Siblings

Yesterday the W family went to visit my sister and her husband.

Jessica and her dad, my brother in law and his son, went to see the rugby at Twickenham. Jessica was part of a record breaking crowd, the highest ever attendance at an English regular season domestic league game, to see Harlequins play Saracens. I can't decide if she has, subsequently, talked more about the rugby or the bus journey there (her first, a red double decker). I think that public transport is edging out sporting spectacle in her three year old mind. 

My sister and I stayed behind with Reuben. We were playing Kirby's Epic Yarn (which I can highly recommend if you are the computer game playing type) and had an equally epic conversation about parenting styles, the influence and idiosyncrasies of our own parents, how these have formed various aspects of our personalities and our own, previously discussed, parenting or mis-parenting, how we might have influenced one another, how we have communicated and mis-communicated throughout the years. And so on. One of those looping, sustained conversations that occur between people who have known one another for their entire lives. Well, I have known her for her entire life. Prior to that I was mooching about on my own for nearly five years waiting for her to show up. 

And this was interspersed with occasional bouts of shouting and cries of "take me OFF your head you fool! No, no put me back ON!" related to Kirby.

The rugby fans returned. We packed the children up into the car. We said goodbye to my sister and her family and drove home.

I thought, as we drove home in the dark silence, I could have spoken for longer. I would have enjoyed talking for longer. I would have liked playing that computer game for longer. But only with her. Not on my own. Because it wouldn't have been so much fun on my own. 

Without the conversation. Without the faux mad and jostling. 

Because although we are 32 and 28, we aren't really. Not when we're together. We could be 8 and 4 sometimes. We are some weird essential flickering self, composed of many selves. So many that it is incoherent to anyone other than those who saw the infinitesimal progression from one step to the next.

Because there is a depth to a conversation with a sibling (or a sibling equivalent) that there simply isn't with anyone else? Perhaps? It is like reading a webpage absolutely jammed pack full of hyperlinks. Or a book crammed with footnotes. Somebody whose formative years and cultural touchstones are so similar to your own that you can both flick back and forth at speed through your own histories and current life and times. So I say, "you remember that time when I was so sad that I tried to melt myself with one of the small electric fan heaters that Dad gave us even though they were incredibly dangerous and I'm surprised we didn't burn the house down what the hell was he thinking and I think I was just hoping to evaporate myself at that particular time with said dangerous fan heater and I'm never giving either of my children access to a fan heater by the way" and she knows exactly the time that I am referring to. The sadness that I am referring to. Even the fan heater. In fact, that fan heater is probably the mental image that pops into both of our minds when we hear the word fan heater. Because we had the same fan heater. She just wasn't trying to melt herself with hers.

No matter how you try, I don't know if you can really create that kind of sibling bond. It all its deep weird rich annoying loveliness. Generally the longest relationship of your life. If you're lucky. Well, I suppose it would only be lucky if you liked one another and that is certainly not guaranteed. 

It's almost a strange kind of experiment, sibling-hood. One that would not be granted ethical approval. Here - we will take two young(ish) creatures of the same species with a similar genetic inheritance and force them to compete for parental attention and affection in a very limited space (I live in England without substantial financial backing thus forcing me to live in a glorified rabbit hutch and it is often dark and cold, forcing you inside) and see what transpires? Nah, never going to make it past the committee that one.

Like knocking two pebbles together inside a very tiny sea in a very small glass jar. With one or two prevailing tides. Or a couple of moons.

I suspect a twin sibling relationship would stand an even smaller chance of passing ethical scrutiny.

But I don't know. It hurts. And I worry. Jessica could have expected a life long companion in Georgina, someone who would have that fullness of shared knowledge and experience. I don't know what that relationship is like with a brother, if it is different in quality or just the same or purely dependent on the people involved. I've never had a brother. I hope that it is this fact, rather than some inherent sexism on my part, that makes me worry that you can't have that sort of closeness between a brother and a sister. 

I rather hope that Jessica won't mourn Georgina too much. If that doesn't sound odd. That Reuben won't seem less or worse for being younger, for not being her twin, for not being a female, for not being a sister. That he will just be himself and be accepted and loved as such.

Perhaps Jessica herself will never contemplate any of this at all. I kind of hope not. When you have one parent who very rarely seems to reflect on anything (or not that I have any inkling about) and one parent who ruminates from now until kingdom come on the same three small days? Who knows which way that wind will blow? I'm hoping in the opposite direction from me. 

Long may she be more interested in buses. 

I was going to write about parenting, inspired by Aoife's comment on my previous post, but now this is already far too long and it's getting far too late here. I will save my ramblings on that for a later date although, given how this post worked out, perhaps I should save them permanently.

Here's some sisters, I'm nursing a serious obsession with this particular song of theirs.

Can any of you who have brothers or sisters advise? Or no siblings at all? Just interested to hear how it all panned out for you.

Christmas Eve

Last night, Christmas Eve.

My boy, he cries. His stomach bloated.

I get out of bed and blearily pick him up. He slots in, between us. My husband's back, turned against us. My son and I turned into one another. He has a large birthmark on the back of his neck, forcing lopsidedness, it puffs up his skin. Ready for kissing. My lips find that mark. The ever-fixed mark. I imagine seeing that mark on his thirty two year old neck. Him as me. Imagining life times away. And still wanting to kiss it. Perhaps I will just run my fingers across it briefly. As I hug him in a polite, motherly way. Because I will have to let my ever-fixed mark go. That is the nature of motherhood.

And worlds and worlds of assumptions fall away. Assuming that I will be here. Thirty two years later. Me, doubled. Sixty four? When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now. Will you still be sending me a valentine? Birthday greetings? Bottle of wine? Will I? Will you? Will they? The walls wobble under the weight of my complacency.

My sister and I sung that song to our father yesterday. Jokily. But I wasn't joking. I don't think he knew that I wasn't joking.

Because I'm glad. I'm so glad I get to sing that silly song, so stupidly, to my father. So that he thinks that I'm joking. Because I can't sing. Because if it wasn't so light, it would be too heavy.

Will he? A full grown man? That, which seems greediness now, such a gift.
Reuben, thirty two. With children. Without children. With lines on his face? Oh I hope so.
Breathing? With that same birth mark on his neck? Me, with my same eyes, here to see it?

I rub his poorly tummy. We discuss it. I say, "Say goodbye poorly tummy. Bye bye. Once there was a boy. A boy with a poorly tummy. But they were parted. They never saw one another again. Say bye bye."

And they were parted. Bye bye poorly tummy ache. Don't come again. He falls asleep.

I wished. I wished stupidly and without the hope that should surely underpin a wish. I wished for that moment of reassurance. Mutual reassurance.

I wished I could just touch her skin. Touch her tummy. Rub a bad tummy away. Kiss her birthmark. My ever-fixed mark. My love. My girl. My first born. Who'll never be thirty two. Or sixty four. Or anything at all.

My love. My love. My dear girl. Bye bye.

Service

There are three Christmas trees arranged by the altar. The church is old and beautiful with a vaulted ceiling, crammed against a rather smart hotel and shopping district in London's Knightsbridge. The jolly red and green tags tied to the trees seem at odds with their purpose, part of me wants black paper tied to a blasted twig. But I'm obviously in the minority as the jolly trees stand up at the front. And I suppose my alternative isn't going to cheer or comfort anyone.

There are more people than I would have imagined. Although fewer than I know could have attended. There is some comfort in the democratic nature of bad luck, of tragedy. That which seemed so unfair, in this place, rights itself and shows the inherent fairness of its nature. Like blind justice. Unfeeling. The finger simply happened to point at me. At her. They'll do for our purposes. Those two. 

We are slightly early, I queue for the toilet. As ever, there is a line for the ladies. I suggest using the gents which is empty. Twas ever thus. An older lady kindly offers to keep watch on my behalf, to ensure that none of the intended users walk in on me. My friend tells me that she jovially chased a man away. So kind, so twinkly. But I know why we are here. Me. My friend. The lady who guards the toilet door for me. The man guarded against. 

We are here for the dead. To remember the dead. 

I can't help staring. I stare and stare. And sometimes the sheer volume of 'us' makes me panic. Sends my mind soaring to the roof. Because it seems impossible that one building could contain so much pain. Or so much love.

My eyes snag on certain people. A young couple. So young that I could be the mother of one of them. A young blonde girl in a bright red coat, leaning against her dark haired partner who, if I had met him on the street I'm certain I would have called a boy, but here . . here he has to be described as a man. They lean together, inward, like an upside down V. 

The lady in front of me. Her head is bowed. 

I want to ask. Who is it? Who is it that you miss? But I don't. Because, even here, where we are all the same, all missing. It seems too bold. Almost rude. 

We cry. We light candles. We emerge into the cold night air.

Suddenly everything seems full of meaning, full of significance. As though a thousand, thousand people were whispering to me, each imparting a secret, words of importance, lips pressed against my ears. But their voices are just slightly too quiet for me to hear. 

It is an overwhelming sensation. A sensation of almost being under attack. A feeling of urgency, that if only I can grasp this, all will be revealed. 

We descend to the underground. I notice the feet of the woman opposite. She has pretty feet, beautiful shoes. I look up and see her face has been scarred. She is carrying a bag with the slogan, "looking for a smile, well, look no further!"

A beautiful girl is flirting and fighting with an extremely tall, far older man. She is so light, she seems hardly to touch the ground. He is abashed and flattered. Eager. She holds all the cards.

Once, I might have wanted to be her. But now, I sit back in my seat. Content to be myself. My feet suddenly seem to be more firmly planted on the floor, denser, stronger, attached to the soil, to the worms and the dirt. Despite being in a train. I feel strangely giddy and golden, as I imagine I would on drinking a double brandy. Although I've never even had a sip. The light, beautiful girl and the burnt woman and the tree labels and the church all spin around and make a horrible, perfect sense. I feel that everything is as it should be. 

Which I might as well. I might as well feel that everything is as it should be. Perhaps this is what resignation feels like. 

***

A poem, written by H.D., loved by a long past sixteen year old me and forgotten about until I heard an extract from it on the radio last week. 

H.D. has been described as an Imagiste - writing about the image, a radiant node or cluster, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.

It is odd how this description, of a thing preternaturally dense, radiant, alive, rushing, reminds me so very much of my dead daughter. I think of her as a small set of images, superimposed upon one another, again and again, so that she becomes something so definitive, so very much herself. A super concentrated being, like a dying, collapsing star.

By comparison, my many incarnations, my comparatively long life, becomes something hopelessly fuzzy and chaotic. Because I've been so many different things. Sometimes I'm not sure that I was, or am, any of them at all.

Rose, harsh rose,

marred and with stint of petals,

meagre flower, thin,

sparse of leaf,

more precious

than a wet rose

single on a stem -

you are caught in the drift.

Marred, stint, meagre, thin, sparse. And yet precious. So precious. Dear child. 

***

And, as if this long ramble were insufficient, I'm also at Glow writing about good grief. 

Preoccupations

Prompted by Cathy from Missouri noticing some connections between several of my more recent posts and the amazingly gracious (and tenacious) Aoife who has been delving through the archives here.

Georgina.

Denial, disbelief, waiting. Still.

Wombs, machines, whirring, gasping, aliens, isolation, unusual, outlier.

Maternity, motherhood, parenthood, failure, shame, embarrassment.

Fooled, foolish, fool, fool, fool.

Creepiness, self consciousness, self doubt. self loathing, rotten, rotting, rottenness. Rotten inside.

Smallness, discreteness, separateness.

Shot through with gold.

Time travel, space, temporospatial fluidity, movement, communication.

The after life, contact, wires, threads, strands. Loneliness. Cut off. No reply.

Chaos. Construction.

Regret.

Georgina

Love.

I hope?

Love.

***

Proprioception is an underrated sense. Not one of the big five. Smell. Touch. Taste. Sight. Hearing. Proprioception doesn't even feature on Nina and The Neurons.

The sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement.

I don't know if it is possible to experience proprioception in relation to a body other than one's own. Probably not. I suppose my constant awareness of my living children's bodies in space, their rib cages, their brains, their moving hands, their turning eyes, would fall into the category of awareness of the outside world, exteroception. But I imagine that I feel it, it is as though I experience their proprioception. Using my long, maternal antennae which brush up against their little brains, intruding and sending shivery signals back to me.

I feel them, moving through space, their bodies displacing empty air. Emptiness replaced by solidity. Such an unlikely occurrence. How it ever happens I simply don't know. How it is so widely accepted that it will happen? And not end in death and despair and mourning? Regret?

A mystery.

***

I was out Christmas shopping this week and I was feeling happy and benevolent, kind of avuncular towards the world at large, gazing at the window displays and idly thinking about the presents that I would buy to put in Jessica's stocking. Amongst others (too many others) I've opted for a space hopper, which suits her personality I think. And a powder that will turn your bath water into pink jelly.

But suddenly, amidst bath jelly and feelings of good will, I had a flash of a First Christmas outfit. Almost reflected in the window that I was looking in to. Like an eerie flash of Christmas Never Was. Christmas Imagined by Catherine W in July 2008 perhaps?

It is an outfit that I own. It consists of red velour dungarees with an embroidered reindeer on the bib, a red and white striped vest. It is size 0-3 months. It still has the price tags on it. Actually I own two of these outfits. For the daughters I never had.

One is in the loft in a bin bag I think. The other is in Georgina's box. Too big for the girls. Too small for Reuben. And so achingly, achingly flat. Occupied by nobody, filled out by nobody, worn by nobody. Never or ever.

My mother bought them. For granddaughters that never existed. But were expected. Were wanted.

And I'm so sorry. For the whole thing.

Just so very, very sorry. So sorry I could curl up into a ball and just keep curling.

Regret. Again.

***

And why is this still being written?

Three years of emptying my chatter into a void the size of my daughter.

I'll leave it to someone else to explain.

There is no deadline.
There is no schedule.
There is no plan we can fall back on.
The road this far can't be retraced.
There is no punchline anyone can tack on.
There are loose ends by the score.
What did I come down here for?
You.
You.




Georgina. You. My love. You.
I hope you don't mind. 
I hope I am not keeping you from your rest.
Somehow tying you here, trapping you here.


You. 

Plumb line

I often wish that Georgina's little life, her death, everything to do with her, could be separated from the rest of my life. By a process like fractional distillation or skimming or the like. That she could be a discrete part of my life. Here, she starts. There, she ends. Complete. Small. Perfect. Contained. Just her. Not tangled up in this nonsense over here, that triviality over there. Here, Georgina. There, bills and supermarkets and putting the bins out. She is above all that, beneath all that, so far away from all that as to be unrecognisable, an almighty overarching presence, a diminishing echo, existing in a set aside place.

Her life and death occupied such a short amount of real time, a temporal blip, and yet they have expanded. Perhaps I have puffed them up with air, inflating something not designed to be inflated and stretching it thin and macabre with my own preoccupations.

Georgina's death felt like a rounded stone, no seams, no joins. Dense and homogeneous. It plummeted downwards, with one perfect splash, concentric ripples evenly spaced. And a wire stretches from that stone. Like a plumb line. Straight. At right angles to the rest of my life, to the living, to her sister, to her brother, to her mother. Away and down, down to the bottom of the sea, to the centre of the earth. Far away but yet. Yet. Just at the end of a wire. A wire that I twang at and tug at and telegraph hopefully. Trying Morse code. 

Only problem is that lots of other stuff seems to have got tangled up in that wire. Old fish hooks, swallowed anger, empty wine bottles, baby clothes, jobs that don't quite meet expectations, cigarette ends, failures, dissatisfaction with our house, shopping receipts, dead things, fluff and hair, silences, vandalism, chocolate wrappers, frustration, resentment, the glare of the internetz, smashed bowls, matching outfits, words I've written, things that I've said. Because all of these things seem somehow involved, implicated, in her death.

I want all this superfluous stuff to get lost, because it is getting in the way. It is blurring my memory and it is spoiling my tenuous lines of communication. With the stone? With her?

A voice that says, "This wire? You're querying this and its many attachments? This wire is here because you are rotten. Rotten. Rotten. Rotten. Why did you think it was here? You idiot. Why do you think she died? You idiot. Idiot. Just in case you didn't hear me the first time."

I pull at my over burdened wire and think to myself, this? This is the link? This is not what I remember. Not this.

I leave the sea and fishing wires and hooks and mix my metaphors hopelessly. 

Because it was something different. I'm sure of it. Sparse and elegant. Clean of limb. Small and precious and shot through with something golden. Desiccated and poised. More like a fire. Or tinder, kindling.

Not slimy and rotten and knotted. Not like this. 

I look at my twisty wire and wonder how this mess ever happened.
How did I let her get tangled up in all this?

Probably because I carried on living when she didn't.

Thank you / Long legged beasties

Just wanted to say thank you so much to Angie and to everyone participating in the Spoken Word Blog Round Up. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed listening to every single post. I am so very grateful to Angie for having this brain wave, setting it up and being brave enough to post herself, and to everyone else who has contributed. My husband thinks I have gone completely mad as I don my ear phones and laugh, cry and utter little squeals of recognition at my computer screen. Alone. Yet very far from alone.

I know I found it quite scary to record myself speaking, it is strange how anxious you can feel sitting alone in your own bedroom talking to a totally non judgemental piece of electrical equipment. I wish I'd been brave enough to give it another go and at least tried to look more presentable or to speak more clearly but thank you so much for accepting my spoken word post, warts and all.

***

I've been thinking about Jess's post at Glow, turning it over in my mind. Ghouls and gruesomeness. How I sometimes feel that I am going out of my way to avoid them? That I am a liar. There are things that, even after all this time and all these words, I find difficult to give voice to.

In an act of divine retribution for my contribution to the realm of the spoken word I have, today, lost my voice. Sunday, when I decided to record my post, seems to have been a merciful respite between the appearance and lingering disappearance of a massive pimple right between my eyebrows and the reduction of my voice to a low croak. If I believed in favourable omens still . . . .

The sore throat, combined with the sudden cold and dark weather and the approach of Halloween, murmurs of the arrival of winter. Jessica exclaims at her own reflection in the window, "DARK! Look DARK!" I open the door to retrieve something from the car and hear soft, socked footfalls creeping up behind me. I rush her back in and cram her feet into bright, floral patterned wellington boots. They clash with conditions outside, incongruous against the damp, autumn mulch.

We are going hunting in the dark. We discuss what we might find. Or I say their names and she repeats them. 'Discussion' is over egging the pudding a wee bit. Hedgehogs perhaps? Bats? Owls? Foxes? But I know that all of my suggestions are a little over ambitious. More of an attempt at educating her with a brief 'Who's Who' of nocturnal animals than a list of what we might actually see here in suburban England.

I know where I am taking her. To the great evening snail crossing. She puts out her hand to hold one. "Eyesssss," she breathes out heavily as the delicate stems unfold and poke up at her accusingly.

We put the reproachful snail back down into the damp grass and tread carefully around his companions, all crossing in the same direction, on some mysterious snail business of their own no doubt.

We head into the large, unlit pavilion that stands outside the front of our house. It is dark in here. Very dark. There are no streetlights. Jessica's pale hair flashes past as she runs around the outside. "Look Mum-mee, woooooooo!" I laugh, a strange, rasping croak. An old crone's laugh. A witchy laugh. We run around, my little wailing ghost and I. It feels a mite creepy. But what am I to do? Is Jessica never allowed to pretend to be a ghost or a skeleton? I suspect she's doomed to a lifetime of spider, pumpkin and cat costumes given my reaction to even the mere sight of a skeleton costume in size 2-3. Thanks to my over-thinking and ability to find pathos and symbolism in every fricking thing. Sorry Jess. You aren't allowed to play at dead things. Though I know you will, most children do.

Her attempt at ghostliness. It's unsettling and oddly comforting both together. Perhaps we are being haunted. By an absence. Or I say we. I, really. Her haunting may be only just beginning. I hope not. My mum told her today that she loved her, that she loved Reuben, and Jessica piped up with "Georgie." Scared that this strange, elusive presence known as Baby Georgie might be missing out, might be left out. I was proud but sad. That she trusts me to the extent that she accepts the existence of this other baby, this sister baby, that she has never clapped eyes upon. Just part of a story that mummy tells her about tummies and plastic boxes and death that seems as unlikely as the other stories mummy tells about pigs and wolves and fairy princesses.

I wouldn't mind being haunted by a presence, by a connection. But not by this small void, the size of a three year old girl. This sort of haunting isn't fun or spine tingling. But yes, like something squirming in my heart.

***

It's strange. As I said in my spoken word post, it honestly never occurred to me that other people would feel awkward when I talked about Georgina. It took me about a year to tumble to the fact that even a cursory mention made some people feel very awkward indeed, not knowing where to put themselves or what to say next. But I was caught up in such a rush of love that I didn't see that. I honesty didn't. I thought everyone would let me carry on talking about her, forever.

Now I wonder if people find me creepy. Am I a thing that goes bump in the night? A three legged beastie? With the necklace with my dead daughter's name on it around my neck and her listing on my facebook profile page and my burning candles and my box of ashes. And this blog if they've found it. "Hai, enjoy the car wreck folks," if you have. Here I am in all my (possible) creepiness, step right up and come on down.

I try to imagine myself back into my pre August 2008 mind. But that door is firmly locked, no matter how hard I kick at it. I would like to be let back in, just for half an hour or so, to assess my own level of creepiness. Not those exhibited here but as seen through the eyes of my ex-school friends on the horribly compelling facebook, through the eyes of my old friends, through the eyes of my sister or my mother. Do they find it gruesome? This is a thought that has only recently started to trickle down the back of my neck, like ice water. Perhaps this is something like the awkwardness effect, one that, through my own lack of imagination or awareness, I am slow to see. I suppose I could ask but I don't really want to hear the answer. I hope, hope, hope that there is understanding, sympathy. I'd settle for indifference.

I suppose I don't much care if other people think I'm gruesome or creepy or strange. Do your worst acquaintances. If you think you can make a dent in me after late 2008 go ahead. But I don't want them thinking that Georgina is creepy. She wasn't creepy. What happened TO her was creepy and gruesome and painful. Some elements of it certainly were, there is no denying that. Not even for me who viewed them through a haze of love and shock.

But she wasn't creepy. She was a lovely little baby. At least that is how she looked to me. And I'm sorry that she died. I'm still really very sorry indeed. More than I can say.

As I watched Jessica poking in the puddles with sticks and talking to snails, I think how very acceptable my love for her is. I can post endless pictures on facebook and coo and tell stories and I am probably never going to get told to shut up or that I am sick or creepy. The harshest response I'm going to get will be 'breeder' from some quarters.

I don't know how people would react if I posted anything truly about Georgina. Not just a memorial. I mean really Georgina, a photograph of her or something about what happened to her. Medical details, her birthweight, even her blood group. My store of facts is small but true. Probably truer than my posting about my living children, whose mouths I am frequently to be caught stuffing words into. Assigning personalities and quirks and publishing them on the internet. Yay me!

Those who find my breeding tendencies laughable or who sit in silence. What do they think when I mention Georgina? I find I've started to fill in the silences with all sorts of poisonous words. And I don't like it.

Because it is just the same.
That is what I want to tell them.
The love is just the same.
Jessica, Georgina, Reuben.
The root is just the same.
The stem is just the same.

"From ghoulies and ghosties and long leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us" 
Old Cornish (or possibly Scottish, the wisdom of the internetz is conflicted about this) prayer

Spoken Word Blog Round Up

Joining with Angie at Still Life with Circles in the Spoken Word Blog Round Up

I tried to find a quiet time in which to record this but just to warn you that you can hear a child (Reuben to be precise) crying faintly in the background on the audio. I haven't abandoned him to his fate, his father is trying to rock him to sleep as it's getting late here and it's past his bed time. I'm afraid I'm simply not brave enough to try recording this again! Once made me nervous enough.