MOTHER ZEN

Jacinta Tynan
 To Jasper and Otis,
for opening my heart.
Thank you for choosing me.

Every attempt has been made to request permission from copyright holders. If you have any
queries, please contact the publisher at the address below.

Quotation from How To Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran, published by Ebury Press, repro-
duced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; quotation from I Don’t Know How
She Does It by Allison Pearson, published by Vintage, reproduced by permission of The Ran-
dom House Group Ltd; quotation from The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, © 2009,
reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

First published April 2015 by Harlequin Nonfiction

An imprint of Harlequin Enterprises (Australia) Pty Ltd.
Level 4, 132 Arthur Street
NORTH SYDNEY NSW 2060
AUSTRALIA

ISBN 9781743692387

MOTHER ZEN
© JACINTA TYNAN 2015

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 Introduction

When my first baby was still a baby, I wrote a story about motherhood.
Like many new mothers I was giddy with the flush of it, enraptured by
my baby boy in a way I’d never known, and I wanted to gush about it.
The angle was the massive difference between what I had been led to
expect and what was actually happening.
From the minute I shared the news of my pregnancy, and well before
that, really, I had been bombarded with tales of woe. From pregnancy
to birth to bringing up baby mothering was, by all accounts, going to
be a rough ride. ‘Kiss goodbye to your life’ was a common refrain. ‘You
will never sleep again’ was another. Of course there were occasional
bursts of the good stuff too, mainly from older people peering back
through the heady haze of hindsight, when the sharpness of memory
might have dissipated. But I was repeatedly told being a mother was
‘the toughest job in the world’, a thankless task that I must fortify
myself against if I was to make it.
This was coming not only from people I knew but also from strang-
ers, who, on noticing my condition, would offer condolences for the
cataclysmic life change that awaited me. In a bookshop one morning,
‘Do you have any idea what you’re in for?’ said another mother about
my age, eyebrows raised. She didn’t mean this in a good way. The press
painted a bleak picture too of toil and trouble. Read enough newspaper
articles about motherhood — not, please note, fatherhood — and the
overall gist is of a career-sabotaging, money-sucking, relationship-killing,
6 JACINTA TYNAN

sanity-threatening, body-wrecking venture that might be more trouble

than it’s worth.
Not surprisingly I was apprehensive. As much as I wanted it, I was
careening towards a life change which I had been led to believe would
suck the energy, identity and life-force out of me. For the rest of my
life. With no turning back.
Which is why I got such a lovely surprise to find it nothing like that
at all. When my baby finally arrived — after two days of labour and
a touch-and-go emergency caesarean — I couldn’t wipe the smile off
my face. Awash with happiness and powered by the deepest love I’d
ever known, I settled into a warm blanket of contentment, and there’s
nowhere else I wanted to be. My mother (herself a mother of six) had
told me that if I could get through the first six weeks with a new baby
then I could get through anything. If that be so, then I was on a roll. I
still felt that way several months in. I was sleep deprived, sure — give
me a new mother who isn’t — and didn’t have a second to myself. I only
showered every second day and rarely checked emails, and sometimes
I had no idea what I was doing, but I was having the time of my life.
One morning while my then nine-month-old baby was sleeping, I
started writing. A first-person opinion piece for Sunday Life Magazine,
the Sunday newspaper liftout I contribute to, about my mothering
experience thus far. I hankered to describe the joy and privilege of it, the
flipside you so rarely hear about. It wasn’t my intention to preach to or
berate mothers who weren’t having a similar experience. I didn’t assume
I had any superior skills or knowledge in the ways of this motherhood
thing. I only had one baby, for goodness’ sake, a healthy one, and he
wasn’t even walking yet, all of which I made clear in the story. But
what I did think was that if I, of all people, could turn things around
from the fear and trepidation I had felt about becoming a mother to
actually having quite a nice time of it, then couldn’t anyone? If I shared
my story, gave a little insight into my baby world, then it might inspire
others to look at it a different way too, to see their way through the fog.
The prevailing message of our time, the line we are all buying, is that
motherhood is Struggle Street. Perhaps one little snapshot that suggests
otherwise might do its bit to question that manifesto.
‘There is one thing nobody warned me about when I became a
mother: what a breeze it would be,’ I started. I wrote the story during
 MOTHER ZEN 7

a mid-morning sleep (the baby’s, not mine: by now I had trained

myself to do just about everything in those precious snatches of time).
I admitted (it felt like an admission) that I was finding motherhood
‘one of the most seamless, joyful, intuitive things I have ever done.’
‘Yes there are sleepless nights (many of them, in a seemingly endless
row), but there is nothing difficult about being up all night with the
love of your life.’ The common assumption that motherhood is hard
work? I could now say from experience that, really, I didn’t think it
was. I would take this any day. ‘Hard is being tied to a soulless job for
eighty per cent of your waking hours. Hard is fighting cancer, or hav-
ing a child who is. Or not being able to conceive a child when you ache
for nothing more. Soothing a crying baby who won’t sleep for love nor
money is a privilege, not a hardship.’
It was intended as an uplifting piece, a dose of positivity on a Sun-
day morning to remind us how precious is the opportunity to be a
mother: an invitation like no other to love and be loved. ‘I never knew
I had such capacity to love. Nobody warned me about that,’ was my
closing line. It was a gentle prod to get things in perspective and laugh
at ourselves. (Which went for me too.)
Then I hit send.
After filing the story, I received an email from a sub-editor, profes-
sionals notoriously succinct in their correspondence, confirming I had
hit the mark. ‘Nice upbeat piece, even if I am coming off about four
hours of baby-interrupted sleep!’ it said. That there was a litmus test.
If she in her new-mum state was seeing the ‘upbeat-ness’ of my words
then it was mission accomplished.
Only it wasn’t.
The Sunday my story appeared was like any other Sunday. I forgot
it was even in the magazine, going to print, as they do, several weeks
after I wrote it. I barely manage to glance at a newspaper most days
since becoming a mother, and that was one of those days: me too busy
entertaining our crazy crawling boy, who darted off in all directions,
yanking and burrowing with no radar for danger, to read anything at
all. But by Monday morning it seemed every other mother had some-
how managed to read the paper. Propped up at the hairdresser getting
a quick blow-dry before work that day, my baby on my lap, I finally had
a chance to check my emails on my iPhone, and they were overflowing.
8 JACINTA TYNAN

At first, a ripple of camaraderie. ‘I can’t agree more,’ wrote Sandra.

‘I’m so tired of hearing all the negativity of having a child.’ ‘I am so
sick of reading about whining middle-class women moaning about
work-life balance,’ wrote PG (‘too paranoid’ to leave her real name).
‘People with healthy kids don’t realise how good they have it.’ And
they kept coming: ‘It is a shame that women seem to find solidarity
in commiserating the arduous nature of motherhood. For me its not
a hardship but a gift,’ said Raelean. ‘Comfort descended upon me,’
wrote Jennifer, ‘reading that my experience mirrors yours,’ ‘There, I
said it,’ Lola wrote. ‘I love being a mum and I treasure every minute
we have together. Motherhood rocks.’
Several pregnant women emailed to say that after reading my
account of being a new mother, they’re no longer so uneasy about their
own impending — and inevitable — foray into it. ‘I felt immediate
comfort as I read your article highlighting to me that the journey I
am about to embark is of joy, love and reward — not pain, resentment
and boredom,’ wrote (another) Jennifer. ‘I (now) look forward to my
twelve-week scan tomorrow.’
And then the tide turned.
The blogosphere went into overdrive, including the online Sydney
Morning Herald (whose comments section reached capacity within
hours) and the popular Mamamia website, which also hosted my
story, and had some fifteen hundred responses at last glance. I was
invited onto TV and radio to ‘defend’ myself, and my story inspired
several follow-up articles and opinion pieces. Not many in favour.
When my story was posted on Mamamia, with my permission,
dissenting mums took to it with a vengeance. It was a lighting rod for
every mother who had ever found parenting hard. I, with my suppos-
edly superior life — on my ‘high and mighty chair’ — became the
unwitting target for their frustration and discontent. ‘If only we all
had the money, fame, childcare and hair and makeup every day to
make us feel good about ourselves,’ wrote Craazy. ‘I can tell by your
lack of regrowth that you are not living the life that many of us have
as new mothers,’ quipped Mother of 4.
Much to my chagrin, many mums had interpreted my rosy senti-
ments as an attack on them, and they fought back. ‘Try a week at
my house with four kids under ten and we’ll see if she still thinks
 MOTHER ZEN 9

motherhood is a breeze,’ wrote Random. ‘Jacinta has, unfortunately,

made some very emotionally vulnerable mums even more so,’ posted
Dianne. ‘It lacked any sense of compassion for people who find it
overwhelming, for whatever reason,’ wrote Green Leaf. From Meg:
‘… extolling the ease and smoothness of her maternal journey is likely
to cause more than a few feelings of inadequacy in the rest of us
mere mortals.’ Someone calling themselves ‘Where’s her sisterhood?’
posted: ‘Writing a deliberately provocative article is one thing. Writing
an article that can be damaging to the mental health or self-esteem of
a struggling new mother is quite another.’ And from Petal: ‘Jacinta, I
really don’t think you should be talking about how easy motherhood
is while the baby is at home with the nanny.’
It unnerved me to read that, rather than inspire readers as I had
hoped, my words seemed to have enraged them or, worse, caused them
greater angst. ‘I’m still angry and it has been a week since I read this
article,’ wrote Enz. Mummum said she ‘had moments where I was
frothing at the mouth’. ‘I actually spent all of Sunday in a fog and
wept a couple of times, just because of your amazing ability to make a
mother like me feel like a complete and utter failure,’ wrote Amanda.
‘She should watch out for karma,’ warned Brissie Mum. And ‘guest’
got right to the point: ‘Stop being so up yourself!’
I was on notice. ‘I’ve been a smug mummy before too Jacinta and I
promise you it’ll come back and bite you in the ass!’ warned Gilly. And
from Sofia, who likened me to the ‘Queen of Motherhood’ (should I
have been flattered?): ‘Lucky we have this enigma that is Jacinta Tynan
to put us all in our place!’
It was hard to see, in the thick of all that, as I ducked for cover
behind my laptop, that it was worth it. But it was.
Despite weathering the relentless fallout I’m glad I wrote the story.
For the majority of mums who posted their appreciation for the ‘over-
due voice of reason’, grateful for a different perspective. For the ‘expect-
ing’ women who shared they now had an upwardly revised outlook on
giving birth. And for those who were reluctant to have a baby at all
because of the bad press, but who were now giving it some thought.
‘My hopes have been lifted that I too will be able to survive mother-
hood when the time comes,’ posted ImNotAMum. From Miss M:
‘Now I’m convinced it’s worth a go.’ And Talia: ‘It’s now something
10 JACINTA TYNAN

I know I truly want.’ ‘It’s nice to hear mothers talk about the joy of
motherhood rather than scare the be-jesus out of us non-mothers,’
wrote Non Mum.
As difficult as it was to bear at times, causing me to question whether
I had lost the art of saying what I meant to say, contemplating even
giving up this writing gig, or at least avoiding anything to do with
the contentious issue of parenting, it was also worth it for the ensuing
onslaught it triggered, because it started a debate that was busting to
be had. To suggest that motherhood might not be the intense battle it
is made out to be — for everyone — hit a massive nerve and caused
women to think about where they stand on that, and why. One camp
clinging with all their might to their belief that their post-baby life
has been hijacked. Another floating about in a sea of euphoria and
gratitude. And everything in between.
What became clear was that we are entering a new era of mother-
hood. We may not be fully cognisant of it, but all that resentment
unleashed by mums unhappy with their lot — a silent scream of
disenchantment — shows something needs to give. We can’t go on
like this. Our experience of parenting is not universally definitive and
we should feel free to describe our realities, whatever they are. Our
mothers and grandmothers dared not speak of their discontent, many
simply playing happy homemaker and dealing with their lot. As it
should be, that darker side of motherhood is now open slather: per-
mission granted to own up to any traces of unhappiness or dissatisfac-
tion. So much so it has become the norm.
For a good two decades, we have applauded mothers for taking on
the ‘hardest job in the world’ without being paid for it. There are end-
less books and blogs and support networks for women who are over-
whelmed by the task before them — as there should be — reassuring
them they are not alone in their struggle to keep it together.
But what about the rest of us?
What stood out in the cavalcade of responses to my story, brack-
eted by the almost desperate cries for help, were the women who said
they were hesitant to speak of their joy of being a mother for fear of
backlash. One woman called it her ‘guilty secret’ that she loves being
a mum, another saying, ‘Good on you for being brave enough to say
what I, and many other mums, couldn’t say.’ ‘I have to hide the fact
 MOTHER ZEN 11

that motherhood is amazing for me. I have to hide the fact that it’s not
a struggle nor difficult,’ posted Bethany.
There is a new unspoken code around motherhood, one that has
firmly replaced decades-old taboos about complaining or criticising
what was seen as the most precious of feminine birthrights: it is now
not in good taste to speak of the good times. Not too loudly, anyway.
The impassioned dialogue that took off in the wake of ‘The Big Easy,’
as my story was headlined, uncovered the silenced voice of many
mothers who say they are ‘not game enough’ to acknowledge the posi-
tive side of their experience in case they get shot down. As I was. We
are keeping a lid on the good stuff, yet it’s the very thing so many of us
are obviously hanging out to hear, need to hear. As Bethany said, ‘I’m
sick of having to pretend that it’s bad.’ And Deb: ‘I’m tired of trying
to censor my joy.’
Which is why I didn’t stop there: because the conversation had only
just begun. It hardly seemed fair to open the floodgates, inviting mums
to dive in with their tales of how they make the most of their treasured
mothering days, others sharing their struggles giving them a forum, for
once, to get it off their chests, and then go back to ‘normal’, leaving all
those women bottling up their stories for fear of losing friends. What
I witnessed in the mass outpouring (because that’s what it was) — the
good and the bad — was women reaching out. Those who were strug-
gling sought reassurance from other mums that they’ve been there too
and promise it will pass. And those who felt they could speak up finally
about their content — as Libby put it, ‘the absolute joy and bliss my
babies gave me’ — found simpatico with other mums in the same boat,
and perhaps shifted the sands for those who desired the same but had
no idea how to tune into this radical perspective of rapture.
The extremes opened eyes. Including mine. The perspective offered
by other women — however brief — provided precious insight into the
intense battle that motherhood is for many, from irritating to crush-
ingly dull to utterly desperate. It proved women no longer wanted it to
be this way. By hearing the accounts of other mums who were loving
the ride — accessing the ‘ability to cherish the moment’ as one mum
put it — they were being given a taste of an alternative approach. If
this woman can feel this way, then just maybe so can I. Maybe it’s not
just luck of the draw after all.
12 JACINTA TYNAN

And so, after a brief hiatus bringing up two babies, I got back to it.
I started writing Mother Zen, just a few hours a week, any time I could
grab it. One reader, Tali, had suggested, with great sarcasm, that I
should ‘get together with Gisele and publish The Guide to Being Fabu-
lous at Everything — including Motherhood for the rest of us poor souls.’
That’s not quite what I’ve written. If only I knew how to be fabulous
at everything. If only I knew how to contact Gisele. But what I have
written is a book intended to guide mothers away from the endless
negativity surrounding motherhood and towards relishing this unique
and blessed opportunity, providing ways to access the joy that is avail-
able to us all. It’s important for mothers to have ‘permission’ to have a
range of experiences, as they inevitably do in life, including daring to
find motherhood trouble-free. At least some of the time.
I have come to believe that, in most circumstances, how we look
at things, including pregnancy, birth and motherhood, is a choice. It
has become de rigueur to complain about it, the default position for
so many mums, so much that we don’t even question if there’s another
way. But, for most of us, there is. I learnt to meditate when I was five
months pregnant (the first time) and I have no doubt that’s what got
me here. Not that you need to meditate to enjoy being a mum. Not
at all. But my ability to slip into gratitude and presence and see the
wonderment above all else (not always but often enough): I work for it.
My baby was like everyone else’s: he fed every two hours, cried for
hours on end, and kept me up many nights — sometimes I wasn’t sure
what to do next. But I decided to make the most of it all and not to
will away one second.
And so I am.

(Just to be clear, this is a book about mothers, and it’s framed by my

experience as a biological mother, but the word ‘mother’ is a shortcut
meant to include all the non-birth mothers and the fathers and the
carers doing the same work. Of course their experiences will differ
from mine, as do all other parents’, and I’m sure there’ll be some work-
ing dads who find that something here resonates! I’m not trying to
address every variation on the parenting theme — that’s an impossibly
large task — but my hope is that by sharing my own experience, and
those of many others, some more universal truth might emerge.)
 CHAPTER

1
Mother Doubts
No one said over and over again (because that’s how many times it
takes) or even once, When you grow up you can embrace motherhood
wholeheartedly and still accomplish great things. It seems absurdly
obvious now, but growing up, I swear, I could not fathom it.
Rebecca Walker, Baby Love

Don’t get me wrong. I was delighted to be pregnant. I knew how

blessed I was that it happened with such ease and with a man I hap-
pened to be in love with. I was, after all, thirty-nine.
I had put off being a mother that long, testing the very limits of the
fertility window, not only because I hadn’t met the right man (hav-
ing carefully avoided him on at least one occasion, terrified as I was
by commitment) but more so because I hadn’t found the right time. I
had a career to think of, sure, and one that isn’t traditionally accom-
modating with motherhood. But that was also in the scheme of things
a rather convenient justification for both myself and the people who
were starting to wonder. I was known as the type who put career
above all else. But, really, I wasn’t. Underneath all of that, what was
holding me back was that I wasn’t sure I’d be any good at it.
I’d always assumed I’d be a mother eventually, even when others
had their doubts, even when I was passing over perfectly good men
14 JACINTA TYNAN

into my thirties. But from everything I could see it was going to be a

mammoth, life-changing event and, frankly — not that I admitted it
to anyone, hardly even myself — I wasn’t sure I was up for the task.
Motherhood is a daunting prospect. Ask any mother. It means no
longer being able to call the shots, but getting swept up in the hurly
burly whirl of someone else’s — a little tiny person’s — agenda. All
that is allegedly cancelled out by the love and the privilege of moth-
erhood. Mothers tell you that. It’s just that that part — those more
uplifting mitigating circumstances — cannot be explained. Only
understood. And only when you get there yourself. And I wasn’t any-
where near there. Not yet.
Motherhood was for other women, women who were natural nur-
turers, the ones who had always cooked and had their lives, homes and
emotional states seemingly in good order. I had several friends like
that, two sisters (so far) and a sister-in-law who had seemed to quite
effortlessly bring three children into the world without much fuss. I
meanwhile felt as if I was only just starting on my own quest for inner
peace, let alone being responsible for the happiness of someone else.
In an article I wrote for Madison Magazine (called ‘Mother Doubts’),
back before I was pregnant, I examined why I felt quite inadequate to
mother another. ‘I’m not afraid of the inevitable onslaught of sleepless-
ness, disorganisation and career disruption. Of all that I have been
well warned,’ I wrote. ‘Nor do I baulk at the whole philosophical shift
of handing over my life to someone else. After thirty-eight years of
self-obsession, bring it on. It’s just that — am I allowed to say this? —
how do I know I’ll be any good at it?’
‘No one tells you about this,’ I went on. ‘All women seem prepared to
reveal is their primal yearnings to procreate and their God-given destinies
of motherhood with a complete absence of misgivings. They know they’ll
be pros because it’s instinctual, isn’t it? It’s a woman’s birthright to give
birth and, like a cow with its calf, she will know what to do. Yeah, right!’
I was worried I was too selfish. I had enough going on trying to
keep my own life in order, making it to work on time, collecting the
dry cleaning, catching up with friends, grocery shopping for one,
thinking only about myself, that the concept of someone else in the
mix, someone who needed me every minute of every day, was way too
much to fathom. I watched other mothers, including my own, and I
 MOTHER ZEN 15

marvelled. What selfless souls they must be, I thought, to give up so

much. Was I capable of the same?
For starters, the only people I’d ever said ‘I love you’ to (apart from
my mum and dad) were boyfriends past, and it hadn’t, in the long run,
turned out to be the case (other than for my first love, Simon, who
died suddenly, and for whom my love will never die). While I never
doubted the love, like so many of my generation, we weren’t a stop-
to-say-I-love-you kind of family. There was no need. It was implicit. I
wasn’t au fait with hugging either, aside from greetings and farewells,
and teary and tender hugs of condolence from my mum when each
one of my relationships ran their course. I treasured those hugs from
my Mum. I knew I had it in me — the capacity to love and show love.
But it wasn’t going to be a natural fit.
Was I too unhappy to be a mother, I had wondered, given, as I was,
to intermittent but crashing waves of melancholy that had me want-
ing to stay in bed all day (and, on the odd occasion, obliging)? ‘You
wouldn’t be able to wallow if you had a child,’ my mother said to me
more than once. ‘You’d be forced to get up and get on with it.’ See,
that’s what worried me. I had had depression twice (officially), and was
put on a course of antidepressants. When I settled into a mind numb
from feeling, in stark contrast to my regular state, I suspected it had
been there a lot longer, sadness and mild anguish trailing much of
my adolescence and twenties, masked well by my deliberately sunny
disposition and capabilities.
It felt a bit like an emotional roller-coaster. The best of times were
fuelled by a band of similarly single, childless friends, who holidayed
together, dined together, and gathered for breakfast and yoga on Sun-
day mornings. Then would come a low, brought on by not much, and
seemingly out of my control. I got hurt easily, crushed by the antics of
an unreliable or insensitive friend, or goings on at work, misconstru-
ing everything and allowing it to take up way too much of my head-
space. I cried a lot, at the push of a button. About feeling lost, unloved,
directionless, pointless. I was reluctant to inflict this on a child. One
generation was enough.
Someone inferred once, as a kind of joke, that I’d be no good with
children, and it stayed with me. ‘Would you like me to babysit?’ I’d
asked of their toddler.
16 JACINTA TYNAN

‘Are you serious?’ The guffaws were not intended to slice through
me. ‘You might lose her!’
I highly doubted that, but it reinforced my own inferior view of
myself: I was a self-obsessed career girl who had not yet managed to
find true love or lasting happiness let alone got it together in time to
have and look after a small person. It looked as though I wasn’t the
only one who thought it.
Aside from minding my own younger siblings, I had babysat
once — only once — as a teenager and it didn’t go well. The parents
were put out that their three-year-old was still awake when they got
home. Well, we were having fun (playing toddler cricket in the front
yard on a summer night) and no one had said anything about bedtime.
But it scared me off. My one failed attempt at looking after a child
(who wasn’t family) determined the course of my non-maternalness. It
clearly didn’t come naturally to me.
I got around it by sticking with family. That much I could handle.
I borrowed my nephews and niece and took them to the movies and
concerts: Cinderella on Ice, Walking With Dinosaurs, Santa’s Kingdom,
a Miley Cyrus movie, satisfying my deeper desire to commune with
kids, regaling their parents with the adorable things they said, with-
out having to commit to parenting myself. I took notes, once, of my
niece’s hilarious theatre commentary so I wouldn’t ever forget, my
heart flipping with adoration. Good-time aunty who could hand them
back by the end of the day; there was less risk of stuffing that up.
But it wouldn’t do in the long run. It would never be enough.
Beneath the layers of doubt, beneath the idea of myself as hapless and
hopeless, I knew otherwise. I didn’t just want to be a mother. I desired
it, a longing that kept me awake at night and gnawed at my gut at
the vaguest inkling that it might not happen. To not be a mother was
simply not an option. That would not be my life. I wasn’t sure how it
would come about, just that it would. Best I get myself sorted then, I
thought, before attempting to love a child of my own.

I took great heart from hearing stories of older women getting preg-
nant, including those I’ve never met: Naomi Watts at thirty-eight,
Halle Berry at forty-one, Nicole Kidman at forty, Geena Davis having
 MOTHER ZEN 17

twins at forty-seven. The slew of female celebrities giving birth after

thirty-five gave us ‘older women’ hope. But were we conveniently over-
looking the airbrushing, ignoring the fact that fame and money often
buys options: surrogacy (as in the case of Sarah Jessica Parker), adop-
tion (Michelle Pfeiffer and her first child), or donated eggs (which, at
the time of writing, funnily enough, no celebrity had owned up to).
I tried to practise the Law of Attraction, all the rage at the time,
and kept a pile of wishful thinking books by my bedside: The Wisdom
of Florence Scovel Shinn, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr
Joseph Murphy, The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent and Ask and
It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks (‘you are the creator of your own
reality’), several Wayne Dyers (top of the list, Manifest Your Destiny)
and Deepak Chopras, and not one but two well-thumbed copies of
Creative Visualisation by Shakti Gawain. I made a Vision Board fes-
tooned with magazine cutouts of babies and men with babies, includ-
ing a handsome dad holding a toddler aloft above his head in his
sinewy arms. In my daily stroll along the Bondi Beach promenade I
would close my eyes and imagine pushing a pram until I could almost
feel its handle enclosed in my fingers, my walking slowed by the weight
of my baby, a sweet smile of contentment plastered across my face.
I had a massage once where the masseuse got me to close my eyes
and imagine it: my child. And I did. I saw him/her. A chubby blond
baby at my feet (I couldn’t quite tell the gender; didn’t matter), beck-
oning to me its mother with outstretched arms. Other times I saw two
of them. A sign of things to come? Or wishful thinking? Whatever,
the image brought me peace.
I didn’t have a boyfriend but it wasn’t just logistics holding me back.
I was plagued by apprehension. If only I’d had more time to prepare.
Which is why I’m glad I had a deadline. Not a definitive date, of
course, but just that lurking inescapable knowledge that a woman’s
fertility declines after thirty-five — give or take — a subtle biological
whip-cracking that meant I couldn’t loiter on the sidelines forever.
Because such was my lack of faith in my ability to handle this toughest
job of my life (as I had been warned), I would have if I could have. I
needed to be pushed over the edge and time racing swiftly by was, in
my case, the only thing that would do that.
18 JACINTA TYNAN

Love in itself was not enough. A good man was not the incentive
I lacked for motherhood. I had been in love before but, when it came
to the crunch, so fearful was I of surrendering my heart fully, I always
found a way to duck out of it (often by giving them no choice but to do
it for me), causing immeasurable pain in the process (to me, at least).
But, at thirty-seven, when another good man came along, I stopped. I
was in no position by now to be letting love slip away, so I paid atten-
tion. Eventually.
We met on Sydney Harbour one Sunday afternoon on a friend of
a friend’s boat, me forgetting momentarily the clairvoyant who’d pre-
dicted, ‘You will get an invitation to go out on the water on a Sunday.
Say yes. It will change your life.’ I told him I wanted to be friends at
first. I had met him in the midst of a dating moratorium imposed
by my concerned and caring friend (and literary agent), Selwa, who
wanted me to recover properly from a string of hurtful encounters
with men who were not good for me before I fell for anyone else. I was
impressed that he took it well. Instead of going off in a huff of ‘I never
liked you anyway,’ or refusing to take no for an answer and pursuing
doggedly (as had happened to me before), he became my friend. When
I asked him once why he was happy with friendship, hanging around
when there was no apparent likelihood of it going further, he smiled
and said he liked spending time with me, ‘so I’ll take what I can get.’
It was a book that won me over. On my thirty-eighth birthday, he
bought me a first edition copy of the The Women’s Room with a card
about celebrating ‘another first edition’ (nice handwriting, I noted)
and, overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness, I thought I’d better sit up
and take notice. Thank goodness I did, because not only did I fall in
love, but this man was to be the father of my babies.
We had discussed it briefly: I was more ready than him to have a
baby, but at least he was open to the idea. So we dived in the deep end.
Though I was still not utterly convinced I was match fit, and wary as all
hell, time was getting the better of me. If I kept putting off motherhood,
I might miss out altogether. I was in love with a perfectly good man so
why not? It wasn’t going to get more optimal than this. Despite my mis-
givings I just hoped all my ardent soul searching would be worth it. That
by the time a baby came along, I would have defied my past and found it
in myself to be a responsible, loving, present, competent mother.
 MOTHER ZEN 19

I had no idea I was already pregnant when I turned up to the GP a

year or so later to discuss my fertility. I wanted to know the optimum
time to conceive. She drew me a little graph on the back of some scrap
paper with an asterisk on the days in the middle of my cycle where
I would likely be most fertile: between day nine and day fourteen.
‘There’s no need to have sex every day,’ she assured me, as if it was a
chore. She was surprised I didn’t know this already, at my age. ‘Well,
why would I?’ I smiled. ‘There’s never been any need to.’ I had always
just assumed any time was ‘danger time’.
The doctor, who looked younger than me, suggested I get myself a
thermometer so I could better gauge when I was ovulating; my tem-
perature was likely to go up 0.5 degrees on those crucial days. But
not always. And I wondered with such long odds how anyone ever
gets pregnant at all. Why has nature made it like a jackpot window
of incredible good fortune (or misfortune, depending on age and cir-
cumstances) to conceive a child?
‘So how long should we give it?’ I asked. ‘How long before we decide
it’s not going to happen naturally and we might have to look into IVF?’
‘How long have you been trying?’ She looked up at me over her
glasses.
‘Well, we haven’t really been trying as such. But we haven’t not been
trying either, if you know what I mean. It’s only been a few weeks but,
now that I know about this tiny ovulation window,’ I laughed, holding
up my take-home chart, ‘well, the timing has been considerably out.’
‘Then give it a bit longer.’ She smiled reassuringly. ‘Let nature take
its course.’
I sighed in relief and picked up my bag to leave.
‘Oh, hang on a minute,’ the doctor said. She is staring at the com-
puter screen, motioning to my date of birth, looking mildly alarmed.
‘Actually, probably best you don’t wait. You are in the danger zone.’
The danger zone. At thirty-nine.
She advised I get to an IVF specialist quick-sticks, just to cover my
bases, and sent me off with a referral for a hormone test.
‘Your partner should probably get checked out too, you know,’ she
added. ‘To see if the problem is with him.’
The problem? We weren’t pregnant within weeks (without even
‘trying’) and it was a problem?
20 JACINTA TYNAN

I knew the stats. How could I not? That a woman’s fertility declines
rapidly after thirty-five before taking a massive plummet at forty. I just
didn’t realise it was dangerous. I’d had plenty of friends get pregnant
in their late thirties and assumed it was more common than not. ‘A
spring chicken,’ one doctor called my thirty-eight-year-old pregnant
friend. Compared to all the forty-plus women filing into his rooms,
she was. That had given me hope when I was thirty-seven and single,
and it gave me more hope when I was thirty-nine and in love with a
man who was up for having babies with me.
I went straight to the chemist next door to the medical centre to
buy a thermometer. The woman serving me probably assumed that,
at my age, I was buying it to take my children’s temperatures. Until I
threw in a pregnancy test as well.
For the first time in my life I hoped my period would stay away. The
usual signs were there, the ones I had got to know well after almost
thirty years straight of menstruating: swelling breasts, tinges in my
abdomen, a dull headache. But the GP had told me you could get all
that and still be pregnant. So, just maybe … Also for the first time in
my life I worked out the day when my period was due. And it came.
And went. I Googled ‘how do I know I’m pregnant?’ and ticked all the
boxes: missed period, morning sickness (is that what that queasiness
was?), skin around nipples darkens (I’d just had a spray tan so hard to
tell), extreme tiredness (that too), frequent urination (is four times a
night normal?) …
Then, with a pounding heart, I sliced open the chemist-bought
pregnancy test, used it, and saw for myself, rushing it in to show my
man as the two of us watched the wonder unfold. Two pink lines.
I took great delight in going back to the GP waving the magic wand
with the pretty pink stripes for a blood test to be certain: it was then
license to call off the IVF visits, fertility tests and sperm counts and be
referred instead to an obstetrician. Phew! I was heading off to the ones
who delivered babies, not the ones who made them.
‘You are very, very lucky.’ She grinned, shaking her head in awe and
writing a prescription for my already-set-in morning sickness.
We were very lucky. Conception is like a waiting list. There is a
perception that you must ‘do your time’. I felt like I was jumping the
queue — getting a job for which others were so much more qualified.
 MOTHER ZEN 21

There was not an ounce of smugness in my heart as I headed down

Gestation Road. I had no idea why I’d slipped through the net.
My mother was fertile — I am one of six — and my three sis-
ters (a third pregnant with her first baby just a few months ahead of
me) all conceived with ease. My grandmother, also a mother of six,
famously said to Mum when she announced her sixth pregnancy and
wondered how it could have possibly happened, ‘You’ve got to watch
those things. They crawl up from the foot of the bed. You can’t kill
them with an axe.’ But genetics is no guarantee in the fertility stakes.
Falling pregnant after thirty-five carries with it equal parts elation —
glorious fortune has shone upon you — and guilt. Conception guilt.
What right did I have for this rarest of blessings to be bestowed upon
me while others suffered? One friend who I rang to tell the happy
news squealed with delight before hastily adding, ‘Oh, dear. What
will I tell Laura?’ Laura is a friend of hers who’d been attempting to
get pregnant for years. ‘She’s going to be devastated,’ she speculated.
‘What, by my pregnancy?’ I asked.
‘It’s just she won’t get why it’s not happening for her.’
Despite this growing awareness of my good fortune, when I found
out I was pregnant, delighted as I was with the concept, I still had a
bit of adapting to do. I was relieved I had time to get my head around
it — eight months to be exact. I’m convinced that’s why humans
require nine months’ gestation. It’s not so much for the babies as it is
for the mothers: just enough time to brace ourselves. To gently pre-
pare. Not for the buying of cots and prams or painting of nurseries —
although there is that too — but enough time to grow up. To take
deep breaths and accept the era of childishness, of dependence — of
independence — is over. I was about to be the one dishing out uncon-
ditional love when I was not at all convinced I knew how. Not some-
thing anyone can come to terms with overnight.
And, yes, as much as I wanted to be a mother to the depths of my
soul — it was even quite possibly, I was starting to think, my reason
for being, I was anxious about the disruption. I had been warned end-
lessly about how bloody hard it was going to be. And that was before
I got pregnant. ‘Get to the movies now because you’ll never go again,’
one friend — a mother-of-two — advised ominously. No movies I
could deal with, but I was more anxious over predictions of two hours’
22 JACINTA TYNAN

sleep a night, persistent crying for seemingly no reason (the baby, that
is, but quite possibly the mother too), that I’d be in my PJs all day
because there’s no time to change, and a shower only if I was lucky.
No yoga classes or strolls on the beach ever again, my career on an
inevitable downwards slide, feeling out of control and not having any
answers — all that was one giant daunting abyss and I wasn’t sure I
had the mettle for it. The consistent theme as I edged closer to join-
ing the motherhood ranks myself, building in crescendo once I got
pregnant and was in the game for real, was that it was arduous and
relentless and required the patience of a saint. And it scared the hell
out of me. I could hardly even deal with the thought of it. So I didn’t.
I took to my bed instead.
In that, I had no choice. Within weeks of getting pregnant I was
floored by the most debilitating all-day sickness (if only it had been just
the morning). I threw up several times a day and felt seasick for the rest
of it. I couldn’t stomach anything except dry crackers, Cheesels, and
slow sips of flat Staminade. Not even sleep was a respite; I woke often
pre-dawn with the compulsion to hurl. I kept a bucket by my bed for
easy access and lay on my back for every minute that I didn’t need —
really need — to be up. Such as my job. I managed to front up there —
most days — but only just. Being a TV news presenter — appearing
live on air for six hours at a time (on slow news day) — was a little
tricky to navigate with quease as my default state, so I timed my vomits
for the sports breaks, whipping off my clip-on lapel microphone and
bolting off set in the four-minute slot to get to the bathroom and throw
up, stopping for a quick pat down of my hair, a powder of my nose,
and a quick swig of water, then slipping subtly back into the presenter’s
chair in time for the throwback. The throwback from the throw up.
‘And that’s all in sport; Jacinta?’
‘Thanks, Craig, and let’s check today’s weather now …’ Grinning
warmly as if nothing was at all amiss, when really I was sitting upright
by the thinnest of margins. I was immensely tempted to place my head
quietly on the news desk and close my eyes. Forever. It took all my
inner strength not to follow that urge.
I accepted an invitation — how could I not? — to be a guest on
The First Tuesday Book Club on ABC TV. It was a big call. Trying to
appear bookish and worldly among folk of that ilk, while struggling
 MOTHER ZEN 23

to hold back vomit. The book we were discussing was Revolutionary

Road. I had always meant to read it, so here was the perfect excuse,
but the subject matter was confronting for a woman in my state. April
Wheeler, a girl who could have been an actress if she hadn’t got married
too young, is considered insane when really she’s just railing against
the ‘hopeless emptiness’, the conformity of being a wife and mother.
The worst thing was, I couldn’t tell anyone my news. It was too early
in the piece. But how I would have loved to tell the host, Jennifer Byrne,
who, on the only other occasion I had met her had pulled me aside and
urged me (after reading all my ‘single girl’ columns in the newspaper)
to not miss out on having children. ‘It’s more important than any of
the rest of it,’ she had said, or something to that effect. Here I was sit-
ting opposite her on national television, in front of a studio audience,
taking her advice and, in that moment, at least, paying the price. I had
rehearsed some answers (I couldn’t trust myself to think too hard on
the spot) and I stuck to the script. I wasn’t at my eloquent best, but to
make it through without throwing up was the main thing.
I also agreed to host a quiz show. Not televised this time, thank
goodness, but taken very seriously by brainy schoolkids all over the
country. It was sponsored by National Geographic, and tested the
cream of geography students on their knowledge of the world, with an
international flight promised to the winner. The room was tense, the
stakes were high: a huge digital timer ticked over to signal time up on
each question, as earnest kids with sensible haircuts closed their eyes to
summon the right answer. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to sit down,’ I said sud-
denly, cutting through the silence, breaking the mood. I had held on as
long as I could but, being on my feet that long, I was fair about to faint.
I know why I got it, the all-day-sickness. Everyone, from mothers
past and present to medical professionals, insists it’s a random hor-
monal curse that happens to strike some and not others — but I was
not so sure. Maybe the whole point of morning sickness is to force the
mother to stop and rest so the baby can grow. Evolutionarily speaking,
are we designed to run around working at the same time as building a
human? I certainly wasn’t.
Really, I suspect I created it, that the twenty-four-hour, twenty-
four-week nausea was a symptom of my resistance to my new life (my
now certain future), while simultaneously preventing me from having
24 JACINTA TYNAN

to face it. It was nature’s way of obscuring my trepidation over what I

was about to take on. ‘I’m scared that by having a baby I am signing off
on my career for good,’ I wrote in my diary at the time. Pregnancy —
and childbirth and child-raising — is all about surrendering, about
relinquishing control. I was struggling with both. Dad-to-be could see
it. ‘Mourning sickness’ he called it. I was mourning my old life.
I went to see Sky, the beautiful, wise psychologist who had coun-
selled me through several destructive relationships over the previous
four years, and who was convinced that my time would come. We had
been working on helping me see that I deserved to fall in love with
a good man and have a family, an understanding that proved elusive
at the time. No wonder she cried when I told her the news, leaping
up from her chair to embrace me. ‘Oh, I am just so happy!’ She stood
back to regard me, her hands in prayer position. It must have seemed
like mission accomplished.
‘So am I. I really am …’ I stammered. ‘But …’
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
‘Is this the death of my career?’
I don’t think she could quite believe, after all my talk of wanting to
have a family of my own, that I was asking that. But she also under-
stands it’s not all I want. She reassured me that my career will always
be there. If, indeed, I wanted it to be.
I also went to a hypnotherapist, the same one I had seen to ‘clear my
negative blocks’ about meeting a good man. (I had all hands on deck.)
‘You are being forced into neutral,’ she said of the incessant nausea
taking me hostage. ‘You have no choice but to be in the moment, to
sit still, because you don’t have the energy for anything else.’ It’s for
the baby’s sake as much as mine, she tells me. To save the baby from
absorbing my ‘angst’. ‘The message is to surrender,’ she concluded.
‘You must erase the conflict between you, your career and your baby.
They will all support each other, side by side like railway tracks.’
After counting me into a trance (which felt much like hanging back
on the recliner with my eyes closed, a water feature trickling in the
background and a scented candle on the loose), she whispered away
like a medieval witch doctor, then, with another gentle count, brought
me ‘to’, and assured me the job was done. ‘The story in your head
that career must be established first before you have a baby has now
 MOTHER ZEN 25

changed. It’s not one or the other. You will soon see that. This baby
will be the making of you.’
I liked the sound of that. I really did. But I was still sick as a dog.
So I tried tapping. Dad-to-be emailed me a ‘tapping therapy exer-
cise’ ebook he’d found on the internet. Also known as Emotional
Freedom Techniques (EFT) it ‘works’ by tapping acupuncture points
on the body and repeating affirmations out loud to clear up ailments,
physical and emotional. ‘Even though I have this morning sickness, I
completely love and accept myself,’ was my line. Over and over I said
it while tapping the most obscure places — under my nose, beneath
my little finger, on top of my head, and just under my armpit. I felt
relief in the sheer force of taking my mind off the problem at hand
but, for the rest of the day, it didn’t touch the sides. I was told much
later by someone who knows about tapping (it turns out tapping is a
‘thing’), that I perhaps should have tried the phrase ‘all-day sickness’.
The ‘morning’ part, in my case, was decidedly inaccurate.
I tried acupuncture too. Why the hell not? A gentle midwife and
doula-in-training named Heather, who I also knew personally, stuck
tiny needles all over me, assuring me it would make the same differ-
ence she had seen with countless other clients in my state. She sent
me home with a little pack of homeopathic pregnancy remedies. I was
tempted to skol the lot. ‘Call me if you need me,’ she offered kindly. So
I did. ‘It’s not working!’ I wailed down the phone to the poor woman
one morning from my bed. ‘Try to get rest,’ she reminded me. ‘And
hang in there.’ I was clearly a lost cause. ‘I’m so over this,’ I protested
often to my chandelier, which was in my direct line of sight more than
anything else at that time.
But the hiatus had its payoffs. By being rendered virtually immo-
bile and robbed of the headspace to think clearly, I was thrust into the
unanticipated luxury of shutdown mode. It meant I couldn’t — even
if I’d wanted to — whip myself up about my ability to mother well,
or not. I was growing a baby and that’s about all I was capable of. Just
the here and now.
I was in denial. Now that it was really happening — that mother-
hood was not one day, someday but actually fast approaching — I had
escalated from mildly daunted to terrified and, if it weren’t for the
nausea distracting me, could well have been overwhelmed. Even so, I
26 JACINTA TYNAN

fretted over whether I’d be able to cope. Those women who do — friends
and sisters I see taking motherhood in their stride, for example — are
exceptions, surely. Revered and rare natural-born mothers, and I was
not one of them. Whether it was the filter I selected because you hear
what you want to hear or whether it is the predominate wail of our
time, all I seemed to hear about through my pregnancy was the bad
stuff, and I took on the understanding that being a mother would suck
the life out of me.
I didn’t walk into one baby shop — not one. I didn’t peruse one
cot, pram or cute little outfit. It wasn’t just the all-day-sickness that
held me back but that an expedition to Baby-and-Beyond would have
made it more real than I was ready for. Luckily, my man, the enthusi-
astic Dad-to-be, picked up the slack. Hunting for new baby necessities
became his obsession, jumping onto chat rooms and parent consumer
websites for the lowdown on the most practical choices, and scouring
eBay for the best deals. He bought the Leander bassinet and matching
sheets before I had even heard of the brand and was handed down a
Mountain Buggy pram. He stockpiled a baby bath, onesies and a tiny
towel with hood in the shape of a turtle, and traded in my Mini for a
car with room to change a baby in the back, all while I lay in bed with
morning sickness. He subscribed to a pregnancy website for weekly
updates about the progress of our foetus, forwarding them to me to
keep me in the loop. He arrived at my apartment one night with a
cheery yellow copy of Up The Duff and various other baby parapherna-
lia. ‘I think I’m more excited than you are,’ he said once. He probably
was. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself back then.
We didn’t even move house — into the same house, that is, as each
other, a house with a room for our baby-to-be — until days before he
was born. It’s not like I could go looking at real estate while bent, as I
was, over a bucket.
The chemist gave me a sample bag with my maxi container of Preg-
nancy and Breastfeeding Gold vitamin tablets. It contained, among
other handy items, breast pads (I had no idea what for), nipple cream
(my mind boggled), nappy-rash cream samples and a dummy. It didn’t
get me in the mood. It just made me more wary. There was no baby
yet, hence there was no breastfeeding, hence why did I need all this
stuff? I wanted to be left in peace to just lie back and let the baby grow,
wallowing in my own apathy.
 MOTHER ZEN 27

I didn’t drop the ball on air, thank goodness, but I did in real
life in front of a couple of hundred women celebrating International
Women’s Day with me as their guest speaker. At their kind invitation
and against my better judgment I had trekked to the Ex-Servicemen’s
Club in Boorowa, a country town about 330 kilometres southwest of
Sydney, where my youngest sister, mother of (then) two, happens to
live after marrying a local farmer, our youngest brother’s best friend.
They wanted me to talk about my books, specifically the one about
my journey to meet a man in my thirties, something titillatingly for-
eign to women who married in their early twenties, most of them
to no-nonsense farmers, and wasted no time knuckling down to the
business of starting families. The life of a late-thirties woman in the
city with a career and no bloke (although I was able to mollify their
concerns by informing them I had at last found a perfectly lovely one
of those who was waiting outside) and a rapidly diminishing window
to procreate (one I had wriggled through barely eight weeks earlier,
though that information I wouldn’t be sharing) was equally as fas-
cinating to them as it was calamitous, and they wanted every detail.
I stood behind a wooden church-like pulpit on a small semi-circle
stage, where generations of children singing their hearts out at end-of-
year concerts would have stood before me, and countless town meet-
ings would have been held on all manner of bush concerns, and Anzac
services, one a year, since it was built in 1952. There was a portrait of a
young Queen Elizabeth II over my shoulder and I wondered whether
she got morning sickness and if so how did she manage her official
engagements? Much later her granddaughter-in-law was forced to pull
out of her formal appearances and lie low with a very public bout of
hyperemesis gravidarum, giving her no choice but to tell the world
long before the traditional twelve-week mark. I had psyched myself up
to make it through the next allocated half hour to a cool drink and a
sit down. But I didn’t make it.
About ten minutes in — at the bit where I shared the story of
losing my first love at nineteen, the sadness of which I’m sure the
women assumed was the reason for my melodramatic falter — came
an understandable dramatic pause while I collected myself … and I
collapsed. The whole scene went black and I knew there was no way
out. ‘Umm … I’m s-sorry …’ I stammered, mid sentence, gripping
that rickety lectern with all my might. ‘I need to sit down.’ And so I
28 JACINTA TYNAN

did. And not very gracefully. It was rather more like a slump than a
swoon, legs askew in my pretty mauve Leona Edmiston frock. Organ-
isers leapt up on stage and gathered around me then, in full view of my
enthralled and captive audience — all the good women of the town —
I threw up into the Paul’s ice-cream bucket a quick-thinking CWA
member (in all likelihood, given her sensibility) had thrust under my
chin as she rubbed my back with her spare broad and trusty palm.
When I was done I was led backstage in a cluster of reassuring arms
to a floral-carpeted anteroom filled with dusty props for the Christ-
mas pageant. I lay on my back on the floor, allowing the efficient and
practical throng to buzz about; someone popped a wet facecloth on
my brow, as someone else offered me shortbread from a circular tin
depicting a Scottish highland fox hunt and a lemon cordial with ice.
I didn’t come clean, — I didn’t tell them I was ‘in the family
way’ — although I would be most surprised, given they have seen all
this before, if they didn’t surmise my condition. They were naturally
far too polite to pry. At only eight weeks along and with only me and
Dad-to-be in the know, I certainly wasn’t about to ’fess up to a room-
ful of strangers — as kind and caring as they were — before anyone
else. So once the blood had returned to my head, I bravely and gaily
popped back on stage and reassured my audience with a giggle that all
was well — it was just the heat and the heels (though my feet were now
bare, the first ever on that stage, I bet) — and ‘now, where were we?’
Driving home — Dad-to-be at the wheel, thank goodness — my
seat reclined and my legs up on the dashboard, we headed straight for
casualty (via McDonalds drive-through for a cheeseburger, for which
I had an rare and inexplicable craving) at the same hospital where
I was booked in to give birth in seven months’ time, and lined up
with the physically wounded to ask if there was anything, anything
they could do for someone in my condition. It seemed I wasn’t the
first pregnant woman to turn up in desperation, and not for being in
labour or even close to. I was issued a standard injection of Maxolon
in the triage room to settle the nausea then ordered home to bed. It
was either that or an intravenous drip that would take two hours, and
I couldn’t do two hours. At least, unlike so many despairing people in
that grey waiting room, their sallow eyes fixed on So You Think You
Can Dance on the tiny monitors mounted on the wall, mine was a
 MOTHER ZEN 29

temporary condition with a likely happy outcome. I expected, though,

that I would recover only when I truly said yes to my baby, to being its
mother, with every fibre of my being. Which would be great. If only I
knew how to do it.
In the meantime Dad-to-be said he would confiscate my car keys
if I went anywhere that week. I was under strict instructions to rest
and hydrate or, according to one text message, to ‘Change Eat Pray
Love for drink sleep love.’ (Like most women of my generation I was
reading the book.) Unbeknown to me, he rang my boss and, telling
him I had gastro (well, the symptoms were similar), arranged for me
to have the rest of the week off work. I had rarely taken a sick day in
my life (could count them on one hand) and I wasn’t about to start
now, so I would never have made the call myself. But he could see
what I couldn’t see: that if this went on much longer I was destined
for collapse.
Despite all his precautions I dragged myself to a good friend’s wed-
ding, but spent the duration slumped in the back pew white as a ghost
then slipped out the side door to a courtyard to vomit in a plastic
shopping bag. There was a hole in the bag, dammit. I watched help-
lessly as vomit pooled in my lap on my pretty lace dress. My baby, it
seemed, had joined forces with its father and was giving me no choice
but to put my feet up. And so I did.
‘I know how you feel,’ Dad-to-be told me one day perched on the end
of my bed. He had been seasick on the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.
‘Sometimes it gets so bad you’ll be looking over the side of the yacht and
think, “One little slide and it could all be over”,’ he said. ‘It does happen
in sailing circles. That’s one of the reasons they strap them in.’
I would have taken offshore racing any day.
A lightweight chick-lit novel someone lent me at the time summed
it up much better than I did: ‘Imagine beings seasick for thirty-four
weeks with no sign of land or medication. Now double that feeling.
You’re almost there,’ quips the narrator in The Starter Wife.
We ventured out to my friend Shamini’s picnic in Centennial Park
one Sunday afternoon, and I spent the duration lying under a tree,
sipping ginger beer. My friends asked, concerned, if something was
up. ‘Just tired,’ I said. I stayed on after the others had all gone home,
circling the tree trying to make myself dizzy enough to throw up.
30 JACINTA TYNAN

There was some relief with throwing up. ‘It’s very exciting,’ Dad-to-be
says, watching me circumnavigate the tree. And I wonder when the
time will be right to break the news to our friends and families, who
by now must have been starting to wonder.
It was very exciting. But, still, on some level I wanted to know,
why me?
If there is such a thing as pre-natal depression then I think I had
it. This was supposed to be a joyous time — this wait for a new baby,
a first baby, especially at nearly forty, when I should be basking in a
sea of gratitude — but I was as flat as a tack. I had had depression
before — memories still raw of the hopelessness and darkness — and
this was looking eerily similar. And so I feared its return. At this rate I
would be a prime candidate for postnatal depression, or at least for the
much more common and less serious baby blues, and this onset before
the baby was even born did not auger well. I needed to take action. I
needed to embrace my looming motherhood quick sticks — for my
sake and the baby’s — or I was doomed. I had to find a way to get my
head around it, to gear me up for what was in store.
I wrote in my diary:

I haven’t given much thought to the baby because I’ve been so

distracted by the nausea. It’s all I’ve been able to concentrate
on. But this morning as I lie in bed (for the third day in a
row) I have rested my hands on my abdomen — or a bit
lower, where I know our baby is growing. I am sending love
through my hands.

I did enjoy occasional ripples of excitement and anticipation about

meeting the little person inside me, especially when I started feeling
it wriggling around. Much later, watching it slide across my stomach,
limbs jutting and jarring, became my greatest obsession, and I laid
awake until all hours because I couldn’t bear to part even momentarily
with the wonder, with my new love. ‘Just one more kick and then
lights out,’ I would tell myself — and my baby — but I always allowed
a few more trying to catch it with the palm of my hand. Is that a foot?
An elbow? A tiny bum? I tried out names too, saying them out loud to
my belly to see what flowed. And I had moments where I pictured us
 MOTHER ZEN 31

together (there was time enough for imagining), me cuddling our little
one or watching him or her crawl around at my feet, catching smiling
and feeling utterly content. I knew I had love to give — lots of it, a
huge stockpile — and wondered if love would be enough.
‘There is great wisdom in desire,’ Sky told me at the time. She meant
if I desired this (which, she knew better than anyone I did) my desire
would give direction and guidance. I could do this. Not your garden-
variety psychologist but one who believes in the spiritual realm, Sky
also assured me this was all part of a grander plan she referred to as the
soul journey. ‘This baby chose you to come into this dimension,’ she
said with such clarity that who was I to doubt it? ‘You three are a soul
group orchestrating for the baby to come through. It is time.’
I tried to convince myself too, writing in my diary:

Right now in this moment I am having a baby. It is one of

those rare moments in my life when I know it’s meant to be
because it has all happened with such little effort. There was
no angst involved, or coercion. It just transpired. This baby
is meant to come and it is meant to be ours. And there’s so
much potential for peace in that. Everything else will find a
way around it.

As my time grew closer it suddenly troubled me that I didn’t know

any lullabies. I bet other mums-to-be did. I know I’m supposed to
start singing to my baby — even in the womb, they say — but what?
What do I sing? ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ came back to me, but
that was all I had. I’m not a play-music kind of woman (I’m embar-
rassed to admit), so I didn’t have much else in my repertoire. My
baby mostly got news radio in the car.
I worried that all my apathy, unpreparedness and avoidance might
have an impact on the baby, even in utero. There’s a school of thought
that the baby is influenced by the dominant emotions of the parents —
dads too — from the moment of conception. According to Thomas
Verny, a psychiatrist and co-author of the best-selling The Secret Life
of the Unborn Child, and a leading authority on the effect of the pre-
natal environment on babies: ‘From the moment of conception, the
experiences in the womb shape the brain and lay the groundwork for
32 JACINTA TYNAN

personality, emotional temperament and the power of higher thought.’

If that were so, we were stuffed.
But I couldn’t be concerned about any of that. As if pregnancy
isn’t taxing enough, the stress about being stressed can get too much
to bear. I do not just exist to grow a baby. I am not an incubator. I
have very real and present emotions (mostly lingering around fear at
that time), which, as much as I would have liked to, I could not just
flick a switch to turn on to happy-go-lucky and inner calm. For that,
I needed a few more months.
Then two things happened to snap me out of it, and snap me into it.
My veil of nausea started to dissolve — ever so gradually, but enough
for me to see the light and imagine a life without having to take a
supply of Qantas sick bags with me everywhere. (Dad-to-be grabbed
bulk supplies on a business trip to cover me for those inconvenient
moments. Incidentally, he also found some purpose-built Morning
Chicness bags, and ordered fifty from the US. Fifty!)
And I learnt to meditate. I’m not sure which happened first — I’m
certain there was some overlap — but have no doubt one led to the
other. And only then — only then with four months to go — did I
start to sense thicker threads of joy and anticipation, and with them
the slightest inklings of faith. Perhaps I was ready for this. Maybe I,
like so many billions of women before me, could make a go of this. I
had the stuff to be a mother. I was being called to action.

Lesson Learned
Despite my doubts about my ability to mother another, despite my
past threatening to overwhelm my present, I am mother material. I
have what it takes. Love will be enough.