It snowed on my birthday.
In the middle of the night, my mother called to my father, “Hurry!”. But their Ford Cortina was covered with a foot of snow. My father, called his nephew S, who was lodging with them, “Get up, re Malaka…she’s having the baby”, and together they dug out the car.
S had been thinking ahead about getting to work the next morning and had put a blanket under the car bonnet. Still the engine did not start the first time, or the second. Then the third time as my father sat in the black leather driver’s seat and S pushed the car down the small drive it gave a guttural cough, jumped, and woke up grumbling.
“Panayia! Mother of God! Hurry!” my mother had cried.
I wasn’t meant to arrive for another month, by when the snow would have long-thawed, and the snowdrops and crocuses would have given way to daffodils.
“What was I like when I was born?”, I asked as a child, eager to hear the fairytale again.
“Ooh you were tiny, skinny legs and arms, black hair, and these big lips hanging onto your face. When your Bapou saw you, he said to me, ‘what is this? A rabbit?”, my mother would laugh as she said the word rabbit, “kounelli”, and I would laugh too, delighted to be told how I was born ugly but sweet as a Beatrix Potter creature.
“They had to put the fire out”, my mother would go on with the story. Your Godfather, dear Godfather, S, forgot to take the blanket off the engine, and we had to stop on the way when it started smoking”. Her golden-brown eyes would narrow and her wide reddened lips stretch with laughing.
This year, it snowed on my birthday. To be precise, it snowed a night and a day before. It was the most perfect sticky snow. When we realised it was falling, at about 8.45pm, my boy and I abandoned the steam-filled bathroom. Instead we put on our coats and shoes and danced around the front garden in the gathering swirls, sticking out our tongues to catch the flakes. I grabbed the first handful of snow to throw but missed him. He grabbed a handful from the bonnet of my car and chucked it at me, missing too. I grabbed more and hurled it back where it burst softly as a pillow of white feathers around his face. “YES! direct hit!”, I taunted.
He ducked behind the car, then sneaked behind and scored a cold wet hit to the back of my neck. It was so funny that he had to throw himself onto the cushioned lawn, and roll around dramatically, while shouting, “I slipped, look Mum” as he got up and re-enacted first the snowballing and then the slipping over.
“Inside now – bath!” I said and he ran upstairs excited, pulling off his wet clothes to climb into the bath and warm up. The next morning we made a snowman. Hands burning with cold, and munching at carrots meant for his nose.
My boy came late and early. Three and a half weeks early, 8 days before my 40th birthday. It had snowed before Christmas as I carried him big-bellied, but still something light in my steps. I trudged to work in the city, when the cars and buses were not getting through. I was wrapped up and booted, a gleeful peasant, delighted at my own strength. Delighted that my body, had worked perfectly, despite popular opinion, and my sense of guilt and failure, and every feature story for the last 10 years tormenting me: ‘…egg count … cliff edge’, ‘career’, “miscarriage’, and on and on.
Despite my uncle who stared me in the face at the first family party after my divorce, age 36 and childless, and asked: “And how OLD are you, E?”, And I filled in the inference frozen in the air between us as I refused to answer. “Now, now H, so rude to ask a lady her age”, I scolded. Inside I was screaming. Too old. Too old.
Then there was the schoolfriend I could not bear to keep in touch with any more because I was convinced she must have three children by now, and here I was husbandless, childless. When we finally met by chance at the supermarket checkout it turned out she had had 4 rounds of IVF. Unsuccessful. I could hear the avalanche of her pain crashing about me, as she spoke softly and packed bread and milk into carrier bags.
Walking to work, aged 39, pregnant, I talked to my child constantly at the pace of my walking: “I will carry you little one, always, I will carry you safely…all my life. Stay in the warm, stay warm, grow strong, sweet one.” My soft endearments casting spells to protect him against the cold hard icy world.
After the snowball fight, sitting in a bath scented with sandalwood and lavender, water swirled pink and blue from a bath bomb, my son asked me: “What was I like when I was born?”. I looked at his pink warm cheeks and glittering eyes and said:
“You were tiny. Skinny little arms and legs, just a scrap of a thing, with a funny pointy head, and beautiful wide lips. When your grandmother saw you, she said to me, what is this? a baby rabbit?”.
e.antoniou