Taking Up Space

Unlearning the Limbo

It is August 2006. It is roasting hot, and the heat is made worse by the fact that I am pregnant with my first child. Every day I eat enough to sink a small ship. I particularly like large bars of chocolate and orange juice, because it makes the baby kick, and I like to know she is well.

I am the queen. I am absolutely fantastic. Anyone who has been pregnant will probably know this feeling. You behave like you are the only person in the history of the world ever to have been pregnant. Make room for me. I am making life. I am incredible.

Someone trying to take your space in the car park? Move out the way, I'm pregnant. Someone not offering you a seat on the train? Move out the way, I'm pregnant. Queuing too long in the shop? I'm pregnant, don't you know.

Well, that's how it felt for me. And perhaps it was one of the few times in my life where I felt entitled to take up space. I certainly did, considering I was the size of a small sofa and eating for about fifteen.

I am sitting in the beautiful garden of my fiancé's best friend's house in Portugal. Bougainvillea tumbles over the covered porch in great falls of pink and orange. A gecko holds absolutely still on the warm stone wall, then vanishes. I am wearing a pink satin dressing gown. My face is plump and red with the heat. My hair is lush and glorious for once, and I am deep in conversation with my fiancé's friend, who is kind and curious and genuinely interested. I am, in this moment, entirely myself.

All of a sudden a grating, nasal voice says:

'Look at the camera. It won't break.'

I have that video still, and I came across it recently. I watched it and saw the light leave my face.

This is how it works. Not a single blow but a slow erosion, so gradual you barely notice the ground shifting beneath you. An insulting comment here, argued against, called out, sometimes even apologised for, though in that particular way some people apologise, the kind that leaves you feeling somehow they don't mean it, somehow you are the one at fault. You know the kind. Most of us have someone in the family greatly skilled in this art.

But then you have the baby, and whatever confidence had been carrying you burns away in the sheer shock of it. Even in the ecstasy of new love for this creature, you are lost in nappies and hormones and a torturous lack of sleep. It is then, if you are not alert, that small aggressions take root and grow, robbing you of the last semblance of self you had.

I had ten years of this. There have been too many occasions on which I have realised that the bar I set for myself was far too low. The trouble is, my life had taught me to limbo.

I remember saying, not too long ago, to someone else, in a different life and a different story:

'Why do you do it? Is it to keep me in my little place? You weren't even kind to my dog.'

Well, I'm not in that little place anymore.

So I stated it, and then I left the room.