Daughters

Alice Mary was born safely, three days overdue, on the 12th of November. The labour was so quick that she was born at home. My husband had gone to take Jessica and Reuben to school, on the agreement that we might think about going to the hospital when he got back. But by the time he returned, she had been born.

Having never had a spontaneous labour at term before, I don't think I realised how quickly progress could occur. I am so very grateful that Alice's birth was straightforward and neither of us any the worse for the amateur nature of her delivery.

A strange full circle completed as I caught her head and felt her body slip out, my own scream echoing around my own bedroom. I want to make it mean something, to go from technological innovations and medical interventions to just my own quivering, screaming flesh. But it doesn't mean anything at all, it is only the way things worked out this time.

An ambulance crew and midwives soon descended and the strange, solitary spell was broken.

***

She's always with me. Irreplaceable. Implacable. The constant at the centre of the equation as other things are added and subtracted. Georgina is the never changing 'c' - always. I'm always waiting for her, she is always dead and so we remain, in solemn stasis, whilst everyone else spins around us in unseemly haste.

I am reading a book, 'Far from The Tree', which is a reflection on how families cope in situations where children are very different from their parents. For instance, where the child is born deaf, with Down's syndrome or homosexual and thus, arguably, becomes part of a subculture that their parents cannot fully enter. It would seem that part of us wishes to, or believes that we will, simply perpetuate ourselves when we have children. That we will reproduce literally.

It seems to me that was never my intention. Perhaps it is the legacy of having a first child who is so very, very different from me? She is dead and I am alive. I will, one day, become like her and thus perpetuate her deadness. She will not inherit any of my qualities or failings. Not for her the dreaded shyness or self doubt. Instead I will inherit her single and defining characteristic.

I think that I take pleasure in the elements of my children that are most at odds with my own character because their difference is . . . . . delightful. Perhaps because I do not much like myself and would not want to see them become a version of me? But Jessica's gregariousness, Reuben's no nonsense staring down of the world and sharp toothiness, Alice's . . . well, who knows as yet. They delight me.

***

I am back in the strange echoing place of childbirth and newborn. Probably for the final time. I look into my daughter's newborn dark blue eyes and see her sister's. That far away look. And I wonder.

The small, scrawny limbs with their peeling skin, the ache of the fuzzy head and rolling eyes. The mouth that seeks and the hands that pat, pat, pat. She seems unbearably small but I know that she isn't. I wonder, fleetingly, if she might stop breathing. But put the thought from my mind as I can't even start to think it.

***

"Was she a single baby or a twin?"

"Single."

"How many other children do you have?"
"Two," he says.
"Three," I say.

He peers at us with some consternation, perky bow-tie suddenly seeming somewhat droop-ish. His hand poised over the keyboard.

"Three," I pipe up decisively. "If you look at the register you'll find three other children. Our eldest daughter died but her birth is registered as she died at three days old."

"Ok. Any stillborn children?"

"No."

I fleetingly wish that he had said that he was sorry. But I didn't really expect him to.

And this is where it ends I suppose. There will be no more babies. I am tired. I just hope to keep going, that I am not an absolutely awful mother. That I am not overly harmful.

***

Drifting in and out of sleep, I hear this song from the radio. It was written by Molly Drake, mother to the famous song writer Nick Drake.

Happiness is like a bird with twenty wings
Try to catch him as he flies
Happiness is like a bird that only sings
When his head is in the skies
You can try to make him walk beside you
You can say the door is open wide
If you grab at him, woe betide you
I know because I've tried
Like a butterfly upon an April morning
Very quickly taking fright
Happiness is come and gone without a warning
Jack-o'-lantern in the night
I will follow him across the meadow
I will follow him across the hill
And if I can catch him I will try to bring you
Why yes, happiness
If I can catch him I will try to bring you
All my love and happiness.

Perhaps it is my imagination but to my mind there is a catch of weariness in those final lines. Because the following isn't always easy or enjoyable. But I follow him, that twenty winged trickster, on behalf of other people.

If I can catch him my dear loves. If I can catch him, I will try . . . . .

Because that is what I want for you all. Even my littlest one who has tried to foil me by dying.

All my love and happiness. Happiness.

Enduring Love

I never meant to fall quiet.

But it shuts you up. As somebody far wiser pointed out.

It does. It simply shuts you up, it grabs your words away and runs off into the middle distance.

Whatever 'it' may be.

***

I bob about, broadening, surfacing occasionally from whatever heaviness it is that presses down upon me so. Guilt mainly. I think. I'm so clogged up with it that no senses are free to probe its precise identity. It is something that I press through, viscous and syrupy, I squelch along, my body like an ever expanding rock.

36 weeks pregnant now. But I find that I can't really think of her at all.
I can't imagine her alive, can't imagine her dead either.
Either the first or the last.

I try to speak. For my eldest daughter, my first child. But I find that it has  . . . .  shut  . . . me  . . . up.

Because I can't talk about her, or about what happened to her, in a way that anybody would want to hear. Or that would even make sense.

The quick phrase that I have prepared for occasions when I feel that I have to mention her, 'my daughter was one of twins but her sister died in intensive care' is as dry as tinder.
But it never catches alight.

Five years on and it is still only a howl that will do. Or silence. Which is the more acceptable option.

My silence peers at others. Where it sees a suspicion of a companion, sticking out around the edges of conversations and glances. Not properly tucked away.

I sigh and avert my eyes. Because what could I say? In places where there is no comfort. There is simply nothing. It shuts you up.

When people talk to me about this pregnancy, I want to change the subject. I don't want to draw any attention to myself, to her, to any of them. I don't even feel like I want to draw attention to Georgina. Which is daft - I mean what is the worst that could happen to her? Didn't it already happen? Well, one variant anyway. There are whole worlds of 'worst' out there, it transpires.

So it seems best just to quietly drift along, trying to remain inconspicuous, hoping to stay on the right side of the numbers.

***

Jessica selects a library book, 'Hello Twins', and I feel a slight stab, somewhere in a minor heart valve. We read the book, I try to explain that she was a twin. She looks at me, utterly mystified. And I lapse back into silence.

The same old battles rage inside, guilt and regret. Wishing that I were a better parent, a better mother. Perhaps none of this would have happened. I still expend a foolish amount of energy on simply wishing that it hadn't. No matter how many healthy babies I can birth, there will always be the first two. The unexpected and half finished twins. They look at me reproachfully, heavy with symbolism and meaning.

Although I don't believe in either of those liars, symbols, meanings. Not anymore. Doesn't mean I don't miss them from time to time however.

I plough on.

Struggles with homework and communication and toilet-ing. The slow, grinding acceptance that I am not a minor deity, that I cannot rearrange this world to suit the needs of one small child. Instead I am forced to assist in squishing her into a more socially acceptable shape instead.

Reuben bites me (unexpectedly as I thought this time had passed) and looks up, toothily satisfied. I can hardly blame him. If I had access to the being seemingly in charge of all this would I not be sharpening up my own teeth, ready to get my quick chomp in when an opportunity arose?

***

But, in the quiet, something still murmurs.
Despite my attempts to stuff it down into various holes, to stop its incessant, small voice.
It might have shut me up.
But it can't shut this up.

It won't let me forget.
It won't let me give up.
It won't keep quiet.
It chants.

I think that this un-shut-up-able element  . . .  might be love.

Repetition

Still the same. 

Still without you.

Mutterings

It is nearly five years now since Georgina died.

Like a slow tide, the grief that once turned me outwards now drives me inward.
Towards silence.

Jessica progresses. Sometimes slow. But steady.

"What did you say my darling? Try again?"
She repeats herself.
I fail to comprehend.
She sighs wearily.

We both stare out of the window or at one another in the rear view mirror, communication impasse locking us in place.
Toilet training grinds onwards into the middle distance.
Her kind eyes, her patient hands.
We will try again.

Reuben grows.
He issues orders, my tiny emperor.
Mildly unbelievable boy.
The unlikely child who did not die, who was not ill.
He looks like me, grey eyes, prominent ears.

Of the first (third) child, little mention is made.
The silver disc around my neck with her name engraved dangles, tarnished.
My naive expectations of kindness and comfort set aside, both for others and for myself.

Another baby kicks inside me. Just one. A girl or so they tell me.
Already bigger, already older than one of her sisters will ever be.

I imagine the flickering fused eyelid, the thin hand.
But not for too long as I cannot bear to.
I talk of her as though she will be born on her due date and live.
I do not claim her as the fourth child.

I stay quiet.
On the whole.

All's Well

After nearly five years, the words have dried up.
Nothing left except a heavy heart that shifts inside and aches.

Surfacing from sleep, a voice sings to me.

'And though death draws near, I've nothing to fear today.
As the colours they fade, the colours they fade away
All's well . . . all's well.'

A voice that sounds certain. Sure. Quiet and dignified. Seeming to echo through time, at one remove.

A song inspired by Dr. Edward Wilson, who was the chief scientist and artist on Scott's doomed expedition to the Antarctic. The lyric is based on a letter he wrote to his wife, as he realised that he would soon die.

Dr. Wilson believed that everything that happened to him was part of God's divine plan. He repeatedly used the phrase 'all's well' in an attempt to convey this in his final letters.

I wonder.
A death that was avoidable, freezing, lonely. Only a matter of miles away from safety and life.

I wonder.
Georgina's death seems so strange and senseless.
To half form a little body only to cast it aside.
Every narrative I spin to myself frays apart at the memory of the blood running out of her tiny mouth, the laboured breaths, the little hands that squeezed.

Two deaths. One remembered by some. The other forgotten. Except by me.

But it matters very little how I think of it. In truth.
I can fight with it, I can howl at it, I can curse and spit and swear.
I can cry and think it unfair.

It remains there. Implacable and suspended.
In a time that I cannot alter.
As cold as snow.

Perhaps I should just attempt to believe that 'all's well.'
To let some of that quiet dignity seep into my tired old heart.
Maybe if I said it frequently enough, whispered it to myself in the night, I would come to believe it?

All's well.

You can hear the song here

Whispers from Billy and Samuel

I walked outside with you this evening. Into the dark, damp grass beneath my feet, grainy stone.
Cool air whistling into my lungs, inflating, ribs lifting, heart contracting.
Moon ponderous in the sky, waiting for introductions to be made.

Even here, in the dull British suburbs.
No pear tree or dark roses.
The Moon waits for a small child with wide eyes.

But I have no year-old child to carry out. Not in any world.
Only a weary thirty three year old body, tattered, to raise a blood shot eye aloft to your fat expectant whiteness.

My arms are full of imaginings, gathered to myself.
The soft, sweet heft of a child never-to-be.
The phantom weight settles comfortably into nerve endings, the old habit of making solid flesh from  air, the repetition of yearning that has altered their branchings and signals.

I wish that you could see her, old Moon.
I have carried her outdoors to be introduced, the nothingness of air shaped into limbs and lolling head.
My daughter, never in need of a tattered blanket.
Neediness is not in her nature.

You look blankly at a woman turning nothing into her shoulder.
No introduction necessary.
This is already familiar.

But, just briefly, I look through the eyes that might have been yours.
My daughter, tiny creature, with a mouth that never made any small cries.
Just whistled breaths.

Your eyes.
Wide.
Borrowed by your mother, to look at the Moon anew.
To make my cries seem small.
And I twirl about, clumsily, drunk with light and wishes.

***

whispers from here and here

Time

It's early in the morning of Reuben's second birthday. The house is quiet, calm grey light filtering into my kitchen window. The presents are wrapped, the food prepared.

Time rattles past. In a whirl of computers and spreadsheets, children, meals, strangely vivid dreams that leave me unsettled. Until there is no time left. I mean to read and write but there is nothing to say and no time to write it down in. Intentions dry out and blow away in the wind, desiccated tinder-like stuff.

"Play me the song about shooting," Jessica demands. I look up. Disconcerted. What the heck? She wants a song about shooting? Have I been playing her a song about shooting? Argh. Neglectful, bad mother.

After about ten false starts, I finally tumble to the fact that she wants the track 'Titanium'. We dance around together, slightly grimly on my part. Shoot me down but I won't fall. I am titanium.

I swear that she has more titanium about her than most. But not me. I'm more like . . .  a marshmallow. Easily squished.

***

Reuben is slightly suspicious of the entire birthday celebration. He squints his eyes at the presents and fuss. Not certain what is happening and not sure whether to trust in it. I am so protective of this child, his scant hair, his wild emotions, his stumbling words.

***

Five years this summer and I am sad. Not angry, not devastated.

There is no fire left. Only a small, cold sadness that sits in my throat like a smooth pebble. Or perhaps it is merely the scar of where that stone resided, my throat permanently scratched by a memory of what it once contained.

Sadness accompanied by flashes of blinding happiness. Throat, eyes, brain. None of which seem to work in their old familiar ways. Photoreceptors all bent out of shape, throat etched with a reminder of something that is long gone, brain all fried and fuzzy. But, eventually, this will be the old familiar way. I've had a seventh of my life to adjust already. That proportion may well increase. If I'm lucky.

An icy wire running alongside my spinal column, a pebble, something cold and metallic in the palm of my hand. Something that even a multiplicity of metaphors could never quite capture.

And yet it is nothing special or unusual. Except in the context of the specificity of the link.
Me, my daughter, Georgina.

***

Occasionally she resurfaces. Sometimes I drag her up, through the years. Never can quite understand what prompts my actions on these occasions. Sometimes it just tumbles out, before I've had a chance to make a decision.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," a colleague says kindly. "Just goes to show that you never know what other people have been through."

And, later, a back handed compliment, "but you've a lovely figure . . . given that you've had two children."

***

Time.

I'm scared, yes I'm scared. 
That like the wind takes a leaf from a tree, time will take your love from me. 

That time will take this strange, dead-end love away from me.