Frankenmother

What must it be like to lose an infant?

To awake and find it cold, without breath? To feel your breasts full with milk and no one to drink it; to wrap the limp body up that once kicked inside you; to know that some inexplicable failure of creation is yours to shoulder; to be the mother, now, of a ghost?

Would your baby, then, become caught somewhere in between life and death, a grotesque, unworldly creature that peeks in on you whenever you least expect it, unsummoned, from a window in your mind that you can never, ever close? An undead monster haunting you forever; because, being already dead, it can never die. You: tormented, left to live always in dread of sorrow, in unearthly fear of memory.

Small wonder, then, that the gothic genre was invented by a bereft mother.

When my son was a year old, there was a fire in his room, started by some faulty wiring in an old heater. Stupidly, I had placed the heater on the bed next to his crib (which ensured there was plenty of material to burn) and had closed up the room, so the heat would not escape. Incredibly, inexplicably, and perhaps undeservedly, a series of extremely fortunate events followed, without any one of which I would not have a child: First, I had had enough sense to leave the baby monitor on, so when my son woke up and let out a single cry I awoke, at four in the morning. It wasn’t a particularly distressed cry, and the smoke had not yet reached my room, which is on the other side of our apartment. So it was by one last unbelievable stroke of luck that I decided to get up and check on him.

Groggily I passed the entrance hall, where I was blinded by a bright white light. I was yet to comprehend that when the fire started it shorted our electricity, causing the safety mechanism on a flashlight we had plugged in to switch it on. When my eyes adjusted, I saw tendrils of smoke licking at the ceiling. Still not entirely apprehending the severity of the situation, I called out to my husband that there was smoke. I thought maybe somehow the oven had been left on, or something.

Casually opening my son’s door, I saw him sitting up in his crib. Not a meter away flames were licking at the bed, and he was gazing at them with calm curiosity. It was only then that I sprang into action, grabbing him and yelling for my husband, who jolted awake. He fought the flames with buckets of water while I held my son on our bed, door closed, windows open to let out the smoke, rocking back and forth and murmuring: It’s okay, it’s okay. This was more for me than it was for my son, who seemed unshaken (though later, at my mom’s house, he awoke every hour or so, crying, until morning). 

When we arrived at my mother’s, at four thirty in the morning, she said, “Oh dear, what a trauma.” But everyone is alive! I thought to myself, incredulously. 

In a state of stupefied shock we scrubbed our son’s face, which was full of soot. The soap bubbles that clung to the edges of the water turned a dark, dirty gray. And still my mind repeated, alive! to make myself believe it, perhaps.

When we returned to our apartment the next day, we felt as though we were bearing witness to a nightmarish ‘after’ pic in a news article called something with ‘tragic’ and ‘death’ in the title. All the ceilings and walls in the apartment were black with soot. The fire had eaten away nearly half the crib, and its remains were blackened and charred. The stuffed lion my son had loved to sleep with looked like a patient in a burn unit, and for weeks afterwards I had to clean soot off the thick cardboard pages of every baby book I read to him. 

A cleaning company was engaged, through my landlords’ homeowners’ insurance, and we spent a week at my mom’s while they slowly scrubbed, painted, and restored order. During this week and the ones that followed I was so busy I didn’t really have time to process what had happened, but for a while afterwards I kept finding soot in odd places: on the lids of jars deep in the cupboard, inside cooking pots not often used, under an old can of peas I had been meaning to throw out.

And after quite some time had passed, the event seemed to reemerge in my mind, usually when I was drifting off to sleep. My son’s door was always open now, and a new radiator had been installed, with an extra layer of iron wrapped around it in case somehow the heated oil leaked out (I had heard many horror stories in the weeks that followed the fire, from parents wanting to share their own traumas and those of their friends, one of which had featured a radiator that sprang a leak, hot oil shooting out and just nearly missing the sleeping child in the bed). 

Understandably I found it hard to relax fully, but the hysteria in me had been quieted by the renovated house, the restoration of routine. Yet I found myself thinking that perhaps, if, as even the wisest of physicists believe, there are countless dimensions running parallel to our own reality, then maybe mine is the only one in which all of those random strokes of luck had aligned to save my son. If this was true then there had to be dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of ‘me’s’ living in devastating realities in which my son had perished in the fire. What must they be feeling, all those other Adi’s? Are they still sane, even? Have they divorced, run off to India to live a life of meagerness and austerity? Are they addicted to anti-depressants? Or perhaps they are still going to work at the same job, enduring the pitying looks, reveling in them, even? Regarding other parents with an evil gaze, jealous of the simple fact that their children will outlive them? 

And is it possible that they imagine my dimension before they drift off? Undoubtedly troubled sleep prefaced, perhaps, by the strange hope that there is a world, somewhere in this mysterious universe of ours, in which their son survived, and is now living the carefree life of a four-year-old, punctuated by only the shortest spurts of anger and sorrow at being told no, denied sweets, forced to brush his teeth and go to bed. 

And would those other Adi’s have another child to try to fill the void? With the same man or another? Would those children remind them, in their infancy, of the lost boy? Would that child’s every achievement be compared to the unobtainable perfection of the dead son?

I imagine, sometimes, that I am visiting such a world, attempting to comfort such a ‘me’. I imagine telling her that her son survived in my dimension, that he’s objectively gorgeous, and is constantly told so, that unlike other boys he takes ballet and likes to wear dresses, but no longer to school because he fears his own difference, his own unique and amazing distinctness from the other humdrum kids, who are nice enough but of course cannot hold a candle. That he blows me kisses and tells me he loves me at least twice a day. 

Would the bereft ‘me’ be comforted? Or would she hate me? Perhaps she would attempt to leave her world and come to mine, or perhaps, after three years, she has come to terms and built a new life, a new child. Perhaps she would ask me to come visit again, the window in her world always open, anyway, to allow for impromptu visits from her child-sized monster; perhaps she would tell me to enjoy every second of every day, because I am lucky, oh so lucky, that in my mind, the windows are still closed.