Soldier Sailor

by Claire Kilroy

We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic, even. That we know how to handle it. But I don’t.

I am worried that one day we won’t speak. It happens all the time. You’ll turn around some day and blame me for everything. Things that haven’t happened yet will be my fault. What I have done and what I have failed to do.

There is always an idealised image in my head of how a thing will be, but it never matches up to the reality.

No, Sailor, marriage was not what I had anticipated marriage would be. You leave yourself open when you plight your troth to another person. You place your well-being on a level footing with theirs.

wonder whether you can die of resentment, Sailor? Not instantly, but over time. Can it damage cells and trigger cancer? Weaken your heart? There were times when I resented my husband so much, I worried it’d kill me. If I didn’t kill him first.

Who is this individual? Where did he come from, this husband who has seen fit to finish me? Although he had been in my life longer than you, he felt provisional in a way you never could.

What was he training for? Night after night he was down in that garage doing whatever it was he did out there, getting leaner, stronger, harder. Defining himself in opposition to me, this wife who had grown weepy and soft. With the knotty arms and the buzz cut, he looked like a thug, an intruder in our home.

My God, we hated each other. All along, we had been harbouring these unplumbed reservoirs of hate—I cannot tell you what a fright this discovery was.

You think you’re over something when out of nowhere a tentacle grips you. Skeins of pain unspooling across time: there is no end to it, Sailor. We are walking landmines.

The urgency of that need scared me because I haven’t yet lost a person who is close and if this is how bad the death of a cat is?

We set out in life believing we will forge so many enduring bonds when really we are blessed with so few, no more than three or four if we are lucky, and one of mine was with a cat.

Please, I begged, but to whom and for what, I still can’t say.

In my mind I was performing an act of love. The most loving thing I thought I could do for you was to rid you of me. To set you free.

There is nothing a mother would not do to protect her child from harm. She would kill others for him, she would kill her husband, she would kill herself. Mary suffered more than her child, and for longer. She suffered the horror of her child’s suffering until her dying day.

I feel sick. I feel physically sick at the prospect of harm coming to you. Where are they, those who would hurt you? Line them up. I’ll take them out one by one.

Where was Mary’s father the night his child gave birth in a stable? Where was the hatchling’s father? Why did the burden fall on us, the females, with our ruptured bodies?

Desperate things happened to newborns in the past, desperate secrets were buried by desperate women. And desperate girls.

When had it all become so life and death?

We are joined, you and I, our names on the stone anchor. When one of us dies, the other will feel the loss always.

I practised the things I would tell you throughout your gestation to prepare you for a man’s world. Then you appeared and I don’t know what to say to you except don’t be one of them.

Word of advice: don’t leave all your washing to your partner. I couldn’t bear for anyone to resent you. Especially someone under your own roof. You might be murdered in your bed. Though you won’t. It’s the women who are murdered.

this was freelance motherhood: struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own, which were louder and angrier and scared us both.

My baby’s skull. Which wasn’t even closed yet, which still had a soft spot at the crown, your fontanelle; further reminder, where none was needed, of your fragility.

People think that looking after an infant is basic. I know this because I once thought so myself.

Detach my child and you detach my air supply. The umbilical cord is a two-way street.

Do not be afraid of these female parts, Sailor. Be aware, be not afraid, be not a dick.

Sometimes when a train approaches you get an impulse to jump. Everyone experiences this, you will too, it’s nothing to worry about, just your imagination flexing itself, exploring the potential extremities of life and, in considering your condition from a radical perspective, realising yourself more fully, kind of like you do now when pretending to be Superman.

love you because you do everything, he was telling me, even though you are exhausted, your eyes hollow sockets. I love you because you haven’t had a day off in over a year now yet still you keep going, slogging on in sickness and in health, raising our child so I don’t have to. I love you and will tell you so to deflect your criticism and assuage my guilt.

“This is life-is-shit depression. All I do is housework and childcare and I’m sleep-deprived and think-deprived because I never get a moment to myself, not even in the toilet. I miss my old life like I’d miss a lover. I pine for it, I daydream about leaving you so that I can be with it again. You’d like to diagnose postnatal depression because then it’s not your fault.

words have many meanings, Sailor, and you must deploy them with care because they can inflict real hurt.

They say a mother forgets the pain of giving birth but that is not my experience. It’s everything outside of that pain that she forgets, everything that is not her child. In short: the rest of the world.

You cannot leave suspicions of such gravity hanging between you and the person you love—okay, Sailor? Suspicions are chisels. They cause cracks in the surface. Water gets in and the water turns to ice and splits people apart because water expands when it freezes and—Christ, it’s going to take so long to explain life to you and even then, when I get to the end, it won’t make any sense.

I ran as if I had an assignation, as if I would meet my self at the end of the road, the old me, the real me, find her waiting on the corner. I would tell her that she was free. She had not known about her freedom. Only in losing it did she understand what she had lost.

There was too much to be done to sleep or eat. Or even go to the toilet. New mothers say this in amazement, laughing like it’s funny, when it’s not funny, and we’re not laughing: we’re bewildered, we are floored. Our laughter is the public face of our incredulity. We can’t even go to the toilet, ha ha!

Here’s my ennobling truth, Sailor: women risk death to give life to their babies. They endure excruciating pain, their inner parts torn, then they pick themselves up no matter what state they are in, no matter how much blood they’ve lost, and they tend to their infants. Your fires on Orion and your Luke, I am your father. Tell me, men: When were you last split open from the inside?

From the outside a woman cradling a newborn looks peaceful. A new mother is not peaceful but in a jittery state of high alert. We declare her serene so we can leave her to it. So we can behold the glittering surface, remark on its beauty, and walk away.

Little girls are so much more articulate than their male counterparts. But don’t worry, Sailor: you’ll still be paid more than them.

I am tired. I am lonely. I have found myself mired in resentment in this new life, become a person I don’t wish to be, feeling constant guilt for not feeling constant gratitude for the blessing that is my child. I do feel constant gratitude: I adore my child. But I am tired. I am lonely. I am lost.

When you were born, you didn’t enter my world: I entered yours.

It took me some time to realise your father was no longer with us, not quite. He was there in the beginning but at some point wandered off, stepping out to make a phone call from which he never fully hung up, popping his head in from time to time to see how we were doing,

There is a thing that happens to a woman when she is alone in the dark—shall I lay this out for you now? Explain about the curfew? How in the darkness, women become prey. Captured in their snow globes. A hyper alertness charges our being because for us the vampires are real. They set out into the night to hunt but just for female flesh. There are men out there who are worse than dicks. Oh, Sailor, far worse.

In love there is always loss, Sailor. There is no way around this that I can find. There will be a last look. That last look may come sooner than you think. One of us will be left behind. These are the things you accept when you accept love into your life.

The reason this work is considered unchallenging is that women mainly do it.

Here’s more of it: I was born with you. This was news to me. A baby girl is born with all her eggs in her ovaries. How about that? A part of you was always a part of me. I don’t want to read too much into this staggering fact but still.