About five years ago – 16 years into a happy heterosexual marriage – I fell in love with a woman.

This experience would dissolve much of my life as I knew it, and the only way to parse the intensity was to write my way through. So I wrote; first diary entries, then loose chapters that coalesced into a book.

Throughout that period, I wrote like a woman on fire, partly because I was on fire – with new love, with discovery of my queer body – and partly because I believed in fire as an instrument of change. I wanted to burn off shame. I wanted to illuminate and praise desire, to posit it as a birthright, especially for those who had historically been taught to ask for less.

All images by: Marie Haefner

Scroll forward to winter 2023, and I am writing from hospital, where I am staying with my 14-year-old child. Today marks Day 8 of his admission for streptococcal that led, with terrifying rapidity, to toxic shock syndrome.

He spent three nights in the ICU, while the doctors stabilised his blood pressure and restored his lung function. Even typing these words feels shocking, as though the bacteria has fused his consciousness to mine, as though the toxin leapt out of his molten, itchy casing and into my eager maternal blood.

Driving to the hospital on the first night, I recalled the last time I had stayed here, almost 10 years ago to the day. This is the hospital where my son’s younger sister was born and survived against pretty wild odds.

In this same hospital, four suburbs to the east of our home, past the largest shopping mall in the southern hemisphere, down a highway of car dealerships, sad-meat drive-throughs and neon-blasting petrol stations, one suburb west of Melbourne’s largest Jewish cemetery, she was born into the latexed palms of ICU doctors.

She would spend the first 49 days of her life here and, now, I had returned to hold her brother’s trembling fingers.

As I rounded the corner into the cavernous parking lot, my body recalled arriving here a decade earlier, with her in my belly. The muted tightness of the moment, a contraction strangling us both.

Then, what it felt like to go home night after night, leaving her in the hospital while the doctors puzzled over her many congenital mysteries. I recalled, with dangerous light-headedness, the singular lunacy that comes when your newborn is somewhere other than her own home at night.

I parked the car, trying to stay crisp. I felt my feet in my shoes, aware of the merging of stories, of the fact that trauma’s very best party trick is temporal confusion, crossing our wires so our bodies can’t discern past from present.

I took a slow inhale of early-June air as I rounded the path to the automatic doors and let them swallow me.

The week is a furnace. My son seems to be recovering, but slowly. Every second compresses me, dents my senses.

It turns out that it’s not just newborn children that induce parental lunacy when they are away from their own bed. On Day 2, my mum comes to visit and brings my daughter, unannounced. When they enter the room, panic rains down on me like late-game Tetris blocks.

But while I shake, past and present colliding, my daughter stands unflappable. She appraises the raised, slanted bed holding her sedated sibling. She gives his hand a little pat, calmly avoiding the cannula. She glances at his oxygen prongs and asks if he’s had jelly and ice cream yet.

Her breath is completely her own, even though the last time she was here she was on a CPAP machine and there was a nasogastric tube in her tiny face. I watch her maniacally, waiting for the past to catch her. But it is just me getting tangled in all the wires.

She walks around the perimeter of the bed, panning like a camera dolly. Then she turns to the nurse and says, with charming confidence, “And I am the sister!”

That night I watch, with rapt attention, as the doctors insert things into my son’s body: a tube to drain the fluid around his lung, a femoral central line.

The nurses joke about this “strange mummy” who wants to watch such gruesomeness, implying that at worst I am some kind of masochist, at best I have grossly overestimated my own nerve and might faint from the gore and sight of my child’s suffering.

What they don’t know is that far from fainting, I feel more grounded than ever.

I have waited 10 years to watch my child’s body being fixed immediately, to observe not the suffering but its quick resolution, invasive as it is.

I watch as the doctors calmly scrub up, tying each other’s robes from behind. I stare as they select the site for insertion, make a concert of silent calls about placement and angle and speed and pressure.

All of it is like beautiful, hypnotic theatre. Their vast knowledge and its elegant transit through their hands, all of it slows my heart, which has been running at an ungodly pace for a decade.

Day 5, I am driving to the hospital, listening to an interview with author Cate Kennedy. She speaks on writing through pain, writing from inside adversity rather than from a comfortable distance. She discusses her harrowing experience of miscarriage and baby loss, and of the poems she wrote at the time.

She undergirds the memory with this startling description: “Waking up is like going through a windscreen each morning”.

I have not known miscarriage or baby loss. But this image, of a mother waking up to exile from her child, her entire body flung, is deeply familiar and deeply consoling.

This is the gift of writing, I think, suddenly weeping with gratitude to this mother-author for capturing it so well, but also for reminding me of craft. Writing is repair, a tool at our disposal when worlds implode.

That afternoon, a friend texts from a sun-drenched beach in Italy.

She says, “The women here are so hot. So free.”

Texting from the thick linoleum armchair, my febrile child asleep next to me, I reply, “This is very far from my reality rn.”

His antibiotics drip has finished and is beeping loudly. I feel struck by the remoteness of my friend’s statement, its exoticism, like she has just parachuted a flock of flamingos into the ward. The drip keeps beeping and the nurses are scarce. I can feel my nerves fraying.

Then, because I don’t want to sound grumpy and bitter, I message, “I am so happy for you, darling, one day we’ll do this together.”

And I mean it. But also, I realise how long it has been since I have languidly dwelt in the presence of hot women, or of one hot woman.

I miss it. For a moment this hurts. Then just as quickly, the missing feels good. It’s a sign of life, of desire undestroyed.

Later that evening another friend texts from Europe, saying she’s “leaving the hotel to drive to the Dolomites”. She attaches a photo of the stillest lake, glistening like boiled candy.

This friend, almost 50, is in love with a woman for the first time. It is early in their relationship, but already my friend says, “it’s going to be an amputation” to leave her beloved in her European home country.

I feel her state so completely – the nascent romance, the opiating bubble of being with a lover round the clock, the wrench of separation. I feel so happy that my dear friend is experiencing this level of bliss. But I notice how this too feels like flamingos from the sky.

She asks me, half-jokingly, if I will educate her in “gay things” when she gets home.

“Of course,” I tell her excitedly, “We will go to all the places, and watch all the shows.”

Then I remember my book, and the love story it captured, and the end of that relationship not long after I’d finished writing. I recall the saturation of touch, of immersive play, that I had taken for granted, year after year.

“Distant memories of pleasure reside somewhere in my consciousness,” I reply. “Sometimes I wonder if it was all a hot, messy dream.”

There are many references to hands in my writing. In my memoir alone, I reference my lover’s hands, her fingers in space as she speaks, her gripping my hand in heightened moments. I compare the exhilaration of discovering my sexual orientation to “a newborn discovering her own hands”.

I discuss the obstetricians who handled my daughter; my mother holding paintbrushes; my mother hand-washing the bloodied sheets of my first birth; a beautiful stranger’s hands soft as nectarine cheeks; hands as instruments of explication, hands as wands, as metaphors and mirrors.

There is a passage about my maternal grandmother’s insistence on living fulsomely, with pleasure. She who endured war and evacuation, illness and tragic loss of family. I describe her stubborn joy as “a fist raised to the sky”, an up-yours to the grimness of what life had dealt.

Across my writing, I have tended to grapple with feeling as much as touch, my words a container for sloshing, tidal emotion. There is so much water in the way I fathom both pleasure and pain. And these days are so much fire.

It is hot on the ward. The nurses are in short-sleeved scrubs. My child is still suffering from nightly fevers, even after litres of intravenous antibiotics. I thought I couldn’t write anything in the centre of such heat, both his and mine, but it seems that is precisely where the story wants to be written.

It is not exactly a pleasure to write this, but it comes from a pleasing place, a place of burdens shared. It is a clutch at patience while my child recovers, a pause in wanting while the furnace does its work.

As my son’s central line was being inserted, there was a moment before the anaesthetic hit, while the doctor calibrated the levels. I gave my son my left hand.

I said, “Squeeze it as much as you hurt. Pass all the pain into me and I will dispose of it.”

My mind slid over to my daughter, and how much harder it was to help her because she had no words. As her parent, I could only guess at her interior, and this guessing was a hell of its own.

She couldn’t speak and I couldn’t say, “You don’t have to hold this alone,” and for 10 years I have carried the dark suspicion that she has.

The morning of her visit, I had taken my daughter aside and said, “Darling, this is the hospital where you were born”.

She didn’t say anything, but leaned into me silently, a light into the dark suspicion. As my son gripped my hand, I felt my baby girl on my chest.

I let him crush my knuckles with all his 14-year-old might, his fear, his loss of control, the cutting ache at the wound sites, all of it, moving from one body to another.

In the squeezing, he pressed hardest on the wedding finger. I no longer wear a wedding ring. Mine is a single hand, the hand of a mother in transition. It is a hand that misses being held with softness and yearning. And this too is good.

It is the finishing touch, the sensitive ribbon, on a body that will know all sorts of pleasure in time, I am sure. Some of it will be a memory. But some of it will come at me fresh, like the sound of the ocean, new and humming with intent.

This article first appeared in Archer Magazine #19, the PLEASURE issue.

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Katia Ariel is an author, book editor and educator from Melbourne/Naarm. She was born in Odesa, Ukraine. She was a recipient of the Varuna ResidentialFellowship in 2022 and has been published in a variety of literary journals, including Womankind and Antithesis Journal. Her memoir, The Swift Dark Tide, published by Gazebo Books in 2023, chronicles the discovery of queerness later in life, and the history of desire and rebellion in her female line. 

Grab a copy of The Swift Dark Tide by Katia Ariel through Gazebo Books.