Life, still pending

It's been a while

Life was pending. Then a life was pending. And then she arrived.

Lifted, Simba-style, above the blue surgical sheet, sparrow legs dangling either side of the cord. A face, though not one I could focus on, without my glasses, my eyes blurred with tears, fatigue and blind, sweet relief. She was carried off to a corner of the room for several minutes (seconds/hours?). Then she was in my arms.

That she was born a girl was as much of a surprise as the head of dark shiny hair. For weeks, almost everyone who’d expressed an opinion on the subject was predicting otherwise. My neat protruding bump, the precedent of eight male cousins. “We’ll be meeting that little boy soon enough,” said the florist at the end of our road. But the truism of hoping only for a safe delivery meant I’d dared not the slightest hunch.

Now this little life was here. This one, our baby, breathing in her own air, her downy shoulders soft and real, with a slight sheen from the harsh lights of theatre. The breath I’d held on to for so long released.

And at the end of the pending: a still, small calm.

In July 2023, I wrote what proved to be my last Substack for a long while. I was deep in summer cold at the time and signed off the post with a painting by Alice Neel I’d seen on my cultural rounds the week before I got sick. It was of Neel’s daughter-in-law, also a Nancy, and as I explained, I was posting her as ‘my proxy’. What I didn’t mention was that the Nancy in Neel’s painting was pregnant. And so was I.

Ironically, my ‘pending’ posts halted suddenly at this point because after finally getting lucky – biologically, mathematically, impossibly lucky – I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise that luck. The life pending inside me felt so very precious and fragile that even speaking it, writing it, seemed too risky.

I began this newsletter to mark the waiting at a time when so much was in the balance. I was between jobs. My partner and I were trying to buy our first home together; had been for a while. But most of all, we were waiting on something that might never be.

Then, like the surfer’s perfect set of three, our waves all came in (job, house, two lines on a stick). As I said, impossible luck. From nothing to something. And then from something to here, that big/small thing we’d been waiting for: all 7 pounds, 1 ounce of her. Life contracted and expanded with exhaustion, happiness and wonder – and it was no longer pending.

Except, of course, that’s not how it works. If you’re lucky enough, one pending takes over from another: pregnancy from infertility; labour from pregnancy; parenthood from birth. Every transition a privilege (when there are so many harder outcomes). But no one tells you. Or rather everyone does but you cannot know or hear it. That the pending doesn’t cease, the waiting game just changes. And that new parenthood makes Humpty Dumpties of us all: smashing your selfhood to bits and leaving you holding the baby and the bits with no clear instructions for reassembly.

Through it all, I’ve wanted to write. But how to start up again? I made an attempt at a post last August and that draft is buried somewhere in this one. But I don’t want to leave it longer. From all the advice I read, there’s one takeaway: get on with it. Write.

This has been a personal post, but I look forward to getting back to other people’s pending alongside my own. In the 22 months since I last wrote, the waiting of the world hasn’t stopped. It’s intensified, often incomprehensibly. And the brief of Life, Pending hasn’t changed since day one: to explore the art and reality of waiting, for things big and small. Once again, I hope we can be in the wait together.

While I wait this week

I’m reading: That’s it. I’m reading. On the regs for the first time since A arrived. But if you want recommendations, I’ve just finished Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers, as brilliant as her devastating Small Pleasures, but somehow more redemptive. No one writes South London quite like her and it’s Croydon getting the treatment here.

I’m enjoying: £3.50 supermarket tulips. The natural successor to £1 daffs, as eulogised by Sophie Heawood over on The Sophist. DM me and I’ll tell you the celebrity that I spotted buying them in South Lambeth Road Co-Op at 8am on a Monday morning.

I’m watching: Conclave. We got two thirds through it last night, but early wakes call for early nights, so along with the Cardinals, I’m still waiting on the white smoke.