Of all the sacred places

You needed to go somewhere where you were taken care of. It was urgent. It couldn’t be that rest was only possible when your boy was away from you, you wanted him with you but needed  help. You could call where you went a kind of mothers retreat, it took a long time to get there. It isn’t clear whether you were taken there or whether you went of your own accord. It was a warm, modern construction set in nature, designed by architects that know about cocoons and how to nestle a building into its surroundings . There was a central courtyard, which contained an ancient copse of trees. The trees were spaced so you couldn't lose sight of the children but they were gleeful to be playing in what they thought was the wild. A shallow brook ran nearby, through the gardens and just beyond a cove sheltered by pines. 

You thought of nights in hospital when your son could not breathe well. You walked around the ward in a rage and turned off the lights in the hallways and the nearby bays. Your little boy wheezed and coughed, a nebulizer hissed, monitoring machines beeped aggressively. You thought of the nineteenth century, ‘he died of a bad chest, it was an unspeakable winter’, and you think this is what it must have sounded like. Spluttering in the overcrowded slums of the industrial revolution, when to reach the age of five was a milestone. Welling eyes, jolting adrenaline. Particulate matter 2.5 and 10. The buggy you had was low to the ground, you took the underground everyday when you were pregnant and walked beside lines of idling traffic, sat in an office all day till 7pm that reeked of photocopier chemicals. Microplastics have now been discovered in placentas, of all the sacred places. It is probably your fault that your child does not breathe well. These are the kind of things you have thought of. They come back to you as you doze here in the fawn and charcoal light, mostly hush with only the sound of birds and wind.

When you arrive, after you have had some tea and fruit, you are given a cotton outfit, that you can move and rest in. It is 24 degrees everyday.  A sense of ease is returned to you. Your child is occupied and well fed. You have the energy again to play with them and talk to them. You look at them like the beautiful miracle that they really are and you feel as you did when you first held them, that you have won the lottery of the universe. Mealtimes are outside on a long low table with benches. You remember what it is like to feel hungry and to feel satiated. When the children are finished they play at the brook, dipping in sticks, racing leaf boats,  whilst you and the others that are here take time over deserts, reaching out with small spoons to try a bit of this and a bit of that. It takes a village to raise a child, they say. Your people are here on hand, close friends, neighbours, cousins, brothers, sisters, grandparents, appearing as you need them, as if they heard you call. There is no nanny here who has woken resentfully at 5.30 and taken two buses across a grey city to look after your tetchy children. 

At night there is a loosening of your knotted thoughts, the warrens of which are thrown up the surface with the simple purpose of a broad clawed animal. You are given a crying cloth, your own muslin square, with a repeat pattern of mugs of coffee. Weep for all that has happened, for the mess, the brutality of the birth, the disappointment, the fracturing fatigue that made you walk into your furniture. You thought of the days you pushed the pram and felt like you had no skin at all, a walking wound,  it was that raw. When you left the house, leaving soup burning on the cooker and the front door open. Dropped things out of your hand like you had seen a ghost, perhaps you had, as death seemed closer than it had ever been before. The cloths are collected by a large and capable old mother. She washes them in the brook and hangs them on a line in the orchard, where they dry quickly between the apple trees.

The building has generous sky lights and at night you lie down to gaze, your body is beginning to lengthen from rest and joy. Your child is asleep beside you, the perfect ellipses of his face lit by the moon. When you brush your hair in the morning less of it falls out. You slip away to the cove, in softened late afternoon heat,  take your body to the blue water. It's salt solution floats you, fascia untangles.

Exhaustion was easier to deal with outside, hours were spent in the playground, dancing from foot to foot, breathing shallow. That was partly what was strange, the cheery backdrop of stay and plays, toys and playgrounds of colourful equipment. You only wanted something so simple, to just rest. Sometimes you only kept going by repeating ‘breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out’, which you had been taught to do in a mindfulness tutorial, when you woke multiple times from fitful sleep, so tense you felt as though you were levitating over your rumpled bed. 

You are given a midwife and she births you in the role of a mother. The great container, mother of the house. She is right there when the pain is too much, sits with you on a sunwarmed step and guides you back, strokes your head, so that the iceberg that has grown inside begins to melt. You sob breathlessly over the whole lot, over your lost face and lost time. Meanwhile your child is recovering from the damage caused by poor antenatal care and the state of you in the ensuing years. He cries less, concentrates more and giggles. He is the child he was supposed to be before he was altered by the shit system through which he was delivered so thoughtlessly. Mother holds you with an embrace that goes back to your own infancy and forward to your future frailties which are quickly beginning to show. All shall be well she seems to hum. 

You know too that it could have been much worse, so for this you are grateful. You thought about your aunty who was brutalised at the maternity hospital, as a punishment for being unmarried, Ireland, the late 1970s would you believe. How a social worker appeared by her bedside in the morning and told her they had found a lovely family for her baby, and she told them to fuck off.  How you found out, by talking to her friend at a pitch and putt club in Drumcondra, sharing kit kats and tea forty years later, when she was gone already. There had been a separate entrance to the labour ward for unmarried mothers. You will enter this in a different way and so you will exit in a different way. Aunty you are here too to recover. 

And now you know the crevices of suffering. And you also know who else has been there, and they have been invited too. And there is relief to meet others who understand. But it is not so far away that you can look back from a place of safety. The spectre of vulnerability follows you, it only takes one of you to be sick. So for now it is best that we all stay here for just a while, that we recover together in this low lying and soft place.