2.CHILDBIRTH

Hard labour, at least it was for my mother. In childbirth the effort and suffering, conscious purpose and reflex come together. Afterwards. mothers often say they dont remember much, the experience anaesthetised or censored out. And babies, the other party in the process, have no memory of it at all.

And yet, memory or not, the imprint of events must be there, on infant tissue, nerves and brain.
We’re more or less familiar with the mother's side of the story, and external events of afterbirth and cutting cord. We don’t know so much about what goes on inside the infant body, the other side of the belly-button, as that vital terminal is closed, oxygen and nourishment dramatically rerouted.

Does this reflex revolution stay buried without trace? We talk of five senses, and a will-o-the-wisp sixth sense, but not in any clear way of what we sense inside ourselves. We’re ‘gutted’ or ‘fed-up.’ Our ‘hearts sink.’ These cliches denote commonplace physical sensations, not flights of fancy. We talk of ‘tingling up the spine,’ our ‘hair stands on end’. These sensations break surface in visible events. As dogs’ and cats’ hairs bristle, so does ours.

What of deeper, slower-burning, sensations? Not sudden responses to image or stimulus, but in that shapeless space we sometimes call the ‘pit of the stomach’? The name is apt, it's where the sinking heart sinks to, the dark side of that trivial external navel pit.

What if that external cord-cutting has its internal counterpart in every mother’s child? Not so much a wound as a sealed lock, blank memorial for all future partings, aimless signpost for future departures. The physical separation and shutting-off at childbirth leaves a neural footprint, a path for subsequent experience to reopen. That vague ache, dread or longing in the space the heart sinks to may be as rooted in the flesh as the sensations reported by amputees in ‘phantom limbs.’

Of course, the labour of childbirth is the opening of a new world as well as the closing of an old. Both are lost for the child, buried in preconscious wordlessness. And it is that dark space that sometimes intimates itself to us in later life, to be pondered between dusk and dawn, old life and new.