AustLit

'History begins with someone else's memory of you.' This is how Julia Cohen opens her essay on abortion for the New England Review, and I know this because I have been relentlessly scouring the internet for essays on abortion and for poems, song lyrics and admissions of any kind. History begins with someone else's memory of you, and my mother tells me that, as I pressed steadily on the fleshy walls of her womb 28 years ago while she lay in the rickety restored cubbyhouse she shared with my father, a home brief and unassuming, she knew me. She couldn't possibly have known me, which seems a cruel but necessary diagnosis. I tell myself this because, if history begins with someone else's memory of you, if my mother knew me then, my own child's history began at my kitchen basin as I heaved bile and worry, the smell of my cat's litter fixed in my nostrils like some kind of malignant aura or rotten eggs. The air carrying a thick decay around me, never leaving. Until, of course, it did. Three weeks later, my queasiness departing my body with the same fervour, the same immediacy that my pregnancy did. A moment. A womb the shape of a could-be home. A sort-of child, as in something, someone, brief and unassuming.' (Publication abstract)