This week’s Dispatches from New Motherhood piece is an urgent and emotional moment of personal reflection. In ALARM BELLS SOUND, T. Wills writes, in pin-sharp prose, of her conflicting feelings around her IVF and the vast questions with which she’s wrestling.
T. says, ‘I wrote this in a crisis moment. My choices made no sense to me, and also I have fought so hard to be on this path. I wanted to try and talk about the confusion of that in my body and in a way to just turn the whole mess over to a trust. A spiritual trust, I guess. I’m not religious so I found my way to that feeling with bells.’
It's an unflinchingly honest and brilliantly composed piece of writing that we’re honoured to share here.
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Alarm Bells Sound
T. Wills
I’m pregnant again and it’s an emergency. Not a surprise, since it required months of saving, and planning and persuading myself and carefully looking away from any lone parent struggling with two small children passing me on the street, but still somehow a shock in that way that pregnancy can be. Even when it’s taken all your resources and focus to get there.
It’s a secret emergency, because not that many people can know that I’m pregnant yet. It’s too early. And I'm a single parent who is, to be frank, lost on the planet, anchorless, lonely as an anchorite and yearning for something to pour foundations into; a grown-up person to be building something with, a house to call home or a nation where I am sure I belong. My parents who have been generous yet remain ambiguous about us living with them, are shocked at my decision to get pregnant again. They want me to move out. So I attempt to mute the bells and practise looking like I have a plan and am filled with confidence and gratitude. I must be ready. I must absolutely know this is right. I must want this entirely and I must be OK. I am not most of those things, and hide the absence of them under brittle smiles that tense around this baby, this collection of cells that decided to stick against the odds, so cherished inside of me.
The alarm bells are sounding and I am confounded that people can't hear them. Are they carefully looking away as I walk past, ringing? I invited my children but I did not invite this deep practice of aloneness.
My meds have run out. This baby was conceived via IVF in the United States. With the full level of resource and sacrifice that goes into that. They gave me hormones, progesterone especially. The alarm bells went off then too. That causes breast cancer. We have a huge history of hormone-induced breast cancer in our family. I am living with my mum who is living with stage-4 breast cancer. Am I choosing to give up my life to bring a second child in? The doctor is focused on their stats of success. It’s not alarming to them if I die young, leaving two children behind, so long as I’m out of their treatment programme, which is finished as soon as the pee stick said ‘POSITIVE’. He is deaf to the bells. They won’t ship the meds to where I live. Is it safe for me to just stop them? I ask. No one replies. I have nightmares of miscarriage.
My brother gave me a bell for Christmas. A small one made by someone in Eastern Europe, ‘a proper bell maker’, he said. It’s clear and single in its high tone. It sings; 'think higher, like the anchoress, find freedom'. Think of the motion of the bell ringing, that motion is yours for action.
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Alarm Bells Sound by T. Wills appears in the Mothership Writers anthology Dispatches from New Motherhood. All 50 pieces from the book will be published here over the year to come, creating an online library of what it really means – right here, right now – to be a new mother.