Pelvic Floored - FridayFlash

I cuddled up in the marital bed with a ciggy and my new book for some warmth and understanding. Just trying to reclaim some time for myself. To stretch out a little piece of night and smooth out the wrinkles of day. But my corporeal gristle has long since lost its elasticity ...

I was awakened by the familiar aubade from the room next door. But a yet more pressing stimulation, was the driving ache just beneath my shoulder blade. “I’ll be in in a minute Amy”. Valueless to a pre-lingual. “Mummy’s coming” Just perverse.

I groped for the novel that had become furled in the bedsheets. I bent an arm beneath my spine arched for access. Pain spasm. The throb of my shoulder now swamped by the mushrooming cloud of electro-chemical payload, radiating from the ground zero of my canted back. Click-click went the pain geiger counter in my head. Ack-ack came the less than transcendent neuronal response. And all the while, I seemed insensate to the stream of refugee signals emanating from that numbed tributary of the pinned arm, propping up my entire lumpy weight into the contortion. I don’t seem very connected up this morning. Except through a network of pain knitting me together. Oh, and my alarm-clock only reads five-seventeen am. Morning has broken me ...

Sure enough, there it was, my late-night abscondee. With several pages fed back at the edge into an earlier part of the story, shredding narrative flow. The contents less imprinted on my mind, rather now informing the sinew of my back. A feedback loop. Book-suffering-book-pain-book. Silently screaming, ‘Leave this nightmarish scenario! Get yourself out!’ “Coming Darling. Mummy’s coming in right now”. There’s your loop for you. A perfectly enclosed system. A vicious/virtuous circle. With the creased pages, the book no longer sat flush when closed. Feedback becomes distortion, when you’re plugged into someone else’s amplified instincts.

Feedback as the principle of engagement. Each child’s cry, a blip on the radarscope of parenting. The calculus of neglect. How many blips before targeting your response exactly right? Too few or too many, either proffers a lifetime of depth charged unforgiveness. But first, there is a mewling infant to attend to.

*

Thus does literature go the same way as needlepoint, am-dram and cycling. Replaced in my hormonal biochemistry by caffeine, nicotine and TV daydream.

My body shape has altered too. The mesomorphic legs of that cyclist peddling for all she’s worth, now distended to those of an endomorph.

On the plus side, having either to hoick about an exponentially growing child (or her exponentially regressing sister) in both arms; or performing a balancing act, bracing baby in one, while conducting some suddenly minutely calibrated task with the other, has toned my upper body.

However, my overall post-labour, stretched flesh-rather-than-muscle disposition, delineates a phenotype for me which could only be described as that of a fat blob. Regaled at the convenience store with “When’s it due?”, “Boy or girl?", until my blazing red eyes laser-guides their gaze down through the glass counter at Amy in the buggy.

I’m paunching above my weight.