The Way She Came to Be

By Kathryn D'Elia

Chelsea Harten is a journalist for a small newspaper who returned to her hometown after a failed engagement. She has the support of her parents and her brother Milo, as well as their long-standing friends Charlie and Dave Seddon. When Chelsea gives birth to her daughter Katalina Jane she has to evaluate how Katalina will fit into her life and how the new addition to the family will affect her relationships with her closest friends and family. The Way She Came to Be unfolds backwards, beginning with Katalina’s birth and unwinding in reverse to reveal the circumstances of her conception. It examines the effect of the pregnancy on Chelsea, on her friends and family, and her work life, offering glimpses of the way in which one change in one life affects a whole circle of people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925739053

Kathryn D'Elia

Kathryn has been working as a secondary school teacher for 12 years in both Victoria and Tasmania. She has a degree in Psychology and Criminology from the University of Melbourne, as well as a Bachelor of Teaching (Honours) degree. She is currently studying a Masters degree in Literacy. She was inspired to write this story partly due to an assignment she was given for her degree and partly due to a deep-seated love of Tasmania instilled in her during her time there.

Book preview

SEPTEMBER

Katalina: Birth

Katalina Jane was born at 11:42 am on Sunday, September 3rd. It was exactly as eventful and as uneventful as any other birth ever is. Katalina would not recall it. Her mother Chelsea would relive the details for her friends and family as they visited the hospital in the coming days, but a keen observer would note that – as always happens when a story is retold – the details became blurred and confused the more times she described the experience until she thought she’d been offered the gas before the pethidine (it had been the other way around, but this was unimportant) and she thought she’d been to the toilet three times during labour (it had actually been only twice, a detail only mothers ever seem to consider important anyway). Doctor Emma McTade had seen countless births that were more dramatic and countless that were less dramatic, but of course the birth of any child is very dramatic to the mother regardless of how mundane it might seem to the medical profession.

Katalina weighed 3200 grams, or 7 pound and 1 ounce as the people who tended to ask preferred to hear. She was neither the biggest nor the smallest baby that had been delivered by Emma McTade; she arrived three weeks before her due date which was not what Chelsea had been told to expect with a first baby, but which was completely uneventful for Emma, who had seen babies born much earlier and much later; indeed, at 37 weeks’ gestation the baby was medically considered to be full-term.

In the weeks after the birth, the importance of the event only grew in the mind of Chelsea, while Emma McTade found the details mingled in with all of the other births she’d attended until she could not recall a single specific unique detail from it; although the name Katalina stuck in her mind as rather pretty and, when she unexpectedly fell pregnant six years later at the age of 42, Emma McTade named her own daughter Katalina.

As thankfully forgettable as her birth was for Emma McTade, Katalina’s arrival unequivocally changed Chelsea Harten’s life forever. She had, of course, expected everything to change – she knew she would never sleep soundly through the night again; she knew there would be moments when her newborn’s inexplicable screaming would test her patience beyond belief; she knew there would be times when she would passionately hate the very thought of having to change another nappy or tolerate another second of breastfeeding. What she had not counted on, what came as an unexpected shock, was the fiercely intense need she suddenly felt to care for this other tiny human being; the almost violent need to protect her from anything that could cause her harm – other people holding her too tight or not tightly enough; nurses administering the wrong medication; bath water that was too hot. Chelsea found herself unable to trust anybody else to carry out even the most simple tasks. When her closest friend Tria changed Katalina’s nappy, Chelsea found herself checking how tightly the adhesive straps had been pulled; when her mother swaddled the baby before putting her down to sleep she found herself making up a flimsy pretence for unwrapping the baby and rewrapping her snugly; when a nurse mixed up some formula milk for the baby when the breastfeeding difficulties were at their peak Chelsea surreptitiously poured it down the sink and started from scratch to ensure the ratio of powder to water was exactly as stated on the tin. Katalina would be almost eight months old before Chelsea could let somebody else strap her into her carseat without double checking that the restraint had been fastened properly.

When Chelsea had attended the birthing class at the Marinda Base Hospital three weeks before Katalina’s arrival, she had been met with three enthusiastic, happily married couples who had extensively researched the mechanics of childbirth and who each had a written birth plan. While the plans varied greatly in their content they did not vary in detail; each was precise and well-considered and exact. One couple, a severe and serious team who reminded Chelsea of a grey faceless corporation, had determined the order in which the available drugs would be administered and the literal second the epidural would be requested. Another couple, two sweet and considerate bogans who offered Chelsea a cigarette (which she politely declined) during one of the breaks were mostly only concerned with how long after the arrival of their offspring would they announce it on Facebook (15 minutes, giving the mother enough time to reapply her eyeliner and the father enough time to scratch out a hand-written sign with the child’s name, which would be placed on the child’s chest for a photo to be taken which would be the focal point of his post. No relatives would be tagged; they would surely find the photo announcement in their news feed with little effort.) There was the obligatory hippie couple who were determined to have a drug-free birth, and while Chelsea admired their commitment to ‘experiencing the full gamut of labour’, she simply wasn’t sure that a painful delivery was, in any way, a more ‘full expression of nature’ than was one loaded with pharmaceutical benefits. There was only one other attendee at the course who was alone; a quiet and well-spoken woman of about forty, sharply dressed in designer jeans and new season Mollinis with a genuine Marc Jacobs handbag in a style Chelsea had considered buying from a knock-off website. Her name was Abigail and she was booked in for a caesarean birth a week later; Chelsea wondered idly if this was a medical necessity or a personal choice before chiding herself for mentally gossiping about the woman.

Chelsea herself did not have a plan for the birth. So far nothing about her pregnancy had been entirely normal or had gone entirely to plan, so she wasn’t particularly fussed about the need for a plan for the baby’s exit from her womb. She figured it would largely take care of itself, and besides she had great faith in the medical experts and knew that she would agree with anything they suggested when the moment of truth arrived anyway. She lamented the fact that her own mother could not come to the birthing class with her as planned – Edie Harten had come down with a nasty stomach bug three days earlier and was still vomiting on the morning of the class. She could have asked Tria to come with her and Tria would have done so in a heartbeat, but she felt like asking Tria to give up a precious Sunday was unfair given she was currently working six days a week. If Milo were around she would have asked him, but he was back in Adelaide with his new job and she didn’t see much point in him flying home for only one weekend, especially since she knew he’d take at least a week off to visit when his much-anticipated first nephew or niece finally came out. She considered asking Charlie, but the thought filled her with a squirmy feeling in her stomach which she couldn’t quite pin down. She knew it was silly; he was her oldest friend and would do anything she asked without question, but she felt it was somehow inappropriate; improper. And so she went alone, and found the day informative and dull and overwhelming and boring all at once; and left with slightly more trepidation about the impending arrival of the child despite – or perhaps because of – her increased knowledge of the process.

When she went into labour late on the evening of Saturday, September 2, Chelsea happened to be home alone watching a rerun of a 1990s adventure flick that brought back fond memories of growing up in Marinda, with her brother Milo, in the house next to Charlie and Dave, on a street where everybody knew everybody’s name. The neighbourhood was just far enough away from the city that they felt safe and a part of a small community; yet was close enough for the four teenagers to regularly catch a train into town to catch a movie, and Chelsea was sure she’d seen this one at the cinema with the boys. She could remember the way Milo would pretend not to be scared while clutching the armrest with white knuckles; the way Dave would flirt with the elderly ladies on the train in the way in to town, asking about their lawn bowls competition; the time that Charlie got stuck on the train and missed their stop and ended up hopelessly lost.

When asked much later, she couldn’t remember why she didn’t call anybody to come to the hospital with her when she went into labour. She’d planned to call her mother when the time came, or Tria if her mum was busy, or a list of other people who she knew she could call on when she needed them. But for some eternally inexplicable reason, she simply drove herself in to the hospital and went through the process for being admitted as a patient, filling in seemingly repetitive forms and taking pause when the triage nurse asked her if she wanted him to call the father for her. She didn’t know how to respond.

She wanted to call Charlie. She wanted Charlie beside her, talking in his smooth and relaxing voice, talking slowly and sauntering around the room since Charlie seemed entirely incapable of doing anything with haste. Charlie, who would tell bad jokes and do helpful things like fetch ice chips and rub her back. Charlie, who would do useless things like tell her to stay calm and to breathe, thinking he was offering profound insights while completely unaware that his advice was almost always both unsolicited and entirely incorrect. Charlie, who would almost certainly pass out at the very first sight of blood. Charlie, who would later tell the story with such gusto, embellishing his part in the drama and making anyone who would bother to listen believe that the whole fiasco would have ended in disaster if not for his astounding interventions. Charlie.

But she didn’t call her mother, or Tria, or Charlie. She didn’t call anybody. Instead, for reasons even she would never come to understand, Chelsea battled through labour on her own, expecting the whole process to last much longer while simultaneously wishing it to be over much more quickly. After the baby sucked in her first breath and let out her first beautiful, terrifying cry, Chelsea collapsed back onto the pillows of the bed and felt truly, utterly alone.

Since Chelsea’s blood type was O negative, Katalina’s blood type was checked shortly after her birth to determine if Chelsea would need another immune-globulin injection to prevent Rh sensitisation, a process Chelsea did not fully understand but which she knew was important to prevent her body attacking any subsequent babies she might carry with positive blood. It was due to this routine task that something very peculiar happened: a young nurse named Lawson was the one to deliver the news to Chelsea, that her newborn baby Katalina Jane’s blood test had come back with the result that her baby’s blood was B positive. Chelsea was not a medical professional and her knowledge of high school biology had certainly netted her no academic distinctions or awards, but she knew one thing for certain: this result was simply not possible.

AUGUST,

the month

before the birth

Charlie: Regret

Charlie Seddon loved to read, but was embarrassed to admit it. He felt that reading was a feminine pursuit and would not fit well with the lovable larrikin image he had accidentally developed. He was not the type of man to believe that men and women could not undertake the same activities; he was a fierce supporter of equal rights and always treated any person with respect regardless of gender or race or sexuality or religion or even which football team they barracked for unless, naturally, they were Collingwood supporters. He could even be accurately described as a feminist, although if you were say that to his face he would be deeply offended and assure you it wasn’t true. It was simply that, like a great many of his contemporaries, Charlie had long been indoctrinated by the stereotype that reading was a typically female pursuit and men who worked with their hands for a living probably did not use those hands to hold up a novel above the water line of the bath while unwinding at night.

And so, after a particularly irritating day working at Slocombe Electrical with a team of fellow electricians who Charlie considered inept, inefficient or lazy (and, in the case of Timothy Nash, all three), Charlie found himself buried in his bathtub with the water drawn far too hot, a slurp of bath milk moisturising his skin and his book lying beside the tub, waiting patiently for him to pick it up. He’d poured himself a large glass of Semillon to indulge in during his bath; it was another quirk he felt secretly ashamed of. Electricians weren’t supposed to drink wine; the sparky was traditionally a revered and sacred character in the Australian landscape who would naturally drink beer and crush the cans when he was done. Adding further insult to injury, those respectable masculine men who did drink wine were usually refined gentlemen who would, of course, drink only upmarket reds. But here was Charlie, sipping a cheap yet highly regarded white wine from the Barossa Valley, admiring its cut straw and lemon notes, opening up his latest novel – a Michael Crichton thriller – and stretching out his legs, which had grown used to the scorching hot water. He worried for a brief moment about the steam from the water possibly somehow permeating the pages of his book and turning them damp then maybe mildewy then maybe mouldy before he caught himself and reminded himself that Aussie blokes do not worry about the pages of their novels.

Charlie’s apartment in the city was best described as eclectic, largely because he liked to buy things that he found visually appealing without considering how they might interact with his previous purchases. Hence, he owned a stunning red leather couch that anybody who had ever sat in instantly declared the most comfortable lounge suite they’d ever experienced; but which clashed shockingly with the burnt orange rug that lay in front of it. The rug itself was exquisite and would have looked spectacular in his bedroom, but Charlie was unable to visualise this and so had never thought to try moving it. Instead it remained in the lounge room, where it not only screamed at the red leather couch, it also drew too much attention away from the TV while also managing to make the Murano glass coffee table look too big for the room. Charlie had excellent taste in furnishings; each of the couch, the rug and the coffee table were magnificent statement items that would be coveted by those stylish enough to care about such things. The problem was that any one of these statement pieces would have been enough for the room; two of them together was too much for the eye to take in and the three together proved absolutely ghastly, attacking the viewer’s retina aggressively and leaving no blank space to help emphasise the beauty of the individual pieces. While Charlie had impeccable taste, he unfortunately did not have the ability of an interior designer to see how these items should be used (or not used) together, so his apartment was left with a busy, eccentric feel that would be awful if anybody else lived there but which somehow managed to fit perfectly with the fragmented, complicated and simple Charlie.

While he enjoyed the visually pleasing aspects of the fine furnishings he had bought, Charlie was not somebody who was overly preoccupied with material things. They were things; and if he had to spend money on things then he’d rather nice things to ugly things, but they were things nonetheless. He liked his apartment, but not because its address bestowed status (which it did) or because it was modern and large (which it was not). He lived in a sought-after building just minutes from the city by train, in a neighbourhood that had once been crummy but was now somewhat ‘hipster’, a term Charlie despised while simultaneously being grateful that his 82-year-old landlord assumed this was a bad thing and so kept his rent affordably low. What Charlie loved about the apartment was its location, but not for any sophisticated real-estate based reasons such as the up-and-coming nature of the market in the area or its proximity to essential services. No, what Charlie loved was the apartment’s proximity to all of the places that were important in his life: he could take a train eight minutes west to the head office of Slocombe Electrical; eight minutes south to the city; he was barely fifteen minutes from the house that Milo and Dave used to share which was certainly convenient before it was painful; and most importantly, he was twenty minutes by train away from Marinda, where he could visit his childhood home where his parents still lived in the same neighbourhood with the same neighbours he’d grown up with. And where he could visit Chelsea, who had moved back to a small but charming old house just a few blocks from their old neighbourhood in Marinda after a disastrous end to her adventures in Sydney.

As he lazed in the tub, Charlie became aware of a small knot forming in the pit of his stomach, an involuntary clenching of the muscles that made him feel tense and he couldn’t quite figure out why. As he concentrated on the knot and the uneasy queasiness that accompanied it, a slow foggy thought started to materialise until he could begin to recognise why he felt this way: last night he’d spoken to Chelsea, a conversation he thought would be light and quick and cheery. And it was. Until it wasn’t. He’d asked her how work was going, how the house was going, how her parents were going, how the pregnancy was going. The standard questions that you ask a friend that lead to standard responses, the queries and responses that make up a dialogue that binds you together. Nothing special, nothing particularly noteworthy. In the same casual manner as the rest of the conversation, Chelsea had nonchalantly commented, Mum has been sick for the past few days, nothing serious just a bug she picked up when that silly Bronwyn brought her chucky kid in to the office last week. So mum and Tina from the front desk both ended up with it, and as you can imagine Dad’s been no real help, he keeps telling her to take Panadol and won’t listen when she explains yet again that Panadol isn’t really designed to have too much effect on gastro.

Charlie’s mind wandered as he was listening, so that he was also picturing Thomas Harten offering advice and medication to Edie which would be entirely wrong, but he knew that Edie would patiently listen to her husband and then take that long, considered breath in that she took right before she politely explained to any particular moron who was bothering her why it