Sorrow and Bliss

by Meg Mason

The music was extraordinary. The sensation of it was physical, like warm water being washed over a wound, agonising and cleansing and curative.

There was a second of intense quiet before my father started clapping like a recent convert to classical music who is not sure if you are meant to between movements.

I had never been able to tell her about my terror of pregnancy at the time I acquired it or as I got older and, instead of diminishing, my teenage fear intensified until I was a woman not just afraid of being pregnant, a damaged foetus, a damaged baby, but of babies in general, mothers and the concept of motherhood itself – one person charged with creating and keeping safe an entire human being.

‘Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is a different thing to crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.’ I laughed and Peregrine looked unhappy. ‘I am not being whimsical, Martha. For want of another, beauty is a reason to live.’

when I realised that what I had always believed to be true was the understanding of a sick child. I had never thought to question it when I became an adult. Instead, I put evidence to it and stoked it, all those beads on the one long string. I imagined more than what I’d been told and whenever I imagined my damaged baby, a child damaged by the kind of mother I would be, I felt fear and worse shame, and that was why I had been lying.

‘From what I can tell, you’ve never made an effort to find out. Sometimes I wonder if you thought it was going to be easier just to blow everything up. Tip, tip, tip, kerosene everywhere, match over the shoulder as you walk away. Incinerate the lot.’

Why is that, if not for the life you have lived, as someone who has been refined by fire?

‘Clearly you never stopped loving him deep down.’ But I did. I know I did. It is easier to say yes, you’re so right, because it is too much work to explain to them that you can stop and start again from nothing, that you can love the same person twice.