“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 27 : Two for the Price of One
I was writing home, scratching my legs like mad, sniffing and suffering from the wintry weather outside and the cold in my head. This was just a day before being rushed one month early to Afula hospital around 10.30 pm to give birth. The scratching was a last minute reminder that pregnancies produce as many strange symptoms and addictions towards the end of the nine months as in the early morning sickness of the first weeks, which happily I had avoided.
It was the 7th January, 1975 and although I was weighing no more than sixty-four kilos, ten stones, the baby felt much bigger than I’d experienced before. No matter which way I turned I was unable to bend, although bending over backwards seemed slightly easier but of little use if I wanted to pick toys off the floor. I also found it difficult getting my shoes on. We had unfortunately sacked our cleaner, Jemina, that lady of the fast tongue and slow hand, not simply because she wanted to wash the floors with the carpets in situ but because raising her hourly rate ~ according to union rules she said ~ was becoming a weekly demand and beyond both our pocket and our patience. Anyway, I always had to clean up after her.
In my letter to my parents I said that our cat, Hammy, was putting on weight in sympathy without being pregnant and I had been amused by Adam’s neat explanation to our neighbour that the baby would not come out of mummy’s tummy yet because it was too cold. I also mentioned that I had been reading an article suggesting that Georgians can live for ever, well almost. Just then, having difficulty in breathing due to totally congested nasal passages and the problem of a rash on my nether limbs, I was just longing for the day, a few weeks ahead, when I might get back to normal. Living for ever was not uppermost in my mind at that moment. The Georgians, however, were an interesting diversion for an expectant mum sitting down to read a magazine for five minutes.
The Georgian credo I read, according to one of their youngsters of just a hundred years of age, stated that apart from a largely vegetarian diet of yoghurt, nuts and honey, life should be free of extraneous tension. In other words, it was alright to pull or push a plough but not to pull or push around your own or other people’s personalities. Temper was considered as potent as poison and prolonged emotional excesses or stress were to be avoided as far as humanly possible. Ah, so they were not talking about the gods here! Exercise, on the other hand, that wasn’t forced or putting you under pressure...how? … was very important but equally the body should be perfectly relaxed in repose. So laughter, I presumed, had to be gentle and nothing like the loud guffaws I usually let out when hugely amused. Environmental pollution was out of the question.
I had pondered on all that, wondering whether Georgian women, who did most of the work, lived as long as Georgian men ~ and how did the girls manage their pregnancies in that culture spanning east and west, ancient and modern more or less. I realised that taking the basic recipe for longevity seriously, few of us today and fewer Georgians in the future would be able to employ or enjoy it. I say ‘enjoy’ because living longer has to be healthy to be even vaguely desirable. But even Georgia was now ‘on the map’ and no longer out of reach of tourists or the effects of global dust and greenhouse gases.
So in bidding farewell in 1975 to a Georgian who had just died aged one hundred and sixty eight ~ a man born when Napoleon was fighting at Austerlitz yet who’d outlived the Second World War by thirty years and had three wives, or widows, present in the cortège ~ we were probably saluting not only the last hope of a quiet life away from it all but the last ‘old soldier’ who’d never fought a war: a ‘soldier’ who was literally still in the saddle well into his hundreds and whose final bride of twenty-four he had married aged eighty and with whom he’d sired several more children. Apparently the old man believed that it was far healthier to be involved with the community than with yourself, which was obviously borne out by his multiple sexual successes ~ and possible proof that morbid introspection never won fair lady.
Here was I, and indeed here were most of us, fighting or recovering from wars, breathing dirty air, competing for a place on the ladder of life, arguing, jogging even but still reproducing and looking for happiness at any price, whether on our supermarket shelves, in our sex shops or with our super gurus. I was learning where we had gone wrong but it was too late now and I could do little but get on with it. And so it seems to happen in life whether you’re a Georgian or not.
As the old story began, ‘ it was a dark and stormy night’, the rain was lashing down and poor Arni had to get a wife in labour, late on the evening of the 8th January, into the car and drive more than twenty miles to the hospital down the valley. He left me there in a birth room and rushed home to look after the children whom he had been asked to take to their grandparents when I went to have the baby because Klara did not want to come to ‘the hole’ that she called Ramat Yishai. I had stated that the kids should stay at home with my neighbour and continue to go to the nursery with the least change from routine, a request that was ignored to keep mum-in-law happy in being seen to do the right thing.
It was close to midnight in the Afula hospital, two nursing midwives were on duty and I had no notes with me. Never mind, time was running out and the pains were coming faster as they tried to get a temperature reading by sticking a thermometer in my mouth. Regrettably I had to spit it out since there was no other way I could breathe with my nose totally blocked. I tried between contractions to explain and asked them to stick it under my armpit. They were not amused. By this time the baby was on its way out at a quarter to midnight and only then did the nurses begin to look surprised as they prodded my abdomen. Something like panic started to cross their faces on suddenly realising there was yet another baby to deliver. They had been given no instruction that twins were on the way from me or anybody else and this seemed to throw them right off course. They began rushing about looking for an obstetrician who was not ‘in the house’ at midnight and then appeared to be upset with me for not informing them. I seemed unable to convince them that I had not myself been told.
Well, we all had to get on with it, no alternative. The first baby, ‘a boy’, they told me, had slipped out with little difficulty. If only ‘he’ had been a ‘she’ I thought in a flash; the second could have been either, I would not have minded. With only five minutes between the births I was too busy to be able to ask them not to tell me the sex of the second baby but to keep it as ‘a little surprise’… I already had my doubts. I really needed a breather to get used to the fifty-fifty last chance, not intending to get pregnant again. “IT’S ANOTHER BOY”…they said confidently at two minutes to midnight, simply glad that both had arrived safely, expected or not. It never occurred to me at that moment of gender naming to worry about whether the twins were identical. Just as well. I was later overjoyed that at least I had given birth to two non-identical brothers, although I’m sure other mothers of twins might not have been so ‘picky’. So Abigail never arrived but Ben and Dan took her place and they were lovely and still are.
Next morning, when staff had found me a proper bed after I’d spent a fretful night leaking from my nose downwards in a makeshift fold-up bed on the floor in the centre of a crowded maternity ward full of wailing Arab mums from nearby Nazareth, my first thought was naturally to hold my babies. They had been taken straight to the premature unit after their births. Realising I had a nasty cold I accepted that this initial contact might be best left for a few days until I recovered but little realised it would be weeks rather than days I would have to wait before I could hold them for the first time.
Being a month early the twins were small, just over two kilograms each. In their modern medical wisdom, the Israeli hospital doctors in 1975, who were fine and clever but somewhat arrogant in their approach to the mother, decided they knew best and that the twins would not only have to be taken to a special unit but the mother would not be allowed to touch them or be with them in that unit until they had gained sufficient weight to go home. That way the small babies would avoid the additional hazard of germs from outside. Strange thinking, when you consider how important the mother’s body is to a newborn babe and how its immunity is built up with that contact, not to mention the immunity from breast feeding as soon as possible. Surely the babies could be taken to their mums in a room set aside for that purpose.
Some years later they learned from experimentation with the new-born ‘joeys’ just out of the kanga’s pouch that their survival in their tiny, vulnerable and hairless state depended absolutely on their clinging fast to the warm and humid body skin of the mother before they began to feed. This principle, no doubt long understood and practised by less privileged mothers across the world, is now applied to mothers of premature babies in the developed world! I wondered how on earth they could imagine that a healthy mother might infect her own baby more than nurses coming in and out of the premature unit daily? The agony of only being able to look at my twins during five long weeks with my face pressed against an outside window of the unit was pretty traumatic. Not a happy memory. After the helpless feeling of several such visits, I would not go there again until the babes were ready to come home despite yearning for them.
The next hurdle I had to cross concerned my desire to breastfeed my babies and therefore the need to ask for advice on expressing the milk while I was still in hospital. I had already been given pills to dry up my milk without being asked whether I wanted to do this or not. When I made a bit of a fuss about this it was arranged that a specialist would come and explain matters to me. He arrived in due course and despite my somewhat frail emotional state due to the circumstances of the birth and lack of contact with my babies, I was firmly informed that babies would never feed from the breast after having been put on the bottle for days, if not a fortnight or more. In asking why that was, seeing that breastfeeding was the most natural and instinctual thing for any mammalian, the man shrugged his shoulders and ignoring my question in a most condescending manner, repeated his mantra of ‘never never’. He smiled at my ignorance, it seemed, and ordered more ‘drying’ pills. I was furious, threw them in the bin and was determined when I got home later in the week to obtain a breast pump as quickly as possible.
Getting my hi-jacked boys back from the kibbutz, dealing with an affronted mother-in-law (who’d arrived on my doorstep with flowers and cake for my homecoming) and expressing milk without clinical support was hard, especially the latter. I remembered the Georgian way of life and wondered where and how I could relax in repose or even find repose. But having stuck to my guns for the full five weeks, nature rewarded me with the biggest blessing. Following the huge joy of collecting Dan and Ben from the hospital on a bright Spring day at the end of February, I sat on the sofa in my bedroom with a twin at each breast and behold…they sucked and sucked and the milk flowed. It was one of the most wonderful moments in my life.
Life was indeed hectic and Dan and Ben very different temperamentally. Dan was determined, eager and physically alert while Ben was a cuddly lazybones who would have been happy to be nursed all day long. Dan had his feed and then got on with life. Ben hung around sucking slowly and crying if you tried to hurry him. I fed Dan for an indulgent thirteen months, while he still wanted it. We decided Ben was probably not taking enough on board to put on sufficient weight and after two or three months I weaned him onto goats’ milk in a bottle which seemed the next best thing. I felt both babies had received as good a start in life as nature had allowed and despite Israeli medical misunderstanding. More of the goat to follow!