In two days, we will have The Scan. The Scan that will tell us whether we can start the gardening, building, baking… the making of you, baby. When the time is right, Dr Tam Tam and your mom, and the sperm of a man whom we know is tall, and has no genetic diseases, will come together in the not so romantic setting of a hospital bed in a tiny room on the second floor of a building in Wilderness Road. Wilderness Road, that’s a name meant for us. And so it will begin.
You won’t get to hear Dr Tam Tam’s voice, but perhaps I’ll take you to that little room where you were conceived one day and introduce you to the lady who helped your mom make you. She is soft in voice and demeanour and a book reader. She wears her hair in long braids, tied back in a low ponytail. For our appointments she opens the door and steps out in either baby blue, peach pink or new bud green scrubs. I sit down in the chair opposite her and we chat for a bit, about work, but mostly about books, and then about you. I don’t want to leave her chair, her room.
There is the first scan, an ultrasound and a breast examination in Tam Tam’s room where photographs of all the babies she has helped bring into the world smile from their place on her wall, proud reminders of why she does what she does.
No one knows I am here. The start of this journey is secretive and independent, like the best solo adventures.
Tam Tam is one of the friends I make on my journeys, swimming in a pool beside the ocean in a Zanzibari hotel with a Greek opera singer, dancing with chairs on our heads on a beach on Pemba Island with a South American scuba instructor and children from the nearby village, cycling through a wilderness reserve in Kenya with British travellers before sunset, traipsing through a Madagascan forest with a French man and a Malagasy guide trying to ensure I don’t step on hairy crabs, meeting with lemurs hugging tall trees, chameleons as a big as a child’s shoe.
On these adventures past, my camera is always around my neck and the African sun’s heat sticks to my back. Back in my room, villa, cabin, bungalow, tent, I make house, unpack my luggage and hang my clothes in the wardrobe, drape my swimming costume over a chair on my balcony, slip my sandy shoes off and leave them to wait for me outside my door. I slink into a hammock, sofa, beach chair, four poster bed, with the evening hot and full of second-hand novels that I slip from my bag.
Vervet monkeys, brown lemurs, red colobus, Cachma baboons hop like pied pipers across my roof and the winding vines and trees that surround me. The sunset is red and reflecting across the sea’s ripples or the hippo’s pond. Wherever I am in Africa, there is a meeting with someone who will open my mind, whom I will fall in love with for the moment, there will be a monkey of some form or breed, and there will be a path leading through a wilderness where I will feel most alive. There will be moments of silence, when my lips never part except in awe at a zebu cattle crossing my path or an elephant herd coming down to the waterhole. There will be silence even when other footsteps lead me, into a virgin forest cave with the shadows of bats and the light of sparkling crystals.
Dr Tam Tam is the new friend for the beginning of this journey. She is my guide.
When I told my mother and father, “I want to have a baby, alone,” I had already been to the Fertility Clinic and had the checks to see if my eggs and womb were willing and able. I had picked Tam Tam, my fertility specialist, from a website, the kind face peering out from the web page. I had had the ultrasound the day before and that morning I’d laid on a bed while ink was injected into my fallopian tubes by a male doctor to determine whether both sides were open – all while a kind female nurse kept me distracted as I told her stories of an elephant orphanage I work for. I had looked up the donor profiles and examined the qualities of each candidate, preparing for the day of conception.
While I sat across from Mom and Dad in their living room and told them, Mom tried hard to not have her face give away the total overwhelming excitement in her heart. In that moment I could see the cogs in her Cancerian brain already shopping for baby booties and knitting woolly hats and baking bread for baby’s school lunch box. I am lucky to have her, I think often to myself, and to have her heart that overflows so easily. Dad’s reaction is typical too: it starts with stoic reception and then a day or two of processing time, eventually caving to humour and rationality and emotion. I’m not sure if he knows what to do in the face of excess sentiment, but by the fourth day he is giving Mom and I nicknames: Mom is Gammy and I am Incubator. Dad doesn’t name himself but I’ll give him the title we’ve always referred to him as, The Oracle. I know he will be there with all the facts of how placentas work and what vitamins not to take and helping me tell myth from truth along the way.
You’re in good hands, baby.
With Child and I 