Conception, a space-time continuum

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 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.

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

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