Did we have a baby?
From the sagging armchair in Room 5, I watched my wife drift in and out of an opioid haze that I oscillated between envying and fearing. The first cries of new citizens tore through the halls of the maternity ward like the herald songs of a very slow methodically beeping apocalypse.
Did we have a baby?
My wife cooed again beside me.
I feel like Briiiiiitneyyyyyy!
And with that, she was back under the sweet blanket of an extreme medical high. I never expected to find myself in a maternity ward. They’re Nirvana for the heterosexual nesting fantasy. But there I was, so I decided to follow the screaming babies into the hall and see if I could…Well, I wasn’t sure, actually. Absorb some of it? Test my resolute will, now 32 years strong, not to have children of my own and see if it would crumble under the pressure here, in Procreation Disneyland?
When I opened the door to the corridor, I physically winced, realised what I had done, and cackled at myself. To Nurse Lee, who was very entertained by our choice to be married to each other ‘as young girls’ and happened to be watching, this confirmed in one single moment of observation her suspicions about tattooed lesbians. What was I expecting to happen? Moral incineration? For my tits to pop, my hips to spread and a list of the good high schools in my area to sail into my hands?
Having prepared for all of the above in that instant, I was genuinely shocked by what I saw. Men. In every direction. New fathers, nervous fathers, men in socks, men in suits more concerned about the price of hospital parking than the six-pound screaming shift turn their lives had just taken. The ward had the atmosphere of an Elizabethan court engaged in rituals to summon male heirs to strengthen a frail kingdom. Other than Nurse Lee, I never once saw another woman in the maternity ward.
I closed the door and turned to ask Aurelia a question, which was an interesting move at this stage, given that she was halfway through was halfway through a deep verbal think piece on the Kathleen Folbigg acquittal. What I wanted to ask was if she had chosen a Christian hospital, or something to that nature. It was a weird call, I’ll admit, but I couldn’t account for the liminal testicular hallway and the emphasis on the male achievements of childbirth any other way.
In that moment, Nurse Lee delivered a rolly tray (technical term) with a single piece of bread in a plastic bag on it, accompanied what looked like a portable potty filled with drain run-off. It was, allegedly, pea soup. And it smelled like death. Hospitals, as a rule, don’t freak me out. Probably because I’m not someone who could actually pick the smell of death from a line up of criminal and offensive scents. I haven’t lost anyone to one yet (touch wood) and the times I’ve had surgery myself felt like a very straightforward way to relax under the influence of class-A drugs rebated by the government. W
hile Aurelia slipped on and off the surface of the world beside me, I tried to count how many people I knew had been a patient in a hospital. Because I work in the arts, most of them have been mental health admissions. And I don’t say that lightly. The impacts of the social devaluing of the creative arts affects the body in a very real way. Six of my friends from my drama school year level have been sectioned in the past five years. Our class only had 21. But that’s a story for another waiting room.
Then, I remembered an old friend from a couple of lifetimes ago. One who had, then had beaten, cancer. Around the time they had been diagnosed, they had also come out as non-binary. Their particular cancer was in their breasts, which was already a site of contention. They ended up having both breasts removed and were constantly in and out of hospitals and clinics. Free top surgery, we’d half-joke in foolish attempts to the lighten the post-chemo mood. Their treatment went on for years, what felt like a chemical eternity, until the cancer eventually, victoriously, left. But their experience as a non-binary body in a gendered medical system never has.
Did they cut my pussy out? Ask them.
It’s not until you’re in the incredibly raw and badly furnished pressure chamber of a hospital that you realise how vulnerable things like gender identity and sexuality really are. I startled myself by allowing for the return of some archaic feelings of shame and fear when Nurse Lee would pull up Aurelia’s scrubs to inspect her groin, with me standing there. I’m not going to try and touch her, don’t worry, I felt pulled to say.
When visiting hours were over and I had paid the $49 for two hours of hospital parking, I sobbed on the short drive home, both from the shock of seeing the love of my life so fragile with pain and so human, and because of the sudden onset of shame I had felt that night. There’s a lot of work to be done to expand the structures of healthcare to encompass bedside chat that doesn’t automatically begin with “so, do you have a boyfriend?”, that question why a patient would have so many tattoos, “as a girl”, or ask if there’s someone that should be called if the person at a patient’s bedside doesn’t automatically look like the obvious choice. And that’s been my experience, as a queer person with straight-presenting privilege.
At my non-binary partner’s bedside, it really hit home that trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming care is just as critical in the moments between surgeries - in the consultation suites, tea rooms and hospital hallways, as it is in the operating theatres themselves.
We did have a baby, by the way.
Well, that’s what it feels like. During Aurelia’s surgery, the doctor had actually called me to ask permission to perform a caesarean section, if it became necessary. The fibroids were sizeable and may not be able to be birthed the natural way – keyhole. I asked the good doctor to please avoid it, if they could. The scarring is more significant and we were almost out of Bio Oil as it was.
While the fibroids were present over the last year, Aurelia’s stomach that of a woman who four months pregnant. We joked that we were the only successful ‘pure lesbian’ pregnancy in the world. I would hold her belly and blow kisses on it. Sometimes, we’d pose for photos like we were expecting, with my hands cradling our demonic bundles of anything but joy. Because neither of us actually want kids, these four collections of benign tissue were as close as we would ever get to parenthood.
Something nobody will tell you for free at any hospital is that pain keeps newborn hours. At home, we are nursing fresh scars and screaming abdominal pain around the clock. Looking in the mirror, we can see we’ve both got new parent glow – deep set bags around our eyes, unwashed hair and a chocolate or banana smear down the front of every t-shirt. To be fair, that was happening pre-pain baby. There’s the pressure to bounce back to our pre-baby bodies, when we could run without Aurelia wincing or having to find a bathroom with a minute to spare.
All of this to say that, if anything, please treat this is as a very long out-of-office reply. If you don’t hear from either one of us for a while, consider us on maternity leave. In lieu of flowers, please email your local member of parliament, senator or councilperson and demand they start implementing plans for systemic accommodation of queer, non-binary and non-gender conforming hospital and healthcare immediately.
We also love chocolate chip cookies.
-TN
Oh bloody hell Tamara..
You’ve done it again .. I love this one even more than the last !! I hope Aurelia is on the mend 🤞xx Susie