Wild Words Competition Runner-up: Hannah Ray

You were born in a pandemic

When you were born,

We had our “Smooth” playlist

Playing:

Jonathan had asked

What music I would like,

But I couldn’t really reply.

He recorded a voice note on my phone

Of your first breaths:

You can hear the music

In the background: an album by

Juliana Barwick

Playing:

Choir-like, a backdrop

to your bleating cries.

It wasn’t the birth we had planned,

In the pool

We had tested

On that watermelon summer’s

day at home in May.

Or in the birthing suite with the mood lighting.

They lifted you out of me, like Simba,

And handed you straight to me, as I had requested.

It was ours.

They put you in a red woollen hat,

They had run out of the amber ones, they said.

Red to show trauma.

Red being the most severe

End of the hat colour spectrum.

It was ours. You clung

To me and I clung back, while

They rummaged around in my tummy,

Like I was a big washing machine.

I suppose everyone was wearing masks,

Except you and me.

You were so much you, we cried.

We clung to each other,

In the hospital room,

United earth side they say.

Choir-like voices chanted in

Your arrival.

The anaesthetist BEN

Gave a commentary on

what was happening,

Those last few moments,

— You are about to meet your baby,

They kept saying.

I was wide awake, calm.

I had been awake three days,

Not allowed to eat to drink

anything other than small sips of water

For the last 12. It was ours.

I clung to you and you clung to me,

Our bodies warm, cosy in

The yellow hospital room.

Everyone introduced themselves

At the beginning, like a workshop,

A Zoom call. — My name is Debbie,

I’m a support nurse.

— My name is Parveen, I’m the consultant.

Jonathan held my hand, we listened.

He was shaking; he had cried so hard

Before we went into theatre. I went

Into reporter mode, first

On the crime scene, getting facts.

Your Papa, unused to blare and gore,

Was so brave. It was his worst

Nightmare. It was ours.

I used to tell people I loved hospitals.

My Dad took me with him

Every Saturday on ward rounds.

I was supposed to sit at reception

With the secretaries, feeding

Me Quality Street. But I would run

Along to be with Dad, then pad beside him

From bed to bed, nodding along

To his inquiries.

The patients would light up:

A little chatterbox.

I didn’t notice their ashen faces,

The tubes going in and out,

The chequered hospital gowns.

It was my playground.

It’s just as well, I like hospitals.

Given how you were born.

Just as well, I don’t mind

Blood (lost: some, needed: some more),

Or needles (a big one, in my back),

Backless hospital gowns (exposing),

Hospital instruments (cold, so 80s),

And knowing how our skin

just about keeps everything in

(they had to cut through

Four layers, to get to you).

I don’t remember being wheeled

Into a recovery room.

It was much bigger than the labour room

We had been squashed into,

Watching your heart monitor

Rise and fall.

The room was bright,

Though it was evening.

No concept of time by then,

I had arrived on a Friday morning,

Was it now Sunday evening?

You nestled into me.

Jonathan held you too.

We sighed and thought,

It was ours.

Then they told us Jonathan

Had to leave,

Because of Covid.

That was when everything

Changed.

Biography:

Hannah Ray is a writer and editor living in West Cornwall, UK. Her professional career spans more than 12 years in the media and tech industry, including working for Vogue, Instagram, the Guardian, consulting for Netflix and the BBC. She specialises in helping people, brands and communities tell their stories. She writes fiction, non-fiction and short stories. Her first novel, Family & Company, was longlisted for the 2019 Mslexia Novel Competition and she is working on her second fiction novel Hard Reset. She works as a freelance writer and editor for startups and artists on the cusp of revolutions in technology. She is currently a writer and editor for Substack.

On writing the piece:

I didn’t have a smooth ride in making babies or growing them, so I didn’t expect pregnancy, birth or raising my child to be as easy as some mothers make it look.

And yet, I couldn’t have predicted the extra curve ball to my matrescence in the form of the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

I was just entering my third trimester when Boris Johnson announced pregnant women were on the ‘high risk’ list. We had been visiting my sister in London, and immediately loaded up our van and hot-footed back to our home in west Cornwall, picking up groceries on the way and going straight into isolation.

The next six months were some of the most intense and obscure of my life: ridden with a new and gnawing generalised anxiety disorder.

Despite all, our beautiful daughter was born in June 2020, a month before the first lockdown lifted.

A journalist by trade, I kept detailed logs, journals, documents, notes, texts and wrote poems on her first year of life, particularly the first few months and days.

A year later, I read Michael Rosen’s book Many Different Kinds of Love: a collection of poems, diary entries and texts around his time suffering with Covid-19, including four months in an induced coma. I was deeply affected by this honest style of memoir. I took a week off work and spent the days my daughter was in nursery compiling a pamphlet of poems, notes and texts from the time. This was one of the first poems I wrote. I can’t remember when I wrote it, those months being such a blur. But it’s very raw and unedited, which reflects both the feelings and time at which it was written.

I started forming a lot of those notes and thoughts into poems and something resembling memoir. I hope to share this collection one day, and to perhaps bring as much solace to other new mothers raising their first babies in the height of the pandemic from March 2020 to March 2021, as reading their words of love and loss during that time brought to me.