Seeing your face

I almost know my way around by now. I say ‘almost’ because my lack of sense of direction is such that I don’t totally confidently know my way around my own house. But we have been to the hospital now for our dating scan, for a midwife booking-in appointment, and for a blood test, so I can at least relatively confidently find my way to the right area, navigate between the toilets, the cafe, and the reception desk. I even knew that I’d be directed ‘down the pink corridor’ to wait by the sonographers’ rooms.

There were a few people there already, sitting staring into space. One woman was called, but  needed her interpreter. Another was alone, and looked a picture of misery, huddled up in her plastic chair. Periodically, a door would open and a man would call out a name in a desultory fashion, call the name again, look quizzically at the row of chairs, then close the door again. Jack was sitting opposite me, then stood up and kissed the top of my head, "I’m just going to remind my PA that I’m on holiday this morning." And he was gone, brandishing his Blackberry. I stared after his retreating back with narrowed eyes, thinking, "If you miss our scan because you’re on your Blackberry, I am Going To Kill You." Luckily he came back quickly, so it didn’t come to that.

I felt a bit quiet. Perhaps Jack and I had both read a bit too much about these scans. We were steeped in the knowledge that the scans are not, contrary to popular belief, an opportunity for you to coo at your baby and to find out the sex, but are instead intended to allow the sonographer to check the baby’s development, measure all kinds of measurements, and check everything is going well. I thought I’d been feeling him* move for a while now but, I reflected, I could easily have been making it up. (After all, how are you supposed to know what a baby moving feels like? the books and the internet told me to expect a ‘fluttering’ but what I felt was more like, "tummy-ache without the pain" I said to my Mum, or once, after a particularly dramatic shifting about, "Like when you get out of the bath, and all the water rushes around to fill the space where you were… it felt like it would feel if you were the bathwater rather than being you." "Uh-huh." said Jack, and kept his face neutral.)

So when a woman came out clutching some notes and said, "Rumtum?" I wasn’t exactly petrified with fear, but I wasn’t totally relaxed either. She had a friendly face, with dark hair, and some kind of European accent, perhaps German, or from the Balkans. I lay down, and she put what my sister describes as ‘ecto-plasm’ on my stomach. Jack sat down, and we both peered nervously at the screen.

She had to shove around quite hard to get any image at all. There were a few seconds where her hand moved around, and the screen showed nothing at all. Then, out of the black and the gloom: our baby.

He was facing the sonographer, so we could see his little face dead on. The sonographer showed us his eyes, and his face, and he had his arms up, so that his hands were up besides his face. She moved her instrument around, and as she did so, more bits of the baby appeared and disappeared, as though sliding out of the inky water like a monster from the deep. She did some quick checks and reassured us that everything seemed to be fine. And just like that, I felt myself begin to cry, looking at that small face, swimming around inside me in the dark and the peace, tiny fingers stretching out briefly then coming to rest back together, arm twitching grumpily as the sonographer disturbed its sleep, legs curled up besides its tummy and bent at the little knee.

It seemed very near and yet also very far away, moving through the darkness on the screen yet also right there inside me. A face that was so  unfamiliar and so small and yet a face that will become more familiar than my own: a face that will be a bit of my own and a bit of Jack’s face, and yet a face that is all its own, that belongs only to my baby and not to anyone else. She played the heartbeat and I knew that it wasn’t just a momentary welling-up, and had to wipe away the tears that continued to slide down my cheeks. "Oh!" she said, smiling, "You are so emotional! That’s ok, you are pregnant. You can cry all you want." The heartbeat was so small and insistent. So trusting and fast. Like the scan itself, so strange to be given a momentary window into something that is always there inside me: a tiny heart beating away, a little face turned inwards away from my skin, tiny fists bunched up by each cheek.

I had begun the session by explaining, "We don’t want to know whether its a boy or a girl." and we still didn’t. It feels right somehow. This little person who will be part me, part Jack, and part stranger, yet part so familiar. These tiny features that we will recognise and yet find so individual and compelling. Tears kept, foolishly, sliding down my face as I looked at the screen and saw a small foot, saw the string of pearls of the spine, and felt as though I was looking at the strangest, most unusual thing in the whole world, and yet at the same time seeing something so natural, and so familiar.

As we left I knew that the next time we would see that tiny face would be probably in the same hospital. But next time Jack and I will be looking at it, and it will be looking back at us. And I expect that to a newborn baby, we will appear just as strange, and be just as compelling.

I have been absent for a long time. I confess I haven’t even found time to log into opendiary and check my favourites. I have been an absent noter. But we are still here, the baby and me. And I want to write more of this down.

with love,
therumtumtugger
xxx

*We’ve both been referring to the baby as a ‘he’ while he’s in utero. Don’t ask me why. Somehow I can use the word ‘he’ without making any assumption about whether it will be a boy or a girl.