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The Heptade of the Were-Toad

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There are lots of downsides in the later stages of pregnancy: two of the less gross ones are not being able to breathe lying down and having to lean back to counterbalance the weight. You long for it to be over, and simultaneously dread the process of getting it over, and the quality of the life-after is hazy and uncertain. But the magic of hormones takes care of some of the fear and angst, because you become unnaturally calm in the face of the unknown, though unwontedly irritable with your partner.

You have changed shape, your physical and emotional balance is altered, you are now a were-toad, dragging your massive belly around searching for strange foods. Or a were-jellyfish, floating mindlessly in the warm sea of ignorance, stinging anyone who swims too near. What it must be like to be the partner of a person who has suddenly become a were-toad/jellyfish is beyond imagining.

Of course, everyone’s experience is different, this is only mine, a person who had not troubled to find out much about the production and rearing of offspring, and lacked the skills necessary to survive in this strange new landscape. At some phase of the nine months it takes to make a new person I was aware of an enormous door hissing shut on all the accumulated skills of the previous 31 years and opening on to a quite unfamiliar prospect, a kind of Desert of Unknowingness: I was now no longer a mountaineer or linguist or mathematician, I was Elderly Prim, a piece of meat a bit past its use-by date.

Prim not in its normal sense but short for primigravida, pregnant for the first time (discounting any that got away in a miscarriage). And “elderly” is “over-25, or -30 or -40” or whatever is currently believed to be the maximum desirable age for women to reproduce. Women, not men. It’s perfectly OK for a 90-year old man to reproduce, cheers. This is not unfair dealing, just a fact of life.

So as the great door hissed shut and blotted out the familiar terrain of the past it was like being parachuted onto the great Cairngorm plateau at midwinter in a whiteout, with no map, compass or whistle to blow for help; I could walk straight over the edge without even knowing it was there; too cold to stop, too lost to turn back, the only thing to do was keep on, and hope. What a fine source of metaphor is the mountain!

No good now comes of consulting the wisdom of the ancients: they were almost all blokes, and all they wrote about was bloke stuff – war, politics, law, how to build aqueducts, chaps in wee boats being blown hither and thither in the Mediterranean – interesting enough in its way but largely irrelevant to the conduct of a pregnancy.

Fortunately for the survival of the human (or any) race, ignorance hardly matters. The organism knows what to do, at a level even more basic than the old lizard brain (which spends the months snoozing with its feet up, unless there is an emergency) and just carries on with all that fantastically clever cell-division, organisation of specialised bits, checking that the feet are on the right way round and timing of the escape mechanism, without you having to do or think anything. All you have to do is obey commands: if it says “eat coal” or “drink lemon juice”, you need to eat coal or drink lemon juice for whatever component is the chemical that the organism needs. And on the process goes, unstoppable.

During this time, agitation and speculation from the big brain would be a nuisance, hindering the basic organism’s smooth operation, but luckily a peculiar calm fogs the little grey cells and sends them to lie about sleepily in hammocks with flowers in their hair; until the moment comes when the GP sends you to hospital, whereupon the peaceful reliance on basic organism is stopped in its tracks, and the wonders of medicalization take over.

The process should have been medicalized much earlier, for there existed pre-natal clinics that one was supposed to attend; but I went to only one, and it was so reminiscent of a combination of Kafka and Primary School - mindless bureaucracy coupled with infantile bullying - that I never went back.

Arriving at the hospital, I was told “It’s the wrong day, the clinic’s on Tuesday.” When I said the GP had told me to come, they asked “What  for?” I think the bump wasn’t showing as much as it ought to. Eventually they admitted me and the process of humiliation began. The elderly prim had no name, it was simply “mother”, with a note of exasperation, the very word spat out like a curse. Hearing the well-known and beloved note of my Ariel coming into the parking, I remarked “That’s my bike, that’ll be my husband,” and they tutted at me as if I’d lost my marbles. The moment when push came to shove arrived, and the nurse said “O gawd, what am I supposed to do?” and scurried away to get her Ladybird Book of Midwifery. Not reassuring.

I’m exaggerating a bit, of course, it wasn’t a Ladybird book.

(The next two births were at home, a much cosier experience; and from what I hear, a hospital birth now is very different from what it used to be.)

Back home, not only did a succession of hormones rage on and on, but there were the well-known sleep-deprivation effects, used to torture the captive for as long as humans have wanted to be nasty to each other:

Sleep deprivation can cause impaired memory and cognitive functioning, decreased short term memory, speech impairment, hallucinations, psychosis, … stress, anxiety and depression. (The Justice Campaign: Torture Techniques used in Guantanamo)

Mm, yes. And sleep-deprivation was visited on me in spades by this new tiny creature. Now not only had I turned into a were-toad in a Cairngorm white-out but I was becoming a hallucinating, psychotic, stressed, anxious and depressed were-toad. What hope was there for the future of Kay, the new child?

You might easily think “None”. But fortunately for Kay and all new humans, at the basic animal level we inherit millions of years of experience in how to produce and rear a child, and the basic animal cares not at all for the mutterings of that big useless lump of grey matter beneath the skull, its doubts, its worries, its ignorance; the animal just keeps going, day after day, probably copying what its own mother did, way back, and - with luck - the new creature survives and grows.

And the most astonishing thing happens. You fall in love, not the wishy-washy love of the romantic novel, not the lust of the bodice-ripping Sir Jasper, but a determination to do everything needed for the creature’s survival, even at the cost of your own health, sanity or, if necessary, life. Because it has been part of you and always will be, in some degree.

But it is also, of course, its own self, and that’s another source of wonderment: that this new human, with hardly any experience of life, already has its own personality, different from yours or your partner’s, different from subsequent siblings’, something entirely its own; where did that come from? Fascinating to live with and watch what happens.

creatures with their own personality

These are the features that gradually unfold as the mist dissipates and the view becomes clearer: love, wonder and fascination, and the daily grind necessary to enable the continued survival of the loved, wonderful, fascinating creatures that - in spite of all your ignorance - you have produced. Wherever you go in the future, whatever job you undertake, they are your primary concern; and if that alters where you might go or what you might do for a living, so be it.

Later on the wonderful creatures will come to rebel; they will ignore your advice, despise your habits, laugh merrily at your food, clothes, language, music … go their own way as independent people, as they must do. And you may feel the occasional surge of irritation, but you don’t really mind, because it’s so fascinating. As if you were watching a David Attenborough wildlife series, day after day. No way would I want to live for ever, but it would be most entertaining to be able to survive in the form of a succession of flies on the wall, simply watching what happens next.

So, during a seven-year stretch (a heptade) in the ‘60s, Kay, Cee and Em entered the world in Edinburgh, each in a different place, for our moves during those years were frequent. At the start of the heptade I was a singleton, a teacher in Crieff living for weekends; by the end of it I was part of a tribe, learning how to live the tribal life, and - after entrepreneurial rise and fall - a teacher once more, without having yet properly emerged from the condition of hallucinating psychotic were-toad/jellyfish, possibly delusional about the wondrousness of the small people of the tribe. And living now in Orkney, an unfamiliar place, among a people with a way of life and culture rather different from what I’d been used to, but a place and people that taught me, during the next three heptades, far more about living than I ever taught them about the ancient culture and language that it was my job to reveal.

But Orkney needs a whole post to itself, perhaps even more than one.