The End We Start From

The moment that Z is admitted to the hospital denotes two critical points. Firstly, R is both a source of support and tension for the narrator. Because he is traumatized by his parents’ deaths, he experiences panic attacks around large crowds of people and is afraid of hospitals, churches, and refugee camps. His fear—not his love for his family—motivates his choices. The narrator is forced to contend with this when R resists taking Z to the hospital and again when he refuses to take shelter in a refugee camp. Their conflicting perspectives represent two different ways of coping with crisis; one is to become more individualistic and independent, trusting only one’s self, and the other is to become more community-minded. Throughout the text, the narrator benefits from solidarity and building friendships, and the text insinuates that crisis cannot be managed alone.

Secondly, this moment highlights The Vulnerability and Resilience of Humanity as seen through the narrator’s choices. Although she sympathizes with R and does not want to be insensitive to his fear, she feels driven by a need to protect Z above all else. As a baby, Z is inherently vulnerable, and the narrator feels a responsibility to shield him from pain, sickness, cold, and hunger, even during a natural disaster. In this respect, the narrator displays resilience; she wants to protect Z so much that she is willing to put herself through tension with her husband, sacrifice her comfort, and continue to push through these challenges.

By contrast, R does not share his wife’s resilience. He is eager to leave them at the hospital, and after only two weeks in the refugee camp, he leaves them again, ostensibly to find a safer place, although the narrator doubts his motivations. After he leaves, the narrator feels free to focus on her relationship with Z and becomes open to developing new friendships with other mothers in the camp. These early interactions with women referred to as P and O introduce The Healing Power of Female Friendship and prompt the narrator to reflect on her pregnancy and her feelings toward other women during that time. She recalls the cliques of mothers in London who formed groups when they were pregnant and continued to cluster exclusively together once they gave birth. The narrator remembers thinking they were unfriendly and ridiculous, but in the camp, her friendships with other mothers feel different. Both P and O were abandoned by their male partners, and the three women find comfort and solidarity in drawing close to each other.

While the narrator has cared for Z largely alone, this dynamic changes in the camp. When Z rolls over for the very first time—and falls off the bed—the narrator is horrified by the possibility that he could have been hurt during the three minutes when she turned her attention to another chore. Though Z is completely unharmed, she worries that she is a terrible mother until “P comes, and O, and they tell [her] no. It happens to everyone” (52). As P and O comfort her and validate her experience of maternal anxiety, the narrator reveals that she feels especially nervous about Z’s safety due to previous struggles with infertility. Following the trauma of eight miscarriages, she spent time in online forums, soaking up the stories of other women who had lived through miscarriages and finding hope in their success stories when they later had healthy pregnancies. Her friendships with P and O remind her of this experience, and she feels encouraged. This underlines the importance of community support and solidarity during major life changes. Through her relationships with other women, the narrator is consistently stronger. This is reinforced when she and O decide to travel north to O’s friend’s safe haven together, leaving their missing partners behind. They realize that there is safety in numbers; if they travel together, they can rotate responsibilities, with one mother looking after the babies while the other queues in long supply lines.

This journey underlines another gender disparity as the narrator encounters strange men, some with bad intentions. While her interactions with the two men who escort her and O are positive, she still feels inherently vulnerable and unsafe because she does not know them. O offers a different perspective that evokes parallels with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and the concept that women are viewed and treated differently in postapocalyptic societies. Just as The Handmaid’s Tale features characters referred to as “un-women,” O “thinks the babies make us non-women as far as these men are concerned. […] they make us safe” (62). The idea that the babies make them “safe” suggests that their identities as mothers supersede their identities as women and prevent men from seeing them as sexually available. This does not protect them from sexual violence, as they are subjected to a strip search when they encounter male guards at a military checkpoint. The narrator feels deeply uncomfortable and humiliated by the experience; when she records her feelings about the journey, she wants: “to write about the checkpoint quickly […] Theyforceusoutofthecarbabieswillmakeussafedoesn’tseemtruetheyareroughwithusandtheysearchustheymakeustakeourclothesoff” (64). The stylistic choice to join all these words together like this mimics the narrator’s fear and helplessness at these men’s hands.

In contrast with the fear and brutality the narrator associates with men, her depictions of traveling with O are tender. When the travelers stop to rest, they “all sleep in one room without even thinking about it” (65). O and the narrator sleep next to each other with their babies between them, and the mothers nurse each other’s babies without feeling awkward or uncomfortable about this physical bond. The narrator briefly wonders whether R would approve of her sharing such physical intimacy with another person, but even considering his opinion feels alien to her as she “does not know where he would approve from or if approving still exists” (66). This thought reinforces the fact that the world around them is so changed that even the narrator’s conceptualization of appropriate thoughts and feelings is restructured. She feels distanced from her husband, from herself, and from the feelings, boundaries, and questions that used to make her feel tethered to the world.