Getting Ready to Fall

A Better Woman
by Susan Johnson

Acclaimed novelist Susan Johnson found, at age thirty-five, that her desire to have a baby became overwhelming. She had no inkling what motherhood would cost — or give — her. But as she went on to experience pregnancy and birth, and their impact on her marriage, health, and heart, she recorded it all. In this hauntingly lovely account, Johnson portrays a woman transformed by motherhood, and a writer forever changed by a widening chasm of experience. Her initial ecstasy jostles against bewilderment, rage, and despair, however, when she develops a rare complication of childbirth; she is "a one-woman catastrophe, a small ruined country." She is also burning to get words on paper. The result, A Better Woman, should be required reading for every woman hungry to give birth — and every mother yearning to have her deepest feelings heard.

Chapter 1

When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.

Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

The year that I turned thirty-five, my arms began to feel empty. I remember a moment when I was sitting behind my lover in a car driving through France, staring at the back of his head. Everybody in the car was talking but all I was conscious of was a longing in my empty arms to form themselves into that ancient female crook and cradle a baby.

I was living in Paris then, and my sixtyish, childless painter friend Simone confirmed that this longing first struck the body. 'My own body did not need it,' she said in English, without sentiment or regret. 'You must find out if yours does.'

My lover was an Italian-American who spoke heavily accented French. His character had a large dose of American schmaltz and an Italian love of drama, and inside his head were screened private soaps in which he imagined himself as the war/foreign correspondent who finally settles down with a difficult but artistic Australian.

He cried easily and was terribly kind. He had thin lips and when I first kissed them I imagined myself falling into a kind of black abyss. I had separated from my English husband and left Hong Kong only a short time before and was not sure I wanted to kiss anyone.

I told him this but it only increased his ardour. The less available I was the more he wanted me, and it took days, weeks and months for him to convince me that his hands bore no weapons and that his fleshless lips opened into softness. With one finger I traced a line down his flesh and was surprised to find his skin's tenderness.

Perhaps because I found myself hopeless I was writing a novel about hope. I lived in a large room with a tiny kitchen and a shower installed in a kind of cupboard. The room was off one of Paris's poorer streets and when I lay in bed I could clearly hear my neighbour's stream of piss hit the bowl of the toilet above me.

I tried to forget my lost husband as best I could but pain often roared in my chest. Yet paradoxically I was often exhilarated, when words rushed down my arm and out my blue pen, when I sipped a café crème and happened to look up at the dusty Paris sky. At times I even felt lucky.

My lover and I often talked of children even though we were virtual strangers. Once he sobbed in bed late at night when he spoke of the mutilated bodies of children he had seen in a river in El Salvador. I held him and my small room was crowded with our mutual terror.

I had never thought of myself as someone capable of ever having children. I thought it was what normal people did, people whose bodies and hearts and minds functioned in a way mine did not.

This conviction arose, in the first place, from an awareness that my body was not like everyone else's. My mother and I still dispute this, but I say I was aware of the hole in my chest as early as six, when I fell off a fishing wall onto rocks covered with oyster shells and had to take off most of my clothes so my rescuers could get to the wounds.

In my version I remember trying desperately to cling onto my shirt to cover my terrible flaw: between my flat nipples there was a large hole, as though God punched his clenched fist into me before he let me out. I already knew that no other children, including my two younger brothers, had this imperfection and that it somehow marked me.

I remember standing in the sun holding in front of me a blue Hawaiian shirt while fresh blood streamed down my arms. There was blood on my legs, on my face, in my eyes, but all I was worried about was hanging onto the shirt so that no-one would see how different I was, that I was not a normal girl.

Even years later, after I turned sixteen and the hole was repaired by breaking my sternum and re-setting it with a steel pin, I never felt myself to be like everyone else.

Now that my sons are here I sometimes find myself watching too carefully the flare of bones in their tiny boys' chests, on the lookout for the smallest hint of collapse.

I believe now that the bones which formed me physically formed me in other ways too. Many people who grow up into writers experience themselves as different, left on the sidelines by illness, physical uniqueness, tragedy, some profound notion of their own solitariness. Only children often become writers, children from toxic marriages, children whose interior worlds somehow became more radiant than the regular world witnessed by eyes.

I believe now that I wrote myself into life. Before I learnt how to do it I lived as if blind, forever raging against the dark. Learning how to write illuminated life itself for me, letting me see fully for the first time its shape and dimensions.

Before I learnt to write I did not know who I was. I was young, of course, but back then it always seemed that I was living in the wrong place, with the wrong people. I remember miserable early years living with a man who was totally unsuitable for me and sharing a house with his politically active friends. It was the late 1970s; I was nineteen, twenty; everyone else was closer to thirty and appeared to know everything.

I would sit in our room trying to get the courage up to say something at a meeting, or even at dinner, but whenever I was in a room filled with people having a discussion about the banning of street marches in Queensland I noticed the wrong things. I noticed that a woman had been crying, for example, or that someone's hands shook or that so-and-so appeared to have an unrequited crush on the dark, good-looking man in the corner. In other words, I was a writer. I was a witness to the small, unspoken gestures which reveal felt life, I was in love with the idea of making sense of everything I saw.

I did not yet know how to write but I was already full of yearning. I felt strangled by inarticulateness, choked up with all the million things I wanted to say and it was only when I held a pen in my hand that I felt soothed and the world became untangled. I longed to grab life by the throat and wrest it into some kind of beautiful pattern so that other people might recognise the weave. I wanted to move people in the same way I had been moved by books which illuminated the experience of being alive and breathing. I wanted to write the truest things I knew.

I see now that I also wished to create or invent myself. I do not understand how other people can live their lives without this. For me, living without writing, without trying to make messages from chaos, would be like living in exile from the deepest part of myself.

It seemed to me that my body grew older faster than the rest of me. At thirty-five I sometimes still imagined myself a young girl bursting free, smashing imaginary fathers and impossible husbands and anything else which stood in my way. I was embarrassingly unmade on the inside, still groping on the water's edge while my same-aged friends had long ago swum away.

If at thirty-five I knew without a doubt that writing was to be my life's work, I was less confident about my ability to love and be loved in return. I remember being stung when my Paris lover remarked that my books were way ahead of me and it was vital that I catch up.

I secretly looked upon my best friend Emma in Brisbane as a grown-up, with her long-time husband, her two children, her steady, everything-in-place life. She had a proper house and a car, living-room furniture: she knew what she would be doing from one month to the next.

I thought of women who had given birth as having passed through one of life's most crucial doors, mothers somehow rendered unable to reveal the secrets they had found on the other side to those non-mothers who had not passed through.

The year I turned thirty-five I began to sense clumsily that I must find a way to move forward into the second half of my life, to find a way to grow up properly. I certainly did not believe that the only way of doing this was by having a child, I only knew that I had come to the end of myself. It was clear even to me that the old way of being myself was no longer working and that unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life emotionally atrophied I had better act.

Copyright © 1999 by Susan Johnson

About the Author

Susan Johnson, an internationally acclaimed author, has written four novels, including Hungry Ghosts. She lives in London with her husband and two sons.