Free Not a Fairytale by Shaida Kazie Ali Page B

episiotomy. What a lyrical word for such an ugly deed. Out pops my child, and they slip her into my left armpit where she nestles in a spot that appears to have been designed with her in mind.
    She looks at me vaguely and then, with more interest, at the play of light and shadow on the ceiling made by the cars driving past the window. She makes soundless noises with her mouth. She has no eyebrows, like Ma. Salena comes in, kisses my wet cheeks and whispers the azan in my daughter’s right ear, before the nurse whisks her away. For a moment it feels like they have taken my left arm too.
    I phone Jimmy as he’s sitting down to a supper of home-delivered pizza, my favourite pregnancy meal. The line’s bad, our voices echo and bounce against each other. But when he finally understands, his near-silent sniffs are more valuable to me than the most extravagant of his gifts.
    Later I get to see her, my baby, Nazma, my star-child. She has a tube up her nose, other tubes are hooked up to her, machines are beeping, but she sleeps as if she invented the act. I cannot believe that outside of this room, this ward, this hospital, there is a spinning earth, with all its joys and horrors, because my world lies in an incubator.

Dreams of Sleep
    I FANTASISE ABOUT SLEEP THE WAY MEN ARE SUPPOSED to think about sex all the time. I crave a night of uninterrupted sleep the way I craved chocolate before my period when I was a teenager. I long for my body to be mine, not to wake up ten times a night to feel little demanding hands clawing at my breasts for sustenance.
    Since Nazma’s birth I can’t remember sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time. She’s supposed to be sleeping through the night, according to her doctor and the baby magazines Jimmy still buys. But she doesn’t read the magazines so she doesn’t know she’s falling short of her milestones. Often she screeches hysterically, ear-piercingly, for what seems to be no particular reason. She’s not hungry, she’s not wet, she’s not cold. There is no obvious source to her despair.
    Sometimes I dance with her, sometimes I coo lullabies. Sometimes I fantasise about placing a soft feathery pillow over her dewy skin, her eyes like open flowers, and just holding it there until she sleeps for a hundred years.
    I’m an unnatural mother. I’ve never heard other moms wishing their children away. Maybe I’m becoming Ma.
    When I’m close to despair I break into Jimmy’s snores and he is instantly alert and inexplicably upbeat . He hugs her close to his chest and strolls around the room like he was born to the task. If only he could lactate. I leave them to it and find the dark smoothness of the couch and the comforting undemanding bodies of my cats Lily and Raven. All too soon it is time for another feed, and I force my gritty eyes as far open as they can go.
    Jimmy gets home-help, Spanish-accented Gregoria, whose voice sounds like she’s permanently on the verge of catching a heavy cold and who wears long dark dresses in a heavy fabric, with long sleeves, even in the Floridian heat, because she wanted to be a nun but her agnostic father wouldn’t allow it. Instead she has made a career out of caring for other people’s children. She says Nazma might be her last baby; she’s searching for a cloister that will accept her although she is approaching her fortieth birthday. Nazma likes her. She naps in a sling against her body for hours, and I am free to sleep, but find it impossible to do so. I’m jealous of Gregoria’s competence. But by the time Nazma turns a year old and Gregoria bakes her a gingerbread house birthday cake from scratch, I am prepared to bow to her domestic agility.
    She takes control of the house and it preens under her attention. Even the taps sparkle in a way I never could get them to do. Gregoria hates crowds and goes shopping at midnight when the supermarket is near empty. I get used to her unpacking groceries in the early hours of the morning. She