I’m a woman in my early sixties. Somewhere between late and never. No longer the career woman, mother, housewife and lover doing it all, meeting every demand, and then some, just with my left hand.
Now I’m wife, mother, grandmother, and my mother’s mother. But I still have to satisfy all the demands placed on me.
A strange place to be, this one. On the outskirts, yet still in the middle of the road. In a desert where beautiful flowers crop up.
A strange place where one thought sort of bumps the next one along.
Thoughts flare up, only to put themselves out half-way. There isn’t much scope left for surprise. I have mulled over the unimaginable.
One thought is starting to nag a little—that the remaining leg of the journey is the shortest. It has taken hold, but refuses to settle in just yet. Heaves. And sometimes gently wafts. Like seaweed.
It’s as if I’m straining to crane my neck ever so slightly, so I only look out and up, not down. A bit like a turtle. I choose a contented sigh. I simply need to send my morning gloom packing with that vital cup of coffee, then go for a long walk, and then afterward . . . I have a good book on the go. I have stopped working, because I plan to “do all those things I never got around to, but always wanted to do.”
This strange hopeful promise, which was never meant to materialise. Impossible to keep because it’s confined to a time gone by. Long gone by now. Destined only to be savoured as a dream, while the world still burns around you.
Beware not to brood on your dream for so long that, like a precious royal mummy, it crumbles to dust when it finally sees the light of day.
On the other hand, it’s possible that by giving up on a dream you may just make something of it. Big dreams have a tendency to shape-shift when they are transformed into earthbound finite reality.
But given that none of this is plain as day, you partner up with the haze. The dream has to be pinned down, even though a faint trace of this truth still clings to it.
Must be pinned down and taken for a test drive, no matter if it’s headed straight over the cliff edge.
Pinned down while there is still life to be lived. This is the plan.
And you? You sit and wait by the window as evening falls. See the dream sail in on moonlit waves and feel the swell of its prow in your blood. You watch it glide in to moor, gaze down at it, unable to haul it in, because the window is perched too high. Slowly it drifts away again, with heartstrings that were supposed to fasten it trailing like sodden bunting.
Now the bustle has settled, now that everything is within arm’s reach, it is too quiet. Much too quiet. That raging fire has gone out. There is no drive left. Nothing but smoke. A vast empty hall has taken up the space that used to be so crammed you could barely breathe.
A fresh unease surfaces. A pressing feeling that it’s urgent.
This isn’t the old yearning for peace and quiet, but an impulse to rail against such things.
You arranged the journey to the summit in sweeping orderly turns through the landscape.
But now you go and ruin it all by carving a sharp shortcut. No caution. Like a sheep track across the mountain. The way man has always trampled desire paths straight through the architect’s ingenious designs, as he forgot to factor human nature into his work. Nature with its blind eyes and greedy fingers.
At times the longing feels sweet and the search like a little sorrow. Perhaps it all balances out in the end.
*
The phone rings.
“Mamma, could you look after the kids tomorrow?” my daughter asks. “The nursery is having an inset day.”
And in tumble Spiderman and Hulk, swords in hand, a shy Snow White with her wellies on wrong, and Pocahontas cuddling a teddy. All these little ones you played your part in producing to keep humanity going.
Life is made up of moments. Yes, I know. It has been said before. It’s timeworn. But worn really ought not rhyme with scorn. Worn wrinkly hands are beautiful, when you think of all the caresses they have given. The burdens they have carried. The stitches they have knitted. They were only ever idle at dusk, sometimes.
A worn staircase is beautiful. Life has cascaded down the steps and moulded its current form. The stairs bear witness to feet, flitting up and down, a whispering flood of life that has carried us forth to this day.
A threadbare woollen jumper with cobwebbed elbows and fraying edges touches something inside you, and you hold it briefly to your chest, before you bin it thinking of the body that wore it thin.
Need I say more?
As the years go by only moments remain in memory. Like stars on a frost-bright night. The darkness between them is the rest. A primeval pool of oblivion. Everything you struggled to squeeze into life, all those things that seemed so important, didn’t matter after all. Just faded to a dark backdrop of the forgotten. Space waste.
But the moments. Some but a few seconds long. Something somebody said. Or did. Something that happened. They twinkle away. Nobody, nothing can put them out.
A matchless sky only you have the binoculars for.
When you look closer at each individual star, you see a common denominator:
These moments are all in the company of others.
You also notice that they aren’t where you thought you took the right turn. No, they lit up in places where you had little or no influence.
Other moments are there too. Peculiar snippets of forgotten contexts, which make no sense, but stay with you though you never understood why.
Like photos with all the faces ripped out.
*
A star. The moment and eternity. The night in the delivery room is long. In my mind I suffer with the young women laboring in bed. Knowing what it’s like. Odd to be so close without sensing the pain in my body. Feeling grateful that I got to experience it myself.
The infant’s heart beats into the night, like the thumping of a little giant, breaking rocks deep in the Mines of Moria. Weakens a little when the contractions peak. Then regains strength.
Boom. Boom . . . The drum from the Earth’s core. The difference between everything and nothing. A stranger’s heartbeat. We don’t know who it is: Boy or girl. Servant or master.
Heartbeats. Contractions. Everything is measured by devices latched onto the belly.
Boom. Boom . . . Slightly ominous. It certainly makes the moment more dramatic.
When I had my children there were no such sounds or devices. The midwife would place a long wooden tube on my belly every now and again and listen. Not talk. I lay there alone and terrified in the fist of a raging natural force. That clenched and let go. Clenched and let go. As if the force itself were a heartless heart.
Night is so well suited to this mysterious wonder that is birth. No noise. Silence to focus on the contractions. Nothing but this monumental shift. You get silence to join in the struggle. Participate. With or without control. Silence to lay your hands on your stomach and prepare to receive someone you already know, but have never seen. Someone who already knows who you are, and who knows your voice.
And in the end you feel driven into something infinitely greater than you.
It’s as if I am sitting behind a window now, looking out at a storm where quivering trees are being torn out of the ground at regular intervals and vanish into the darkness.
Boom. Boom . . . Each time the beat fades we glance at the midwife, alarmed, the father and I.
That full-grown man, who is so little in the heart-shaped locket dangling from my necklace.
A few months ago I said goodbye to my father, when life prematurely turned its thumb down. And now I’m about to receive my first grandchild.
Dawn breaks outside. A summer morning peers through the delivery room window. The blood red sun lets go of the horizon. The sea is smooth as a mirror, and the world is quiet, pure and new.
And a strangeness suddenly overcomes me. I feel surrounded by a mighty force. The little one’s first cries somehow complete the circle. This terrifying, wondrous circle spinning around us here on Earth. Setting the terms. Disembarking us on one side and picking us up again on the other. Round and round in no hurry: birth, life, death. Life in the middle, utterly self-absorbed. So meaningless.
So precious.
My knotted grief loosens, and I understand. Take this new little life into my arms and feel the close bond to past generations and old traditions. Feel the age-old urge to hold the newborn out to the red morning sun and give thanks. Cradling the little bundle I feel all the love I have been given. Want nothing more fervently than to pass it on. Feel this lightness in my arms. Look at the tiny little face, where I detect features from the entire family. Gaze at the curled little fists, the perfect nails.
Look at this new miracle.
Becoming a grandmother is different to becoming a mother. In addition to that subconscious sense of completion, you also catch a fleeting thought of nascent dismantling. Like with scaffolding when a building is finished. A whole life lies in between. You see the child with other eyes. Imagine it at all ages. See time run away with it. Feel wisdom and melancholy. Pray the Lord will keep its soul through life.
The mother gets the child back and cradles it. Her hair is drenched in sweat. Strength and vulnerability shine in her eyes, alongside a fading terror, a trace of the ordeal she just escaped.
The man looks at her, but she doesn’t look at him yet. She is gazing at the child. At the little red face, and when she finally looks up, a little inquisitive smile appears, and I take a step back, sensing their relationship is changing. Becoming something else. More. And less. Never the same. Then she turns her attention back to the child: This is it.
Till death do us part. No hesitation.
And he straightens his back.
*
Blood. Sweat. Tears. These lifelong female life fluids. Flowing and flowing. On and on, until all sources dry up. Until the last drop congeals and the last pearl is wrung out. The final tear drawn from the once overflowing beaker.
*
“Hello. Are you there?”
I have started to dread the phone a little. Mamma calls. Problems keep cropping up. Help me with this or that! She was always so independent. Even in her many years as a widow.
A stroke is not to be trifled with. Especially when it steals away your capabilities. Everything has changed. Her mind is sound, but the right arm is dead, and walking is more of a challenge. There are no knitting needles out. The steady stream of beautiful hand knitted garments is dammed up. No more warm pancakes or freshly baked bread for our visits.
She doesn’t loose heart. Acts like nothing has happened. Learns to write with her left hand. Makes sure not to screw lids on too tight, so she can open them again. Tries as hard as she can on her own. Puts up with these new circumstances. We try to lend her our hands, because there is little other help to be had, and there are no prospects of a place in a home. You only get to go there to die, or if you already checked out, because your memory is gone, and you have lost your way into a land called Limbo. Nobody can reach you there, except perhaps the ones who already inhabit it and are hybrids of living and dead.
__________________________________
From On the Other Side Is March by Sólrún Michelsen, translated by Marita Thomsen. Used with permission of the publisher, Transit Books. Copyright © 2015 by Sólrún Michelsen, translation copyright © 2026 by Marita Thomsen.
