The Family Law (2 page)

 

*

 

Right now, I'm putting together the latest edition of
The Family
Dictionary
. This year's edition will have ninety-six entries. It's not a universally loved thing. Inevitably, over Christmas, someone is bound to be offended or confused, or feel left out. Sometimes I get the entries wrong. ‘It didn't happen that way,' my mother will say, correcting details or giving me facts I couldn't possibly have known. Or Michelle will interject gravely: ‘That's not actually what slitoris is.'

‘Then what
does
slitoris mean?'

‘I'm not entirely sure,' she said. ‘But I think it's a fancy word for vagina.' She brightened up. ‘Because it's a slit with a clit!'

To most people,
The Family Dictionary
is a collection of stupid and indecipherable phrases, stories that don't make sense. Friends have picked it up, flicked through it, only to say, ‘What is
this
?' or ‘I don't get it.' Sometimes, it's more pointed: ‘Usually you're funny, Ben, but this is just shit.'

When my boyfriend saw the first edition of
The Family
Dictionary
, he'd smile or break into laughter when he recognised a joke. Then he'd ask me to explain certain entries. ‘What is
three generations of mud
?' he asked. ‘Or
wing-toong-boong-tar-len
?'

I'd explain what the entries meant, correcting his pronunciation along the way, adopting the accents, putting on the voices.

‘Right,' he said, slowly. ‘But some of these …' He didn't have to say it. They were lame and weird, nonsensical and not funny. For a moment, I was offended and we had a small argument. I took
The Family Dictionary
out of his hands, stomped around and closed doors. But a few hours later, to relieve the tension, I broke into a dance wearing a red helmet and suspenders, something that made us both laugh for reasons that don't make sense, and neither of us completely remembers. I'd probably remember if I'd written about it at the time, but it's gone now.

No one else is obsessive-compulsive enough to document all this, so I'm the one responsible for the mistakes I make in putting the thing together. Inevitably, I'll get stuff wrong. There are some things about my family I think I know, some things that are impossible to understand, and some things I don't really get. And every year, when I go to compile
The Family Dictionary
, I'm reminded how flawed my memory is, and how impossible it is to remember things in detail. I know that years from now, we'll pick the dictionary up and come to the conclusion that we were childish and stupid and relied a lot on non-sequiturs and foul jokes for laughs. But until that day, we'll be laughing.

Baby Love

It's a small miracle that more mothers don't kill their children. My mother said that although she'd never experienced post-natal depression, she'd read about it in magazines and instinctively understood where it came from. ‘You know, it's those mothers who want to kill their baby,' she said. ‘Like that woman from
Blue Lagoon
, the one with the eyebrows. It's natural with all those hormones, I think. Some animals have it too, like those kangaroos that don't want their babies in their pouch anymore. Oh, and that movie about camels,
The Story of the Something-something
. Did you see it? Very touching.'

Still, my siblings and I weren't put off by her negativity. When we were old enough to have children of our own, we discussed our options at the dining table. Were we going to adopt? How many would we have? Would we prefer an older boy or an older girl? Was it okay to have an only child? What would we call them? In the middle of our discussion, Mum snickered from across the kitchen and warned us off the idea. ‘Ha, you want to have kids?' she asked in Cantonese. ‘Don't even bother. No one should have to have kids. If I had a choice, I wouldn't have had them.'

It was hard not to take this personally. We stared at her, open-mouthed and offended, before mobilising as a unit and howling her down in protest: ‘What are you
saying
? You wish we were never
born
?'

She shook her head. ‘No, no, you don't get it. I enjoyed motherhood. Having five kids, being a full-time mum, all of that. What I'm talking about is
if I were born now
, as a completely different person. I'd get my degree or career first, then maybe have
two
kids only: no more. Definitely not
five
.'

Tammy, Michelle and I – the three youngest kids – glared at Candy and Andrew hatefully. If history had been rewritten, the three of us would have been the abortions.

To be fair, we also needed to consider what childbirth did to a woman's body. Over the course of twenty years, my mother's body underwent a remarkable and cruel transformation, from a petite, small-waisted Chinese-Malaysian beauty to a pumping, sweating baby machine that spat out five children in quick, bloody, semi-automatic succession. In some mammals, I think, this many children is referred to as a
litter
.

Mum also said childbirth was unbearably, gratuitously painful. When I once asked her to compare and rate each of our births – which was easier, which was faster – she balked. ‘No birth is easy!' she exclaimed. ‘Of course a
man
would ask that question. Men can't even begin to imagine. Can you imagine squeezing a lemon coming out of your penis-hole? Yes, yes! That's what it's like! I'd like to see a man squeeze lemons out of his penis-hole. OUT OF YOUR PENIS-HOLE, BENJAMIN. You can't even imagine, can you? A whole
lemon
– with the points on each end and everything, except this lemon has
limbs
. Out of your
penis-hole
. PENIS. HOLE.'

She delved into the more graphic details of childbirth for my sisters: how children robbed you of calcium while in the womb and weakened your teeth; how pregnancy made you want to hurl at the slightest smell; how for weeks after giving birth, you walked around uncontrollably leaking blood and milk all over the place, like you'd been shot. I usually had a strong stomach for gore, but her frank descriptions left me feeling light-headed.

‘Plus, every woman's vagina
tears
when they have their first child,' she continued. ‘With your first-born, you're bound to get stitches.' When she was in labour with Candy, she underwent an induced labour before her doctor said words no woman should ever have to hear. ‘Jenny,' he said gravely, holding a syringe to the light, flicking it with his fingers. ‘What I'm going to do now is put a needle in your vagina, then I'm going to cut it with a scalpel.'

In retrospect, Mum said, she was glad he sliced her open. Nowadays, she said, some doctors let your vagina split open naturally, insisting it was better than cutting you with a blade and stitching you up. ‘No
way
,' Mum told my sisters. ‘Letting it tear will make you look like you have third-degree burns down there. My only advice to you is this: If you have children, don't let your vagina tear. Tell your doctor:
stitch
.' Still, she suspected that after five children, none of it really made a difference. ‘After that many childbirths, your vagina meat goes all f loppy,' she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Not so stretchy. Dingly-dangly.'

*

For some women my mother knew, falling pregnant was a difficult business, an exact and fraught science. They needed to synchronise and schedule everything in order to conceive, mark their calendar with the rhythms of their menstrual cycle, analyse their partner's sperm count, map out weather changes, ensure the stars were aligned. Then there were women like her, so obscenely fertile you could get them pregnant by raising an eyebrow in their direction or handing them a bouquet of flowers.

Mum had fallen pregnant with Candy almost immediately after losing her virginity – which, for her, coincided with her wedding night.

‘Not much fun there,' she said. ‘Not much foul play.'

‘You mean “foreplay,”' I said.

‘What's the difference?'

When I explained it to her, she laughed and shrugged.

‘Doesn't sound very different to me,' she said. ‘Anyway, I didn't know I was
that
fertile. It runs in the family, though. Look at my mother: seven children. It's our genetics. If you weren't gay, I guarantee you would've gotten some girl pregnant by now. And if your sisters weren't on the pill, they would have gotten pregnant a
long
time ago.'

 

*

 

When she was twenty-one and pregnant for the first time, my mother found herself subjected to a suite of ancient superstitions that my father and grandmother had imported from mainland China. Having grown up in cosmopolitan Malaysia and Hong Kong, Mum found them ridiculous, but did her best to play along.

Some of the dietary requirements seemed faintly plausible, like avoiding watermelon or pineapple – which, they believed, were just asking for a miscarriage. But other requirements were curve-balls, like the nine-month enforced ban on attending circuses and barnyards. The belief was that if she was exposed to living animals for too long, her baby could come out covered in hair (contact with apes) or with a snout-like nose (looking at pigs). All of this also explained why Mum didn't have a single photograph of herself pregnant: Dad insisted the flash could make their offspring cross-eyed or blind.

She found childbirth itself even more humiliating. ‘The most embarrassing moment in any woman's life,' she told me, ‘is when she's giving birth. Crowning, crowning, crowning, and everybody's just looking at your
hole
, waiting for something to pop out, like a prize.' The first time it happened, it was like a strange nightmare, where she found herself in stirrups and watching doctors impale her with what looked like a knitting needle. Warm liquid burst out over her legs and spilled into a pan. Feeling defiled already, Mum got out of the stirrups only to be handed a giant adult nappy. ‘Wear this,' a nurse said bluntly. She changed into the nappy and shuffled back towards her hospital bed, exhausted and ashamed, until the nurses started screaming at her in shrill, scandalised voices.

‘
No-no-no
, Mrs Law!' they said. ‘Don't go back to bed.' They pointed sharply at the door, jabbing with their fingers. ‘Walk outside! Up and down, up and down! NOW.'

Like a humiliated pony at a royal show, Mum began to walk slow laps, round and round, while other patients stared at her shamelessly, fascinated by the bloated Asian woman in a diaper parading for them all. But just like they said, the contractions sped up soon after.

The next two pregnancies were blurs. Her body reacted to Andrew's pregnancy – her first boy – in strange new ways. Her pelvis felt split open like a fractured hull and she walked like a double amputee in physiotherapy, shifting her weight between two swollen, artificial pegs. Andrew wasn't any heavier than Candy, but his skeleton seemed longer, and he fought for space with her vital organs. By the end of it, her liver felt bruised, her kidneys misshapen. Giving birth to him felt as though her entire spine were being rearranged.

Still, Andrew's birth was easy compared with what came later. ‘A miscarriage,' she explained to me, ‘is like someone's switched on a tap of blood that can't be turned off.' Even now, she'll remind people that she was pregnant
six
times, not five. She was admitted into hospital during the day, but woke up from general anaesthetic at night, in a darkened ward full of sleeping women. Although there were no nurses or doctors to confirm what had happened, she knew.

Groggy from anaesthetic and blood loss, she was sent home the next morning; the hospital needed the bed. ‘I wasn't even there that long, and then they
discarded
me,' she said, before correcting her English. ‘Not “discarded,” sorry.
Discharged
.' On the way home, Dad drove while Mum watched the scenery go by: bitumen and rocks, dirt and gravel. It was the start of spring, but everything looked dead to her. Dad didn't know what to say, and Mum was too exhausted to start a conversation. What was there to say? Silently, Mum swore in future to avoid all procedures where she'd be rendered unconscious.

All she needed was some rest and to be treated gently. But when she got home, she was immediately cordoned off and quarantined, like someone with Ebola or swine influenza. Chinese superstition dictated that she be hidden away from the world. Her situation was a bad omen, possibly contagious. So late at night, while my father showered, she huddled up close with her two toddlers and turned on the television. Candy and Andrew gurgled, laughed and screamed as together they watched variety shows. Although three pregnancies had surrounded her with children and noise, my mother couldn't remember a time when she'd felt lonelier.

 

*

 

After I was born, my parents reached an exciting turning point in their marriage: they began to fight openly and without reserve, like two cats thrown in a sack and swung around wildly. Why hold back? they figured. Shouting is so much more satisfying! My mother learned to scream; my father screamed back. Every marriage starts with passive aggression, but couples soon realise that being passive requires effort. It's easier to be openly hostile.

On the night I was born, my father drove their new red Ford Cortina, speeding down the newly paved roads that cut straight through to Nambour Hospital. It was night, and the powerful headlights of the new car made easy work of the darkness. In the backseat, Mum was sprawled out without a seatbelt, her legs crooked and raised while she panted like a walrus. Watching the night sky through the rear window, Mum saw streetlights and stars whip past in a quick blur of whites and yellows against the black. When another set of contractions punched into her groin, she groaned.

‘Ugh, it's
coming
,' she said. ‘It's
coming
.'