I Left My Haight in San Francisco – Xan Ashbury

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

Eight years ago I was thought I was going to lose (in no particular order) my baby and my home and my marbles.
In the end I lost none of those. But I did leave half my name in San Francisco airport.
You see, back in 1993, like any well-travelled, free spirited, authority-averse, screwed-up-by-broken-family 19-year-old I thought it would be great to change my last name to Haight-Ashbury, after the San Francisco district at the epicentre of the flower power movement of the late 1960s.
It was my sister’s idea and it fitted the bill. Our family name was Haigh. All we had to do was add a ‘t’ and a hyphen and the Ashbury.
I pretty much hated my dad at that point and I liked the irony of a double barrel name that was the compete antithesis of what most double barrel names represented.
It was a subversive way of wearing my ideology on my sleeve – and in this case, my student card, driver’s licence and passport as well.
The man at the deed poll office was good enough not to venture any sage advice about how perhaps when the time came to get a proper job, having the name Haight-Ashbury on my CV – a name that was now synonymous with drug-fucked hippies – would not be a good look.
He probably should have said that because the thought had never occurred to me. Fortunately for him, he didn’t because I think he could tell from my Violent Femmes t-shirt and nose ring that I wasn’t someone who would care to be lectured.
And when I got married in 1999, my husband was a bit miffed I wouldn’t be trading in my juvenile, gimmicky name for his sensible family name. But like the man at the deep poll office, he knew not to push the issue.
Seven years into our marriage, I got itchy feet. So I shoehorned my husband, our toddler and a baby names book (I was pregnant again) into an old campervan to spend six months on the road, to culminate in blissful week in an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
Except we never quite got there.
Life on the road took its toll. After vomiting after every meal throughout the first and second trimester, I was no little miss sunshine. And the fact that my husband didn’t have any sympathy for my situation – because I refused to take medication for the nausea – made me even crankier.
He grew up in a medical family, in which drugs were offered at the first sight of any ailment.
I grew up with a mother who, even if I was half dead, would administer garlic – and possibly aloe vera. And this had served me perfectly well. I might have chosen to be a Haight-Ashbury but there was no way I was going to take any so-called harmless drugs for morning sickness. You say harmless, I imagine missing limbs.
The week before we were due to hit the city of my dreams, we did the ultimate tree-hugger’s pilgrimage – we visited the giant sequoia trees in the mountains a few hours south east of San Fran.
And it was while communing with nature that I started to feel the “call of nature”.
Only it turned out it wasn’t really a toileting issue – it was an impatient baby wanting to pop out nine weeks early.
What ensued was a quick trip to the nearest hospital and quick birth and a quick look at my tiny, weeny baby before he was intubated, pumped with drugs to make his heart and lungs work and put inside a glass box in the neonatal intensive care unit. There I was, terrified – feeling like the life had been sucked out of me.
But also relieved that my love-hate relationship with pregnancy was over.
When the doctors wanted to know if I had taken any drugs, I couldn’t help wonder if the old Haight-Ashbury name had thrown up a few red flags. (As I later discovered, most of the premmie babies in the NICU were “drug babies”. Fresno, 40 minutes away, was officially the crystal-meth capital of the world. )
I told them I hadn’t taken anything since trying acid, twice, in 1993, and that I hadn’t even had a coffee in seven months. They took a blood test anyway.
The next few months were a blur of hand scrubbing, cuddling, sobbing and expressing milk every four hours. The days and nights were filled with watching monitors blink and bleep. Of holding Carter’s tiny hand through scans, echocardiograms, blood tests and blood transfusions.
Nearly every day there were conversations with our insurance company, which was refusing to pay up – and we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Perhaps they looked at my hippy name and mistakenly took me for pacifist.
This fight (which I won), this overwhelming desire to stick it to the man, was driven not by hate but the passionate love you feel for your own flesh and blood.
Although the nurses in the Neo Natal Intensive Care Unit didn’t make it easy for me by constantly playing those two types of music – Country *and* Western. Not recommended listening for fragile, sleep-deprived or depressed mums. (“I lost my wife, I lost my job and then my dog died . . .”)
Finally, Carter was fit to travel, our bills were paid and we were ready to leave the hospital and the US of A.
Oxygen bottle – check
Freshly polished resuscitation skills – check
Tickets for a business class flight to Sydney – check
And so there I was in San Francisco airport, baby in my arms, checking in an esky, packed with 30 litres of frozen breast milk.
I still had my marbles, I still had my house and I vowed to leave the Haight behind in San Francisco, so many years after that Summer of Love.
Since then, I’ve just been Xan Ashbury.
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