Transience, parenthood and deadly serious farting around

“The older you get the more important history becomes – to state the bleeding obvious” is a line from a movie I saw some while back. I think it was Michael Caine who delivered this line, lying in a bed with his white slightly corpulent arm around an actress of similar vintage who was playing his wife of many years.

Although I’ve forgotten the rest of the movie that line has stayed with me. I wondered if there was a specific point in a life when the weight of memory exerts more gravitational pull on awareness than the call of the horizon. I wonder if it has something to do with the uncertainty of the future and perhaps, as we age, the eventual certainty of all futures – death.

I have some powerful memories. One is the birth 20 years and one month ago of my child. As she emerged, a most skilled midwife flipped her onto her mother’s chest where she lay, umbilical cord still attached, eyes clenched closed, slippery with blood streaked mucous, strands of thick lanugo hair plastered across her back. She coughed and I breathed in her first breath – impetus for a lifetime.

I often revisit this memory. I have polished it in my mind.

As I held her afterwards while the medical people attended to the emergency of a placenta that would not follow the birth, she was so still I was not sure she had continued breathing.

I frequently describe this memory to that woman-child, who now posts bikini pictures to Instragram, has a girlfriend and is moving into a flat in Stellenbosch to tackle her second year of a degree in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology.

She is learning about the material basis of life. An excellent route to find the gods.

I was reminded of the story of a woman who gave birth in a mango tree as a tropical storm flooded Mozambique in 2019. How she did that I cannot imagine. A person’s birth is a violent storm and to do it in a tree in the midst of wild weather is unimaginable. If I am ever in any doubt that I am nothing more than an animal like any other I remember that every one of us comes from inside another animal and arrives in a miracle of blood and pain.

I notice that one of my most significant memories is the seed of my child’s future. So much of life seems to be a letting go, a releasing of moments that pass and an acceptance of transience. Moments move through us in a turning twisting thread of story and one of the things I have loved about being a parent is the ongoing witnessing and involvement in another person’s becoming. To serve as the container for that has enriched my life immeasurably and the commitment to try not screw it up has shone a revealing light into my character and fertilised much of my own becoming.

Perhaps it is a treasured memory because it speaks of permanence. It is the only thing I can say I will always be – her parent. Certainly, there is letting go in this relationship but no matter what, she is my child and I am her father, until I die and beyond.

Most other memories are tinged with loss. Many speak of places and people that are no longer part of my life. Moments where stories connected and wove a cloth that held some time together and left a mural of memory and some photographs on a wall or on the screen of my mind.

And now cliche propagated by some rock star of the self-help world, reeking of Armani and secondhand bookshop wisdom, tempts my fingers with stories of the only constant being the present moment but that’s not the point.

The author for whom this blog is named says in one of his later books,

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Kurt Vonnegut

Perhaps that’s the point. We are all engaged in the deadly serious business of farting around. But I’ll say this – hoo boy, getting used to the loss is a lifetime’s work.

There’s more thoughts about those threaded moments and how so often I find them sewn together in ways so unbearably beautiful that it hurts but the child whose first breath I inhaled has just walked into my study and placed a packet of orange chocolate fudge at my elbow, spoils of her stop at a farm stall on her way back from a short holiday.

So I will stop writing for the moment and get back to some properly serious farting around.