From the mother in me

TW: From the mother in me, for all the mothers, a lament. This post contains photos of my gorgeous lost child. It also contains one of a dead Palestinian girl. I'm dancing with motherhood and loss.

I stagger up the stairs, rubbing sleep from my face. Mum is already at the kitchen table, surrounded by a colourful swarm of glossy butterfly wings; missives from past days captured in ink and light. Blaise clutching her Peppa Pig toy on her third birthday, three months before she flew away. Blaise and I on Hamilton Island, you can practically smell the humid ocean breeze. Blaise at twelve months, atop a huge horse, clutching the pommel, head back, glee radiating from the faded photo, her crooked smile twining into my heart to stir ancient aches to life. Blaise, and Blaise, and Blaise.

It’s a decade now since she left me behind. I muddle through life without her, making meaning from the madness of that grief. She, who grew in my body, from my cells, whose birth broke me into the wisdom billions of women carry without fanfare, the tectonic rite of passage of motherhood; this radiant child is gone, forever gone.

I held her body as she flew away, tucked its limp poetry into the hungry scoop of my ribs until she grew cold and stiff, but her back was warm where I poured my heat into her, as if to bring her home with my love. I washed her body with tears and tenderness, every movement a prayer; dressed her, sang hitching songs of death and hope. 

Unless you know this, you can never know it. To hold the body of someone you love once they have discarded it is a doorway to ancient oceans where our ancestors swim, with all their gelid murmurings. It is a razor that slices through the quick of burnt skin, revealing the pink muscle of a heart hammering against a cage of lonely years. Free me, I wail. This is too big. I cannot bear it.

But bear it I must. We must. All the women who have held their children so. When they die, we die. Some of us do not survive this death. Others turn themselves inside out and find their way.

For ten years I have grieved with every part of me. In the places nobody sees, bright blood ran dark then slowed to glue. Crimson scars faded to white. Now the pain only resurfaces at odd times. Like this sudden ambush from Mum’s unerring excavations. She’s invited Blaise into the kitchen, and my breath catches with the sharp beauty of her short life. I smell her like she never left, hear the joyous patter of her feet to the front deck where Dad tosses meat to the Kookaburras, and her husky voice calls ‘Mama! The Ookas are biting Pa’s fingers cos they think he’s made of WORMS!’

Last night before I slept I fell into my phone. It’s been a while. I’ve been on a crazy schedule finishing my memoir (to be published in October), deadline screaming impossibly loud, while filming a TV series for SBS and planning a podcast, also for SBS. I’ve surged barefoot through the inane mosh pit red carpet and glittering privilege of an industry awards ceremony, prepared for speaking engagements, Rewild camps, somehow catching a few hours of sleep here and there. One thing after another. My world has upended since I won Alone Australia, and half the time I feel like I’m hanging on to a ratty surfboard, grabbing a breath before the next wave. Surfing with wobbly-joy when I find the line. Catastrophically, gloriously dumped at other times. You know you’re alive in big surf, and I love it.

Last night was a pause, and before sleep claimed me I dropped into social media and my breath stopped.

My feed is full of dead and dying children, juxtaposed with the mindless hysteria of a huge sporting event with a fairytale pop star at its nexus.

One of my real-life friends is defiantly, rage-dancingly brown-skinned and her fire blisters my phone at the best of times, but now she is incandescent. My Palestinian friends, including 5Rhythms teachers who are my peers, shout DO NOT LOOK AWAY. 

DO. NOT. LOOK. AWAY.

I do not look away.

I’ve found it hard to know how to respond to the horrific, awful events since October 7th. I count myself lucky to have Jewish friends and Palestinian ones. The events of Oct 7th are absolutely unforgivable and horrifying. No part of me condones the murder, torture, rape, desecration, the taking of hostages and the inconceivable sexual violence enacted on captured women and children that happened in the attack. Nothing excuses it. Nothing ever can. What was catalysed with that Hamas attack is pure horror. For civilians on both sides. For all of us.

Jewish friends call me in tears about the antisemitism they’ve faced since Oct 7th. They feel isolated, afraid, abandoned and unchampioned by their non-Jewish friends (I’m guilty of this), and are contracting into their communities as it’s the only place they feel safe. I’m so sad that they’re receiving hate, these beautiful friends of mine, for nightmares enacted in their name. I’m sad that their very real trauma so often isn’t recognised or acknowledged in the tangled analyses of this conflict. When nowhere feels safe, when there is a real history of the unthinkable genocide of the Holocaust, and when their young, old and everyday citizens are targeted in an unspeakable act of horror, this trauma needs recognition. Empathy. Compassion.

In my conversations, there’s a line in the sand for me and I speak it. No matter the provocation, on either side, the killing of women and children, of civilians and innocents is, for me, never. Never. Never. Ok. Not by Hamas. Not by Israel. Not by the USA or Australia or anyone in the myriad conflicts around the world.

To me, the Gaza invasion defies sanity. Watching the swift and surgical sanctions imposed upon Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, I waited for the same thing to happen to Israel. Nearly 30 000 dead in a civilian population with nowhere to escape can only be called genocide, no matter the race. Surely we couldn’t let this go on. Surely world leaders would use their power to stop it.

We use the word humanity to describe our better nature, but I think a dark voice is wound into the human story. We can’t have one without engaging with the other. In some way, I see us all (me included) wrestling with the part of us that freezes into numbness when our empathy overloads. Wrestling with the part that cannot give or receive love, and a thirst for power that uses these fragments to act (or not act) in ways that bring our better selves shame. 

For many of us this turns up in our dance with integrity. In our privileged lives we trip over the toothy shadows of our childish needs, unconsciously practice our power to the detriment of others, and hopefully learn from consequence that life works better when we are kind. 

When there are vast generational wounds of genocide, displacement, marginalisation, poverty, racism, annihilation, hopelessness and the myriad ancient calls to war; it’s more likely humanity’s better angels will flee for the sun in our fight for survival. We get broken down to basics, where the only response can feel like kill or be killed. The echo chamber of the algorithm means we only see images that reinforce our own position, justifying our actions further.

I keep coming back to the children. On all sides.

The image I can’t erase from my mind is of a young girl hanging from a hook, her legs blown off. The force of the blast threw her against the wall where she hangs, one arm limp over her head like she’s asleep, but this is no sleep, her skin is pale from drained blood, and her severed thighs are split to the meat. She would have died instantly, but that’s no comfort. She could be my daughter. 

I weep through a video of the bodies of children being stacked into a stretcher. They all look like they are sleeping. I know this from my own daughter’s death. The eerie feeling that she’ll wake up, dance again.

A father carries his child, missing an arm, praying out loud as he runs to find a medic, unaware the child has died, I can see it, I know what it looks like; the father runs barefoot on broken glass and will never feel his son’s kiss again.

These terrors scroll up my phone, interspersed with images of a pop star and her boyfriend, millions tuning in to the glittering glitz and glam of the game that stops America. The carpet bombing of the only place left in Gaza for civilians is timed so the world is looking away. I feel sick at the planning of this, sick that there is such deep understanding of our ability to distract ourselves from that which is too hard to watch.

I’m one of the distracted. I’ve just come from a red carpet awards night, all glammed up. I live a life of privilege. When I’ve had enough horror I can put my phone on aeroplane and go to sleep. I can look away.

These mothers cannot.

The mothers of the Jewish hostages, the raped daughters and massacred families. The mothers waiting for news of their captured children, every day a lifetime of hope and terror. The mothers receiving word that their child’s body has finally been recovered, and then the wonder, what did they go through in that death. A photo of relatives of the hostages holding up photos of their loved ones shows the faces of smiling children, children, who if recovered, may never smile again.

The 30 000 mothers of the dead in Gaza. The mothers of the 12 000 children blown apart or buried under rubble. The mothers of the missing who will never hold the bodies of their children. The mothers of the one in 1000 kids who are missing limbs, who had to hold their children down while their limbs were amputated, without anaesthetic. Without anaesthetic. The mother of the squalling baby sucking on a date because she has no milk or formula to feed him.

The bereft mother in me howls to the cold moon. I want to claw open my chest to release the rotten-ness, my acid shame that I am a human in a world of humans and this is how we behave, no matter our angelic, righteous rhetoric. I’ve been able to grieve my lost daughter with support, with gentleness, having sung to her as she flew away. The pain of losing her has broken me and made me, because I have metabolised it in a world of kindness. It nearly killed me anyway. 

These mothers have only darkness.

If the mothers have this pain, what of the fathers and brothers on both sides, the protectors who could not protect? What of their rage? What have we created?

DO NOT LOOK AWAY, my friends say. Blaise is smiling at me from the kitchen table, and as her starfish hand slips into mine on this gorgeous sunny day, I feel her tiny hug and I break, weep for all of us, for my helplessness, for the bloody cost to our humanity, the stain we carry collectively, that this happened on our watch. 

Most of all, I weep for the mothers, and for the children of conflict who survive into a world as black as the inside of a dragon’s heart. 

I get to heal. They never will.