn’t agree, and neither do all the right websites, nor the mother’s group I’m thrust into in inner-city Abbotsford.
They all agree, however, that the only reason to stop breastfeeding is because the baby doesn’t latch, or the baby is losing weight, or some other Right Reason. Does it have to be hard, or dangerous to the baby, for me to justify abandoning what is natural and good? What about my body? What about what’s natural and good for me?
* * *
When you have a baby in Australia, you’re promptly sent to see a nurse who specialises in post-natal particulars. The MCHN – the Maternal Child Health Nurse – my guide through the first few years of motherhood. The motherhood Yoda. Perfect mother, I will be – that’s a Star Wars joke, for the uninitiated.
She’s there to tell you everything you’re doing wrong and send you into a dizzying spiral of self-immolation. Sorry, I mean, she’s there to help. First your mother, then your mother-in-law, then your friend who had a baby before you, then an influencer on social media… and now some stranger with a clipboard, measuring your little bundle on a cold table covered in doctor’s roll, telling you that all the excruciating hours of keeping it alive, and quiet, and fed, are not quite enough. Nothing’s ever enough in the tricky trap of motherhood.
It’s we – the mothers – who are left to fill the knowledge gap at 2am when we’re faced with an unrelenting hour of screaming unassuaged by rocking, feeding, changing or baby Panadol. It’s we – the mothers – who have to salve bleeding, burning nipples, cracked open by desperate suckling, and go on feeding, again and again and again, against our will.
But the MCHN isn’t paid to give you sympathy. They’re not paid to encourage you to substitute your excruciating pain, manifesting in mastitis, for a soothing, fulfilling bottle of readily available formula. They’re paid to collect statistics on whether you’re breastfeeding or not.
* * *
Statistics seep into my work. I’m working on an article about the NSW parliamentary inquiry into birth trauma. Horrible stories of women’s trauma, shocking stories, stories that should come with a trigger warning. In fact, I should look away now. Because I’m reading about a woman pushed out of bed eight hours after a C-section, denied pain relief and labelled a junkie as the blood from her severed stomach, her shedding womb, runs down her legs. I’m crying as a woman’s stillborn baby is taken away in a Styrofoam box by police, her own torturous flashbulb moments imprinting themselves on her delicate brain.
My memories and their memories, unreliable and tangled, viscerally real, interwoven into generations of collective trauma. Carved up and served to us in equal shares.
Sexual assault allegations, inquiries into birth trauma, the IVF Industrial Complex. It’s all the same system, really. Set up to defer responsibility. Set up for women to shoulder the weight. Intricately constructed to place the burden of truth onto the victim – the victim who wanted this all in the first place, didn’t she? Truth, proof, it’s all a trap – the cognitive scientist said so. It’s not how our brains are wired.
But I’m getting distracted now. Where was I?
* * *
A tortured, muffled scream breaks through thin walls. I am here. A soft, pained “Mama”, teething, a warm embrace as I shift my weight from foot to foot, swaying in the darkness. I am here I whisper to my tiny boy, this unimprinted offspring. This bringer of tiny, iterative, significant revolutions.
A soft couch welcomes us to rest. I pull the warm, cosy blanket over my son as we both nap in fits and starts. Syncopated breathing. I reach out to the morning in my dreams.
My fingertips brush the sun as it rises, and I convince myself it was worth it.
Bianca O’Neill is a Melbourne-based writer and freelance journalist who has bylines in The Age, The Herald Sun, Rolling Stone Magazine, Refinery29, Yahoo, News.com.au, Traveller, ABC and more. She’s currently completing a Masters in Creative Writing at University of Melbourne. She is working on too many novels, none of which are finished yet, and all of which vary wildly from SF military thriller to horror lit fic to climate refugee space opera. Follow her on Substack at @biancaoneill and Instagram at @bianca.oneill