Births and endings

Something struck me the other day. I almost never talk to children. In fact, the last conversation I had with a child was when I was alone in Sydney, and but for what I read on other people’s blogs and in the status updates of Facebook friends, their lives are mysterious to me. I have little to no contact with anyone under the age of 17, the age of the stepson of a friend; he’s my go-to guy for any queries relating to Mxit.

Given that so many people around me are breeding ferociously despite all the gloomy climate change ads on MTV — the channel to which the TVs at work are tuned — this tends to feel a little odd. I’m out of step, and eccentric spinsterhood looms dangerously. Should I not crave the act of procreation? Should I not fantasise about nappy cream and gurgles and saving for school fees? Why is it that I always joked about how I’d only consider having a kid when my ovaries were screaming — and there hasn’t been a peep?

I have to be honest with myself and admit that I am not a baby person. I like children, but find babies faintly horrifying in their fragility and their otherness, and whenever other people bring theirs into the office I hunch my shoulders over my laptop and hope that I won’t be asked to come and coo over the child or — heaven forbid — have to hold it. My offspring are my books, the novels that are lined up on ghostly shelves and stored in phantom iPads, and are now nagging to be written. It is to them that I must devote as much of my energy as I can spare: that they should remain unwritten, as they have for so many years of procrastination, is unthinkable.

These reflections were prompted in part by the fact that on September 7, my ex-husband’s new son was born on the other side of the world. Coming a week to the day after my birthday, the arrival of this baby feels like the proper conclusion to an intermittently tumultuous chapter in our respective lives, one that started with the death of my mother-in-law and continued with a move to Australia, living apart, then retrenchment and moving back, followed by the spiral into divorce and all of its attendant despairs — which are trailed in turn by demons that catch up to you once the agreements are signed and the judge has made his ruling. It’s after all the dust has settled that things get tough, when in the sudden, uncanny stillness around you, you are forced to confront how you feel about what has just happened.

In many ways what catalysed our parting of the ways was my ex-husband’s suggestion that I use the recession to have a baby, which prompted ominous visions of spending another 20 years of my life in tight-jawed resentment of a spouse who behaved more like a schoolteacher who was required to show me the error of my ways. So this child is significant beyond the fact of his entry into the world.

I have blogged about some of this here and written about other aspects of my story elsewhere, notably a piece in the wonderfully successful Home Away and a chapter in a book on emigration. There was a time when my ex-husband was absolutely insistent that I write about the chain of events that led to the split, and so I have, though much of what happened will never be written about, ever. Our narratives, even the stories of those of us who — like me — make them so public, are always selective.

The exact circumstances that led to my ex-husband’s new life are far too complicated to relate here, suffice to say that amidst the smoking ruins of our marriage, a week or so after the divorce officially went through, he found a nice girl in the right suburb on an Australian dating website; messages led to mails led to Skype, and he flew out to meet her in December. In April he gave me the news I had been expecting all along, that she was pregnant and they were getting married, and two weeks ago the baby was born. It has been less than a year since I moved out of our rented townhouse, and the first anniversary of our divorce will fall on November 6, by which time the baby will two months old (I’m thinking of investing in a bottle of JC Le Roux to celebrate the occasion). I left my ex-husband with a wife-shaped hole and he was compelled to fill it, quickly.

He is happy, and I wish him and his fresh-off-the-showroom-floor family well (though truth be told I’d be happier for him if I were picture-book happy too). As it is, the version he has now is much closer to what he always wanted. So I can’t decide whether to be philosophical or resentful about our failed union: given that his destiny seems to lie with a woman on the other side of the world, were those years with me strictly necessary? Could they have been avoided? Our paths have veered off in very different directions and but for one safe deposit box and the last of what remains of my life in Sydney — books, a small TV set — we will never have anything to do with one another ever again. The decade we spent together will bleach and fade until it can barely be discerned at all, as the bright urgency of life in the here and now fills all the space set aside for remembrance.

For some reason I am reminded now of the last line of my Matric set work, The Great Gatsby. “So we beat on,” F Scott Fitzgerald writes, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” I know that I will write about the past — my past — and I may spend who knows how much time thinking about what was and what never could be. But I will not live there. There is too much for me to do.