Cleo

A black shape trotted down the side of the house in our direction. I’d forgotten she was so tiny. Her pace was businesslike at first, as if she might be heading out to check for spiders in the letter box. She hesitated, pricked her ears and scowled at us. For a moment I thought she might drop her tail and scurry under the house.

“We’re home, Cleo!” Lydia cried.

The cat meowed gleefully and sprinted towards us. We dropped our bags and ran to her, each of us fighting for turns to hold the purring bundle and smother her with kisses. Even though Rob and Lydia had sprouted over the past year, she remembered all four of us.

Once we were inside, the warmth of her welcome cooled. Cleo decided we needed punishment for our absence. She asked to be let outside and perched on the roof for several hours. After we’d unpacked I lured her down to ground level with a bowl of her old favorite—barbecued chicken. Halfway through her meal she looked up at me and winked as if to say So, pregnant again? Can’t you humans control yourselves? Oh well. Guess I can put up with a few more years being dressed up in baby clothes and wheeled around in a doll’s pram.

Early in the pregnancy I went to a specialist and begged him to anesthetize me from the neck down for the birth of my fourth child. He agreed. At the age of thirty-eight I even had a medical title—Elderly Multigravida (which, by the way, any aspiring rock band in search of a name is welcome to). To reinforce the notion I had everything to fear he showed me a chart of the increased rate of birth defects as mothers approach forty. I left his offices feeling old. Sick and old. Following his advice I underwent invasive tests, one of which brought on worrying contractions. The tests showed the baby was healthy. And a girl.

With Cleo curled on my lap one afternoon, I phoned Ginny in Wellington. Instead of laughing at my vision of a high-tech birth, all bright lights and scalpels, she put me onto a magnificent midwife, Jilleen.

The moment I opened our door to Jilleen the baby somersaulted inside me. Jilleen had the kindest brown eyes. Her small hands were crossed neatly in front of her body. I knew this was the woman who would deliver our child despite the fact that we’d never thought of ourselves as home birth people.

A smudge of cloud crossed the moon. Schubert’s music wrapped itself tenderly around the room. An open fire flickered shadows of Philip, Cleo and Jilleen against the wall. Time dissolved. We welcomed each muscular surge the way a surfer greets a wave, with concentration and respect. As the contraction reached its peak Jilleen taught Philip how to massage the pain away with gentle circular movements around my belly. Katharine tumbled pink and disgruntled into the world around two in the morning in her big brother’s bedroom. Our support team (including Anne Marie and a local doctor) glowed with that sense of achievement seen on the faces of people who have plunged off a bridge with elastic bands attached to their ankles. Lucky for Rob, he was staying at his dad’s house that night. We weren’t even going to tell our sixteen-year-old son exactly where the baby had been born in case he refused to ever sleep there again. Our plans were quashed when he discovered an acupuncture needle on his bedcovers and demanded to know the truth. To my surprise he wasn’t the slightest bit squeamish that his room had doubled as a delivery suite. In fact, he seemed almost proud of the fact.

Time is said to heal everything. Certainly on the surface our lives were looking good. I no longer dreaded parent-teacher interviews at Rob’s school. He’d worked hard. The tone in the teachers’ voices had changed. Instead of learning difficulties, they spoke of career options like medicine or engineering. His final-year marks were dazzling enough to earn him a scholarship to embark on an engineering degree at university.

I was happy, too, and grateful for the loving stability Philip brought us. Nevertheless, there was part of our lives that Rob and I tucked away and seldom talked about, certainly not in the company of others.

“Sometimes I feel as if our lives have been split in two,” he said one day when the house was silent except for the mews of Cleo pacing in front of the fridge. “There was the existence we had with Sam, and the one after he died. It’s almost as if we’ve had two separate lives.”