First published as an extra essay in the January-June 2024 compilation of Speculative Insight
If this was a hundred years ago, my daughter and I would probably be dead right now.
But by some cosmic chance, we exist in an era of private hospitals, sterilised medical equipment, highly trained nurses and anaesthesiologists and obstetricians—experts who, in 2018, nonetheless still use the antiquated term ‘geriatric’ for women like me, a forty-one-year-old who built an excellent career, a solid marriage, and an actual sense of self before deciding to have her first baby. Someone lucky enough to choose what she does with her body, and when. Someone who—despite a flawless pregnancy, perfect health, and almost unbearable excitement to meet the strong girl kick-kick-kicking inside her—can only be grateful we’re both here. It’s a miracle, really.
The birth is horrific.
It’s not beautiful or transcendent or empowering. I’m not powerful. I’m not amazing. I’m not Gaia reclined with a resplendent, fecund body bringing forth new life. I’m not doing Lamaze while screaming obscenities at my partner. I’m in quiet agony.
After a dose of Prostaglandin to kick the labour into gear, a full night of painful contractions, no sleep at all, there’s another dose at 6am when it hasn’t progressed enough. At some point someone adds Pitocin, then maybe it’s midmorning when a fancy crochet hook scratch-scratch-scratch-scratch-scratches into the amniotic sac—but the waters don’t break yet, so we wait an hour, get the gas mask out, try again, scratch-scratch-scratching up deep inside me as I suck in nitrous oxide. My head floats while my body cramps and bleeds and tiny heels jab my ribcage. Now everything’s wet. There’s the fluid. Blood. Too much blood. Turn the gas up to 5. It's not enough. The day is a blur of writhing and white fog and short breath and so much pain under my ribs. Is this normal? Sit up. Epidural in the spine. Breathe. Doesn’t help. Nothing’s enough. Nothing’s happening.
No more Pitocin; the baby’s distressed.
I’m distressed.
Where is she?
I try to focus on the machine beside my bed that’s tracking her vitals—it looks like a dot matrix printer, all cream-coloured plastic with yellow ochre details—spitting out scrolls of paper with indecipherable ink zigzags. Hovering nearby—above or beside it, I can’t see straight anymore—is that a Commodore 64? Its green-digital screen blips and beeps, telling us in wonky lines and echoed by my obstetrician’s Australian accent that we’ll have to do a c-section.
It's not progressing nearly enough her head is too big now she’s turned herself around now she’s breech now she’s going nowhere—
My doctor is always so calm. Reassuring. Sensible. Kind. She says something about available operating theatres and that it’s already after 5pm. (Is there a scheduling issue? What’s the problem here?) She’s explaining something about the procedure. She’s trying to reason with me.
If you want your Halloween baby, we’ll have to do it now.
As if I need convincing.
I don’t care how she comes out, I say. I just want her to come out alive.
#
I’ve loved the sickbay on Star Trek: The Next Generation since I was a teenager. This show was my gateway drug to SF franchise television, and its 1990s sets, soundscapes and storylines became the indelible blueprint for all my subsequent star-travelling needs. Before I ever encountered fantastical medical wonders like The Orville’s mass tissue regenerators (in which missing limbs can be regrown) and multijectors (which can do everything from heal minor cuts to resculpt smashed physical features), or even the sorts of osteo-regenerators and biosynthetic limbs and vasostimulators I later saw in other Star Trek spin-offs, I was captivated by TNG’smedical tricorders and portable sensors that diagnose injuries, illnesses, and alien viruses within seconds. Dermal regenerators that completely erase cuts off Riker’s chiselled face while he talks. Cortical stimulators that revive the unconscious, no matter how traumatising their injuries. Biobeds that enclose patients within sensor arrays, short metal tunnels that scan and analyse—all, I imagine, while keeping sick and hurt beings warm. And then there’s the hand-held hypos that inject liquids with a distinct and satisfying hydraulic hiss. Out of everything, these simple little tools are my favourites.
One ksssshhhhhhhht, and you’re healed.
#
Our delivery suite has a pseudo-dot-matrix printer, a team of blue scrubs, and the promise of a scalpel.
#
Finally, she’s born in less than thirty minutes, a warm purple salamander now wriggling on my bare chest, drumbeat swells of Wardruna’s Runaljod pounding out of the OR’s speakers. I’m blubbing with relief. She’s silently blinking. Her tiny fingers strum the air.
#
She is, objectively, the most beautiful baby ever.
#
We spend one night together, much of it unconscious: her knocked out from the earthbound journey, me still sleeping off the anaesthesia. We have one day with our only visitors: two of my dearest friends, Kate and Kylie, come to snuggle our enormously overwrapped blanket bundle while I lie in bed smiling, snapping pics with my phone. With my whole family in Canada, these girls are my surrogate sisters, chosen aunties for our bub. Kylie’s youngest daughter comes too, she’s there in the pictures, curious and cautious and bright as the morning. I don’t remember them leaving or saying goodbye. I’m still so tired. My skin’s itching like crazy as the drugs wear off. If I feed the baby, I can’t remember doing it. Now the room’s dark except for a small round fluoro inset high in the shelving unit, its muted yellow light gilding the bouquets and teddy bear that have magically appeared in the nook below. I don’t know what time it is, early evening or midnight, but now it’s black and she wakes up crying, and a bulb suddenly glares over my head, and she’s out of the bedside cot, and she’s refusing the breast, she’s red-faced and honking for breath, and my stomach clenches, and this isn’t right, she sounds like a dog-toy, she shouldn’t sound like this, this isn’t normal, and we press the emergency button on the wall, and it is an emergency, and they come and whisk her away.
#
“At Ashford Hospital Maternity,” the website cheerily boasts, “our focus is you. We love what we do and understand that this is such an exciting, unforgettable part of your life.”
#
There aren’t many babies in outer space.
At least, that’s the impression I get while doze-watching all the perfectly cheesy, nostalgic, extraterrestrial adventuring, stargate puddle-jumping, intergalactic-exploring TV I feed my exhausted eyes on while it’s dark and quiet and I’m supposed to be sleeping. (Why else would I have this time to myself, if not to rest and recuperate? If I’m awake, I should be with her. Right? Taking care of her. Mothering.) In these few lonely hours, I can’t seem to watch anything else. None of the crime dramas I used to love (too many kidnappings), none of the fantasy epics (too hopeful and pretty), none of the reality trash I’ve consumed by the sugary bucketful (who cares about these rich idiots anyway?). If it’s not set in a distant, vast, star-sparkling elsewhere, if it doesn’t feature a diverse and ambitious crew, if it doesn’t take me far far far away from here, I can’t bear it.
Sometimes, there are children in these shows. Dr Beverly Crusher has a teenage son, Wesley, in Star Trek: TNG. A fifteen-year-old kid with Starfleet aspirations, he’s occasionally thrown into school-like scenes with extras his age; mostly, he’s failing to pass the Starfleet Academy entrance exams, saving the day in preposterous ways, and/or making Captain Picard uncomfortable. Speaking to Riker one day, Picard admits this discomfort with children—which sees Wesley banned from the bridge in TNG, and perhaps explains their absence from the command deck in the other SF series I’m watching. In Star Trek: Discovery, the orphan Adira Tal is quite young in appearance (IRL they’re in their twenties, but both Adira and their adorable boyfriend, Grey, are ostensibly in their mid-late teens when they first appear on Discovery). But as the host of a much-older Tal symbiont, Adira is no simple child. As far as I can tell, there are no kids to speak of in Star Trek: Voyager or Stargate Universe—but two travel with their parents in Lost in Space.
When babies do appear, they don’t stay on screen for long.
In the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica, Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii (a Cylon sleeper agent programmed to believe she’s human) falls pregnant with a human/Cylon hybrid baby in Season Three. Immediately, the powers that be decide the foetus should be aborted—but when the incredible cancer-healing properties of its blood are discovered, Sharon is given permission to carry the child to term, though winds up giving birth prematurely. And as soon as Hera is born, it’s deemed too dangerous for a Cylon mother to raise her own child, so the head honchos steal the girl away and gaslight Sharon into thinking her daughter has died from breathing complications. This effectively gives Sharon (along with Hera’s father, Helo) plenty of juicy character angst and twists the plot in pleasing ways, even as it removes all the messy ‘taking care of a defenceless creature’ aspects from the screen.
There’s a fertility cult / surrogate mother storyline in Season One of Killjoys which, thanks to complicated inheritance rights on this planet, culminates in Delle Seyah—one of the posh-elitist leaders of the Nine Families aristocracy—becoming a newborn baby’s legal guardian… but then she exeunts stage left for a few episodes, only to return sans baby as a recurring antagonist in the series. Two seasons later, Delle Seyah is pregnant and her unborn baby becomes the focus of two episodes. In the first one, an organ harvester captures her and wants to harvest the baby! Oh no! In the second, she goes into labour, but—convenient complication!—the baby is growing at an alarming rate! Deals must be struck if they’re to save it, and her! Okay, they’re struck! Now the baby is born! But, in the following episode, the newborn keeps growing so very quickly that it becomes a five-year-old, and then a teenager, within a matter of minutes. Phew! No more baby! This teen has a full vocabulary and a strong will and can take care of itself.
The Athosian warrior-turned-Earthling ally, Teyla Emmagan, discovers she’s pregnant in Season Four of Stargate: Atlantis—a storyline adapted to coincide with the actress Rachel Luttrell’s real-life pregnancy—which amounts to Teyla being suspended from active duty. This doesn’t sit well with Teyla, but after a near-death encounter with the Wraith Queen, she accepts that she’s in no condition for dangerous missions… but nevertheless manages to get abducted by Michael (the relevant Big Bad), with whom she remains until the first episode of Season Five, when she is rescued and gives birth to a son. Her baby features as a plot device in this, the show’s final season, but Teyla is (understandably) too busy fighting the Wraith to be a stay-at-home mum.
In the first season of the comedy-drama The Orville, Lieutenant Commander Bortus and his spouse, Klyden, have a baby together. In one episode, Bortus plays hen to their egg (for the requisite twenty-one days), before the real trouble ensues. Born and raised on the male-dominated planet of Moclus, Bortus and Klyden know that all girl-children undergo a mandatory sex change operation to ‘fix them’ into boys. But when it’s time for them to inflict this surgery upon Topa, their female hatchling, a lifetime of nurture conflicts with Bortus’s true nature, which tells him to accept the baby as she is. Nevertheless, the voice of tradition is much louder than Bortus’s instincts and so Topa is ultimately removed from the ship (and the screen) and physically altered. This plot-driving mechanism and (positive but nevertheless) didactic metaphor causes ongoing tension between Topa’s parents—in a handful of scattered episodes, that is—until that simmering pot boils over toward the end of Season Three. In ‘A Tale of Two Topas’, their now pre-teen son (who must’ve been sprinkled with the same quick-gro fertilizer that got all over Delle Seyeh’s son in Killjoys) discovers the truth of their birth, and with the help of The Orville’s enlightened crew members, is able to reverse their gender reassignment surgery. The controversy surrounding Topa’s identity is the moral and narrative lynchpin of these episodes, but the difficult day-to-day reality of raising a vulnerable infant on a starship—not to mention the mind-numbing cycle of feed-change-sleep-bathe-feed-change-sleep—is absent. The baby in this series isn’t what’s important; what she represents is.
You’d think the situation would be different on generation ships. I always thought these ships were designed to do more than just go where no one has gone before. Aren’t generation ships—at their core—floating incubators? Seed banks in space. Vehicles for ensuring humanity’s survival. Its proliferation. And yet, Ascension highlights the strictest management of births in space. Halfway through their century-long journey to Proxima Centauri, the people aboard this ship celebrate ‘Ostara’, a sort of lottery in which only the winners are allowed to bear a child. The population must be controlled, this narrative tells us. Numbers are limited. Resources are under strict regulation.
And babies are impossible to control.
#
I thought I’d be spending the next few days in hospital swaddling her, learning how to properly feed her, how to anticipate and respond to her needs. I thought I’d be carefully handing her to parades of loving friends, telling them to mind her neck, accepting compliments on how well we both look. I thought I’d be whiling away these first few precious hours, rubbing my cheek against her fluffy head, cradling and kissing and singing to her, gazing starry-eyed at the length of her lashes, the sweet fullness of her lips, the incredible fact that she’s here, she’s adorable, she’s real, and she’s mine.
#
How long has it been since we’ve seen her?
A slow trudge down the wide corridor, compression socks on my feet, bandages swathing my belly. I think our room is on the same floor as the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. A short, far way away. At the double doors, we press a button or something, wait to be buzzed in. My guts swirl with worry, with unhealing, with unknowing. Through the high window, the room is so bright (how can they even sleep?), an organised jumble of yellow and blue curtains, white tiles, bleeping screens, plastic tub-cots, and so many red-purple-blue little babies. Now we’re inside. People are talking at us, something about a huge (for her) dose of antibiotics in case of infection, but it’s not an infection they now believe, as far as they can tell that’s not the problem, but something’s not right, her oxygen levels keep dipping, numbers down in the 80s (a Distinction’s bad news here), and they don’t know why.
Now we’re in front of an incubator, I think.
I think that one’s ours.
I think this memory is real.
She’s naked except for a tiny diaper, ID bracelet matching mine, plump belly exposed, long skinny legs curled up, skin mottled red-yellow. A bit jaundiced, they tell us. Oh, okay. I assumed that’s just what newborns look like, but okay. Right. She’s in an incubator. It’s warm in there, they tell us. She’s comfortable. Okay. Maybe she doesn’t need to be in there. Maybe they’re getting her plastic tub-cot ready. Do we reach through the small porthole in the side? Do we stroke her soft head? Or just stare at her like a baked ham on display in the deli counter? I don’t know. Maybe they’ll let her come back to our room tonight. Maybe this is a nightmare. Let us show you where the pumps are, they say. We’ve started her on formula, but… something about colostrum, breast milk in syringes, coming back in three or four hours.
Okay.
She doesn’t have any tubes in her, I don’t think. Not yet.
That part comes later, nine or ten days down the track, when we walk into the NICU to find her tucked off in a corner, alone, sleeping in a single crib raised high on a trolley, surrounded by four or five fridge-sized machines. Neon numbers flashing overhead. Beeps and alarms going off. Pink and green stripes on her flannel blanket. Wires dangling. Tubes up her nose, connecting her to the fridges. White surgical tape holds their lengths in place, each piece almost as wide as her pink-yellow cheeks. Her skull’s the size of my balled fist.
#
Most of the time, I don’t think about the lack of babies while watching these shows set in space.
I’m here for the ragtag crew’s camaraderie. The strange new worlds. The far-fetched technology. The relaxing electric zip-zip-zip of wormhole travel between stargates. The frequently ridiculous plotlines. The earnest plotlines. The dissatisfying plotlines. The ingenuity and humour and joy that goes into—and beams out of—every last one of these episodes. I’m here for their hour-long solvable problems and their multi-season character arcs. I’m here for the shark-jumping and the orchestrated pathos. I’m here for the nostalgia. For the comfort.
Along the way, I get to remember the version of me that loves this sort of stuff. The me who reads SFF by the library-load. The me who teaches it. Supervises PhDs in it. Writes it.
The cheerful, carefree, pre-motherhood me.
The me whose heart was whole and safe and sound—not broken wide open with this huge scary love, this adoration mixed with terror and utter exposure. The me who was so happy in her independence. So self-reliant. So self-contained. So secure.
She’s out there, these old shows promise, lulling me with their familiarity. Somewhere.
But sometimes, somewhere in the back of my numb, postnatal brain, I must notice the general babylessness on the screen I’m jacked into—with the brightness turned way down and headphones plugged in to keep these midnight escapes secret, quiet, just mine.
Is this part of the appeal?
Is this part of the comfort?
I don’t know.
Maybe.
Probably.
#
About halfway through Season One of Stargate: Atlantis, the team discovers a stasis chamber in a new section of the city, in which a woman has been miraculously kept alive for 10,000 years. Turns out, the Ancient Atlanteans somehow managed to create a time-travel ship that somehow captured an earlier version of Dr Elizabeth Weir, the expedition’s civilian leader, and somehow created a parallel universe while doing so—honestly, I’ll never understand how it works. I love time travel narratives, but the science is too much for my brain at the best of times, so I just roll with it. What makes me pause here—my throat thick with anxiety, my eyes sandpaper marbles in a throbbing head, my guts stew-pots of liquid worry—is the advice Ancient Elizabeth offers her much younger self when, at long last, they finally have a private moment together.
“I wish there was more we could do for you—” present-day Elizabeth says.
“Oh, look at you. Always worrying,” her Ancient self replies, lying on her deathbed. Her croaky voice is Canadian, from Ontario—where I grew up. It gives me goosebumps as she continues. “Put too much pressure on yourself. Remember that miserable Baltic negotiation? What Simon told us afterward? To breathe.”
Weir’s lip quirks. “Among other things.”
“Enjoy the moment,” the Ancient one goes on. “What’s here right now. The sun. The breeze. Our birthday.”
They both smile, but by now I’m tearing up.
“Shepherd couldn’t keep it to himself, huh?”
“I’m just saying, stop being so damned hard on yourself.”
Elizabeth nods and my face is hot, damp with sweat and silent tears.
“Life is quick.”[i]
#
Is she going to die?
I’m lying in the hospital bed, still. Not much else to do. Sleep, cry, gag down some trayed food, chuck most of it, fill out the order form for more. No visitors—what’s the point? They can’t see the baby, only parents allowed in the NICU, and only at set times for feeding and bathing and twenty minutes to stare at and kiss her and rock her, short interruptions in long churns of anxiety. Then it’s back to bed, alone. Chad’s snoring on the short vinyl armchair, wrung out. Supposed to be gone by now but they’re turning a blind eye, letting him stay an extra night. Three nights. Four. Rest, they tell me. Night staff will feed bubs. Go on, sleep. But I’m awake, still. Stiff white sheets, beige walls, brown cupboard with its sliding door partway open, stacks of baby clothes folded on top of my carry-on suitcase inside. I don’t look at them, but at the disruptive stream of nurses checking my blood pressure, my low heart rate, infusing me with iron, feeding me laxatives I definitely don’t need; and at my phone, texting my friends and family in group batches, no news but needing to tell them maybe she’ll get to be with us tonight, maybe tomorrow, we don’t know, hungry for their replies; and at my obstetrician—who’s used to me laughing and joking in her office, fit and happy and confident and so ready for this, it’s the smoothest pregnancy ever, despite my age, I’m a super-healthy “geriatric” machine, High Distinctions at every check-up—and she’s so friendly and maternal, I can’t speak to her without bawling, apologising every time I do.
Go outside, she tells me, worried hen. Go for a walk around the block. How long has it been since you’ve had fresh air? Six days. Seven. Eight?
I’m still in bed.
Is she going to die, I ask now, desperate for a straight answer. The paediatrician is Canadian, from Calgary I think, maybe Toronto, I don’t know, five years later I still can’t remember so much, the hours, the days, the long dead-quiet nights. What’s her name? We have so many appointments with her—then and for many months after—but still I don’t know. She’s my age, I think, maybe a few years younger, her thick brown ponytail and bangs are youthful, blithe. Her accent comes from my childhood, my mother country, my mom. When it isn’t all warbly with phlegm and fear, my voice sounds just like hers.
No, this nameless specialist tells me—finally someone says it aloud—she’s not going to die.
But we need to do some more tests.
#
While watching, I can’t help but mull on the concept of mothers in space. Not just the babies, but the women who bear them. One of my PhD students, Bronwyn Lovell, wrote a whole thesis about this a few years ago, so it’s not like these late-night ruminations come out of nowhere. I remember an article she published in Science Fiction Film and Television about female astronauts in films such as Alien, Gravity, and The Cloverfield Paradox—not quite the shows I’ve been snorting more and more these days, but they’re in the same thematic galaxy. In it, she convincingly argues how, “Each of these narratives features a female protagonist who goes to space, whose job is the impetus for her space journey, and whose backstory features a dead child.”[ii] To reach their career goals—space exploration of various sorts—these exceptionally intelligent, high-achieving female characters must ultimately be childless, and in these films, childlessness is the result of the most terrible loss. “Reading these space narratives while considering these characters’ status as bereaved mothers,” Lovell argues, “suggests that loss of family is the symbolic price these female characters pay to travel to space.”
Jesus, that’s a lot to swallow.
Not saying she’s wrong, it’s just—ooof.
In the same issue of this journal, Joseph Jenner analyses many of the same films and series Lovell discusses at length in her article, and similarly points out how “contemporary sf film and television is populated by female astronauts who are grieving a lost or dying child, are infertile, or give birth to alien or monstrous children” in order to argue that “the failure of procreation is projected onto anxieties about the Earth's increasing inability to sustain life on Earth.”[iii] While Lovell’s article dismantles the problematic patriarchal structures that traditionally associate women with “mother earth” and other reductive binaries, Jenner’s piece shows us how SF depictions of female astronauts sometimes reinforce this association by using mothers as metaphors for the world’s problems. “The female astronaut is … the subject of Anthropocene anxiety in which fears about the failure of life on Earth become mapped onto her procreative function. […] This twinning of the failure of maternity and planet Earth is suggestive of Anthropocene anxiety that ‘we’ have crippled Earth’s ability to sustain life.”
As if these women don’t already have enough to worry about, without also bearing the weight of the world’s survival on their shoulders.
#
The keywords for Bronwyn Lovell’s article are: female astronaut, astronaut mother, astronaut, career, family, working mother, gender bias, motherhood.
Joseph Jenner’s are: female astronaut, Anthropocene, failed motherhood.
Failed motherhood.
#
A week or so and one stressful ambulance ride later, she’s out of the NICU and checked into the public system for a bunch of specialist tests at the Women’s & Children’s.
We arrive through a back door, a triage room of some sort, a souped-up garage with lots of gurneys and machines. She’s in a diaper, shivering, they don’t have the right tubes or something, admittance is delayed, Chad’s not here yet, he’s driving our car over, finding parking in the labyrinth of North Adelaide, while someone’s trying to find a bottle for her, someone else is shoving paperwork into my hands, thin onionskin papers with carbon-copy layers, sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher as they try to get me not to tick the box for ‘private health insurance.’ Wahmpwammpwhamp wamp they say, and I’m blinking at them, staring at the pink A4 sheets, looking at the door, wampwahhhmwaahmmphealthinsurance, and she’s over there in a machine, can I just hold her please?, and they’re putting a pen in my hand. Why wouldn’t I use my health insurance? why else would we have it? And then the doctor’s here and Chad’s here and we’re off to the furthest corner of the ward. There’s a giant crib for her in the only private space they have left, a single bed for me, a chair for Chad, monitors for her oxygen tubes, control panel in the wall, a fridge for her milk, a tearoom down the hall, other babies crying through the tissue-thin walls. Weird twilight glooms from the overhead lights.
I figure out how to use the breast pump; it’s different from the one at Ashford, it’s got different settings, it actually works. I manage to produce the first few ounces she’s had since day one. The nurses bring her bottles of formula.
I’m wearing every layer of clothing I packed in my overnight bag—thick socks, leggings, jogging pants, t-shirt, long sleeved jersey, hoodie—but I can’t stop shivering, even under the blankets it’s like I’ve got hypothermia. I’m quaking so hard, it hurts.
Chad changes every diaper.
Chad feeds her.
I’m in bed, trembling.
She’s so beautiful.
She’s happy as a lamb, smiling up at me.
She barely notices the tubes on her face.
They test her lungs—she bellows under the chest x-ray, just like they need her to, but stops the instant I pick her back up for a cuddle—and test her blood and her stool and her ears, nose, and throat—she doesn’t even gag when they do the endoscopy; she’s so cute, the whole team is enchanted—and it’s always the same. She’s the picture of health. She’s alert and thriving and cheerful even when they’re sticking needles in her. But the oxygen alarm keeps screaming at regular intervals, warning us about her irregular intake. After one night of its incessant blaring, we’re frayed. Frustrated. Next night, we beg the nurse to turn it down, if not off.
It screeches on and on.
Now she’s up for the big one, an intense sleep study, twelve hours of uninterrupted analysis. I can’t bear to go into that lab overnight. I know should—I’m the mom, she needs me, right? and I need her—but I can’t. I just can’t. Chad goes in with her instead, while I shiver and shake in bed. He texts me a picture before they turn the lights down. She’s completely wired up. She looks like a bomb. There are so many electrodes, the doctors have to choose which ones to leave off—they can’t fit them all on her tiny body. I think she’s wearing a navy onesie? Wait, no. She’s clothed in blue wires.
She glows up at me from my phone screen. I’m not hungry but still suffering the delusion I might be able to breastfeed, so I sit on the grey nursing chair and stare at her and fumble open the Tupperware of homemade frittata Kylie dropped off for us earlier today. Old me loves Kylie’s cooking. I’m choking a piece of it down, bawling through each bite, when the latest new nurse barges in. I like this one—she’s not openly judgey—and she stops in her tracks when she sees me. Alone in my baby’s room. Hunched over like a gargoyle, slurping bits of cold egg off my fingers, ugly crying. I apologise to her around a spitty mouthful, tasting nothing.
#
Later, I’ll tell myself that she looked like the awesome Hybrid figure in Battlestar Galactica—that catatonic, preternaturally striking woman lying in a glowing immersion tank/bathtub, part-biological, part-machine, powering one of the basestar’s central computers through the umbilicus-tubes jutting up from her submerged body. It’s the wires that get to me. That and her terrified expression. She’s haunting, occasionally uttering prophetic nonsense-riddles before relapsing into incoherent gibberish. She’s an enigma, this Hybrid. An incipient being.
I don’t understand her.
She creeps me out.
She’s one of the best parts of the show.
#
Now I work with the actress who played the BSG Hybrid. I see her, sometimes, at faculty meetings and Christmas parties. I never tell her what that role means to me.
#
At last, we’re heading home.
The sleep test? Inconclusive. Oxygen dips, as per usual. Possible apnoea. Maybe that’s why she wakes so frequently? Professional shrugs all around. Not much we can do. We’ve tested for the scariest possibilities, keep returning to the one diagnosis no one will officially confirm for at least four months. Laryngomalacia—aka, soft larynx—“a congenital softening of the tissues of the larynx above the vocal cords [that] is the most common cause of noisy breathing in infancy.”[iv] So common, but they can’t be sure.
Before they’ll release her, we take emergency CPR lessons, learn how to change her oxygen tubes, fill out order forms for oxygen tanks and tubes and tapes and carriers and a warning sign to hang in our front window. “Danger: Oxygen in Use. No smoking or open flames.”
Just to be on the safe side, you understand. We don’t know the long-term effects of oxygen deprivation in newborns. She should grow out of this, sooner or later. Maybe six months? A year? Eighteen months, give or take?
Our house is two storeys and the oxygen machine is awkward, a clunky blue plastic box that’s nowhere near as light as they said it would be. We set it up downstairs in the living room, where its Darth Vader breathing becomes the soundtrack of our lives. The tubes are maybe twelve feet long, so we’re tethered to the couch day and night, shifting her to the portable tank in its Ghostbuster pack if we want to go outside. She won’t sleep in the bedside bassinet my mom and sisters bought us. Only in our arms, on our chests, or in the white wicker basket that came full of baby supplies. At the hospitals, we had to record her milk intakes (time, mLs) and her outputs (time, amount, liquid or solid). We don’t know when to stop, so keep jotting these details in small spiral notepads, showing them to the specialists and the lovely Canadian paediatrician and the visiting midwife. See, she’s still alive. We have numbers to prove it. She sleeps in bursts, eats less than we’d like—what do we know?—she’s bubbly and chatty and growing like a champ, she’s warm and smells sweet and I swear she’s laughing—it’s not always gas—she’s already got our weird sense of humour.
I read her The ABCs of DnD so many times, I can still repeat it by heart.
We take her to appointment after appointment after appointment.
If she catches a cold, it’s back to the hospital…
Oxygen stays on.
They give us a disabled parking pass to make it easier getting in and out of the hospital with all her equipment.
My last patient wore the tubes for 24 months…
A speech pathologist gives us lessons on how to feed her, staring while we sit at a toddler-height table, balancing her on one knee while teeter-tottering the formula bottle in and out of her mouth so that she won’t aspirate on the milk while she drinks.
She might drown she might get an infection she might have to go back to the hospital—
It’s impossible, this stupid technique, and now she’s crying from hunger, it’s like we’re teasing her for god’s sake, she never cries like this at home—so after the third visit I crack the shits and refuse to come back ever again.
She eats just fine when we’re alone.
We take it in shifts to feed her: four hours on, four hours off to sleep.
I’m still trying to pump the few drizzles of milk from my body, so I’m not drinking coffee yet, but it feels like I’m on ten cups a day, I’m exhausted but buzzing, overstimulated and completely wrung out. In my off-shifts, I sit on the toilet upstairs, the only time I’ve been alone and untouched for hours, and I stay in that lightless tiny room long after any need obliges me to be there. In bed, I dream she’s beside me, on top of me, beneath me—I wake up each time I roll over, afraid I’ve smothered her or pushed her out onto the floor, that I’ve lost her. It takes forever to remember that she’s downstairs, snug on Chad’s chest while he plays Red Dead Redemption to keep himself awake.
Heart thumping, I grab my phone and AirPods off the bedside table.
I’m so tired, I can’t track the names of the warring factions at the beginning of Star Trek: Voyager. B’Elanna and Chakotay are in trouble: it’s the clan of M— somethings versus the C—s, somewhere in outer space. I relax in Janeway’s presence, upright with her Edwardian pouffe hairdo, her straight hipless figure striding confidently everywhere—in New Zealand as she recruits Tom Paris and, later, all over the starship—her short legs and overlong torso that have never borne a child. She’s tough but soft, we already see that in episode one, while she FaceTimes the man she’s left behind on Earth, her lover, carer of her dogs. I chuckle at the weird way she says Chakotey. I admire her.
#
“Adriana Teodorescu has noted how ‘The bad mother is egotistic, career-oriented and chooses everything that seems to go against nature’, while a ‘good’ mother is one who prioritises her children’s needs above her own in ‘self-sacrificial spirit’.”[v]
#
What if a ‘good’ mother could manage a nursery on the USS: Enterprise? What if she could lead an expedition to the Pegasus galaxy and take maternity leave (after all, there’s time; it’s such a long way away…)? What if she could be visibly pregnant and fulfill her duties as chief of security? What if she didn’t have to beg to rearrange shifts, or do overtime, or miss out on promotions just because she wants to drop her kids off at school on the way to the bridge, and put them to bed most nights, and see them perform in goofy end-of-year concerts? What if, in the future, child-rearing isn’t a dirty little secret women have to keep off screen? What if—in these shows I still love so much—the system evolves to accommodate all the messiness, exhaustion, and wonder of motherhood?
Too far-fetched?
#
A few weeks ago, I read one of my short stories at a wonderful literary salon before listening to the main attractions ‘in conversation’ about autobiographical writing. The first author, a famous Nobel Prize-winning octogenarian, kicked things off by proposing that memoirs are always about parents, not children. Our parents are omnipresent in our formative years, he said—I’m paraphrasing here; it’s been five years since my daughter was born but still the sleep deprivation is real. They shape us throughout this most critical period of our lives. We write memoirs to get our revenge on them once they’re no longer in a position to respond. [Insert laughter from the crowd.] But our kids aren’t as interesting, he said. They don’t have that sort of profound impact on our lives. They don’t make us who we are in that way.
In his response, the soft-spoken, much younger writer didn’t quite disagree.
#
I do.
#
No one has ever affected me this much.
Even while I’m grieving for what’s gone—the guiltlessly selfish life she’s taken—I’m so profoundly happy she’s here. I have never loved anyone, in my entire life, as I love her.
Nobody else—not my stoic mom, my narcissist dad, my nice husband, my closest friends—has smashed me open like this, rearranged and reformed and remade me into someone who sort of resembles my previous shape but is now also somehow fundamentally different.
I’m new.
Fragile.
(Think of it like kintsugi, except replace Japanese pottery with spirit and body and blood.)
She tore me apart.
She keeps me together.
How could I ever not write about this?
#
Generation ships can’t accommodate too many children.
#
Escape is essential to human survival.
#
I watched every episode and every season of all of these shows while my baby was on oxygen, and for months after the tubes finally came off. They were a balm for my worries, a salve for my soul. Daunted at the thought of seeing a therapist about postnatal depression—yet another doctor in an endless list of doctors—I spoke to sympathetic friends and self-medicated on SF franchises. They both healed me, eventually, in their own ways.
After three months, I stopped trying (read: failing) to breastfeed. After five, I stopped counting the quality and quantity of her meals, stopped tracking her wet diapers and bowel movements. After seven or so, we stopped needing specialists. No more check-ups. No more checking-ons. No need to worry so much.
(At least, not about all of this.)
After a while, I trusted her—trusted me—trusted us—to survive.
To be fine.
Together.
#
“It worked,” young Elizabeth Weir says to her Ancient self in the final minutes of SG: Atlantis episode fifteen. “The stasis? The failsafe? You gave up your entire life—’
‘No,’ the wise woman interrupts, lifting a hand to stroke her younger, future self’s cheek. ‘The best part of my life is just beginning. I’m exploring a new galaxy. I have years ahead of me still. Trust yourself, Elizabeth. All that matters is right now.’
Lisa L. Hannett is an award-winning Canadian-Australian writer and academic. She has a PhD in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Flinders University. A prolific writer of short speculative fiction, Lisa has had over 80 short stories published, plus five collections and a novel. She has won four Aurealis Awards, an Australian National Science Fiction Award, an Australian Shadows Award, and her first book was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her latest books are Viking Women: Life and Lore (2023) and The Fortunate Isles (2023).
Lisa’s daughter is starting reception this year. She loves reading, swimming, babies, and kittens. When she grows up, she wants to be a mermaid-acrobat-writer.
Notes
[i] Stargate: Atlantis, Season One, Episode 15: ‘Before I Sleep’, first aired February 2005.
[ii] Lovell, Bronwyn. "Cosmic careers and dead children: Women working in space in Aliens, Gravity, Extant and The Cloverfield Paradox." Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 12, no. 1, Apr. 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2019.5
[iii] Jenner, Joseph. "Gendering the Anthropocene: Female astronauts, failed motherhood and the overview effect." Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 12, no. 1, Apr. 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2019.6
[iv] https://www.chop.edu/conditions-diseases/laryngomalacia
[v] Cited in Lovell.