Read an Excerpt
Serenade for a Small Family
By Ingrid Laguna, Madeleine Meyer Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2010 Ingrid Laguna
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-119-0
CHAPTER 1
Mum, Benny and I were having dinner on yet another hot December night in Alice Springs when I felt a tightening squeeze around my abdomen and lower back, way too early in my pregnancy. My fork clinked as I half dropped it onto my plate.
'I think I'll go and sit on the couch for a minute.'
Mum and Benny turned to me, and the candle flickered. I bit the corner of my lip until it stung.
'What's happening, Inky?' asked Benny. 'You okay?'
The tightening was starting again. 'Umm ... not sure ... actually I think I'm going to call the hospital.'
Two rings and a woman answered. 'It's probably nothing,' she said. 'But best to come in and get it checked out.'
While Benny drove, I lay along the back seat with my knees up and my hands splayed over my tightly pregnant belly. He was beside me when the obstetrician spoke: 'I'm sorry ... you're two centimetres dilated.'
Ben and I had been through hell to get me pregnant. I wailed long and loud from deep deep down, my eyes squeezed shut. Not this, not this.
'Shhhh, Inky ... Shhhh!' Ben leant over me and turned my face towards his. 'Inky ... Inky!' His tone was firm.
'There's still a chance but you have to stay calm ...'
I was given pills to delay labour, and I didn't give birth that night. Contractions were further apart for a while, but by morning they were close together again.
'Will the babies be alive when they are born?' I asked the midwife.
She looked into my eyes and for a couple of beats said nothing. 'They will probably gasp for air and then they will stop breathing.' They will stop breathing because they are coming out too soon, I thought, filled with panic. If they stayed in, they would not stop breathing. This is my fault.
A social worker was sent in to talk to us. 'Will we see the babies?' I asked.
'It's up to you,' she said. 'Some people like to hold their babies and others don't.' I tried to picture them, but I didn't know what they would look like. I should want to hold them but I don't know.
When the social worker left the room, Benny put his head and hand on my stomach and cried. I felt a ropey twisting in my chest.
'We have had a taste of being parents only to have it taken away,' he said. 'I love you very much, my boys.'
Our doctor was an Indian woman who swished around the cool, white hospital corridors in colourful saris. That night she stood by my bed in shimmering red and green. 'At this gestation your babies are barely viable,' she said. 'Another twenty-four hours could mean they have a chance of survival.' She adjusted the sari over her shoulder and pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose. 'There is a hospital in Adelaide with an excellent neonatal intensive care unit,' she said. 'They will take you if you make it through to tomorrow morning ... twenty-three weeks and one day.' Another contraction gripped my lower body and I rolled onto my side with a groan. The doctor placed her warm hand on my hip.
'There's still some hope,' she said.
Here are two things I have learnt: with hope, we are able to endure far more than we can ever imagine, and having babies in the world is the all-time greatest heavenly delight. I'm telling this story because it's the only way I can quite believe it myself. Because this was not the motherhood I had planned.
Like most women, I've always been pretty confident I'd be a mum one day, and I assumed the role would come naturally to me. I saw my knotty-haired, knee-grazed children and me at beaches or camping or at markets, eating exotic food among racks of sarongs and baskets of strange fruits. I pictured dressing them like Mum dressed us kids — in bohemian knitted vests and beanies, suede miniskirts and boots. Their dad and I would throw them in the car to visit friends, or pour them out at Mum's so we could go for wine and drawn-out Indian dinners. We would laugh out loud as they ran nude around the backyard, and take them on planes to Holland, Poland and Vietnam. They would fall asleep in our laps at parties, and chase each other around the table, eating toast with appelstroop at breakfast. My kids would not be fussy eaters or allergic to anything, or have hay fever or asthma. They would be bright and beautiful and I would be easy with them. So when Benny and I got together, I imagined all of this was on the cards.
On the day we met, in March 2002, I was sitting outside my girlfriend's house in a narrow, treeless street in Brunswick, Melbourne, waiting for her to come home. It was late afternoon on a muggy day and I was dying for one of the cold beers in my bag, but I didn't have a bottle opener. A guy on an old black motorbike turned into the street and pulled up on the other side. When he took off his helmet, I saw he had thick, dark, curly hair. ('Mooi haar,' Mum said later, which is Dutch for 'nice hair'.) He crossed the road towards the house two doors down.
'Excuse me!' I called out. 'I was just wondering if you have a bottle opener I could use?'
As he passed the opener into my hand, he stood close enough for me to see his brown eyes and the dark stubble covering his jaw. There was an intensity about him. When my friend Nic came home, I suggested we invite him to join us. She agreed (she had already told me about 'motorbike boy' who lived two doors down) and courageously knocked on his door.
'I'm making veggie burgers on the barbie,' he said. 'Do you want to bring your beers over here?'
Moody acoustic music played as we walked through to his backyard; the familiar singer's voice rose and fell in a melody I knew. I was impressed by the ambient lighting in the living room; only later did I learn that it was a choice based on energy efficiency rather than aesthetics.
We sat around a card table laden with our dirty plates and beer bottles in his tiny concrete backyard late into the night. He told us he worked in renewable energy, and was keen to get involved in a program that was installing solar systems in small, remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. To me, he was gorgeous.
As Nic and I walked down his corridor towards the front door, I stopped and turned to him.
'I should give you my phone number,' I said boldly, past the fluttering in my stomach.
He finally called me the following Sunday, inviting me to go with him on his motorbike to the Mornington Peninsula.
'Really? Wow! When did you want to leave?' I asked.
'In about ... ah ... twenty minutes?'
'Right ... umm ...' (As if I had to think about it.) 'Okay!'
I hung up the phone and yelled in the direction of my housemate's room. 'Shit! I've got twenty minutes! That guy Ben rang!' Carrie watched from her bedroom window as he came up the path to the front door, then she turned to me and indicated with a thumbs-up that he was alright. He had brought me a leather jacket as well as a helmet that I was relieved to be able to squeeze over my size large Polish head. As we rode, I held onto Ben and sang in my helmet. That afternoon we swam in the ocean and walked along the rocks. At his dad's beach house he made me Balinese fish curry with lemongrass, and we sat outside, talking, with a blanket wrapped around us. Later that night I pulled the plug from the kitchen sink of soapy water and flicked off the rubber gloves. (I can't believe I did the dishes on our first date!) When I turned around, Ben kissed me, then manoeuvred me towards the couch with his mouth on mine, at the same time expertly, single-handedly, unhooking my bra.
The Royal Flying Doctors flew Benny and me from Alice Springs to Adelaide on a tiny plane that buzzed like a lawnmower. Pethidine kept me woozy, and I lay on my side with my face close to the wall. Benny sat beside the pilot and reached back to stroke my hair. The young Sri Lankan registrar smiled politely in my direction, then looked back down at the folded hands in her lap.
The midwife beside her was rough and friendly: 'Hi, sweetie ... can you let me know every time you feel a contraction starting?' The pethidine felt good and took away some of the worry. There was another patient on the plane — sitting upright, sprouting wires and leads, with his back to me.
'It's a good thing you couldn't see his face,' Mum said later. 'He didn't look too good.' Mum hardly ever cries, but she cried when I was slid on a stretcher into that plane to Adelaide.
When we landed, the ambulance wasn't there to take us to the hospital, so we waited in the hangar, and I kept having contractions in the cool outside air. I was relieved to have made the flight without giving birth, but I didn't want to have the babies in an aeroplane hangar either. Finally, the ambulance arrived, and two men in green overalls and gumboots manoeuvred my stretcher into the back and drove us to the hospital.
As I was ferried along a corridor, a wheel on my trolley bed scraped the floor amid the sound of feet shuffling. 'Take her to the delivery suite ... Room 12,' someone said, which struck me as sounding luxurious. We turned into a starchy, odourless room. A small crowd of doctors, nurses and registrars followed, tripping over each other to deliver scary facts and statistics about premature babies to Benny and me. Bewildered, we looked from one to the next, until Benny tilted his head back and angrily punctuated the room: 'Excuse me!'
Heads turned towards him. 'Could we all just move out into the corridor please!' He herded them out and firmly reminded them how important it was for me to stay calm. 'And only come in one at a time, if you have to come in at all!'
Through the night and into the next day the contractions kept coming, only minutes apart. I was exhausted. Dad flew over from Sydney. He brought me books and a bag of ripe purple cherries. He and Benny sat beside my bed while we talked and ate the fruit. When a contraction came, we stopped talking. Benny rubbed my lower back and timed it. I blew out quick puffs of air to help me through the pain because I'd seen people do that on TV.
'Knock knock?' A man's face appeared from behind the beige curtain by my bed.
'Hi ... come in.'
I adjusted my pillows and sat up. Benny looked up from his newspaper. A labouring woman groaned somewhere on the ward, and the fug of potato and leek soup lingered from lunch. Two doctors — an obstetrician and a neonatologist — came in and said they needed to talk to us. They had likeable, intelligent faces.
'We need to know how much you want us to intervene ...' said the neonatologist. 'At this gestation — twenty-three and a half weeks — their chances are slim.' We're going to discuss this? Benny sat forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. 'And of those who survive, there can be long-term health issues ... sometimes disabilities.' I swallowed. 'Some people want us to do everything in our power for their babies. You need to be involved in this decision.'
I recalled a conversation with a midwife earlier that day. 'About fifty per cent of babies born at twenty-four weeks' gestation survive,' she had said, with a warning tone in her voice and a stark determination to kill any false hope. 'Even then they may well have learning difficulties, or be deaf or vision-impaired. Sometimes there may be severe disability ...' I had suddenly badly wanted to lie down to hold onto my pregnancy. I will not deliver early, I had vowed. 'Before twenty-four weeks ...' she had said. 'Well ... their chances are significantly less. Before then — the baby's lungs are not yet fully developed.'
Now Benny and I exchanged looks. I was lost for words — not exactly typical for me. Ben spoke up: 'They have to have good quality of life,' he said. 'That's the thing ... quality of life.' Benny — my rock. Calm and clear. The neonatologist looked down at his folder and nodded slowly.
'Yes,' I added, awkwardly. 'A good life ...' What does intervention mean? I wondered. And how will these doctors interpret what we mean by quality of life?
CHAPTER 2
Within three months of meeting Benny, I resigned from my puppet theatre job, rented out my Brunswick terrace, sold my car and couches, and was helping him finish work on his old Landcruiser truck. I was going with him to Alice Springs.
Slipping into each other's lives was effortless. Ben was handsome and serious. His decisions were carefully and sanely considered, and he took me more seriously than I took myself. He had the best truck, and the best bum in jeans. We were drawn to each other's opposite qualities — his reserve and deliberation, and my more spontaneous, heart-on-sleeve ways. I made curtains for the truck from op shop fabric in fire-engine red and, at my request, Ben trawled wreckers' yards for an original bench seat.
I slid across to the middle of the seat and leant my head on his shoulder. 'Good one ... much better for sitting close on the road,' I said happily.
'True. Good call, Inky.'
Ben was in the process of converting the truck's engine to run on used vegetable oil. We were driving up a busy street when he pointed to a gathering of forty-gallon drums parked out the front of a Thai restaurant: 'Veggie oil! Used veggie oil! People pay to have it taken away ... they're ours!' We pulled over and loaded them into the back, then drove home victorious. That afternoon I held gauze over a bucket while Benny strained out the chunks.
'Mmm ... smells like pad thai noodles and samosas,' I said, pulling the gauze tighter.
'Yeah ... it's making me hungry,' said Benny, holding his gaze on the stream of slippery golden liquid.
Ben scrubbed the rust off an old camp oven. He attached solar panels to the truck's roof so we had power for the bush fridge, the stereo and the reading lights he had fitted into a wood panel over the futon. It was Melbourne winter, and we wore beanies and jumpers over jumpers. In the evenings Ben would disappear into a small office for hours at a stretch to work on his master's degree in renewable energy.
'Your self-discipline impresses and baffles me,' I said. He prodded my ribs until I released my arms from around his waist, then headed for the office without a word.
It had taken four months but Kelly the truck was finally finished and we were ready to go. After farewell drinks at a Richmond pub, Benny raised Kelly's back to show friends as I swooned with pride at his impressive work. I showed off my curtains and pointed to a line of pop rivets:
'I did them!' That night Benny and I clambered into Kelly, giggling with excitement, and slept there — parked in Ben's mum's driveway.
The following morning Benny slipped the key into the ignition. 'Ready to go, Stink?'
'Yeah!'
I was apprehensive about Ben's plan to take months travelling through the Flinders Ranges. I hadn't been there before, nor had I spent days, let alone weeks, camping in faraway bush and desert places. I pictured shoving our bodies through dense, thorny bushes or shrivelling under a scorching sun. But scarier than that was the unmarked time stretching ahead of me each day; I sure wasn't used to that.
We spent a night at Wilpena Pound, then drove on into the ranges, parking by wide riverbeds lined with river red gums. We arranged stones in a circle for a fire pit. Together we pulled out the bush fridge and opened up Kelly's back and side, then we hung towels, my ugg boots, and a basket holding fruit and veggies from her clothesline.
We pulled out the crockery bin and the shower bucket before heading off in different directions to collect logs and kindling for a fire.
Relaxed and purposeful, I fussed around our truck home, serving dinner from the back of Kelly's tray and filling the water bottle from the tank under her belly.
As the sun went down, we would turn up the volume on Johnny Cash, take beers out of the bush fridge and unfold camp chairs. Benny pointed out every raucous kookaburra while I laid out cheese, crackers, dips and nuts and was labelled The Snack Queen. We would talk into the night, staring and poking at the fire in the silences. (It turns out I'm a pyromaniac.) I played guitar, and cooked roast veggies with almonds and sweet chilli sauce in the camp oven. From our bed in the back of the open truck, we woke to the changing colours of the chilly early morning and took turns to be the first to get the fire going and put on the billy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Serenade for a Small Family by Ingrid Laguna, Madeleine Meyer. Copyright © 2010 Ingrid Laguna. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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