That Man

author: Aunty K

title: That Man

written: January 1994

He, the father of my child,  leaves me every working day to inhabit a world beyond my appreciation. A world of angles and gradients, surveys, audits, plans and bypasses. I hear the language of this landscape as if hearing it on the radio. It is remote from my life. Once removed. A distant relation to the world we here at home inhabit. It has always been so. At school I stood on the shore of this dominant sea of knowledge. An ocean whose worthy craft were Maths I, Maths II, Physics, and Chemistry. I dipped my toe into that water and knew it was not for me. I would have to train myself for other tasks. There was a tidal pull. Here I was and there was the other. A whole realm of other. But he, my man of many years now, is not other. How strange that feels.

I instead learned of language, nuance and intuition. Of colour, form and pitch. My university days frothed with causes, cases and cadence. I ran up and down the scales of experiences bursting with options, schemes and energy. I read, soaked in, and gave myself fully to the fleeting moment. I remember laughter and the passions of youth caught in glowing canvas. A gouache of the era.

But now I am still. I feed an infant from luminous engorged breasts for great swathes of time. Galaxies wax and wane: entire civilisations  rise and fall while I sit and he suckles. Or so it seems. For we are complete and content. Madonna and child  beatific. His waxy features are yet to hold true form but there is already an echo of us both. He is tinged with red downy fluff on his head. His eyes will be blue: they are turning already. He has learned to smile and  teases me with his quirky  mouth  while greedily slurping and sucking. My little milky boy. He smells like our bed, like my skin, like my milk and like a baby. I am fierce with love, tired beyond all reason and leaking milk. I am a colander, a cow, a mammal, a lioness in this new territory we both inhabit.

This other world which feeds us, clothes us and supports our very existence is insubstantial by contrast. It is as though I see the surface of a mirror lake; wherein are vast unknowable depths while all I see reflected back at me on its silvery skin are images of my own self rather than the depths below.

Somehow I married a man who manages the transition between the two gnoses with relative ease. He strides with an even tempered confidence from one to the other as though there were no impervious membrane . He is not flat footed or pedestrian as are many of his profession. He laughs deeply and often, and cries, hugs trees in the wilderness and is an altogether warm and loving man. I love him for it, I cannot help myself. His long flowing red hair at total odds with the trigonometric angles and particularies of his chosen field.

I want my own son to navigate his way with the same relative ease. Already I have plotted his course with women. He will be tall but not condescending. Gentle and trustworthy, embracing but no jailer. I will teach him. His little milky mouth will not speak any words of destruction and cruelty but words of compassion and of care and tolerant wisdom. Maybe his father should teach him. By example.

In our marriage bed there is a strong and powerful current of loving. The sheets strain to contain our breathy contact and the muslin curtain floats in the air as if suspended. Dust motes flicker in the gilded afternoon toward our heavy lidded eyes. Our baby sleeps. It is a miracle. Madonna like, I wonder at this often supped sacrament of loving that brought forth our child. His father sleeps. Later I do also.

My leonine maned man brings our hungry son to me, to the milk bar, to be sated. Here is the rhythm of life. For now I want nothing more.

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