-
The Crepening
Crepe myrtles are trees that flower in late summer.
Sorry if you already know that. I don’t like to assume people don’t know things, but if you don’t and I don’t say, then this story won’t make much sense.
Besides, it’s a huge understatement. Saying crepe myrtles are trees that flower is like saying cats are kinda jerks sometimes. Cats are supermassive arseholes with knives strapped to their feet who can’t even show love without stab-kneading you in soft bits, and crepe myrtles are trees that explode annually. They are trees that take sunlight, water and decomposing things and turn them into pure, raging joy. They are trees that never grew out of being glorious seven-year-old girls.
It’s very important we establish this up front.
(I mean, yes, you can get them in other colours, but why would you?)
Crepe myrtles as so completely, inspiringly, unapologetically extra that I simply had to have one in my garden the moment I had a garden to put one in.
I looked it up, and found the best planting time for them is winter when the tree is dormant as this is least disruptive for the tree. So, the first winter in our own house with our own garden, we got a crepe myrtle.
And waited for spring.
And waited.
And waited.
We watched all the other crepe myrtles in our area get leaves, then buds, then flower. Ours did not.
It was dead. We had killed it. We had failed.
Incidentally, we planted this tree just after my first miscarriage.
Bare trees and grey skies and brown, wet leaves in gutters worked their way into my brain and got muddled up with the pain already in there. For years, winter felt like miscarrying, even though out of our four miscarriages only two happened in winter.
I have that kind of brain. A brain that makes connections that aren’t real, a brain that always tells stories to itself, a brain that organises events and ideas and people into pleasing arrangements, a brain that tries to guess at endings.
It’s a dangerous brain to have when you plant a tree after a miscarriage.
We left the crepe myrtle in the ground all through summer, giving it every chance we had to give, hoping it was just a late bloomer. It wasn’t.
One day, my mum visited. She doesn’t visit that often because I don’t live near my parents, so she had only heard about the crepe myrtle over the phone.
… I probably need to take a moment to tell you that by this point I had got pregnant again, found out it was twins, and miscarried again. One of the summer miscarriages. This conversation with my mum happened not long after I wrote Expecting, and I was in a funny headspace. Not only can my humour tarnish down a few shades of dark when I’m in a funny headspace, but remember how my brain likes to make groundless connections? Right.
My mum has never really got my humour.
I don’t know why. All you have to understand to get me is that most of what I say is part a joke and part not a joke. To me, that seems an accurate and healthy way to get by in a world that is both devoid of all meaning and totally made out of consequences. However, some people never seem to see the joke part, and other people never seem to see the not-joke part, and all this is to say that I have, etched on my memory banks, an ever-growing collection of funny-startled-horrified looks people give me in response to things that, to me at least, are completely fine or even funny.
This one was a doozy.
Interestingly, we noticed the nursery had a whole bunch of dead crepe myrtles set aside. We guessed they probably had a dodgy shipping of them, and the first one probably came to us dead, but no one realised because it was the middle of winter and it was supposed to look dead. It wasn’t our fault it never grew.
But it didn’t matter anymore, because we had Crepe Myrtle 2: Electric Boogaloo.
We planted it in late summer, and it had leaves. Therefore, we knew it was alive when it went into the ground, so we were already off to a great start.
We didn’t expect much from it that first season, and it didn’t do much beyond stay alive. It dropped the leaves in winter (I got pregnant again, I miscarried again), it grew them back in spring.
… only not very many.
There was a drought, so we made sure it got it extra water, but it just wouldn’t liven up. It grew buds, but a whole month later than the other crepe myrtles around the neighbourhood, and again, not very many.
We watched and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And then there was a heatwave, and the few buds it had frizzled and fell off.
Fast forward to spring.
We were ready for it. We gave it fertiliser. (I got pregnant again).
It grew leaves. (I miscarried again).
We nurtured it through heatwaves.
It grew buds. (A fire tore through the area, but did not reach us).
Lots of buds.
Covered in buds.
We watched and waited for the crepening I had been counting on for years.
And waited.
And waited.
For SO LONG. It was just a ridiculous amount of waiting. This tree nursed those buds. I checked them every day for over a month, compared them obsessively to every other crepe myrtle, waiting for them to finally …
About a year later, I got pregnant again, but this time I carried to term and had a baby. In the middle of winter.
I wrote most of this back then, just in case. My stupid brain wanted things to work out like a story. The crepe myrtle would explode to life, and I would have a baby. It sort of happened. The tree made a couple of flowers, and I did have a baby. But it wasn’t … right. The crepe myrtle and my brain’s story had parted ways, separated by reality.
This isn’t a story about miscarriage, although it has them in it. This isn’t a story about regeneration, or about how everything works out, because it doesn’t always. It isn’t a story about how things are connected, because they’re not. It isn’t even a story about how I hate winter, because I don’t. Winter has transformed into birthday parties and amateur animal-themed cakes and memories of tiny baby snuggles.
There is no deeper meaning. Things just happen and you cope (or not). My brain might make connections, but I don’t have to believe them.
While my wallflower crepe myrtle has been doing its pleasant but unobtrusive thing, my baby grew up. She’s almost four now, and she has always liked flowers. As a baby she would try to eat them. As a toddler she would shred them, until she got a little more imagination and then she would strip the garden so she could pretend to feed them to animals (usually sharks). She will start kindy soon, and now when she picks flowers, she puts them in jars or gives them to people.
I pulled this little story out of my ‘nah, not that one’ folder because this year, seven years after we planted it, Crepe Myrtle 2 finally, properly, no-holds-barred, well-and-truly Electric Boogalooed.
Incidentally, I’ll be having another baby this winter.
-
I Like Gardening
I have been doing something new and weird. I have been learning how to exist happily.
Before I had my daughter, I spent four years dealing with infertility and having miscarriages. I was in survival mode. Before that, I spent four years with significant chronic fatigue syndrome. It ended my life and my future as I had known it. I could not work. I could barely leave the house. I was in survival mode. Before that, I was a messy miserable uni student battling social anxiety disorder, panic disorder and depression. Survival mode. Before that I was a socially inept high school student with chronic insomnia and undiagnosed depression. Survival mode. Before that I was a bullied primary school student, too shy to function.
Survival mode. Survival mode all the way down.
Until I had my daughter.
It opened a new world, one that was magical and sunny and made of cuddles. Where I have the child I wanted desperately for so long. And I also have a husband and a house. I live somewhere I love. I have a job, sort of. I do business admin for my husband but also I make a not-insignificant amount selling my pattern designs.
It is … lovely.
And I don’t know how to live like this. I don’t understand this life. My entire process of existence, all my motivation and how I got anything done, was based on survival mode. I don’t know how to look after myself when life isn’t a crisis.
Figuring it out has been a long, complicated process. One I didn’t fully realise I was going through until recently.
It started a bit over three years ago with baby cuddles. Becoming a well of unconditional love. Being so amazingly useful as nothing more than a place to nap.
I spent so many years trapped on a couch unable to move, and it was a pointless waste. To do it for good was incredibly healing.
It continued as I firmly defeated social anxiety. As my daughter grew, she was a busy, busy, busy baby. I needed to get her out and about, so I made mum friends. It was terrifying, but I did it anyway. Even with this secure base established, my kid would barge through other toddlers at kindergym and parks, so I had to talk to those parents too.
And I never wanted her to pick up on the fact it made me anxious. I never want her to feel like she, just going about her baby business, is somehow embarrassing or shameful or difficult for me. So I did it with a smile and faked being calm and cheerful and at ease until I fooled myself and wasn’t faking any more.
Then it was learning I had PTSD from all the miscarriage trauma and figuring out how to deal with that. This is a whole saga. Suffice to say, I’ve improved a lot, but whenever I think I’m through the worst, something tickles my trauma, and it gives me a good jump scare to remind me how deeply it’s wired into my brain.
Then it was learning more about my body and how to look after it properly.
My body, specifically.
We discovered I had chronic recurrent sinusitis from having naturally terrible sinuses. To fix it, I had surgery. I hurt my back badly from a combo of being very unfit, traumatised, and hypermobile (I am naturally a bendy pretzel and this is not a good thing because human bodies are not designed to function that bendy). To recover, I got stretches and a new awareness of how stress converts to physical tension. I ran into metabolism issues from my chronic-illness enforced sedentary lifestyle. To combat it, I was assigned strength training.
Change is distressing. The process of change, of any sort, even positive change, is the same process as grief. We have to let go of the old way of life and move into the new. It is not easy. We do not like to let go, even when we know letting go is good.
Right now, things are good, but I am chaos. I have no firm answers about myself. Everything is upheaval.
Slowly, patterns are emerging.
I like gardening. I do it in a low energy, fatigue friendly manner, but doing so has been worth it.
I am an artist. This may seem obvious to anyone who’s been following my comics for a while, but not to me.
I like writing by hand. I have been teaching myself real cursive, as I never learned it formally, and I now write everything in notebooks, even the stuff I need to type up later.
I am a hardcore homebody. The things I feel excited to do are reading, writing, gardening, sewing, knitting and drawing. I’m not supressing other more lofty or intense interests; I just don’t find them very interesting.
I want to look after myself. To find a balance with parenting. To get myself new clothes before everything I have is threadbare. To eat decent food and not just easy things out of packets. To be strong.
I might be able to figure out looking after myself if I try very hard.
-
Rejected
My first official publisher rejection has rolled into my inbox.
When I started writing this novel, I made myself a deal that I would keep going until I got a rejection from a publisher. I was not allowed to give up before that.
Sometimes when I tell people this, they don’t get it. I have to explain how aiming for a rejection letter can possibly be motivating. (And that no, I don’t actually plan to give up after I get the rejection letter.)
You see, I used to be really bad a failure.
I was a kid who got good grades. I got good grades without trying. In fact, I got good grades while making terrible decisions, such as staying up half the night during exam weeks so I could do NaNoWriMo (a prize-less challenge to write 50k words of a book in the month of November, ie. 30 days).
Maybe you hate me a little for being that kid.
Fair enough.
I hated being that kid. I hated that classmates would compare themselves to me. I hated doing better than people who legitimately studied harder. I hated that the stuff I actually did work for—art and writing—got blown off as ‘talent’ I was just ‘lucky’ to magically have. I hated, most of all, that I wasn’t allowed to fuck up.
It’s not that I got punished for failure. It was just the … lack of options. The complete certainty people had that I would do well. How excruciatingly noteworthy it would have been if I didn’t.
The turning point of my life was moving out for university where I could meet all new people and just be some Bachelor of Arts Nobody faffing around doing Bachelor of Arts Nobody things. Mediocrity breathed life into me.
I still wanted to be a writer. But whenever I said it aloud, people told me I would need thick skin. They always had this weird sceptical look, like my organs were embarrassingly visible through my translucent exterior, and they weren’t sure how to point it out politely.
I stopped saying it aloud.
They weren’t wrong. When it comes to writing, everyone gets rejected. Everyone. EVERYONE. Back then, I hadn’t failed much.
So I did something about that. I created Silence Killed the Dinosaurs.
I don’t think I’ve ever talked about how hard that was to begin with. Me, a loose conglomeration of social anxiety and perfectionism in a trench coat, putting things I personally made with my own brain out there for anyone to see. Absolutely ridiculous. It was like Superman drinking kryptonite cocktails. Achilles dipping his feet in crocodile infested waters. Dracula eating garlic bread while juggling pencils at sunrise. (Side bar: vampires actually have a lot of easily accessible weaknesses for a Big Bad Monster Type, don’t they?)
I had panic attacks after hitting publish, and nightmares about people telling me it was shit. I would obsess over my notifications every time I put something new out there.
I kept doing it. And as I kept doing it, it got easier.
Now when I post something, I barely think about it. I don’t stress about who sees it. I don’t care what they think about it. In fact, it ended up being so easy I set up a whole extra art account for pattern design and regularly enter art challenges and happily post about everything, including my failures.
Practice makes perfect.
Read into this what you will, but I don’t write intelligent literature. I don’t write plausibly bestseller book club type books. I write fantasy. And it’s not even realistic, gritty, intricate fantasy with amazingly detailed worldbuilding and world-changing storylines. I write silly spec fic about small-beans characters who fuck everything up and disappoint everyone constantly.
A rejection letter was my goal, because that’s the hardest thing for me.
This might sound braggy, but I knew I could finish writing a book. Not necessarily a good book, mind you, but an existing book. When it comes to goals, I’m a natural marathon runner. I can keep on keeping on however long it takes to get the job done. I completed NaNoWriMo purely after bedtime during exam month when I was 16, after all.
I didn’t know if I could be brave enough to submit my writing.
Which is why I made it so that to fulfil my personal goal, I couldn’t just write the book and leave it moldering on my computer, telling myself no one would appreciate it like I would anyway so there’s no point. I would have to send it out to get that rejection letter.
Honestly, it was really scary. And really hard. I put off the final step for a long time, especially as I had the excuse of But I Just Did A Childbirth Give Me A Minute right in that window. But in the end, I was brave enough.
The true genius of my rejection letter plan was not just that it allowed me to fail, but that it let me celebrate it.
I’m good at failure now, and I don’t care who knows. I studied for this test.
-
A Tree Fell On My House
(Yeah, I knit. What of it.)
I was absolutely certain from the noise. It was like one of those radio noise-guessing shows where they play a sound and I call up and say ‘that noise was definitely a large branch from a gum tree cracking and breaking away from the main trunk and then crashing down on a corrugated iron verandah, crushing it’ and then win ten thousand dollars for being spot on, except instead of ten thousand dollars I just got a mildly impressed husband and a crushed verandah.
Our toddler, who routinely wakes up at 2-3am and demands someone join her in the living room for a baby shark rave, slept through it. Because toddler.
We poked around with a torch for a bit, and when we were pretty sure that, yep, the verandah had been crushed by a tree, but the house itself was basically okay and we would be safe inside it, went back to bed because, I mean, it was midnight. Nothing to be done about 1/3rd of a pretty impressive tree on your verandah at midnight.
I zoomed through various shock stages in a mere hour. The shortest stage maybe lasted a minute the longest probably about ten.
Dissociating:
Crying:
Optimism:
Joking:
Dramatic story telling:
… with a side dish of unexpected revalations.
Ravishing hunger:
Finishing up with complete non-optional unconsciousness:
My partner, meanwhile, fizzed from the adrenaline and couldn’t sleep until 5am or something ridiculous, at which point our toddler woke up. Because toddler.
In the light of morning we confirmed the diagnosis.
Insurance dropped by for a photoshoot, since they operate on the Pics Or It Didn’t Happen system.
And we got it cleaned up.
And basically (if you don’t count the background grind of insurance waiting on the assessor report, processing the report, missing key things, re-assessing those key things, everyone relevant going on leave, processing the report again, still missing things, assessing these things, processing the report etc) nothing has happened for several months. We still have half a verandah jury rigged to not fall down more, no clothesline, a shed we had to break into by angle grinding the door because the tin got a crushed in the exact worst place, and a tarp strung up above the wooden laundry door to protect it from the rain.
But we’re loving the extra natural light.
-
Procrasti-projects
The best thing about this procrasti-project is in reality when I finished the knitting part it turned out the fit was dreadful so I get to frog it and knit it a WHOLE SECOND TIME.
-
PTSD
It isn’t over.
I typed those words at the end of the long essay I wrote about my first two miscarriages, Expecting, the one thing I have written that drew some real attention. I know a few long term readers found me then. I remember a few comments about they would stick around to find out what happened, since I said it wasn’t over.
The thing was—the thing I knew then, the thing I know even more now—is I was never referring to the journey of having a child and becoming a parent.
I meant I didn’t think the aftershocks would ever truly end. That it would always be just a goddamn awful thing that happened. That I would never forget the parallel timelines that could have been.
I have PTSD.
I sit in a dark room looking at a projection on a wall in blobby greys and a tiny flickering heartbeat. It looks perfect to me, but behind me, I hear the ultrasound technician lean in for a closer look at her screen and say ‘hmmm.’
It’s funny, I have such different standards for myself than others. If you had asked me a year ago if I was aware people could get PTSD from non-warfare type things, I would have said, yes, of course I know that. If you had asked me a year ago if I knew it was possible to get PTSD from medical or pregnancy trauma, including miscarriage, I would have said, sure, those things can be super traumatic. If you’d asked me a year ago if I thought I might have PTSD from my multiple miscarriage experiences, I would have said, oh, I don’t know, it wasn’t that bad, it’s not like I nearly died or anything, I mean unless you count that haemorrhage after number four but I don’t think it does count because the ER were chill about sending me home after it stopped, obviously emotionally it all sucked but it wasn’t like it officially traumatised me, and sure, now I have intrusive memories, weird adrenaline freak outs, nightmares about pregnancy and pregnancy loss, memory and concentration problems, issues with feeling detached, overwhelming guilt, lack of interest in things I used to enjoy and …
… oh no.
Which was about when I checked with my therapist about the possibility.
So apparently, yes, and such an obvious yes everyone assumed I already knew.
I don’t start crying until partway home when I look out the car window and see a boy with a school bag waiting at a bus stop. There are other kids at the bus stop too, mostly goofing around together. He stands by himself, but he doesn’t look sad or alone. Just going through his day.
I learned since being diagnosed with PTSD that we don’t process traumatic memories the way we do regular memories. Usually, when we file something away as a memory our brains include a timestamp. This means, whenever you access this memory your brain has a strong understanding of when it happened in the timeline of your life. However, when we file traumatic memories, our brains don’t do that bit so well. They aren’t timestamped properly. Your brain files them as ‘ongoing’.
Forever.
So whenever you access them, it’s not as a memory you know happened back in the day, it’s as a current experience. Kind of like having a hundred tabs open in your browser, but all of them filled with snippets from the worst thing that ever happened to you, and every now and then you accidentally click and bring up the wrong one.
I step over a gutter full of water and leaves. The leaves are big stars. Orange even though the world is cold and colourless. We are killing time by getting food before we see a doctor who will explain the ultrasound. I hope eating something will settle my stomach because I still have morning sickness. I know it won’t be good news, but I still hope.
I don’t realise those orange leaves will be the last colour I truly see for years.
I’ve gone back and forth on how much detail to give. Some things make a lot of sense and are straightforward to explain, like pictures of early ultrasounds. These were the images that came with the worst moments of my life and my biggest traumas. Similar images hyperlink right back to them. Most people see the logic in that if I tell them about it.
Some things make less sense. For example, I struggle to watch new (to me) TV shows and movies without having hypervigilant episodes.
There isn’t an obvious link to pregnancy loss. I think what’s going on is my brain has programmed itself to anticipate the worst outcome whenever there is any question, because for years that’s all that happened to me. So even that melodramatic tension of HOW COULD THE HERO POSSIBLE GET OF THIS?!?! FIND OUT NEXT WEEK being manipulated in fiction is kryptonite to me.
There doesn’t even have to be a risk of actual harm or death to the characters for it to hotwire my adrenaline. I spent the whole last two seasons of the The Good Place absolutely shitting bricks that the characters, who were already dead (and that’s not a spoiler it’s the entire point of the show), would not end up as happily as I wanted them too.
Like I said, doesn’t make much sense. When I try and explain it to people, they usually don’t get it. I wish that wasn’t a thing and I could still enjoy TV and movies the way I used to, but it’s not how my brain works just now. Perhaps I’ll get there eventually.
And other things are personal.
It was an interesting experience having miscarriages and being very open with not just family and friends but also the wider internet about what was going on. I think there needs to be more discussion about these things, that they should not be swept into the shadows, that there shouldn’t be pressure to cover them up and act happy and pretend it never happened. But my belief there is just about removing the stigma, making supports more accessible and helping people going through pregnancy loss not feel so isolated. I don’t think there should be any pressure on anyone to reveal things they are not comfortable revealing. I do not think any individual or the world at large has a right to your medical information.
That is to say, there’s other stuff, but it’s my business. Besides, I don’t want to sit around talking endlessly about upsetting moments.
Morning light streams through the leaves of a hanging plant. My baby sleeps swaddled next to me in bed. She didn’t sleep there through the night, since we practice safe sleep, but after she woke and I got her from the cot for a feed, she fell back asleep with little milky snores.
I know I won’t sleep again; I’m fully awake. I could move her back to the cot and get up, do some stuff around the house.
I don’t.
The new light, the white crumply sheets, her sleeping face. It’s too perfect to be anywhere else.
I think when I had my daughter it began to retroactively time stamp some of my miscarriage trauma. Because it put a line in the sand—that was before this—and my brain could work with that.
It hasn’t been a quick fix. In fact, at first it was almost worse. Everything was so fresh. Birth brought it all up. Looking after a baby brought it all up. But having her there also helped the miscarriages take their place in the past.
That was before this. That was then. This is now.
It is getting better, but it isn’t over.
I make bubbles with a swishing plastic sword stick for my daughter. She runs around our small lawn in the swirl, hands up to catch them. Suddenly she stops. She is done, the bubbles pushed from her mind completely although they are still settling on the grass all around.
Grabbing my hand, she leads me behind the garden shed to the upturned wheelbarrow. She rushes to spin the solitary wheel and demands ‘bus!’ so I know to sing The Wheels on the Bus for her as it spins round and round. It’s one of her favourite kid songs.
Toddlers don’t really do temporal stuff. Everything that happens now is forever. Everything that happened then is all but gone. They can’t really process ‘that will happen, just later’. They don’t really get ‘this has to happen now’.
It helps them be so happy in the moment, cheer up quickly when distracted from disappointments, and to forgive and forget easily. It also contributes to them demanding snacks ten minutes before dinner and then not eating dinner and then demanding snacks ten minutes after dinner. Or refusing to do boring getting ready stuff like putting jumpers and shoes on to go out but then getting really mad you aren’t out jumping in puddles already. And generally having big feelings over small things.
Life his hard. Even when it’s good. Especially when you’re two.
Everything is a moment. Moments don’t last.
That’s what I tell myself.
I sit in a dark room looking at a projection on a wall in blobby greys and a tiny flickering heartbeat. It looks perfect to me, but behind me, I hear the ultrasound technician lean in for a closer look at her screen and say ‘hmmm.’
-
Living With an Artist
I have been very absorbed in my art lately. But I am seeking balance, and hope to get back to making little comics and stories for this website a little more frequently again.
Silence Killed The Dinosaurs 