Gemma-Rose Turnbull

We went to an Ice Festival. Tried to catch some fish by jiggling our baitless rods through the holes in the ice. Failed. Got colder than I thought was even possible. Ate tasty rice sugar pancakes (as modeled by Adorable Child #3 in pink and silver) in attempt to get warm. Two of them. Burnt my lip at the hot, oozing, sugar syrup, but only achieved brief belly warmth. Ate a silk worm at Michael’s insistence – okay taste, terrible texture – did nothing to get me warm. Stood by the fire. Temporary illusion of warmth. Drank some Makkoli, which was pleasantly boozy. Chattered teeth and stomped feet. Ate fish that someone else caught. Drank more – started to feel warm-ish, or more immune to cold. Clapped hands and jitter-bugged from foot to foot to try and get some heat into my bones. Kept drinking. Laughed at slowly spreading woozy warmness. Went home feeling victorious even though no fish were caught.

We had more fun than it looks. These photos distill the chaos, the heat, the noise and the sizzlingly delicious smells into stillness. It wasn’t quiet like this. The food was delicious, the Soju was flowing, and my best friend Blythe took that photograph of me. She, rightfully, insisted on it.

The snowfall started quickly, sneaking out of the dark winter sky, stealthy and quiet. Just casually swirling its way to the ground, nothing to note. But I grew up on the beach, and I’ve never got over it being exotically exciting. I threw myself outside, and stuck my tongue out, suddenly a red-cheeked kid excited to catch flakes which melted as they hit the warmth of my breath. Some guy wandered past and smiled at me. He turned and followed me, asking where I was from. When I said Australia he couldn’t conceal his look of disappointment and double checked ‘Not American?’, before fading into the white flaked dark. I laughed at his hang-dog face, and kept delighting in the powdery fluff that crunched sandily underfoot. It was winter magic, like a huge hand had sifted icing sugar over Seoul, making everything sweeter and prettier. Which is such a damn cliche that I walked for several blocks trying to come up with another analogy. But I just couldn’t.

Love is not consolation. It is light. Friedrich Nietzsche

The light poured in through the windows, thin fingers picking out the edges of the faces of these people who I love. The orange of my favourite wool scarf umber under its hot gaze, glowing the edges of Blythe’s red top, and drawing a line down Ash’s nose. Making everything more beautiful. Making me love them more somehow (is that even possible?) for being so patient with my exuberant click-click-clicking. For understanding my terror at losing the last moments of warmth, and letting me enjoy the shiny moment where I fall in love with photographing all over again.

I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this? Haruki Murakami

Then there are all the photographs I didn’t take. My heart was a bit sore, and I wanted the sunshine on my skin, setting the sea water into salty tide marks up my shins. I wanted to lie and look at the full moon from my spot on the beach, and feel the sand, cold underneath me. I wanted to ride through the waves, crashing and tumbling into them like I was braver than I am, the dog paddling after me, doggedly. I wanted to stand and cut fruit in the kitchen, monotonous chopping, chopping, chopping. The lime juice I squeezed over the top stinging the scratch on my hand. I wanted to see the afternoon light haloing the small girl and her doggy friend as we walked home across the bridge, and I wanted to feel her weight in my arms as we stood in the cool evening light at the local fair. I wanted to float, water flooding my ears, in the creek we had churned to brown with our paddling. I wanted to hold hands, and drink cups of tea. And vodka at night. In a tall glass, no ice. A holiday. A real one.

So I only took three photos.

I found this lino months ago in my friend Tess’s beach house. I told her that I wanted it and I’ve been anxious ever since that she’d throw it out. I’ve got the roll of it now (and the two layers of older lino underneath) and I’m happy. I feel unreasonably attached to it. The pattern, and its age and the thought of all the lives that have been lived on it. All the feet walking over it, and the laughter, the tears, the measured pace of time rolling on, wearing its layers off.

I think it was the hair that got me. Days later it is still the hair that I’m thinking about. Little waves of it, slicked to her scalp by the way she had entered the world. Dried and curly with the remnants of birth. And her tiny lips, puckered ready for kissing. But this babe hadn’t entered peacefully, and the way her head lay, her tiny feet, her hands and her chest pinpricked with the texture of the towel that covered her, was testament to the lack of breath in her lungs.

Her mouth, that sweet kissable mouth, was dark and seemed to frown somehow. It was like she was sad she knew she’d almost made it from that deep dark place in her Mums belly to that safe milky spot on her chest. Still she lay there, a lovely chubby girl, and I took what I could of her for a memento. I took her face, her hands crossed over her little heart, her feet, everything I could get into my camera for safe keeping, and then I walked out into the relentless summer sunshine, to a world that moved on, paying no heed to the loss of her small breaths, and a parking ticket.

It was then, photographing the second dead child in less than an hour*, that the midwife had turned to me and said “This part is the hardest part. I hate it”. And I knew she meant what I was feeling, that those little lifeless bodies, were more than their size. So many hopes and dreams, even expectations, were tucked up into their teeny hearts, under their miniature fingernails, in the wave of those birth formed curls, that they should have been 1000 feet tall not so terribly, terribly, eternally small.

In that same breath she’d asked me why I did it? Why?

I’d gotten up that morning, to a house full of family sleeping off the excesses of Christmas, and nabbed my niece off a sister thankful for the chance of some extra sleep. I’d had too many champagnes the day before to try for my own lie in, and greedily wanted P’s nine-month-old morning smiles to myself before the family rose and started the slightly competitive game of baby pass-the-parcel (each vying to be the apple of her delightful eyes).

We’d cuddled on the couch, and I’d nestled my nose into the soft folds of her darling little neck, absorbing her. I was born, and then much later so was she, into a family that loves babies. We’re not many, us lot, but we are treasured. Dad was stoked to be a father and welcomed us with home baked bread, and a spot on his chest that I still, thirty something years later, tuck myself into. Mum adored us completely, lavishing us with love, and delighting in our every moment. Then later, when we became a blended family, and I had two more sisters, and another Mum, we were chucked into this big melting pot of love-each-other (with a dash of exasperated just-get-along-you-lot) and told we could be anything we wanted.

We weren’t planned kids, nor the children of people who had tried for long, tiresome and tear filled years to conceive. We were just a raggedy bunch of ratbags, four stroppy girls, who grew up loved. And now the next generation has come along, perfect and kissable and delicious (yes, even at 5am). We’re also a family that throws the kids around, each of us rolling up our sleeves and mucking in with the tantrums, the nappies, the baths, the reading of books, the feeding and the entertaining. Each of us measuring ourselves in children, all adding slightly differently. For me; two nephews and a niece, who have changed my life in the most magnificent and unexpected ways.

I’ve lain with them, just to watch them breathe as they sleep, and my arms have been solace for their hurt. I’ve snuck them healthy chocolate crackles for breakfast (to steal from Roald Dahl “A stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY”), and I’ve told them off for drawing on the wall. My eldest nephew gets a delighted look on his face when I tell him I was the first person to see his face (he laughs too when I tell him he was a cranky squawk of thing who yelled his displeasure on arrival). I might not have grown any of them in my belly, and I may never grow any of them in my belly, but they are my babies too. And that’s the answer to her question.

I walked into the morgue the day after Christmas to give something to that mother whose dreams had ended when her tiny girl had died after 22 weeks inside her because of my babies. Because I’ve learned the value of each of their little breaths. And it was confronting photographing this perfect babe, who was impossibly small. Teeny tiny everything, teeny tiny everything except for how much she was loved. And a photograph is no tradeoff for the life her parents had started to colour in for her, nor for the anticipation of who she was going to become, but it’s all I have to give.

The midwife stood next to me, cooing at the tiny girl, who had come into the world before she had even had a name, about how precious she was, and how much she was loved. And although her small body was without any flicker of life, it seemed like the right thing to do. To talk to her as we photographed her. She paused too, and asked me if I was okay? It was a yes-and-no answer. Yes. I was. Because this moment was good, hard but good, and though it was just the three of us in that pastel walled viewing room, with its bland furniture and soothing palette, we were doing some more substantial than our surrounding suggested. And no, I wasn’t. Because I could see the pictures I was taking in the hands of someone who should have been holding her baby instead.

After I grabbed the parking ticket from under my wiper I drove to my sisters house. P squeaked her funny baby hello and spider-crawled across the room to my feet. I swept her up for a sniff of her sweaty summer skin, and kissed her round cheeks. Her hair waved along her scalp, stuck there by the heat. I felt the saddest then, holding one wavy haired girl and thinking of another, for those mums and dads, and for those aunties, grandmothers and grandfathers, for the siblings, and for all the people who loved those little babies, but wouldn’t get to squeeze laughter out of their tummies, or tell them stories, or hold their soft bodies close, feeling the rise and fall of their sleepy chests.

I carry my babies with me, a catalogue of our moments together in my heart, ready for recall at the slightest provocation (beware indeed a proud aunty launching into yet another tale of funny cuteness). But these babies too, are in my heart. I can’t name them, and they are not mine to grieve for, but they are there. Heart. Felt. So let this be a catalogue for you, of my moments with them, which were privileged and precious, no matter how fleeting.

* I work for a volunteer organisation of professional photographers from all over Australia called Heartfelt, who give the gift of photographic memories to families that have experienced stillbirths, premature and ill infants and children in the Neonatal Intensive Care Units of their local hospitals, as well as children with serious and terminal illnesses.

It’s one of those mornings. The breeze is warm, delicious on your too sensitive skin. Flushed and tingling, the after effect of too many champagnes last night. You’re a bit shaky, a bit unfocused and the back of your neck spritzes and twinges with the weight of it all. But it’s delightful and he sits in front of you, all warm, soft and peachy, perfect four-year-old bones. And his cousin, whose ringlets tumble down his beautiful smooth back, laughs uproariously, and it’s so good. Everything, in that tiny, slightly skewed shaky moment is perfect. And it all seems to ebb away. No. It gushes and floods away. All of the fist clenchingly, teeth grindingly, nagging S-T-R-E-S-S. Because this year has been, in equal measure, magnificent and a motherfucker. A MAGNIFICENT RELENTLESS BEAST OF A MOTHERFUCKER YEAR. And, cuss it, you’re not even going to mind the swearing. Because you still remember laughing with your Nan about swearing. How she liked it to utter a naughty word here and there, a furtive SHIT! And the way she laughed about her neighbour, ‘She wouldn’t say bum for sixpence’, she said. Not for sixpence. She didn’t like the word fart though. You still say it anyway. Make it a joke with the kids. Just to hear them laugh. Tiny utterances of delight that make it measurably better. And of course you feel like a douche writing that, but it is, relentlessly, true.

There’s this moment. And you’re sat at the pub or whatever, and you look round and you realise this is it. Because when you were a kid you had these hazy, half formed ideas about what it was going to be. Floating through your mind, in your mixed up ideas of cool, was this girl in red lipstick who played sax in a smoky Parisian bar. The kind of girl who knotted her scarf effortlessly, like only someone born French could. Now, too many years later, you’re not even sure where you got that idea from, can’t imagine even wanting that. Wanting to be that girl. So here you are, sat amoungst friends, drinking your gin and you look at them and they are not what you expected. I mean, they’re fucking magnificent. Better than you ever could have imagined. But they’re motley. An odd assortment of the most absolutely magnificent people. And you still pinch yourself from time to time that they like you. And they seem to. But somehow, in your teenage head, you thought they’d be flawless, airbrushed and perfect. But they’re just them. And now there’s kids, and waking up at 6am with someone’s small feet in your back, and walking the dog, and the car, the one that’s a bit dinged around the edges, and taking out the rubbish, and plucking your eyebrows, again. And again, and again.

And it’s good you know. It’s good, but it is what it is. Sometimes it’s monotonous and sometimes it’s boring and it sure fucking feels like suburbia. With a really fucking odd shaped family. And you’re sure you’ll go on adventures, but you are who you are now. You’ve been on adventures and you’re still you. You never did become someone else. And the skin on your legs looks old, like your Mum’s, and age is bearing down on, and you’re only 31 and you don’t feel old really, not yet, even though your hair is going grey. But you’ve started a skincare regime anyway. And eying off fat old ladies with giant breasts and fervently hoping you won’t become them. Or at least you won’t submit to those terrible fucking outfits they wear. But it’s inevitable right? And you wonder if you could rewind somehow, if you would. And it’s tempting to go back to when you were younger, and there seemed like so much more time, before your skin showed all the sun you caught when you didn’t care. But you couldn’t face it. You couldn’t face going through it all again. God, the thought makes you feel so damn tired.

Because there is all the history. The layers. You wandered through some party in Melbourne once. You hardly knew anyone and you wandered through with a vat of wine in your hand, and you watched them do that dance. The oh-so-carefully orchestrated one of lovers past, and negotiated territory. That drunk girl in the corner eying off the guy who broke her heart, and him watching someone else dancing in the light, ravenously. You could see their layers so clearly. The ones they thought they had so carefully hidden, and you wondered then if the people walking through your parties could see yours. Could see the lovers you studiously avoided, that guy that you hate a bit now. Could watch your friends and see their past. Like you could see what they were trying to hide. And writing this makes you feel like a miserable bitch. But you’re not. You’re not miserable. You’ve just realised that this is it. And it’s okay. It’s really fucking okay. And the dog, the one that comes with the ticket to suburbia, the one who follows you everywhere you go like some kind of fucking adorable stalker, that dog, the one you like so much, well he’s lying at your feet. Asleep. And you’re happy. This is it, and you’ve added it all up, flaws and all, and you’re happy.