Is it possible to have multiple centres?
I can’t keep track of how many weeks pregnant I am. It’s either almost 11 or 12? Once I heard the heartbeat and my miscarriage rate dropped, there was less to fuss about and more to get on with. In my previous pregnancy the date-stamped volume of images and texts of my prurient belly carried me. Now the story is a faint line.
Is that what it’s like with a subsequent child? It’s as if they are not the centre of my world already. They are always-already second. I am pregnant but I am S—’s mom first and the baby is his sibling. The family dynamic will cleave at its arrival.
A co-worker tells me, “Be careful Magda. I had my daughter and son six years apart, like you, and my daughter, now a grown up, still carries resentment toward me.”
My eyes widen.
“The thing no one told me is that when a new child enters the family, it’s your responsibility to facilitate a sibling relationship, it doesn’t always just happen. So in my newborn intoxication, I breastfed, slept and coddled the baby, thinking my six year old, who I always indulged, would take on the role of big sister on her own. Except she needed me too, and in ways I could no longer centre her.”
M— redirects me.
“I remember when my brother was born, four years after me. I welcomed being a big brother and understood that my role in the family shifted.” The shift allowed him to expand who he was and how he could be in the world. In some ways, it imbued him with a benevolent power that I’ve seen him make use of with all our friends over the years.
Always pragmatic, he continues, “Perhaps, because I was already independent. While my parents raised me to be well-adjusted, I never felt I was the centre of their world.”
Is it possible to have multiple centres?
A quantified self is not the meaning of a narrative, even if it felt like that with S—. My pregnancy is not an advent calendar. Except with S— I wanted to be pregnant more than I wanted a child, and this time I want a child as much as the pregnancy. Quantifying pregnancy is pointless, eight or nine months in one’s life would probably not even show up on a graph, yet its duration like my womb, swells. Henri Bergson was right in noting that life should be felt as duration—many temporal instants—and not counted in abstract time.
I stop worrying about forgetting what week it is.
Duration is malleable; it opens and closes for a subject when an object acts upon it. My body is my baby’s body. We are a multiple body. My baby acts upon me as it grows, as it becomes itself. “Duration is not merely lived experience; it is also experience enlarged or even gone beyond; it is already a condition of experience” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 1988). A day is literally a lifetime.
Erin Manning in Politics of Touch (2007 p. 142) writes, “The body is multiple. My body intensifies differently with every reaching-toward. Touch is duration. Static bodies do not not make space for touch as a reaching-toward.” My baby stays alive by touching me and by the touch of my insides. We are a Möbius strip or an umbilic torus, a similar shape whose typology is like pregnancy and its trimesters—its edge goes around the ring three times before returning to the starting point. Me and baby’s experience of time changes in movement, we are in a world of our own duration.
If the body is multiple, then could it not have two centres that make space for two children? There’s no hierarchy in touch—it’s the quality of that touch that moves us. I am moved because I am a mother. A second child is always-already second in time, but in duration it exists on its own plane in relation to the world. Its existence doesn’t depend on recreating the techniques I used when pregnant with S—; a static-making fallacy. Only by willing to enter this pregnancy's distinctive temporal instants, I re-centred.