Metamorphosis - Motherhood

Excerpted from
A Better Woman: A Memoir of Motherhood
By Susan Johnson

I did not believe I was really pregnant, still less that I was capable of delivering to the world a living, breathing child with a proper head, a body, two arms and two legs. So entrenched in me was the idea that I was faultily made, I could not imagine anything emerging from my body which was not faulty as well.

I had suffered an excruciatingly painful miscarriage only months before, and expected blood every time I looked down. This time, when two distinct blue stripes on the home pregnancy testing kit had revealed I was once again pregnant, I did not scream with joy and do a war dance around the house but sat soberly on the edge of the bath, holding the test in my hands.

Early days, I told myself, so far to travel.

Besides Les, I dared not tell anyone I was pregnant, believing superstitiously that if I counted my chickens before they hatched, they might not hatch at all. Yet despite the earlier miscarriage I could not help feeling lucky.

But before my baby even had a chance to reveal his shape in my belly, great questions began to be asked about him.

On my first visit to the young female doctor in Greenwich, where we were living, she asked whether I wished to consider genetic testing. I was about to turn thirty-eight and the risk of delivering a baby with a chromosomal abnormality' (mainly Down's Syndrome) increases with maternal age.

There were a number of options open to me, she explained in a cool professional voice, and I remember trying not to stare too closely at photographs of her own whole, safely delivered children.

All non-invasive tests such as blood tests and the like, she went on, could only indicate probabilities, while the invasive tests such as Chorionic Villus Sampling (CVS) and amniocentesis gave definite answers but carried a 1 per cent to 2 per cent chance of miscarriage.

I looked at her. Having already gone through one miscarriage I dared not risk another.

'And how does the chance of miscarriage compare with the chance of having a Down's Syndrome baby?'

She looked back at me. i think the chance of having a miscarriage as a result of invasive tests is slightly higher, but they're pretty comparable,' she replied.

Something must have registered on my face, something of the anguish and panic and longing raging inside me, because she immediately looked away again and began riffling around in her desk.

'I just got something the other day about this new, non-invasive test which is part of a research project at King's College. Ah, here we are,' she said, pulling a brochure from the drawer and running a finger down a line of figures. 'You're 38, aren't you?' she went on without waiting for my reply. 'According to this there's a 1 in 165 risk of fetal chromosomal abnormality.'

I sat there, between a rock and a hard place, momentarily swept of questions.

'I suppose it all comes down to how you view disability,' the doctor went on. 'Some women would rather risk a miscarriage than give birth to a disabled child. They don't think they could cope, it's as simple as that. They have no qualms, either, about terminating a pregnancy if the tests reveal an abnormality.

'Other women don't want to risk an invasive test which could endanger a perfectly healthy fetus. They'd rather take the chance and have the baby, disabled or not, than have no baby at all.'

I sat there, famous amongst my friends as one of life's big risk takers, wishing someone who was bigger than me would come into the room and tell me what to do. I had lost completely any taste I ever had for gambling.

It was the first time in my entire adult existence I found myself up against life itself, the big mystery at the center of us all. I have already told you I was a late developer, and I had managed to get to almost forty without death or destruction fingering me directly; I harbored no thwarted wishes, no sense that life had ever said no to me. Even the miscarriage I regarded as a temporary setback and never once imagined it to be my last chance. As you know, I had also suffered personal failures, broken hearts and lost husbands, but I cannot say I ever felt I had been denied what I truly wanted. Even my failures I knew I had something to do with, even if I could not have said exactly what I had done to bring about my undoing at the time. I am embarrassed to say that up until that moment in the doctor's surgery, I believed myself to be the supreme architect of my own life.

Now, for the first time, I realized it was not my will alone which was setting the agenda, but fate, the cosmos, God, life itself: at any rate, something far greater and infinitely more powerful than myself. I might have decided it was time to have a baby, but the eggs inside my body had their own private timetable and had already grown weary of waiting. The question of whether they were past their use-by-date was entirely out of my hands.

It was my first inkling of what lay ahead of me: any sense I had of being in complete control of my life (and by extension my body) was about to be challenged, and my old concept of myself smashed and made new. Life was giving the orders now, and I had been effectively rendered dumb. Sitting there, I felt impotent and liberated, at once.

Somewhere deep inside myself I must have already been practicing loosening my grip. Every woman holds fears for her forthcoming child, either fleeting or obsessive, and as I am sure you will have guessed by now, I am the obsessive kind.

I spent hours poring over columns of statistics: this pregnancy book offered a 1 in 180 chance of a Down's Syndrome child for a woman my age, that leaflet a 1 in 165 chance. I drove Les mad, asking him whether he thought I should have an invasive test or not, asking him how he thought we would cope if I didn't have a test and we ended up with a Down's baby.

It seemed to me that medical advances of the late twentieth century offer women a double edged sword: never before have women had so many choices, so much help in getting pregnant or avoiding it, so many windows providing illumination into the very building blocks of life, yet never before have women experienced such anxiety, burdened by these same choices. I could now have a test which would provide me with my unborn child's genetic blueprint: the only catch was that I must then decide if I agreed with the master builder's plan. This struck me as a terrible price to pay for new knowledge.

I lay in bed at night tossing up ultimately unanswerable questions, remembering how I used occasionally to accompany my mother to the special schools near Brisbane, where large, smiling teenage boys with incipient moustaches would want to hug me. I remembered little girls with round, flattened faces, rushing up with delight to meet my mother.

I wasn't scared of the reality of an intellectually handicapped child, and some part of me thought I might actually be quite good at being such a child's mother. It seemed to me that I was ready to give and that I would readily accept whatever child was meant for me. At other times my heart fled in panic and grief at the idea of it.