Poems

I've been absent from my blog for a long time because I forgot my password.

It was really obvious, so that was silly.

The warmth and kindness of a lot of people who've responded to my poems at slams and my stories on facebook have brought me back to The Echo Hill Adventure, so here I am, kicking off again now that Poppy is 6, Ollie is a hormonal 12 and Hamish a 6 foot tall 14 year old.

Here, as requested, are the two poems inspired by the famous bees in my wall!

I guess in a slam performance I can bring out the ironies and the sarcasm and the deliberately overblown. Read everything I write with a grain of salt please.

All in the mind

In my wall, there are bees.

They seized the opportunity of our temporal impecunity

Our untidy hoarding and no time to bin it

A wall with loose boarding, and no time to pin it.

One day the sight of hesitant flights

Converging studiously to a point

At the joint between plate and stud and creamy paint-cracked weatherboard

Told me the muttering at my bedhead, inside,

Was deep in the liminal invisible cavity

Between wall and wall – not, as I’d feared

Part of the murmuring depravity

In my liminal invisible cranial cavity.

But still, behind closed eyes

The seething and scratching and thrumming

Was breathing and catching and drumming

In the membranes of my skull;

Restless droning in the darkness between ear and ear

Wove with patterns there of angst and fear,

So I fled

To the other end of the bed.

And slept in peace

Between clean sheets

With the pillow over my head.

Until early summer, when the scent of honey rose with the heat.

When melodic humming down by my feet

Spoke of industrious sweet brewing

From blossom and bloom

Of nectar and syrup

In my very own room;

The strange little noises of chewing and nibbling

Meant that sweet honey was stewing and dribbling!

I stretched out and listened

To the distillation of liquid gold;

In my mind’s eye, it glistened

In pale curtains, fold on fold,

Always moodily lit, both day and night

With obedient workers, pictured mid-flight.

I marvelled that inches from my now-turned head

A tiny queen was tended, cherished, fed;

The nocturnal song, sustained and muted chords

Resonating through the building’s boards

Wrapped & lifted

Me as I drifted

With the vast and curious hive-mind for company.

But one roasting morning I woke to a roaring

I lay like a carcass in a fiendish buzz of flies

Then opened my eyes

And saw the window teeming

With two hundred workers, seeming

To be striving for the sun.

One by one

I freed them to navigate their hesitant flight

Into the light –

Then found their entry;

With no sign of a sentry,

The back door of the hive was by my pillow.

The old building’s wood

Had not withstood

Optimal humidity of 50-60% at 32-35 degrees centigrade

And the nibbling

Of the queen and her thousand siblings.

None had stung me, but this had flung me

Into a new cacophony of doubt;

So now, garden variety forms of anxiety

Accompany the buzz and scratch & murmur.

I picture waking shrouded in a bee-swarm

Or swatting through a blizzard bee-storm;

And again, in bed, in my head, they’re

Drawling with ceaseless tenacity,

Scrawling with night-time vivacity

Crawling with restless ferocity,

Bawling relentless atrocity...

I hope that after the specialists come with smoke and

A jemmie bar, I’ll no longer be awoken

By the sound of a vast city by my ear

But truly

The ligurians are too unruly

They can’t live here.

A sequel: The muse in my wall

I’m not sure how they feel

About the seal

Approval stamped upon my verse –

I’d say indifferent, or worse.

Still some days rowdy

Some days drowsy, on they hum, ho hum;

Hot days a cacophony,

While cool nights’ bedtime melody

Lulls me to a false sense of security.

But me – the seal has stoked my hopes and stroked

My self-belief; it’s soft relief

From writer’s block, insidious self-doubt.

Let out,

My muse looks hesitantly to the sun…

But time, a poverty of time,

Conspires;

Aspiring, tiring, daily grinding.

My epic novel wants to soar

But daily living shuts the door.

My ideas flow, but oh, so few –

And the bees must go to pastures new,

But the apiarist, too, has lots to do.

And summer rises to its stride

And still my busy bee-friends hide

Strumming their eternal chord

Behind the paint and weatherboard.

The forecast warns of oven heat

And beating sun past forty one

The morning hesitates

Anticipates

The day’s bake.

The kelpies’ yelping

Calls us out –

The smoke we smell

Is not the conflagration we expect

But Peter Davis trying to inspect

Our hive.

A pine-sharp tang unfurls

As smoke-strands curl

Round needles fresh ignited;

He needs to know the hive’s extent.

Purlin to purlin? Vent to vent?

Above the noggin? Against the cladding?

And all the while, like Aladdin

Smoke blossoms out

From metal spout

And keeps my muse-bees tractable and docile.

Pete has me tap the paint-work in the room

To guage their industry inside the gloom;

But paint is all there is.

With the humidity & nibbling

And their scratchy bee-feet, prickling,

Their canite dance-floor’s worn to nothing;

A satisfying crunch and crumple;

A roiling boiling, angry jumble

Crescendos out;

A shout – “get out!”

I slide the window up to let them free

Then flee.

We mask the hole with sticky plastic

Contact, just a bit elastic,

Like a blister, like a drum

Resonating with their hum

Keeping them inside, but barely

A great, round hole is plugged up – squarely.

My muse, meanwhile, begins to murmur

I push it away, from day to day;

Kids disobey – guests overstay.

Debts to repay. I think I’m OK.

Nothing to say! Just not today.

Too much cliché in the cold light of day.

Well, anyway…

Often, a flurry of workers escape

And launch toward the sun – inside the room.

They buzz and dance

Against the glass they cannot pass

Until they spill onto the sill

And dry to dust, their unquenched lust

For nectar, dew and sunlight all betrayed.

Likewise, some words fall on to the page

But nothing sage

No notes of brilliance spill or slip

Or even drip

Or seep out of the blister of my hopes

Just tepid tropes

That tumble like a bee that’s lost its sting.

Winter comes.

The bees are gone.

Jemmie bars and smoking

Leverage and poking

Honeycomb in buckets

Lots of “damn!”s and “fuck it!”s

Workers, queen & drones

Are happily rehomed.

And all is silence.

No melody or song, no soft, orchestral throng

No musical score nor grumble nor roar

No ear-assaulting dissonance

Arouses my ambivalence

To spur me onwards to compose

Anything in verse nor prose.

Epilogue - Spring

In my wall, there are birds.

I’ve no words

For their audacity

In finding the capacity

To nest between the panels and the ceiling.

But now I’m feeling

A narrative is blossoming anew;

There’s build and flutter below the gutter

And hatch and cheep and wake and sleep

And feed & cry and learn to fly

And swoop and sing and dance and soar…

I feel like I’ve been here before - ?

Milk for Poppy

In about 1970, Jay Godlee, an elderly clinic nurse, said to her young friend, my mother, “You can always tell a breastfed baby by their skin. It’s beautiful.”

So my mother was determined to breastfeed. This was in a time when women strove for the efficient four-hourly feeding routine - clearly a goal created by men to enable a woman to complete her domestic duties. Also a time when many women were told by their doctors that their milk was weak as dishwater, and they should be wholesomely formula-feeding because they were starving their babies on the breast.

And breastfeed she did; I was two and a half when to wean me, she left me with Dad and brought my older brother on a holiday here to Kangaroo Island. They went fishing. My brother caught an octopus.

So breastfeeding was what I was going to do too, whatever it took – because I loved and trusted Jay too.

My first son, Hamish, fed beautifully for 18 months. Even Ollie, who came out of his emergency C-section with a face a livid with forcep grazes, fed well; he latched on with his purple bruise of a mouth and fed perfectly. In 2 ½ years of feeding him I never worried about supply. When he was 5 he said to me once, “I wish I was a falling star, because then I could have all the wishes I wanted, and I could wish to be a little baby again and drink your milk.” Corny, but heart-rending.

Poppy was surgically extricated from her cosy womb-den at the WCH on 28 January 2012. She lay on my chest in the theatre, smeared in vernix, and found her little thumb to suck.

By the recovery ward she was squawking like a chicken and valiantly mouthing for food. Two midwives and I juggled the blood-pressure cuff and various intravenous tubes and danglies, vainly trying to get her to attach. “Babies seldom attach well in recovery,” I was reassured.

 

Over the next couple of days, Poppy seemed to be attaching, but also did a lot of detaching and re-attaching.  I worried a little, but not much; the last time I’d fed a baby was when Ollie was an on-again off-again distracted toddler, so it felt normal. The ever-changing parade of midwives left me alone because I was a third time mum.

By day two I had begun to notice that she wasn’t swallowing. “Oh, you won’t hear swallowing,” one midwife said. Yes I will, I thought. I always have before. That gentle little “click” is what means everything’s OK.

“She’s lost a bit of weight,” said a dynamic Malaysian midwife the next day. “But not too much. Not one-tenth. One-tenth makes the doctors worried.” I pumped milk and was assured that 9ml was a good amount of colostrum, and we finger-fed it to the hungry Poppy with a syringe.

Then Poppy got sleepy. She slept through the night. I woke up in the small hours to feed her, but she didn’t wake up. That night’s midwife was slightly vague and spent a lot of the evening making a Disney Princess name card to put at Poppy’s head. “Never wake a contented sleeping baby,” she said. “Aren’t you lucky!”

I was booked on the lunchtime flight home on day 4, with a bed and my own Kangaroo Island midwives waiting for me at Kingscote Hospital. At 6am today’s midwife (small, hyper-efficient) blustered through the door with a bang and Poppy in a trolley. I woke up with a start. “She’s lost more than ten percent of her weight, and she’s got the quivers they get from a sugar low. When did you last feed her?” My sleepy baby did not wake in the car, for takeoff, for landing or for the drive into Kingscote.

At Kingscote hospital, we set up a 3-hourly feeding regime which included pumping and syringe feeding.  At the end of one feed, there was a short rest before the next. Stuart was at home going spare with the boys. Visiting relatives wanted to admire and hold. And I tried to feed, 20 minutes or so each side, then pumped and syringe fed. Then washed out syringes and pumps, and asked the nurses to schedule my next wakeup.

On Day 5 the midwife Deb said, “she’s just a bird, she eats like a bird.” She helped me as I tried pumping while I fed, to stimulate let down. Nope. Still on and off.

“Let’s try a nipple shield,” she said.

With the shield’s shape, Poppy latched on perfectly and calmly sucked and swallowed for a good long feed.

But it quickly became a catch 22, or not quite that, maybe a catch 33 or 19.4. Without the nipple shield, she couldn’t attach. With the nipple shield, the stimulation which creates supply was muffled. Pumping helped, but not enough. My supply dropped; at the time I couldn’t understand why.

In the midst of all this we were supposed to be moving out of our government rental which was no longer available now that I wasn’t working. Our destination, the shed at the farm, still had great cavities in its straw bale walls, no fly screens, in fact no front door. And running water – hah! As if.

In some delusional alternate reality I honestly believed that moving just over a fortnight after a C-section with two demanding boys and a new baby would be possible. I was in complete denial; the reality of long, difficult feeds, pumping, sterilising, settling and surviving was all-consuming. The midwives organised a social worker, who of course - this being a small town - I knew because I’d taught her daughter. (For that matter I’d taught the kids of two of the four midwives as well.) I helped my cause enormously by having a significant post-partum haemorrhage in the middle of our discussion; she visited me in hospital to tell me she’d got us a month’s leeway. More on the move here.

I don’t want to dwell on those weeks, but there’s something very dismaying about failing to successfully breastfeed a third child after such an easy road with the other two. I felt (irrationally) that giving her formula would be some sort of betrayal, a monstrous failure on my part. And I couldn’t understand where the milk had gone.

When I fed Poppy expressed milk from a bottle she spluttered with the “drink-or-drown” flow rate, then became quicker to give up on the breast when the flow was slow. Midwife Robyn taught me to supply line feed, which worked better than I’d expected but needed the dexterity of an octopus to set up. And we finger fed with a syringe, making her suck properly to get milk. Poppy became very enthusiastic about people’s fingers – she’d get annoyed when milk didn’t spontaneously come out of Stuart’s pinkie.

It felt like I’d hit rock bottom when I sent Stu to the supermarket to buy a tin of formula. I cannot feed my baby. My baby is “failing to thrive” – a hideous term which makes you feel like the failure is all yours.

Unlike generations of women before me, and a disturbing number of women even now, I was not under pressure to comp feed or change to formula. My doctor exercised extreme (self-preserving?) tact in the face of my slightly hormonal bloody-mindedness. The midwives were bending over backwards to help me. Robyn saw the formula on the bench and politely asked me what I was planning on doing with it. I wonder if she thought I was giving up? But I wasn’t.

The night before, I’d been at Mum’s place with guests and family for dinner. I’d spent the entire evening shut in the end room with Poppy, trying and trying to give her enough milk. The more anxious I became, the less milk would let down. The night was hot and she and I were sweating and crying and failing at our little team effort.

But an ABA counsellor  was gentle and strong on the other end of the phone. “Feeding the baby is the most important thing,” she said. “We don’t condemn formula. The best thing is the mother’s milk. The next best thing is another mother’s milk. The next best thing’s formula, and it’s not going to do her any damage at all.”

Another mother’s milk…

I think many people’s first reaction to sharing breast milk is cautious. Body fluids fall into a range of categories, from the abject – phlegm, urine – to the poetic – blood and tears. Breast milk is an elixir, sustenance, but in our culture very personal, and for different people falls in different spots along spectrum. Without any rational objections, many find the idea of feeding somebody else’s baby a bit discomfiting. I don’t think I’d drink breast milk myself, especially somebody else’s. Well – maybe in coffee.

But women of my mother’s generation boast about feeding a whole nursery of babies with their abundant expressed milk. As a child at church, we never blinked at the “wet-nurses” of the old testament (Moses in the bulrushes springs to mind). Why has other women’s breast milk slipped towards the abject in modern life? It hasn’t in Mongolia.

I asked Midwifes Kate and Robyn about it and instead of the positive response I’d expected, they were cautious. It wasn’t part of their professional role to advocate or assist in milk sharing. If I did choose to go down that path, I must be VERY CAREFUL because many diseases could be transmitted through the milk, such as hepatitis and aids.

And anyway, there probably weren’t any mums on the island in a position to share. I dismissed the idea.

I mixed up formula, with its sour, crushed-dandelion smell, and felt my baby’s system change. Stinky, strange nappies, and a chemical scent to replace the warm creamy smell at the end of a feed. Different burps and spills. I was worried she’d start to prefer it, and I’d miss out on the wonderful, easy, relaxing joy of breastfeeding an older baby.

On Facebook, a couple of friends helped me track down Human Milk for Human Babies, where I posted this:

Within hours, I’d had suggestions from on and off island about use of ferry services and flights; 5 offers of milk; two people who knew people coming to the island soon, including somebody who suggested Andrea the Speech Pathologist who was coming to the school on Monday. Then there was a friendly comment from Andrea the Speech Pathologist and a bit of “Oh, I know Andrea too!” action. The conversation stretched down the page, and most of it was complete strangers working together to help me with my problem.

The upshot was that on Sunday Morning, one of the complete strangers, Anna M., asked if I’d had any luck. When I said I had nothing concrete, she drove with her two little girls from Mount Barker to Lockleys, an epic drive, to drop off milk to Andrea the speech pathologist. She made light of it in text messages, saying it was the best excuse she’d had in ages to have a counter meal.

So a little owl lunch-bag with icy bags of EBM arrived the next morning. My Mum happened to be dropping Dad to the airport for a work trip and met Andrea at the arrivals gate. Before 9 in the morning, Poppy had her first taste of another mother’s milk. She drank it down contentedly. And I felt wonderful.

 Anna messaged me:

It was great sitting at breakfast this morning knowing the milk was just touching down on KI. I have never donated before, it’s a good feeling, especially explaining it to my two and a half year old..."the lady we saw yesterday will take the milk with her on an airplane to where the mummy and her baby live." I love that she thinks that’s normal.

Facebook, of course, likes to tell everybody everything, so many of my friends were notified that ALICE TEASDALE POSTED ON HUMAN MILK FOR HUMAN BABIES’S WALL etc. Acquaintances, ex-students, blokey blokes, parents from school. I wasn’t ashamed but somehow it felt a bit private – a mum thing, not an everybody thing.

But I was pleasantly surprised by how people reacted. “I read your facebook thread and got a bit teary. Aren’t people amazing?” said one Mum I was just getting to know. A school Dad approached and said he was going to Adelaide – would I like him to bring back some milk?

And as soon as she saw the post, Kathy Sharrad picked up her phone. Kathy is married to my childhood friend, Campbell. He and I spent many hours up the wattle tree playing koalas while our older brothers had acorn battles around our big hills gardens. Later he was not my bridesmaid, but my bridesmate, with a lush beard and a stripy shirt. Campbell always deserved somebody pretty special, and Kathy is more than up to the job. When they had little Nina I was hugely overwhelmed by avauntular feeling (I struggle to be avuncular).

 “I’ll send you some milk,” she said. “I’ve been really wanting to donate and haven’t known how to go about it.”

Perfect. In so many ways.

My Dad picked up the first little esky of zip lock bags on his return from his work trip, had afternoon tea with Kathy and Campbell and cuddled the scrumptious Nina.

50ml of EBM frozen in a zip lock bag is such a tiny, flat little item, creamy-white and translucent. I thought with longing of the times 6 or 7 years ago when my milk was plentiful - a press on the side of a boob would send it sprinkling across the room in spindle-like jets. Sometimes, it’s throwaway; sometimes, it’s liquid gold.

Thankyou, aunty Kathy

Poppy at last began to grow properly. I told my doctor I was using donated milk. “Oh, you’re the one who’s got the midwives in a spin!” he said. He trusted my judgement, though, and admitted to having laughed at the midwives in their flap.

“How are you getting it down here?” he asked.

This time, no well-timed work trips or speech pathologists had eventuated. “KI Freight’s got a tri-weekly freezer service,” I replied.

“Fair enough,” he said, “but don’t whatever you do tell them it’s breast milk.” Apparently there are protocols for carrying human body fluids. Like blood. And urine. And, apparently, milk.

Utilising the freight service entailed delivering the "freight" to their Port Adelaide depot between 7:30 and 8am, and it could be collected at the back of Drake’s supermarket at 6pm. The early morning posed a challenge, which was surmounted by phone, text, facebook and the generosity of friends.

Campbell agreed to be the milkman and took the sacred little esky on an awfully long drive to my good friend Corinne, whose dedication to the ABA and kindness as a friend saw her at the depot at 7:45am.

“What’s in it?” she was asked. (I’d forgotten to mention the doctor’s warning.)

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yeah?”

“Expressed breast milk.”

“Really? Might use it in my coffee.”

I was at the back of the supermarket on time. The forklift driver stopped the forklift with its pallet-load of frozen peas and pizza and prawns. He disappeared into the cavernous dark of the semi-trailer, and re-emerged from the curling mist with my tiny esky, sugared with ice. Suddenly, it all became epic. If he’d been in slow motion with an orchestral score, it couldn’t have been huger.

At about this time, Poppy managed to attach to the right nipple without the nipple shield. Just once. A couple of days later she managed it again. By the end of the week she managed the left. And by the end of the month the shields were gone, and I had just enough milk. Also at this time, Nina had rotavirus and became a fussy feeder, so Kathy’s supply dropped. It had just been a little window, a break in the clouds where what Kathy could provide met Poppy’s need.

This isn’t the whole story; many other little details of synchronicity and compassion couldn’t fit in this post. Neither was it ever a matter of life and death, like premmies struggling with necrotizing enterocolitis. Formula never did her any damage, nor does it damage the babies of many of my friends who have struggled with breastfeeding. But it was important to me that I could give my little girl the food that is normal and correct for small babies in those crucial early months.

At 6 months, Poppy’s weight is 90^th percentile, she has delectable rolls of fat, and she loves nothing more than a long hearty breastfeed. I have the luxury of scarcely waking for night feeds and having pre-warmed milk on tap wherever Poppy needs it. The leftover formula is about to be fed to some orphaned lambs.

And hopefully one day, in the karmic give and take of the universe, I’ll be able to return the favour.