A single-parent-by-choice on the lessons of the man accused of heresy by her father's cousin
It only happened because one still night in Paekākāriki I stood at the open ranchsliders and a friend on the sofa inside listened to my break-up story – "I would have liked a child."
"I can help with that," he said like some kind of deity. I was 37 years old.
Jason had been my tenant in this downstairs flat when I lived upstairs. He studied creative arts at Whitireia and threw open-house parties at weekends. Sometimes I paid him to tidy the garden.
After he made his offer, we talked at irregular intervals. "I’m keen," he’d say. "We can do it." We both came from conservative families, how would they cope? Did it matter what they thought?
Months went by and in what would turn out to be an oddly productive tangent, I became fascinated with Sir Lloyd Geering and his 1967 trial on charges related to heresy.
Geering, then a theological professor at Knox College, Dunedin, stood accused by two members of the Presbyterian Church of disturbing the church’s peace and unity. One of them was the Rev Bob Blaikie, my father’s cousin.
The trial in Christchurch – front-page news back in the day – heard that Geering taught erroneous doctrines about the mystery and sovereignty of God. He had suggested Jesus was an historical person, not an embodied God, and Jesus’ resurrection an idea, not so much a fact.
At the trial the Rev Blaikie said, “Principal Geering … should be enabled to clear his name of the strong suspicion of radical error to which his statements have given rise.”
Geering replied, ‘‘It is probable that everything I say will serve only to confirm your convictions of my guilt. It is part of the nature of the Christian faith that … it cannot be rationally defended for Christian faith is not primarily a logical system of thought.”
The hearing ran over two days and the church’s General Assembly cleared Geering of all charges. Soon after, he left Knox to become the Foundation Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He published many books, was knighted. He turns 104 this weekend.
Eight years after the trial, the Rev Blaikie was appointed Moderator of the Presbytery of Auckland, but two days before he was to start he died of a heart attack, aged 51, in a break between officiating at two weddings at Greyfriars Mt Eden. I imagine he took seriously his own words at the trial – “If the Church judges my motives unworthy, then I expect to be disciplined, as an indication that I am loved.”
The doctor said at my age, 38, conception was a 1-in-20 chance per ovulation. Even so. Even so...
When I was deciding to become a single-parent-by-choice I read a transcript of the trial and a book on it. I collected newspaper clippings and a copy of the Rev Blaikie’s death certificate. I read Geering and heard him speak. I signed up for a weekend seminar on the historic figure of Jesus, where an American scholar said Jesus was a comic savant who saw the mechanics of the universe through a knothole in the wall and tried to share his vision. But Christians found the vision too hard and concentrated on the visionary. The iconoclast became icon.
What an astonishing statement. Anything was possible.
It took about a year to decide to take up Jason’s offer. By then he was 24, a recent graduate. Was it too much to accept? He misused drugs and alcohol, fallout of the homophobia he’d grown up with in Taranaki. He accepted an offer to go to counselling. He talked with his partner. He wanted to do it. We took advice from a fertility clinic. The doctor said at my age, 38, conception was a 1-in-20 chance per ovulation. Even so. Even so.
I had some assets. After university I’d worked as a financial journalist when houses in Mt Victoria sold for $65,000. Now I owned the home-and-income in Paekākāriki with a garden and a magnificent walnut tree. I rented out ‘the home’.
Could I care for a baby on my own? The sleeplessness? Was it selfish or cowardly to give up on finding a partner? There were still beaux about. The ex-boyfriend, an art critic, visited often to say, "You don’t respect me enough." I went to book fairs with a union lawyer who bought me poems by Ruth Gilbert and Janet Frame but his affections lay elsewhere. A married work colleague wanted an affair: when I went on holiday, he emailed, “I miss you more than your cats do.”
[Warning – childhood sexual abuse is discussed in the following paragraphs.]
The decider came when my grandmother died and my mother, who had Parkinson’s, sent me to the funeral in Scotland.
This grandmother had been abducted and raped as a nine-year old, and my brittle and unstable mother was born from a questionable encounter 10 years after the rape. The victims of child abuse, according to one study, are 7-to-11 times more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviour as teens. My mother emigrated to New Zealand after World War II, and when I was born, Gran moved out here for a decade. After she returned home, she sent me long letters in her spiky hand, sometimes ending with a maxim – discretion is the better part of valour!
December and in an icy Scottish church, a strait-laced cousin told a story about Gran in her later days, suffering from Alzheimer’s. She had walked her son’s labrador down to the river and found a dying salmon. She didn’t know how to carry it back – most salmon stop eating when they return to spawn but can still be eaten. So she tied the salmon to the dog’s tail with its lead and he dragged it back. For the first time anyone there had seen, including his wife, my cousin began to cry.
From there, the granite town of Dalbeattie, I knew none of the beaux would come through. I liked children. A donor was the best chance. I also learnt Gran had left me, and not the other grandchildren, a few thousand pounds – I took it as a sign, a blessing even.
Being pregnant led to shake-ups. Girlfriends who used to come by to bemoan their boyfriends – I stopped seeing them
On the way home I stopped over in Amsterdam to see the Van Goghs and catch up with a journalist friend. We met for dinner, and now a new dad, he pinged with baby pride. On the walk back to my budget hotel, past sex workers behind glass, a little further on a bakery caught my eye – rows of pigs and kittens and barns crafted from marzipan. Gifts for a child.
I became pregnant at the second attempt. It involved syringes supplied by the fertility clinic, and Jason biking from his place to mine, with the contents kept warm under his jacket. When he grew sentimental and talked about staying around, I urged him to move on. He had split with his partner. He would move to Auckland then Australia then Europe, working in hospo. Much later he returned home to Taranaki, to rehab and a building apprenticeship.
Being pregnant led to shake-ups. Girlfriends who used to come by to bemoan their boyfriends – I stopped seeing them. The maybe-boyfriends stopped seeing me. I made a will and worked extra hours on projects for unions. To my conservative family, I implied the donor was from a clinic, anonymous. I wanted their connection to the child to be uncluttered by prejudice. My parents surprised by acquiescing to the news – my mother even gathered up her shaky hands to knit.
My baby boy, weighing 9lbs, was born by C-section in the first week of the new millennium. The obstetrician was Australian, his assistant Polish. I was too drugged to know much, but a friend said later that as they cut the baby free, they talked residency status and visas.
All I heard was the Australian as he lifted the baby over the sheet – “heere’s ya babeee Mrs Blaikie”.
Joy and delight. The baby seemed alert and curious, a spark of magic. He would be fine. He would have a good life. I loved and believed. I had faith.
But fate wasn’t finished with us. The next day, for reasons still unclear, my chest began to fill with fluid and the lower lobes of both lungs to collapse. Senior doctors were away on holiday so the young ones had a go – pushing needles between my ribs to try and draw fluid; from all the tests, veins collapsed, so a registrar cut the chest wall and pushed in a line, into a vein leading direct from the heart. Blood could be taken quickly. But an X-ray showed the line falling too close to the heart and he rushed back to my bedside to get it out. Massive doses of antibiotics, by IV, were fitted in around breastfeeds.
Geering wrote, faith is the attitude of trust and hope with which humans can face the future. At ICU, nurses strapped a rubber mask to my face and a machine pumped air into the failing lungs
At the same time, the whole ward moved up the building. The local abortion clinic was being slotted into the larger premises of Women’s Health, to put anti-abortion protesters off the scent. All day, kanga-hammers thudded through from the floor below and it was hard for the baby and me to nap. The baby fed well. Friends came to bathe him. Jason partied up in Kaitaia at the millennium celebrations.
And Lloyd Geering had a new book out. I’d brought it in, in the hospital bag. The Christian Era was coming to an end, he said. Things were going to be rocky. Nothing stays the same.
An orderly wheeled me up to ICU at the top of a taller building. Rescue helicopters landed on the roof above. I had a sense of going ever higher but only my mother signalled death. She stood at the end of the bed in her best navy-blue blazer and cameo brooch, unspeaking, the effect almost certainly unintended.
Geering wrote, faith is the attitude of trust and hope with which humans can face the future. At ICU, nurses strapped a rubber mask to my face and a machine pumped air into the failing lungs. Monitors and lines and a catheter wired my body like a s spiderweb.
The baby could only be whisked in and out for breastfeeds because ICU had had a superbug and he was at risk. He would ‘board’ in the post-natal ward. I took to ICU a knitted jacket he’d been wearing and held onto it under the covers, but a nurse smiled sadly and took it away.
Long live Geering. He called for love, compassion, goodwill, for a new faith that’s inclusive of different ways of being religious
Even if humans muddled through this time of chaos, Geering wrote in The World to Come, it would not be without pain and anguish. I tried to signal to the nurse when the old guy in the bed opposite, who’d had heart surgery, started pulling tubes out of his mouth.
After three days of tests and inconclusive diagnoses, an ED doctor dosed me with pethidine, a synthetic opioid, so I was even higher and completely relaxed – I could see the future: it would all work out – and he plunged a needle deep between the ribs and drew out a litre of fluid from the left side and 300mls from the right.
Late the next day I was wheeled back to the post-natal ward. The baby fed well. The ward receptionist declared herself in love – she had got to hold the baby at her desk. He slept and ate and looked around. She adored him.
I began to talk and walk for more than a minute. Geering wrote that in this current period of upheaval, it’s time to relearn the value of personal relationships, and I did, with the student nurses on their mid-wifery block courses. I learnt to swaddle the baby so he slept better. He started to sleep more at night, instead of in the day. They advised on better breastfeeding.
The African nurse was gentle, but one tall trainee with an auburn plait, she leapt on the bed, knelt over me, squeezed a breast flat, and declared, “It’s like a sandwich!” The initial pain was right up there with anything so far, but after twenty or thirty seconds (“Count to ten!”), the baby latching on strong – all good. Then, being a single parent herself, she lectured me to get down to WiNZ and sign up asap. Geering wrote, it’s fundamentalists who look for certainty in times of rapid change.
I preferred the Australian nurse. She was having problems with her boyfriend and step-daughter and just wanted a holiday in her home town outside of Brisbane. She’d go to the pub with her mates and bet on live cockroach races.
In a confusing time, said Geering, we depend on the cultures that shape us in order to receive meaning, fulfilment and purpose – and to give back in return.
Did I regret the decision to become a single-parent-from-the-start? Yes, for about one day four months later when the baby had a run of bad sleeps. Was it possible to die of tiredness? Would adoption be better for him? But happiness levels were off the charts too.
Just as well – because some people seemed to fear our family set-up. When my boy was two, I let it be known who the actual donor was, a young gay guy – I hoped by then the family might have bonded with my son for who he was. But the alpha cousin told us to leave his property and to never return. As Geering put it, the more brutal capacities of the human condition survive beneath the veneer of civilisation.
Did I regret the fascination with heresy and faith? Would my time have been better spent questioning parents and spending time with children? If I had, I doubt I would have gone through with it, and that would have been the biggest regret. I love my son, facing the challenges of his generation, in the swim in a choppy time.
There’s a photo of us taken outside the hospital doors, three weeks after his birth. He dozes in a car seat that I grip in one hand, and in the other The Dominion folds open at the business section. We were in business. We would be okay. Peace and unity had been disrupted but well, fuck you God.
Long live Geering. At the end of his book, he pointed to a new society that stands in awe of nature, the living world. He called for love, compassion, goodwill, for a new faith that’s inclusive of different ways of being religious, which to him seemed simply to mean being concerned – for all living creatures. It sounds like living in a woke world, but without the fear and anger.
Lloyd Geering turns 104 on February 26. Happy birthday!
