[Read] Hot Desk Extract: Josephine Mead - (M)Other is an Opera!

As part of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship program, Josephine worked on her book in development (M)Other is an Opera!. Currently it exists of roughly 300 entries that chart their almost 2 years fertility journey. It’s been written as a love letter to their wife.

 

^{AI digital image. Courtesy of the artist.}

THEATRE.
Our first visit to the clinic. He imaged my womb through sonogram. On the screen I saw an empty galaxy. He said it looked ready to conceive. It was the most beautiful picture I’d seen. I asked for a printed photograph. He said No. I guess a woman’s womb is not marked worthy of immortalization until it carries. Still, for me the empty sonogram was a picture of possibility—the dark belly of a theatre.  

~

 

MEAT. 
Meat eating as an allegory for a new language: I’ll soon begin learning your mother-tongue, Tagalog. I’ll skirt new sounds, echoed by my new digestive vocabularies. After 16 years of vegetarianism, I’ve started eating meat. I want to raise my iron levels for a baby. I want to connect with your family’s deep values. I started on a research trip in Greece. I was alone and it seemed fitting to figure out these new feelings without you. We had a video call and realised we were on exactly the same page: ready to start a family once I returned. I took a screenshot to immortalize the moment. Your eyes were sparkling. During a poetry reading in Heraklion, Clare Bale spoke of tearing a cooked chicken breast apart for her lover. Her description was erotic. There is a primitivism to eating meat. People do not gnaw at vegetables in the same way. There is a satiation and a surrender. Perhaps I need to eat meat to understand Tagalog? They say that pigs are the smartest animal. Luckily pork is one of the main meats in a Filipino diet. There is also an eroticism to giving birth, or so I’m told. There is much that has been written about the pleasure of labour. There are tales of birthing orgasms. To her lover, Polly Borland stated, your language is what is missing in me.^[1]  Yet, not all knowledge should be free. With my colonial tongue, do I deserve your words? Perhaps I haven’t thought enough about your consent when making new work…  

~

 

COWBOYS.
I was walking to work thinking about how we had trialled a cowboy insemination. Hitching up to Brisbane twice last year. Giving it a go with our donor (now friend) and a syringe. Attempts before trialling the rigmarole and expense of the IVF clinic. I looked up as I was walking to work and there was a lone cowboy boot, hooked on a wire fence on Johnson St. A relic of a wild night. To wake up and realise you’ve lost your shoe. To wake up with blood between my thighs after both unsuccessful attempts. We lost two shoes, but we were still cowboys for trying.

~

 

WAR.
When speaking of scenes of tearing and ripping apart, in relation to the Pelopennesian War, Page duBois talks of the subsequent re-building of the structures of the city. She refers to the foundations of these new structures as the bones of the mother.^[2] I haven’t thought about the ripping apart of the body that might occur when having a child. The tearing and the stitching. I’m worried about my emotional capacity, but not my physical one. I want my bones to be the bones of the mother. Last night you talked about the violent need to protect me and our family from harm. I don’t have this. Violence exhausts me. But the birth— this is where I am ready to go through war. To tear my own body apart so that I can enter another, so they can enter the world. This is where I’ll strike a line with violence, for our protection. 

The French word for orgasm translates to a little death.

~

 

THREE.
The call from the clinic:
Only three embryos have survived the first night.

~

 

 

WASH.
I love when you wash a shirt enough times that it becomes silky to touch, regardless of its fabric. It becomes the embodiment of comfort. A slippery comfort that reminds you of warm memories past, now slightly out of reach, but still there. Your body is my soft shirt, washed many times. It has changed texture through spin cycle. I rest my head on your chest and feel safe in the fabric of you. One day our child will rest their head there too.

~

 

SWIM.
I swam out beyond the crowd. The sky opened up and it started to rain. Drops sprinkled on the surface of the water like lightening. It looked like the rain was falling upwards. Somehow it was coming from the water and the sky simultaneously. I took a photograph a few years ago of sunlight glistening on water. It looked the same as the photograph, but in reverse. The sky was crying for me and my tears held still, inside, for the first time in a couple of days. I gulped some sea water and felt the salt burn my eyes.

 ~

SHEET.
An embryo transfer. You sat next to me. My feet up in stirrups. A sheet laid across my hips and my body wrapped up in the ever-unflattering open back hospital gown, that I couldn’t tie without the nurses help, which made you laugh. The embryologist said the embryo looked good…ripe, still thawing. I wanted photos of the screen and got distracted taking them as soon as I could stand up. My bum was showing and you swiftly reached out and held the opening of my gown closed, covering my behind from the line of medical professionals. A flash of indecency worth a capture of our little floating embryo. We are rising and falling—we know we can fall (because we have fallen greatly) and we know we can get up and rise, because we have risen significantly. Your hand is always there to shield me.

~

NEGATIVE.
My period is the most brilliant vibrant red. Like glass or paint or syrup. I imagine the consistency is a result of the blood thinning asprin they have had me take daily for the last month. It arrived on Sunday. Moments before I got the news that my nephew had entered the world. I wonder if there are remnants of our failed embryo in the blood leaving me? Or has it already been consumed by my body? All of this, within the most intense working period of my life. But the work has been a balm. Now I can feel the tides turning. I’m starting to wind down and unravel. We have started six cycles. I still have the images of the two embryos that didn’t take on my phone. Small angels. I left the studio early yesterday and spent the afternoon in bed.  The tiredness is hitting me in waves.

 ~

…