You Cannot Drain the Swamp [post]

You cannot drain the swamp.

However dry the remaining land
there is enough to return;
there is silt and sand enough
to do for you and me.

You cannot drain the swamp.

There is a sinkhole with a name
in it; there is a bicycle that
makes obeisance; there is the
churning, opening ground.

You cannot drain the swamp.

The waters, turgid or limpid,
bubble memory as they bubble
nitrogen; they are subterranean
but will not forever be.

You cannot drain the swamp.

The Man on the Roof [post]

With a small kaleidoscope
you make a great panopticon.
There are the men, the men on the roofs,

you saw one, now you see them all.

First give notice, then take notice.
I have a memory, long as a piece of string.
I have a plumb line ready for the telling.

A man comes home from the Forestry service

or the Broadcasting corporation
or off the farm. A man comes in the door.
He takes out his hearing aids

and sits down for ten years.

The man has a long ladder
and his house a low roof.
The man is caught between work

and a piece of the grave.

You see? Then measure,
but you do not have the measure.
What you call a mirror

is a camera obscura.

Forecasts of the Past [post]

All around the ring road
the argots of the locals
overlay the first instructions
that came with the manuals.

What are we to do with all these books? [post]

What are we to do with all these books?

On honeymoon, they bought
two copies of the same new
novel, to read on the train.
They didn’t want to share.

What are we to do with all these books?

When her grandparents moved from Invercargill
to Oamaru they threw nothing away. When,
years later, they moved to Christchurch,
the books filled up her mother’s

hallway. When people came to the
front door, her mother had to shout
through the safety glass, “Please go
around the back. The hall is full of books.

Thank you for understanding.”

What are we to do with all these books?

She bought art and history volumes in
every gallery she visited. The first
lot filled her suitcase from Hong Kong
to the Midlands. The second lot she

posted home not far from St Paul’s.
It cost over a hundred pounds. She
paid by credit card at the post office, too
leery to convert the amount into her currency.

What are we to do with all these books?

They took the books out of the bedrooms
to paint the walls before the baby
was born. The books were still in
her parents’ spare room by the time

the baby was walking. Every so often
she asked her mother, how are my books?
and her mother answered, They are fine.
Come and get them any time. Before

she did, there was another baby.

What are we to do with all these books?

They are putting a false floor in the roof
for the books. The books are in boxes that
stack to the roof of the garage. They are
buying flatpack cupboards in which to

put the books. The books fall through
the gaps in the bookshelves where they
cut holes to secure them after
the earthquakes. The books are

islands on the floor of the toddler’s
room. She remembers a book her
mother had, Babies Need Books.
She moves and moves the furniture

again so that the books can’t
fall on the baby. At night she lies
awake and contemplates her shelf, as a
mystic gazes at the meditative image.

What are we to do with all these books?

Those ones her mother found her,
those she bought on holiday, those
ones are from work when they had
to box up their offices after the

earthquakes. Those are the ones
her friend’s daughter gave her
after her friend died; the old dog-books,
the old-dog books. Those she is

saving for the baby. Those are for
the toddler when she can read. Those
are the ones she borrowed from the work-
mates who later left; those ones

are from her old boss. What are
we to do, she only rarely asks,
what are we to do, what are we
to do with all these books?

Un Pastiche [post]

Come into the orangerie
And bend the bough to bear for me
The dust-bowled limits of our labour
Made sweet for just we two to savour.

The ravelled edge of hum and drum
Exhausted here; no good can come
For us if, pining, in the dirt
We fray ourselves like cuff and skirt.

Facetime (The Screen). [post]

This is me,
looking at your
looking at the baby.

The baby
is a series of fontanelles
that cohere around a nipple.

The nipple is obscure(d)
by the baby.
The little camera

shows the toddler’s gaze
zooming, looming in.
This is you,

looking at my
looking at the toddler.
The toddler

is a system of questions
and switches off,
repeatedly,

the software.
This is the toddler
looking at the screen.

She reaches out to
herself
in miniature;

she reaches out
to me.
This is the baby,

looking at my
looking at the screen.
This is the screen.

St George’s Hospital &
Greenhurst Street,
1 June 2012

The Good Earth [post]

Moral fibre
made
in the dirt

A headful of polenta
a stem, slim,
just so!

No protein. No.

First-Person Shooters [post]

First-person shooter
is a shooting mode
where a story is shot by one character at a time,
shooting for and about

themselves.

First-person shooter may be singular,
plural or multiple
as well as being an authoritative,
reliable or deceptive “shot”

and represents point of view in the shooting.

The shooters explicitly refer to themselves
using words and phrases involving “I”
(referred to as the first-shooter singular)
and/or “we”

(the first-shooter plural).

This allows the reader or audience
to see the point of view
(including opinions, thoughts, and feelings)
only of the shooter,

and no other characters.

In some shootings, first-person shooters
may refer to information they have heard
from the other characters,
in order to try to deliver

a larger point of view.

Other shootings may switch
from one shooter to another,
allowing the reader or audience to
experience the thoughts and feelings

of more than one character.

It was not until well after we were done and rested that her father pointed out that, in labouring without drugs in spite of myself, I had had a Drug-Free Labour. I must accept with bemusement and humility that fate denied many mothers who would wish for it. I was too busy asking for drugs and telling my daughter’s father and her midwife that I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it, to think about the cultural politics of what was playing out. A clear, calm voice, a brand new superego, spoke more and more insistently as things progressed: No-one seems to realise quite how much it’s hurting. You had better yell – go on, yell a little louder! – so that they know.

And that was that, my large, wise, daughter, thick with blood and vernix, lain on my chest where one sealed eye unzipped, amphibian-like, before the pediatric team took over for oxygen and clearing of her airways. She breathed alone, unlike her elder sister, and although her Apgar scores were lower, seemed more robust. I wish I could speak of an immediate, heaven-sent bonding, but I was preoccupied by how much I still hurt and how badly I wanted a shower. That done, however, we took her to ourselves and can barely let her go.

Life is very full, then, of the tender obeisances and wild nights of parenting a newborn, along with the different complexities of a toddler’s days. The elder sister is very tender and proprietary with the younger one and does not chafe too hard at my diverted attentions. I feel torn to pieces, sometimes, by the sight of the two of them: their dependence not concealing the autonomy that emerges, in cries and gestures, before any of us can do anything for ourselves. They are good sleepers, both of them, which might be the thing that gives me the ability to put together words and thereby sentences. They look like one another.

Sleep deprivation is like the exhilaration and confusion of a big night out, for weeks. My state of mind as I grope in the dark for the accoutrements of nappy changing is not much different from that in which I once lurched from venue to venue. The resistance and self-pity concerning what is before one, the recalcitrant companion, are not too dissimilar to one of my favourite songs. The start of each day feels like those strange, bright hours after a long-haul flight. This time I know it’s not forever.

And none of it is, of course, that’s the thing: the fast-moving weeks, the twisting expressions that now flatten out and smile, the closeness, the cleaving. My elder daughter walks tall, climbs surfaces and points at what she wants, uses wiles if not guile to make us work for her, and if good fortune continues to be mine my younger will one day do the same. Nonetheless, she’s mine, now, mine to tend and mine to nurse, mine in all the selfish mining I do of her, the wish to have her that brought her into being, the enduring, the setting aside of other priorities. My family, my heritage, my one-and-onlies, all the world’s tenderness balancing between breastpad and sippy cup.

We may be lonelier, we shall not be stranger:
We are well armed for any mortal danger. 

The buildings are razed, by machinery rather than by fire, and those that remain, damaged, are held up by nailed-on chipboard and large concrete blocks out of which steel poles extend.

**

In February, my friend Jane and I took in Julia Morison’s Meet me on the other side, my anxiety about venturing into the central city offset by the beauty of the NG building as a venue: not only the polished wood floor and plain walls, but the massive steel reinforcing beams that passed high above our heads. It was an exhibition of beautiful-ugly finished-abortive objects, so many of whose names evoked our common consciousness in this town, these days.

Missing thing

Curious thing

Fretful thing

Poor thing

Thing in the making

Old birdcages and medical equipment encased and captured resistant, rebarbative sculptures in liquefacted silt, the last of which was the least of the uncanny. “The mud has kept coming, as it once promised it would do”, wrote Creon Upton in the programme notes. It was easy in our place and time to identify both with those mud formations that appeared to capture a moment in time (“Small triumphal thing”) and the hooks and ropes and crueller tubing that formed their containment and put both Jane and me in mind of the hospital narratives of Janet Frame, the fear of the known blending with the mind’s superlative abilities to conjure up a worse unknown. We needed this, we said. We are so happy to be here.

**

I am shortly due to give birth. In the foregoing nine months I have learned that past pregnancy is not the preparation for present pregnancy that I thought it would be. In my more inward-looking interludes, which these days are more accurately described as streams of consciousness, I think about the loss of our built environment between then (2009-10) and now. The absence of so many of the places we spent those months, the impasses on the roads we used to travel, is as effective a memory-block as any amnesiac drug.

Now we have so few referents for our memories to give to our daughters, I say to my husband. They are going to grow up the way I did with my parents: listening to them talk about places that no longer exist in destinations we can’t go to. We are forever going to be pointing out what isn’t there. Even on outlying, suburban Racecourse Road, Sockburn’s northwestern egress, the old trainers’ homes, the character cottages and villas that had stables behind them, are being pulled down, not by CERA but by developers buying up land for townhouses. The home to which we’ll shortly move, not far from here, still turns up discarded horse-shoes from the soil.

This pregnancy looms, although to the rest of the world it is me who does the looming. Tenuous threads of discourse catch my attention from time to time, but mostly, I am a nesting brood bitch. My toddler daughter sits on the end of my knee with an attitude of patient exasperation. Casual conversations outside the house concern the extent to which I have prepared her for what is to come. I’m not sure that can be done. My lap will not be any more free, and besides, she is old enough now to make her own earthquake-resistant shell as and when is required. I can suggest to her how, but the final form is up to her. The proportion of women I know who as adults cherish their sisters is greater than those who rue them, but when you are not-quite-two, the only time is the present. Her father and I are happier for our siblings and I longed for another baby, in curious simultaneity from more-or-less when she was born. Lizard logic, maybe, but that don’t make it junk.

I have not coped well with the gradual erosion of my pregnant mobility. The start of the third trimester, when this large baby was sitting breach in an excessively large water world, was particularly challenging. We had parked at the north-central end of Barbadoes Street and were walking the several blocks to see Pete Majendie’s temporary installation 185 Chairs at the former site of the Baptist Church on Oxford Terrace. This was my husband’s old neighbourhood for much of his teens and twenties, and as we walked he began to lament all the missing buildings: the empty businesses, the ruined footpaths, the fact that those who were still living there (and there were plenty of occupied homes) would have lost all their neighbourhood amenities and thereby their sense of neighbourhood itself.

As we walked, my uterus constrained my diaphragm and I began to feel that shortness of breath that in another context might signal the start of a crying fit: that feeling that the world of air is shortly to be replaced by the world of water. What would I do if there were an aftershock? How could I run? My husband carried our daughter who grizzled at the uneven trek. When we got to the exhibition we were in no fit state to see it and circled the outer edge of the gathered crowd. The chairs were stark, yet domestic, ritual yet casual, the kind of seating one might put down for a wedding, but here for a memorial. You didn’t tell me, my husband said, leading our daughter to the edge of the grass, that the chairs would be customised. You didn’t tell me some of the chairs were specifically for the babies who died. We walked back rather more quickly and my breathing became even shorter while I did the morbid third trimester calculations about viability in early labour that is the black maths peculiar to the pregnant woman, not least one for whom those three white chairs – infant carriers, high chairs – are too easily summoned in memory.

We still exude earthquakes through our pores; I think we may be like this for the rest of our lives. Our impending move sees us watching Grand Designs with a condescending, jaundiced eye: to those brick-framed homes in the west and southwest of England we murmur that a mere 3.5 would bring it all down, secure enough in knowledge of the unlikelihood of that. As Ann Brouwer noted, wherever we are, we scan the space in three dimensions: what will come from this side, that side and above. Unlike those we lost, we have a fair idea of what can hit us, and when. There are as many places we no longer go because we won’t, as places we no longer go because we can’t. Less frequent aftershocks rattle through with the familiarity of a rip-at-sea, with the unwelcome intimate greeting of an old, shunned lover.

**

I am so agitated to meet my new daughter that I wonder sometimes whether, like the child in this anecdote, I might in fact eat her. This longing absorbs all my creativity as the uterine wall absorbs a blighted embryo. More likely of course is that I will be the one consumed, and that is fine too: by the multiple pole points of partner, daughter, dogs and fetus I am largely made piecemeal anyway. For a person who suffered for too many years from too much time to think, it is a not-unwelcome dismemberment, though it hurts poetry and shrinks prose in the totality of its reach.

Family and earthquakes: two great binders and constrainers that for all their likelihood I would never have predicted. Beyond their semi-permeable walls is the strange, grim spectacle of the city as property-development, a macabre and indeed perverse playing out of the national infatuation with property values and Tory government. The fact that we are getting ready to move house ourselves brings a certain dramatic irony to domestic life too, not least because our wheel-within-a-wheel turns largely unimpeded by post-earthquake bureaucracy (the unearned privilege of moving from TC1 to TC1, a few hundred metres down the road).

In this frame of mind even a few months ago, I saw Tony de Lautour’s Recent Paintings at the Ilam Campus Gallery on the anniversary of the February earthquake, and found in it abstractions of property maps, red zone boundaries, hidden streams and sites of liquefaction. The grim satire in which “the jargon of the Real Estate Agent surfaces”, as Melinda Johnston had it in the programme notes, superseded for me at this cultural moment the wider struggle between suprematist modernism and the present that formed the philsophical backdrop for the exhibition (although this, in turn, reminded me of Michele Leggott’s return to more traditional modernist forms in her poetic volume on encroaching blindness, As Far as I can See). It had been a physical effort for me to walk to the campus gallery from my post-earthquake office in the village on that day, and I returned to my desk just as the anniversary minutes came around.

I act out my anniversaries and moments of significance these days through the almost-liturgical taking in of image and music. The foggy vagueness of late pregnancy does not seem to impair my visual or aural imagination in the way it does my higher linguistic functioning. I play the middle albums of The Strokes in the car and talk to my musical daughter about the importance of a strong, accurate rhythm section in any setting. I sing children’s songs and do actions and talk about colours and shapes. Our whole household runs on a dialect unique to the three of us and I wonder what additions might be made in honour of our new daughter. I wish, with all the wilfulness of a person living among the bereaved, for a live birth and ironise the wish back to tolerability through filters of old pop music and high culture. If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody, baby. My G3, my darling P2-to-be, my little Thing in the Making.

What does this imaginary dust do? It gets, I suppose, in the eyes and mouth, finds its way to the lungs and the nerves. It doesn’t paralyse or even really endanger. It simply is, and by being, impedes.

12:51 was closer to the moments that preceded and succeeded it this year than commemorations might have suggested. It was easy to make and take the silence at my work desk. I felt a little more acutely that quiet constricting of the id that carries on from day to day (and later in the day had to call upon the help of colleagues after a photocopier jam flummoxed me entirely) but largely, that minute’s passing supported my ongoing wish to stay away from semi-secular civic ceremony. It is odd that something not only raw but very much ongoing should be so continually commemorated, last year and this. I was glad that Mr Muzik gave us the cipher of his Strokes cover (above-linked) through which to feed the lumpen emotions of the week. I note that the couplet “We could try to move forward/Pretending that life is not awkward” has no answering confirmation in that verse or the following chorus, except perhaps that “the world has fallen down around us”. “Kiss me now that it’s over” indeed. (What is life? ‘Tis not hereafter.)

Every day we feel it, this earthquake grief. It is a human condition, local and special at the point where we pick up the traces, in a manner part penance for those of us not daily encumbered by horrible bureaucracy, part pathway. It strikes me sometimes as a kind of slap-back to the modernist yearning for meaning in our dwelling-places that clotted the thinking of our literary predecessors so definitively. It is the dull, dribbling substitute of the undeniable to which those writing from out-of-town seek alternative narratives. You know the kind. Most of them involve resilience, that outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual free market come to save the people and their homes. Shut up and be grateful, or not.

There are various strategies in play for writers to account for all this: the first-person memoir, for example, as embedded (and sometimes as unaware) as any of Mansfield’s restricted third-person points-of-view. How did Bertha see the world after the horrible epiphany of “Bliss”? Another is the strike-back, the calling-out, the finger-pointing, the truth-telling. Peter Hyde’s first exemplar in this regard continues to stick in the heart like ice or debris. Within and around the cordons and in the suburbs, journalists from The Press continue to do tremendous work, as do their citizen counterparts in the blogs, the libraries, the humanities. There is and are more, of course.

Somewhere on the margins of this, I experience a kind of narrative paralysis, my imaginary keyboard perhaps clogged with that imaginary dust. I do not want to step into the stream of storytelling, even as not-writing is a modest torture. I think about Robin Hyde’s angry, heavily-worked poem “Spoil“, a simple verse-fantasy of Byzantium in which the narrator spells out in image after image that the listener does not get to know about her experience. I’m not sure why I feel this way, not least when I miss the comforts of these blog pages, of poems and craft.

In writing’s absence my home and work lives proceed according to a strict routine which would astonish the me of a few years ago (perhaps more than would those memorialised names and ruined buildings). It seems likely that this would have happened anyway – our daughter is twenty months old and I am more than six months pregnant. At the same time, however, it also seems a consequence of all else that has happened, the necessity of getting on with things only highlighted by the fact that the life we had, in which, as my mother puts it “we lived in the whole city”, is gone. My husband makes a pedestrian’s survey in his lunch hours of the hidden parks and green spaces of industrial Burnside (of which there are a surprising many) when previously he practised his flânerie at the end of the night shift (also gone) around the Square and the High Street precincts. My mother sets aside a full day to organise travel for afternoon tea with her two friends in Avondale and Redcliffs, their homes green among the red.

We hesitate to narrate these details outside the privacy of our family, aware of their insignificance next to the pain of others: the ruined reoccupied homes, the insurance pain, the arson. A secondary theme of so much of my out-of-town friends’ Twitter-chatter of old, which I thought of privately as their sense of the contemptibility of Christchurch, has long gone quiet. These days when we justify our decisions to stay here, it’s for reasons quite different.

These words are not the real words but they are offerings, throat clearings, in advance of three exhibitions about which I would this week like to write (and which I have promised others I will do). I don’t think I can exaggerate the extent to which art is sustaining me at the moment, and make this assertion with full awareness of its po-faced grandeur. Watch me then, type my way to a more acceptable detachment as I try and draw threads together to tell you about this, this and this and imagine me, shaky narrator, trying to find her way back to some part in this conversation.

It started young and lost me friends in those early days, when we persisted in the belief that our lives were our own to direct and that spontaneity, epiphany and the practised resisting of interpretation would keep us in a state of grace and freedom. These days it gives both me and the señor something like an adult handle on what might at times otherwise threaten to overwhelm: being married (to each other), being parents. In our next-to-darkest hours, we can take comfort in the meta-narrative that auto-processes, incessantly, just beyond the tears.

Fragments from the meta-narrative make us sheepish. In recent weeks it has been the devolving to parts of phrases originally spoken by Homer Simpson, when communication in more thoroughgoing manners was too painful. Not the better-known “d’oh!” but the whining “oh” that accompanies everyday disappointments, so many of them cohering around food and money, to carry us through. Likewise the pleading, anti-rational, “but I have a feeling!”, co-opted from the buying of fifty lottery tickets, to express the wish for hope in the face of fortune’s inability to show its hands save in fetal odds and aftershocks. These verbal squibs carried goodwill to each other when we were too tired and sad to articulate anything more detailed.

The detail of what’s meaningful has roots even older than what amused us during our twenties, however, and it’s been with some shame-facedness that we found ourselves, separately, pulling meaning out of the pop music of our teens as we waited out our uncertainty. No contemplation of the numinous, the deus ex machina, in Mozart’s Requiem or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis for us! The señor was brought to his knees by REM in the same manner, I noted, as 90210‘s Brenda contemplated the disintegration of her relationship with the blank canvas of Dylan (although in our case what was to be lost what not quite so visible). After our results, I found myself blind-sided by culture even more of its time and place. A chance viewing of a Sheryl Crow cover sent me back to the playlists of 1988. Gentle reader, there was meaning for me in the lyrics of Terence Trent D’Arby.

As I have written before, years spent in the archive with the draft poems of Robin Hyde has lent me a love of the partial failure in verse, and the single “Sign Your Name” must be placed in this category. At the same time, the straining for effect that occurs across some verses lends it the striving, aspirational tone that is a feature of both teenage verse and the work of speakers of other languages who are intermediate masters of English. (See “Keep Your Comments in Your Pockets” as an example of the latter.) Thus, the second-verse contention that “Time will surely bring disappointments in so many things”, a favoured sentiment of mine that was more recently expressed by Weezer as “So much pain may come our way”, is offset in its insight by the tentative syntactic inversions of what follows: “It seems to be the way when your gambling cards on love you play”. The musical metre demands a word in addition to cards, and so the overclarifying “gambling” is added.

What caught my attention anew in this song was not initially its lyrical awkwardness but the opening line, the sense of entering in the middle of a conversation: “Fortunately you have got someone who relies on you”. This was its value to me now, the inverting of my personal tropes of independence over dependence, the fear that if I didn’t somehow have a metaphorical bag packed at all times, I would be lost. (Nothing clears that one up like facing the possibility of a disabled child.) Here, the needs of others and implicitly the need of oneself to rely on others are presented as good fortune. This seemed to me an insight, especially when sung in that melancholy, quavering alto of the original (or, as I came by it this time, Sheryl Crow’s Memphis-rendered cover in which her vocal is a disappointingly blank recreation of the source, phrase for phrase the same over the completely different arrangement).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There in the original single’s video is the exotic (French) object of desire, pictured at almost all times with her young daughter, who views her mother’s bikie lover without fear, as of course does the viewer: we know he is only a pop star posing.

When this song was originally a hit I was in my first year of high school, where relationships for girls at least were usually characterised by teachers and students alike as a choice between abstinence or the terrifying threat of pregnancy. I was also religious, which added a considerable other dimension to my thinking about romance. It was in this context that I heard a line from the song as “I’d rather be in hell with the baby that we could have had”, which in my recent circumstances was a memory, reactivated, that cut straight to the heart when this song passed once more across my radar. The years 11-14 were a time of rich lyrical mishearing in my life but this one had escaped me until now: “I’d rather be in hell with you baby than in cool heaven”. The song took its emotional weight in memory for me from something that was never there. It was no stretch for my over-analogising mind to turn that into an extra chromosome of the song’s own. That mishearing fitted of course with my young teenage view of relationships: damned if you did and starved if you didn’t, forced by the nature of pressing adulthood to live humbly in an unideal world.

A browse of Wikipedia revealed that D’Arby, of whom I had thought little for almost twenty-five years, later changed his name to Sananda Maitreya, under the influence of a dream. Many of the YouTube commenters show a lack of familiarity with the 1980s version of masculinity presented in the video and read in soft phrasing and careful grooming evidence of effeminacy rather than the textbook pop star masculinity that it was. Despite D’Arby’s apparently regular declarations of his god-like musical abilities, the song appears second-tier in its presentation, in the sense that the vocal carries the influence of the phrasing of George Michael, Prince and Boy George. These things are by no means flaws, of course, and the sense in the video’s careful choreography of a relationship as wracked by deep emotion as by lust held some trace for me of how my thirteen year-old self might have stylised the days of the señor’s early days of house-calling.

A PhD has failed to do anything except embed my love of pop cultural fragments, and I know enough now not to be abashed that my palate and its context are as flat and broad as any other cultural studies academic. The heart, hurt, behaves like a child and the child seeks familiar comforts. The pleasure therein lies in rendering them again as an adult, of claiming back for the adult meta-narrative those additional insights that the years bring. The overreaching frame of reference that gives rise to the cringing bathos of a line like “we’ll shed our stains showering in the room that makes the rain” cannot complete offset the hope of redemption among vulnerable people, the dream that one day we might again imagine that “the earth rotates to our dictates”. The ability to take self-conscious comfort from failed art of adolescence is an arrow in the quiver of twenty-first century life.

Long talks with my brother, some live gigs in which deep dub gave way to live drum + bass, and at least one night out that took me to the edge of the hell-mouth that is the heart’s-home of silly, introspective drunks, gave me the shake-up that I needed to get my thinking straight. I came home, got some professional help with the house and garden, planted annuals, welcomed my darling hellion and started an internet diary. In short, I took up a way of life that continued, with modifications, even after I began keeping company with the señor fewer than four years later. Its poles of house, garden and work have largely been the standard by which I measure myself even eight years after its establishment.

In one of those mini-epiphanies that inevitably takes place in suburban locations – in this case, the local supermarket carpark – I yesterday realised this early-century standard is in part the source of some of my worries now. The past year should have, more than any other, reminded me of the changes time hath wrought. Time and money have not only been colonised by different responsibilities, but also space. The scale of humanity and caninity that occupies this small house is so much greater than when I finally wrangled my life the way I wanted it, eight years ago, when it was one woman, one part-time job, one dog. This, more than the lack of domestic will I assumed was the source, is the reason the garden is now largely lawn and overgrowing shrubs, and the kitchen, poor, cramped kitchen, the site of daily struggle with a king tide of dirty dishes and food waste (our good fortune in having a dishwasher is offset by the fact it is housed behind the laundry door). When Millie came to us at nine weeks she destroyed in less than a month the level lawn, the plants in pots, the old foam couches on which I had till then lived comfortably. Add to that six live puppies since (the majority of whom still live here) and the folly of my aspirations of shining floors and level garden beds becomes clear.

I am living a life of which once I could only idly dream, but it demands I revise not only the standards to which formerly I held myself and my home but also cease to attempt to put multiple full-time responsibilities into what is only one fulltime life. Parent, employee, domestic slogger: it’s the last, in the case of both the señor and me, that suffers. This is no special insight outside of our own lives, but there is something to be gained, nonetheless, from realising the obvious from time to time. I realise too that I have not helped myself in the last few months by taking as my read-guidance domestic mapping by writers not also working fulltime. I forget, sometimes, when my job is like a second skin, that it is still a fulltime job (as is the señor’s) and thus eats easily the time that can otherwise be spent raising the home beyond the standard of tolerably habitable. We have the care of each other, the care of our daughter and our daughter-to-be, the daily needs of seven dogs; tolerably habitable must be good enough for what future we can foresee.

The needle whose future work had preoccupied our thinking for the previous four weeks was out of its own kit now, its action calmly described by the consultant who sat near the foot of the bed. Neither the señor nor I saw it, my eyes closing as I saw the señor drop his head toward the floor, knees and feet splayed and hands clasped in the sad stock pose of the waiting man.

The incursion of the needle was less painful than a blood test or an injection: with almost no sensation through the skin and then with resistance through the uterine wall, which contracted, as predicted, dully and at its distant perimeter.

Baby’s fine, said the consultant, and far away from the needle. Not paying any attention at all. All done for now.

All done: that moment’s marker that refers only to the passing of that incident, the completing of that process, in this case the step toward another degree of certainty at which, we were assured, we – I – would feel better, or at least less wretched. The process to this point had been a mélange of measurements and statistical probabilities, calculated from a wider range of sources than when I was pregnant with my first daughter two years earlier. Some were tangible and some painfully speculative. All pointed toward what felt, every day, like a door about to close behind me.

I had mantras, straws at which to clutch, that worked for some of the time. In moments of lucidity I could laugh at their disparate origins. A partly-remembered maxim from a former counsellor: that the ability to cope with uncertainty is a sign of mental health. Viv Richards, murmuring to the interviewer in Fire on Babylon that “I always backed myself”. Back yourself to raise this baby, I murmured in turn, not actually saying a word but imagining myself speaking through gritted teeth. The universal message of my colleagues, that they thought us best equipped among parents to take care of a child with the disability the numbers offered us. People wouldn’t consistently say that just to be nice, I reasoned, even in a workplace culture that prizes niceness above many other things.

I read multiple scholarly and newspaper articles to try better to understand just what our numbers were saying, grimly mindful too of the phrase “our numbers” and its usual location in fortune, lottery, fate. I did so much reading and research that I was instructed by more than one social service not to do any more.

Of the fetuses whose nuchal fold – an area at the back of the neck – was measured at the end of the first trimester, just five percent of those called normal would have a measurement greater than 2.5 millimetres. Of the fetuses who would be born with Down Syndrome or other conditions caused by chromosomal variations (I found the standard phrase “abnormality” almost intolerable to say), almost all would have a nuchal fold measurement greater than 2.5 millimetres. Our fetus had a measurement of 3.6 millimetres. Measuring alone could not indicate to which of the two groups a fetus with a larger measurement belonged. The odds could be further refined by including blood test results, maternal age and maternal weight in the calculation. This done, we had learned at the beginning of the thirteenth week of pregnancy that the particular set of odds given our fetus were one in five of having Trisomy 21, which causes Down Syndrome. The odds for the other trisomic conditions, rarer and more disabling, were also increased, but none to that extent.

It was strange to have a private drama take over our daytime thoughts in a year where all dramas and the source of collective hardship had been public, civic and seismological, and the reminder to self to think of the unhappiness of the eastern suburbs, to put my own uncertainty into some wider and more worthy context, was another of my daily maxims. These stuck as inconsistently as a fridge magnet thrown at a metal door from a distance. (It was further undermined when a colleague from the eastern suburbs told me she was using my worries to keep her own earthquake-related problems in perspective.)

I write of fears and worries, but these were specific. I was worried about our ability to take care of a child with disabilities, when the nature of those disabilities remained unknown, except under the wide umbrella of a syndrome: developmental delays and cognitive limitations reduced in significance by the fact of a first-year mortality rate of fifteen percent for affected children; the fear of prejudice, the fear of domestic chaos. I was also, far more pressingly, worried about my ability to know my own mind, my own wishes, in a system which included the facilitation of swift, early termination of such a fetus. My anguish was widely read as good grounds for abortion, should our particular trisomy be confirmed. I did not want this, but nor did I want the anguish.

The fact that we were a minority in this projected path – my reading suggested that anywhere between seventy and eighty percent of fetuses confirmed with Trisomy 21 are aborted – made trusting that I wanted to choose this path even more distressing. It put me in conflict with the señor, into whose moral philosophy relativism has made considerably fewer insinuations than mine. That first emotional plumb, the sounding at the first scan that we wanted our baby regardless, sustained him in a way it did not me. What if I were wrong about our abilities, our commitment? Neatly and swiftly, my fear that this would tear us apart did an accelerated job of doing just that, our lives over those four weeks converted by bitter irony and meta-narrative into a functioning version of what I feared would happen in future, and all, as the señor pointed out, for a paper tiger, a fetus whose nature remained unknown to us.

So I had amniocentesis, the narrative needle to extract the fluid in which chromosomes could be counted. After forty-eight hours and then again at two weeks those odds that more than one professional had described as “huge” were revealed to have gone our way, in that our fetus – female, who quickly became to us a girl, a daughter – had no trisomies, no syndrome, none of our fears. In the relief of this news persisted the fear of the increased risk of miscarriage that came with the procedure, the shadow of a shadow that we had also wondered how we might endure. Roulette, said the señor, Russian Roulette, but my mental health was not going to hold up with the alternative, without amniocentesis, of six months of waiting. Between us we found enough cultural capital – wedding vows, the memory of our respective maternal grandparents, so loyal to each other – to wear that fear.

What do we have now? We have our eighteen-week-old fetus, the daughter-to-be, longed-for no less for the month-long possibility of those trisomies, and her older sister, and each other. We have the possibility of fetal heart problems, another spectre of that larger nuchal measurement, at the coming anatomy scan. We have angry, radicalised, idealised sensibilities, the strong notion that society needs to change, that the solution to fetuses conceived with trisomies is not necessarily or logically that they not be born. The fact that this is the chosen path for so many parents of these fetuses speaks to me of a wider environment in which those commonplace concenrs of feminism and the history of labour are dominant.

The way in which the demands of work and family are positioned as fundamentally in competition, rather than in alignment with each other, the way in which the development of children is predicated, even before they are born, on their ability one day to join the industrialised workforce, the way in which the value of people is quantified to some degree by the amount of money their thriving will cost the state: all these things contribute to a normalising and privileging of certain kinds of human over others. Guidelines for those contemplating carrying or not carrying a fetus with a trisomy invite them to consider such questions as what the value of life is, as if these are matters best reflected on by strained, frightened parents in a window of just a few weeks. Why should moral philosophy be their work alone?

It pains me (and regular readers will imagine how much much) to impose upon the cool brisk tone I like to bring to my written work something approaching an impassioned plea, but these are moral questions for us all, and we have a social duty, I believe, to push beyond the post-industrial dictates of neo-liberalism, to find, as Robin Hyde argued in the 1930s, the way forward for a society in which mothers (and now fathers too) can work and have their children, including disabled children, including people for whom the social prescription seems at present restricted to demanding a lot of work but bringing a lot of love. I do not think the social value of my unborn daughter ought to be contingent on the fact she will not be born with the trisomy that causes Down Syndrome. I do not think our wish to bear and raise her even had this been true should be regarded as an aberrant choice. I do not think anyone is helped in this by narrow abortion laws that make a fetus with disabilities just one of a few reasons for which a pregnancy may not legally continue, although on this matter I doubt I have any stomach for engaging in internet debate.

It is easy when living and working the life of the mind, when running a household of little conflict and relative privilege not to think in any personal manner about the wider state systems that sustain and shape our moral choices, our assumptions about the value and viability of life; let this be someone else’s work, perhaps the working or non-working poor at whose feet neo-liberalism places responsibility for their own suffering. This experience has brought the señor and me into immediate, visceral contact with those questions, in a social context where it is assumed that success and privilege will largely consist in not having to think about them at all. It brings us to to that umbrella question that is the go-to for the left wing view: if like this for us, then how for others? On this and in this, as much as in the increasing fetal movement of my growing daughter-to-be, my thinking turns.