When We Remember to Breathe: Mess, Magic and Motherhood – Extracts

MAGPIE PULP PROUDLY PRESENTS EXTRACTS FROM WHEN WE REMEMBER TO BREATHE

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

When We Remember to Breathe Mess, magic and mothering

A conversation by

Michele Powles & Renee Liang

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

About the authors Michele Powles Despite training in law (or perhaps because of it) Michele has been a dancer, producer and writer across the globe from India to Bosnia, Brazil to Edinburgh. She is now the mother of two small, loud, boys, who seem to have inherited her fondness for generating fantastical scenarios (mostly under their beds). Her fiction and non-fiction has been published widely, and broadcast for radio both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She was New Zealand’s 2010 Robert Burns Fellow and, as an emerging screenwriter, was selected for the 2018 Film Up programme.

Renee Liang Renee has spent her whole life unsure of exactly what she is. And she expects to never find out. Renee is a writer, a mother, a sister, a daughter to parents who made the decision in their thirties to emigrate to New Zealand from Hong Kong, a poet, a playwright, a paediatrician, an arts journalist and a medical researcher. Renee has collaborated on visual-arts works, film, opera, music and musicals, produced and directed theatre works, worked as a dramaturge, taught creative writing and organized community-based arts initiatives such as New Kiwi Women Write, a writing workshop series for migrant women, and The Kitchen, a new programme nurturing stories in local kitchens. Renee has written, produced and toured seven plays. She likes fart jokes. In 2018, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the arts.

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

For my boys Michele

* For my parents, who gave me life.

For my children, who show me life.

And for Mark, without whom none of this would have happened.

Renee

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Contents Introduction

9

1. Waiting for first breath

13

2. Close your eyes (and count to ten)

23

3. Spaghetti time

45

4. Ontogenesis

57

5. This, too, shall change

69

6. Getting on with it

97

7. Love lettering

119

8. Catch a falling star (and put it in your pocket)

155

9. Never let me go

181

And finally

209

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Introduction Michele

I was the brand new mother of two (very) small people. It was a time full of thinking and not thinking. Writing and not writing. And wishing I was doing more of one and less of the other, alternately, depending on the day. I sometimes contemplated whether all the words crawling across the page like so many spiders would infect either one of my children and turn their conversations into ridiculous, spiky things, full of dark and stormy nights and insufferable grand gestures. But they were too little to be thinking about how they would narrate their lives, too little for anything except holding the glitter of life – the very spark of it – in their eyes and making me watch, in awe, as they grew and turned into something entirely different.

In the middle of all that, I wished I was writing more about them, to them, of them, for them. But not in the wow-you-rolled-over-today form, which a lack of sleep makes it all too easy to slip into. When I looked back over the small stitches I’d made in the record I was supposed to

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

be sewing them, all I had was a burst of colour here and there, with milestones thrown in if I was lucky.

Then I read an exchange of essays between two Canadian poets – I can’t find the book anymore, so I can’t give them true credit. The essays were not letters. They were not even necessarily linked in theme or tone, but they did – perhaps just by the very nature of being shared – inform each other. Being a new mum is full on, so I was attracted to this idea of simple sharing. Of writing a paragraph each week about life, about babies, about the mess and the magic of it all. As I thought more on it, I recalled reading Anne Enright’s book on her experiences of motherhood (Making Babies) and the idea became fleshier, like a ripe peach.

When I realised that Renee was pregnant again and that our children would be so close in age, it looked like the universe was conspiring to bring us together to create something bigger than our single experiences – to make good on the gift of words our lives had offered us.

Renee said she, too, had wanted to write for her first child. And now, with her second so close to arriving, she wanted to write for him. But she hadn’t. Neither had I. It’s hard. Life is full. We were busy doing All Of The Things. So, I proposed this book as a kind of cheerleading arrangement. I would write a paragraph and send it to her. She would write one in return. That was it.

Nothing as polished as a poem or as perfectly formed as a story. Sometimes the words might take over, I suggested, and other things wouldn’t get in the way and the paragraph might become longer. Or the opposite would

10

W H E N W E R E M E M B E R T O B R E AT H E

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

happen and what came out would be shorter. But the only rule would be that there was a paragraph of sorts, shared, each week. It didn’t quite happen like that. But the spark was enough to get us started and, for weeks at a time, we would write: to each other, of each other, for each other and for our children.

We didn’t know each other that well, but we knew each other’s work. We hoped we might get a wonderful record of this mad time and also a slightly more-focused one.

Maybe with a few laughs and some shared not-takingall-this-too-seriously intonation in the words. We hope we’ve done that – it’s certainly been fun. We hoped that the paragraphs would feed each other and that certainly happened, too. They fed each other and they fed our families. Moreover, they turned the mess into magic.

Pregnancy, birth, feeding, society, mothers, fathers, toddlers, brothers and sisters, life, mess, magic. A spot of chaos theory in action.

Renee

Writing this, at the end of the process, I’m a little surprised. Did we really make this?

A whole other thing, that wriggled and giggled its way out, asking to be nurtured even as we battled fatigue and distraction and Those Million Other Things To Do. Of course it’s a rather arbitrary end. Not really the end at all, just the fuzzy start to some other era we will one day look back on and say, ‘I remember.’

I N T RO D U C T I O N 1 1

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Reading things I don’t remember writing, remembering the feelings I forgot I had, those moments I was so sure I wouldn’t forget – I am so glad we did this. It’s been building more than words, hasn’t it? Maybe a friendship, or a shared pathway, or a glittering tapestry where the stitches bounce and hop and take on the others’ sheen.

I remember vaguely staring at the paragraphs that, when printed out, looked a little like paving stones. After months of emailing chunks of our lives at each other, we met again. You made me tea and arranged daddy daycare.

We got on our hands and knees, navigating around our insecurities and confidentialities and cups of hot liquid, and we laid out paths. Literally. A room, white papers placed and moved in sequence, with escaped children fluttering up clouds of words. We shooed away the children, admonished the child help and tested the paths.

Walked on them, feeling the warm sunlight and patches of shade. A journey taken in company, with places to rest in between. We wondered if we dared to share the map.

Agreed on the end of the road: the moment when our oldest children started school.

Is it really the end? This morning, I looked at my daughter’s book when I walked her to her classroom and I read words. Telling stories. Written in her own hand, the letters already firm and confident, much like she is. I have an intuition this may just be the start of something else.

12

W H E N W E R E M E M B E R T O B R E AT H E

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe Š Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

1.

Waiting for first breath

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Conception, a space–time continuum Michele

Did you know it’s almost impossible to get pregnant in space? It’s something they’ll have to fix, I guess, if we ever want to make good on all the opportunities science fiction novels have promised us. The problem is the radiation, of course, and the gravity. Radiation destroys cell reproduction, gravity hampers bone development.

I’d like to think the gravity was irrelevant – my baby, floating away inside me. But everything is connected. He may well float now, but, if the floating were never-ending, how would he ever be grounded enough to walk upright when he came out?

Inside my womb, it must be a bit like falling. Spiralling downward, untethered by an end point. Disconnected from the ground by no need to rely on it. I’m almost certain that’s what it’s like, because it’s what getting pregnant felt like. What conception felt like. I remember the exact moment with my second boy: resting in bed and suddenly being struck by pure vertigo. From the inside. It was him, sperm and egg colliding, I was certain.

People say it’s impossible, that the best you can hope for is a sense of discomfort, a twinge of pain as one sperm draws swords with another, while a sneaky outsider hacks into an egg. (Every time I read a book, I look at the full stops and marvel that something even smaller is the source of so many people.) But I remember the moment anyway. My baby and I twined together, falling deep, deeper into the darkness. I didn’t move, didn’t talk or chat. I couldn’t. My whole self was spinning downward, through the bed, through 14

W H E N W E R E M E M B E R T O B R E AT H E

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

the floor, down to the centre of the earth. I tried to get up. I remember reaching for my partner. My arms flailed.

Useless. I couldn’t find him because he was still up on the surface of the world. On the bed. While I was hunched in boiling magma or perhaps floating out the other side, somewhere near Seville.

It was breathless. That’s what I’ll tell my son when he’s older. All breath stopped, the world stopped and in the stillness I started dissolving. And in my dissolution, in that place of being and not being, I felt a baby’s touch. I knew.

That’s something the online discussion boards are full of. Women who knew. Or pets that knew. Or partners.

Or mothers-in-law. And then there are the other discussion boards of women who were sure they knew. And were wrong. In that space – the place where you think something might have happened but you can’t possibly imagine that it has – the internet is full of reassuring contradictions that will verify every single symptom you will ever, or never, have. Dr. Google: a potentially pregnant woman’s best and worst friend.

I floated through the cosmos, over Spain, gradually coming in closer to home until the slash of blue on the test confirmed it. A space baby. The lack of gravity in his conception didn’t hinder his bone development. I’m waiting to hear if he’s seen the inside of a space ship, though.

WA I T I N G F O R F I R S T B R E AT H 1 5

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Peeing it out Renee

A note to my baby: I’m doing my daily walk. Ten minutes to the shops, ten minutes back. The concrete path has a gentle roll to it. So do my hips. Inside, you loll in an amniotic sea, kicking a lazy foot out every now and then, to stroke across my abdomen. The scan lady said that your head was deep in my pelvis. So deep, we couldn’t see your face today. The only thing we caught was a wedge of nose: perky like your father’s, not snub like mine or your sister’s. Strange how I obsess about things like noses. Strange the things that become fixed beliefs, like the Liang nose is a dominant gene. Your nose could be a freak of nature. We’ll just have to see.

You lie bum-to-the-left, legs doubled over so they nearly touch your face. You could suck your fingers and toes at the same time, frozen in a casual somersault.

I, too, somersault, though not as casually as I’d like to believe. My days of having long patches of time to myself are once again numbered and so I flip from meeting to meeting, draw in long snatches of internet, swallow as many emails as I can on the run. I wish I could sip at my tasks and gently pee them out, the way I presume you’re doing in there with the amniotic fluid. That would be convenient.

I wish I could live in a spaceship.

16

W H E N W E R E M E M B E R T O B R E AT H E

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Pregnant (ˈpreɡ.nənt)

adjective: To be full (of hot air or a baby). noun: The spacious pause before a descent into chaos.

Michele

I am a hot air balloon. A rope holds me down – like Mrs Twit – to the ground.

I feel that it should be different. That I should float in water instead of air. I’m swelling with fluids of all sorts, after all. But no. I hover, high enough to see the dandruff on the top of unsuspecting heads.

I’m inflated by a lot of things. By anticipation. By the speed I’m travelling at – the whirlwind I’ve generated is getting trapped in the pockets and pleats of my skirt, and adding to the upward draft. I’m inflated by other people.

I am pregnant and so I am other people’s property – their excitement and advice and coos fill up my balloon day by day, threatening to send me aloft.

It seems visceral, the effect a pregnant woman has on others. So I assume it’s something primeval, something deep and old and animal that we react to. Perhaps we remember our own sway and suck in a bubble of amniotic fluid and, when we see it made real in the flesh, many of us want to touch it or comment on it. All of this has been swirling around me for months and, so, I am buoyed by it – buoyed by the attention.

This is what has sent me skyward, I think. The specialness afforded pregnancy. It sends you to the couch in fits of fatigue and nausea, and drowns you in hormones and

WA I T I N G F O R F I R S T B R E AT H 1 7

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

emotions that have made me break down and sob in a shop just because the woman behind the counter was nice to me. But . . . I have a baby growing inside me. And everyone knows it. It’s (actually) miraculous.

* I’m busy. I’m always busy. The tattoo I had planned to get inked on my foot, ear, arm – depending on what day it was – said everything all the time. And then my friend told me off, because, she said, I didn’t need to be permanently reminded of how much I was always trying to cram into my life. She was right. But the tattoo I eventually got – of an ampersand, a sentence in and of itself – also has a type of business in it. A question about what’s next. That’s OK, my friend allowed, because at least you’re letting the universe have a hand in what’s next; you can’t be a control freak about everything.

She was right about that, too. Damn her. And, as the pregnancy progresses, I can’t control any of it. I can’t control when I will burst into tears in public or when I will inhale a fishy smell at the supermarket and need to scan immediately for a bucket to puke into. Nor when I will stare at a wall for ten minutes, sure that there is a mark there, only to finally blink and find it gone. Or when I will fall down an internet rabbit hole of pregnancy forums on the importance of a diet high in prune juice. I am crazy with it all.

I’m bored with myself and infatuated, in turns. I am utterly in love with the man who has made this happen, except, of course, when he is a dick and I yell, incoherently,

18

W H E N W E R E M E M B E R T O B R E AT H E

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

at him, about nothing in particular. As I stroke my growing belly, I’m constantly amazed by the fact that I am pregnant at all.

Now, I’m busy on the inside and on the outside. I’m busy earning enough that I will be eligible for the maternity leave afforded self-employed people. And I’m busy growing the baby.

* Soon it will be a different kind of busy. Soon, all going well, there will be a pause before I start again. That’s not what people usually mean by a pregnant pause, but it should be. The space in between being a woman and a mother is indescribably full. Full of anticipation, of fear, of hurt and hope, and of other people. It is a hot-air balloon in a blue sky, as the sun pours golden autumn light over fields and you have to stop the car to take a photograph.

WA I T I N G F O R F I R S T B R E AT H 1 9

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Mummy mum Renee

This time, it won’t creep up on me. This time, I know it’s going to happen: that slow mummification (yes, I know, I am clever) of the brain, the layer-on-thin-layer of fog, wrapping until you can’t even plan what you’re going to cook for dinner.

There is the matter of the small person wrapping herself around me, too. The small person means I have to maintain a modicum of alertness. Worse, she’s a talker and never forgets anything I say. We call her the elephant, among many things. ‘Mummy, what you mean?’ she’ll say, making her trademark intense eye contact after I’ve zoned out then murmured something vague and slightly sheepish. I suppose it’s good to have a bellwether for not making sense.

The fog is so bad that, some days, I wonder whether I should even be driving. It might be similar to driving under the influence of alcohol – I wouldn’t know. I don’t get drunk. (Truly. I fall asleep after a whiff of alcohol, so it’s hard to imbibe quickly enough before I pass out.)

Also, Mr. Kickboxer is pretty damn distracting in there.

Like his sister before him, he has a knack for judging The Moments When Mummy Is Trying To Concentrate Enough and then: Wham! Bam! No thanks, young man.

It’s getting closer, though, and I know, now, that there is recovery. Get the baby out, survive the fatigue of the first few months and slowly, imperceptibly, the fog clears. You’re never the same again, but you do get your brain back.

20

W H E N W E R E M E M B E R T O B R E AT H E

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

Anticipation medicine Renee

I’ve spent a lot of time in hospital this week. No need to panic, little one: it was for a medical-education course.

Lectures, bells ringing to signal the end of morning and afternoon tea, the annual catch-up with colleagues. Of course, the inevitable questions: How many weeks to go?

Boy or girl? Is it twins? And unique to paediatricians, a risk-averse bunch: Midwife or private obstetrician?

This hospital, Auckland Hospital, is a place I’ve spent a lot of time in. (Though only once as a patient, thankfully: the few hours of induction and labour before your sister was born.) Somewhere in a parallel dimension, a ghost of my former self still walks the corridors, clutching a notebook, relishing the way a newly-issued white coat flows behind me.

That white coat marked me out as a medical student, but it was hard won by years of study and lectures. Finally, I made it to the ward; my medical ‘practice’ could start in earnest. My first patient, a middle-aged Indian man, told me that I would never forget him. He had psoriasis; his skin fell off him in clumps. Sometimes he woke up in a snowdrift of his own cells. He was polite about Western medicine, in the way that people who don’t believe in it are. He gave me a pamphlet on Ayurvedic medicine and urged me to study it.

And now, as I sit in the lecture theatre surreptitiously checking emails on my phone, you roll beneath my skin like

WA I T I N G F O R F I R S T B R E AT H 2 1

Extract from When We Remember to Breathe © Michele Powles and Renee Liang 2019

the sea. You make such a storm that I try to pat you back to sleep like I do your sister, but it doesn’t work. In just a few weeks, you’ll be here. Hopefully, you’ll arrive as planned, here. Safely, on the ninth floor, a controlled delivery.

None of mummy’s colleagues will need to be in attendance, and there will be no drama with oxygen and face masks.

At the same time you take your first breaths, somewhere in the same building someone will likely be taking their last. The hospital is a microcosm, in its own warped way.

There are the patients, their beds like stages, people (or at least monitors) watching their every expression. Then there is the sea of people, flowing from room to room, corridor to corridor. Some are workers, thinking about what they’ll buy for lunch or about the argument they had with their boyfriend that morning: Will they come home to find him gone? Some are people dropping in from other lives to visit, or to see a nurse or doctor or attend a course.

Some are visitors just looking for a clean toilet.

But all the hoi polloi is yet to reach you. For now, all you hear is the slow thud, thud, thud of my heart, the rhythm of my breathing. There’s distant babble, the impression of light through the abdominal wall. You probably have no idea you’re about to be ejected.

22

W H E N W E R E M E M B E R T O B R E AT H E

TO LEARN MORE AND PURCHASE THE BOOK VISIT WWW.MAGPIEPULP.COM.