Original Labour (cf keywords Love, Labour, Language, Land and Games)

Like every other mammal, I am the product of a mother's labour. So if I want to write about myself, with an eye to others more like myself than not, that's where I start. It may seem selfish, egocentric or self-important to write about myself but that's my only window on a world that runs in and out through me. I'm only one of trillions, but still a case in point – part of the evidence myself and a vantage point on others. Maybe some of them will recognise me, or themselves in me.

Making babies, like digging, fighting wars and social care when we get old can be hard labour. With some blood, sweat , tears and other messy stuff along the way.. Many creation myths have Man born of water, dust and mud. Woman too perhaps, though the biblical creation myth goes way off course when it fashion's the woman from Adam's rib. The Muslim Koran gets nearer the truth with Allah (the merciful and compassionate) making Man from a blood clot. Hard labour either way, with the difference that some privileged men have been able to leave the roughest bits to others while, labour for women mostly cut across class boundaries. Here's song for the labouring man:

A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones....

I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain
Fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebrake by an ol' mama lion
Cain't no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line

16 TONS (Johnny Cash / Merle Travis)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfp2O9ADwGk

Although we all know that a woman's work is never done, I've yet to come across a song that tells the woman-in-labour story as it is. Any offers to fill that gap? Anyway, I was not born in a Kentucky cane break but in a nursing home near Blackheath in South London. That was in the run up to Christmas 1936. My parents and their families may sometimes have felt poor, but they were not. Of course I dont remember that but from what my mother told me later she had a lot of trouble giving birth to me. With midwife and doctor to hand, but not my father, as was normal those days. He seemed happy to see me, and glad to find his wife still alive. But earlier in her pregnancy he had been quite shocked by the transformation of his slim young wife when her belly swelled big and round. He walked out. I dont know how long he stayed away but it was certainly a shock for Mary, my mother. And me too perhaps, if if somehow got through to me. When it came to labour pains and delivery, the narrowness of her hips combined with childhood damage to her coccyx to make things more difficult. Her bent in tail-bone snagged the pelvic exit route.

This story was never just about my mum or me. Human females in general are not very well-designed for the delivery of big-headed babies. Unlike Neanderthals, Sapiens women stand and walk erect on closer-set legs.. The human brainbox may not be bigger than our stone-age cousins' but our hip and pelvis structure came out narrower..

As a man I cant understand how any woman feels in giving birth, but from what I learn it appears that women's hard labour birth probably preceded the hard labour of men out making a living. Eden could not have been a garden at all, with its goodness all to hand and protected by some sort of wall. With better science we can guess that the Eden story looked back to times already going, going, gone. When our ancestors were hunter gatherers, with lots of space to hunt and gather in and fruits, and roots and game in relatively easy reach, life may not have been too arduous for little tribes who moved from place to place. Less strenuous and more fun perhaps than scratching a living out of the ground or felling trees with stone axes or bulding walls.. Why else did hunting become the sport of kings and their warlord peers? It was they who now claimed the open forests as their own, kept killing the wild animals and calling their trophy-meat 'game'?

What the biblical creation myth also misses out is the hard labour of feuding and fighting within and between small tribes, and the accidental deaths that occur in the hunting of big animals or defence against non-human predators. But all that time, we can assume, women were still struggling, bleeding and dying in their inescapable procreative role. How else could we have gone forth, multiplied and colonised the world?

Over that longer hstory and prehistory, my guess is that women in childbirth have been at least as much at risk as were men at war or down mines etc. Men's wounds, unless they are crushed or fall from great height. Traditional warriors wounds were mostly blows or cuts from the outside in. They were more likely to be to the head, upper body and limbs which can be protected with armour and shields. Their wounds are more accessible for treatment than the internal wounds that occur when the labour of childbirth goes wrong. Internal wounds 'down there' have always been harder to treat and disinfect, more open to cross-infection as essential organs, conduits and containers entwine. Another evolutionary design fault, as bladder, bowels and womb are piled in together like soft fruit in a bowl.

Until recently I hadnt given the internal process of pregnancy and delivery much throught. Now I'm older, my mind is more free to wander and look to the important bits it missed. My interest and attention is also skewed inwards and downwards as my own entrails become less resilient and more demanding. But even before that I had observed in myself that the focus of emotion had less to do with heart or head than with gut feelings lower in my abdomen. Above and beind the belly-button, in that rib-cage opening to which God turned for Adam's rib, and with its focus in the solar plexus. I dont know why we're all told about the external cutting and tying or clipping of umbelical cords, but why haven't we heard more about what goes on inside the infant thus suddenly released and deprived. The solar plexus remains a bundle of nerves, and the sudden closure and diversion of such a grand central supply line from mother to embryo must surely have left its mark. While the maternal womb jetisons the placenta, what becomes of the internal apparatus left behind

on the other end?

Were there no lasting scars, adaptations or records of such extraordinary formative events? I wonder if that solar plexus may also be a data base or part of one, a livinig archive of primal loss and transformation? Isnt that where I, or we, now feel it, in a very physical way, when we experience a new shock, loss, fear or more positive excitement? And some vaguer or more lasting sense of longing or forboding? My guess is that this new material is grafted onto an older deeply rooted stock.

This everyday visceral business plays up and around the way we feel and thnk about ourselves, each other and the world. Nothing is too low to play a part in what we most fear, long for and aspire to. Old age can be a pain in the arse, but it also creates new openings and opportunities. As my frailer digestion and bladder interact and vie for attention, I wake up more often at night to relieve myself on one or both channels.

.

With old age, a lot of our visceral business becomes more demanding, digestion more laborious, bladder less accommodating and the two playing off on each other. I wake up at night and need to relieve myself on one or both channels. With more interrupted sleep I dream more, or remember more dreams. The membranes between sleeping and waking become more permeable, and dreams criss cross with memories, new inferences and interpretations. Not a supernatural world but real for what it's worth, at once scrary and revealing if I can keep track of it. Maybe it's always been like that, and I just didnt notice it so much, and now I remember that Common Sense was once the name given to some imaginary point or process in ourselves where the messages from our other senses – sight and sound, taste, smell and touch – combine and integrate. That still seems quite sensible to me though I wouldnt confine it to this or that end of our physical and neural mainlines, or to this or that part of a cerebral mainframe. What more recent science reveals is how much of our sensory information is processed and responses prepared before we become conscious of it at all.

In more everyday terms I am conscious that the traditional five-sense package we pick up at school does not quite fit the bill. Where does it leave the undeniably real sensations we feel inside ourselves, beginning with the pains and discomforts of essential organs under stress and going on through sexual arousal to those other 'solar' impulses that we may or may not as they trigger us to fight, flight or freexe, to reach out or approach, recoil or embrace, hide or shield, touch or stroke?.

Back to that digestive tract, which I sometimes think of as my inner worm. Like the unsung earthworm that Charles Darwin wondered at, it does much of our essential business. Like the humble worm – though 'worm' was also the name given to dragons and the snake behind our fall from race - our digestive tract it equipped with the neural lines it needs to direct and manage its essential work. And oddly the peristalsis mechanism that squeezes our food intake down through our body and enables our digestion chemistry down the way is very similar to that used by worms to squeeze themselves through surrounding soil while squeezing as much as they need to feed on through themselves.

Clever worm, a self-propelled, self-fuelling conveyor belt that predated creatures like us by umpteen millions of years. Now I wonder if our more elaborated systems can be understood as evolutionary add-ons. A long series of chance mutations and new opportunities as found in the hard and soft-ware of skeletons and limbs, more speciallised organs, senses, glands and brain segments. A wonderful range of add-ons, apps and accessories adopted by the primal worm that lives on in us and other ground it helps to feed and fertilise.

I'm not saying having babies is like having worms, or demeaning the 'higher' forms of intellect and sentiment, just getting back to basics on which all such refinement depends. It's taken me a long time and it didnt begin with the visceral reminders of old age, my good fortune in being present at the birth of two sons. It didnt begin with the visceral fragilities of old age, with my good fortune in attending my own sons' birth and infant after. My first proper job at the age of 18 I was as an orderly in a geriatric ward. I worked along-side a small group of older, more experienced 'state-enrolled-assistant nurses'. They were working class women who made sure that I, as a middle-class male incomer took the rough with the smooth. From feeding and bedmaking to changing clothes, washing old bodies and slopping out;soiled linen sheets. I rubbed ointment into bedsores and helped lay out and shave a man I'd known alive the day before. That crash course was a blessing to me. Close contact with patients and workmates was a great lesson and leveller. It washed away old reflexes of revulstion and disgust and enabled me to engage more easily with people I could now recognise as more like myself than not. Across conventional divisions of age, class and sex, conversation and interaction became less stileted, freeer, franker and funnier.

This hospital job was the first stint in two years of 'alternative service' when I refused to join up for what was then compulsory national service in the armed forces. But my father told me he'd had rather the same liberating experience in his own basic training for war time service in the navy. For my mother who, then and later, was often condemned to domestic isolation, there was some collateral benefit when she, as hospital patient in later life, found some relief in the intimacies of day to day care. She too became able to love and laugh across social the social boundaries that had constrained her earlier life. When she found she could chat lightly with a black male nurse as he bed-washed her, she may also have recalled the presence and hands of a black maid who washed her as an infant in Trinidad. Also in that bath, Mary could just about remember the big white hands of her father, which must have been unusual for a middle-aged, Anglo-Irish judge in 1913.

All that must have helped my mother and me to get back to each other at last when she came to stay with us in Wales. She needed somewhere to stay and someone to look after her when she was too old for comfort and no room was yet available at a care-home nearer where she lived. It was |Ada my wife who did most of the washing and changing. Ada's background was Irish Catholic/Communist working class and they had not been too sure of each other until then. But now the became good friends. Once or twice, then and before, it fell to me to take a hand. Now living together, day to day with no holds barred, old barriers between us seemed to melt. For the first time in our lives, after more than 60 years, my mum and I we were able to embrace each other and mean it, enjoy the new warmth between us.

Such a shame we had a hard time in my long-drawn-out delivery. By the time I appeared she was exhausted and drained, literally, by loss of blood. I must have been a bit battered and bruised, with a little forceps scar to show for it. That all left neither of us in any condition to enjoy each other when we first met face to face. Later she told me she felt she'd been a bad mother, and I know I was stroppy with her as a child and distant later on. I'm sorty it took so long to make up, and grateful for all the help we got. I was born on December 1936. My father had returned home well before that. Contrite or not he was obviously glad to see me and find his wife still alive, well-washed and warmly-wrapped by the time they let him in. I hope that by Christmas that year we could all begin to enjoy each other's company.