For as long as I can remember, I have woken every morning with a tight knot in my stomach.

I can feel it now.  Sitting in bed with a  light warding off the dark, and tap tap tapping out words. Nervous energy. My body buzzes with constant anxiety – static – fear. 

I once worked with a woman who was sick every morning on the tube on her way to work. The first time it took her unexpected and she vomited in her handbag. Next time she was ready with a carrier bag. It was a question of when and where, not whether. “How far today?”, we would ask, smiling in anticipation of the latest episode of how she got to work. We weren’t lacking in sympathy but we delighted to hear of her puking in tight public spaces as surely as the Alien bursts out in every replay. She was our space-travelling Ripley.

Swapping to buses helped her a bit. Reaching her next trimester helped much more. Our morning talks became less about comical recounting of disgust and horror, and all about old-fashioned-names v celebrity made-up-ones, whether-to-avoid-gender-stereotyping when buying baby-gros, and how-long-does it take one husband to decorate a box-room nursery.

I had got this job through a morning sickness of my own. A dream starter job in publishing was a happy accident.  Driven by my own unhappiness to action, one lunchtime I bought a pad of A5 blue writing paper from the newsagent-come-off licence . In the greasy-spoon, me in my suit surrounded by men on breaks from building sites demolishing big plates of eggs bacon beans and chips, I wrote my first resignation letter. Steaming mugs of tea, conversations, and cigarette smoke condensed on the windows so that the water ran down as much on the inside as it did on the outside. A grey London day, when the only flashes of colour came from red buses that splashed wind-braced pedestrians with oily road puddles.  

Finally it was the knot in my stomach, purging my insides every morning, that pushed me to stop tolerating an intolerable situation. I could not carry on shaking and crying my way to the station and back. Once there, smile in place, brain in overdrive, no-one would ever have guessed the super-woman effort it took me to get there and stay.

The resignation letter led me to a publishing job, and my morning-sick work colleague, who fell away from my life after she had her baby, only remembered years later, when I found myself pregnant and queasy at work. As my baby grew and pressed up into my chest and down onto my bladder, the fear that had never gone away, took on a physical presence.

In the tiny grey loo cubicles at my place of work, I found momentary peace. My very own confessional, stinking of drains with a thin layer of cheap commercial air-freshener I could walk away from the ringing phones and constant noise in my head and I could speak to it, little prayers, match-flickers, quickly muttered in the work loo. 

Now, my fear had a focus and a growing form. I could speak to her. “Hang on in there”, I would say. Grow strong little one”. And he (as it turned out) did grow strong. Strong enough, anyway, the little vulnerable scrap of a baby who made me both superwoman, and shaking at the thought of walking out of my own front door, along such hard pavements (so much harder than I remembered from before) and crossing any of the city roads I had crossed countless times before. So I crossed myself, a stealthy little prayer of superstition, then crossed the road. Cupped his tiny head in my hand, him and me, each so so fragile but strong enough. 

He is eight now. And hearing his laughter, watching his wild somersaults on the trampoline, I begin to understand what heart in my mouth means as I actually want to vomit with fear that he could hurt himself. So I practise and practise at quietly holding in the fear. Watching with a big encouraging smile, Letting him be. 

His laughter in my ears, sometimes drives out the self-defeating internal noises – but more often they are there nagging at me still. 

As a girl, I was always good at untangling fine silver chains of necklaces. I used to do that for my mother. Long slim fingers gently loosening, teasing apart until I proudly handed over small gold crosses, and impressions of the virgin Mary. Somewhere in my life, I forgot this ability to untangle.. 

My mother promised me pretty treasures. Instead I find myself frayed, unravelling. 

Divorced, dissatisfied, disappointed. One day when the cats come to play, they will pounce on a trailing thread and drag what’s left of me along the floor. 

But not interested in eating me yet, the cats are busy, busy examining and washing their paws. Flashes of pink tongue. Home for the night in their favourite places. 

My boy has crawled in to bed with me too. Snuggling as close as he can in the curve of my bosom. 

Him, me and too many cats. This is enough, for now. The knot will still be there in the morning: Maybe one day I’ll figure out whether it’s choking the life out of me, or holding me together.

(c) e.antoniou 2018