Sick

I've been sick. So sick that I took to my bed for over twenty four hours.

If I hadn't had to get up intermittently to puke my guts up, it would have been quite luxurious. 

I am so lucky to have my parents living close by, poor old Jessica would certainly have had a very miserable day if she had been left to the tender mercies of her mother. I would probably have managed to stumble around and thrown a bit of food in for her, perhaps changed one or two nappies.

She was most unimpressed when I had to stop my (rather less wholehearted than usual) rendition of Tanka Skunk in its tracks. She was unceremoniously shoved on to the floor and attempted to chase me into the toilet, hitting me around the legs with the book and then, when that plan was foiled, beating on the door with it. I emerged to an irate toddler and an enormous spider scuttling around the kitchen sink.

That was when I placed the emergency call to my parents. The spider was the final straw.

It was a strange day. Being in bed with the curtains drawn during the middle of the day made me feel like a child again. 

I drifted in and out of sleep. The radio muttered on. 

I learnt some interesting facts about Gauguin who is having a retrospective at the Tate. 

Although when I say learnt, I find that I can dredge nothing up now.

Apparently all we thought we knew about him was wrong. 

But as I can't remember the new things I guess I'm still misguided.

I must have fallen asleep.

I dreamt that a woman was standing over me. She had smooth brown hair and blue eyes. Kindly. 

At first I thought she was my mother.

I thought that I was four or six years old.

Then I realised that it wasn't my mother.

In my half dream, my heart leapt as I realised it was Georgina.

And that I was an old, old woman.

I felt so awful because I was dying.

Then I woke up properly. I wasn't dying. I felt a bit foolish. I just had a stomach bug. Like I've had tens of times before. 

It wasn't Georgina.

I cried.

I remember reading somewhere that some people loom large in our lives, like giants. 

The girl that bullied you at school, the lover who snubbed you, the passing stranger that saw you trip over your own toes and fall in a heap on the ground. 

Scenes of our grandest humiliations, our defeats, our upsets. People associated with those times stalk through our dreams and thoughts. 

And we probably never, ever appear in theirs. Such a one-sided affair.

So it is with me and Georgina.

She did not see me hurt or embarrassed.

Yet she persists because I love her so very dearly and there is nobody there to love me back. 

Unrequited in the fullest sense of the word.

I have spent hours and hours and days and weeks and possibly even months and hundred on hundreds of words trying to bring her back. To make sense of her death. To bring something back. Anything.

I lost a three day old premature baby and my dreams hand me back a forty year old woman. With kindly eyes.

Her presence, or more appropriately, her absence is such a void in me. 

That I will fill it with anything. 

Any old words. Any old dream. Any old image of a person that might be her. That could have been her. 

Oh Georgina. I'll try anything but I often know that I'm not close. I'm not close to you.

'What I meant to say 

Is that I didn't mean to say 

the things I said

Cornered, cut and rolled

and going mouthful mad 

with things I never said to you

All this time,

All these words,

I'm not even close. . . . .'

You'll have to excuse the video. This song comes from the land that You Tube forgot, the early 1990s.

Darcy and Elizabeth's silences have got nothing on me and my daughter. 

Drive

I have often wished that I worked closer to home. I went from working ten minutes walk away from my front door to over thirty miles away. So I have the best part of an hours drive to work in the morning and the same on the return journey. It is mainly motorway so it is not particularly interesting or taxing to drive. Sometimes it is hard to stay awake at the wheel.

It is a strange time. Spent doing nothing productive and yet unavoidable. A kind of enforced 'sit and think' time. Even when I would rather not have it. Of course, part of my brain is fully occupied with controlling the hurtling chunk of metal that I sit in. But the rest is free to roam.

I'm frightened of silence these days. So I put the radio on. Even then, I frequently find myself driving down the motorway crying. I wonder how many of us there are. In all those cars charging past me. How many of us have tears running down our cheeks, which we try to wipe away clumsily with one hand, all the time trying to ensure that we don't hit the car in the front? Sometimes I try to peer in. To find a fellow travelling mourner.

The radio murmur has it own little triggers.
The phrase 'strangled at birth.'
Discussions about medical ethics.
Snippets of news related to pregnancy or miscarriage.
Some poor member of parliament who found himself telling us all about his wife's recurrent miscarriages in an attempt to defend himself from allegations regarding his sexuality.

One evening this week there was a story on the news about an elderly woman who died at the grand old age of eighty nine in the seaside town of Torquay. What nobody had really known about her, until after her death, was that, at twenty three, she had been a secret agent in occupied France. She was found out, captured and tortured by the Gestapo and wound up in a concentration camp. She had survived but kept her secrets to herself. Nobody had known about this lady's past.

She had been due a pauper's funeral but, instead, was buried with full honours. As befitted her.
The closing sentence of the item was "You will never be forgotten, addressed to a lady none of us really knew."

Inevitably, I suppose, I thought of Georgina's funeral.

My mother used to say that the old mourn more at funerals than the young.
That they have a cumulative effect and that, at every funeral, you mourn again for all those that came previously. I used to think that was awful, that humans couldn't even take a few hours to mourn specifically for one individual but that we had to take out all our own little individual griefs and superimpose them on the one we were supposed to be  mourning currently. Seems a little disrespectful somehow. But that is why we are human. Those ties that bind us to the dead may stretch and strain but they never snap. Those threads only go slack when we go to join those who go before us I suppose.

I'm not entirely sure of the date of Georgina's funeral.
It has merged into that blur of after.
We wanted to have her buried initially. We live within walking distance of a children's cemetery and I wanted her to be buried there. But they wouldn't take her, the cemetery is full.
And so she was cremated.

There were two mourners.
The service was taken by the hospital chaplain who had blessed her days earlier.

I remember waiting outside the crematorium. We weren't sure where to go. We walked around the gardens.
There was a path around the edge of the building and this was edged with places to put flowers. Each slot had a name. And there was her's.
Baby Georgina W----.
That appellation. That 'Baby' nearly undid me. At once so tender, so gentle. My baby. Baby.
And simultaneously, so dismissive.
Only a baby.
Not even her full name. Georgina Jane.
Just Baby Georgina.
And there are those who would argue with affording my daughter even that status.
Other people being cremated that day did not have a qualifier prior to their names. Old Man Joe Bloggs. Middle Aged Woman Sarah Brown. Because they didn't need any clarification.

We hadn't thought to bring flowers for her. We didn't bring anything. The place where her flowers were supposed to lie was bare. Just like the space her life should have occupied.

The slot next to Georgina's was also a baby.
As we walked into the chapel, another couple walked out. Like walking into a mirror.
As we passed them, I wondered if we looked as destroyed as they did.

We sat down. Georgina's coffin was at the front. As there were only two us at her funeral, the chaplain told us to come and sit right up by the coffin. And so we did.

The three of us, my husband, myself and the chaplain sat around the white box that contained our little girl.

I remember that I wanted to open the coffin. That I wanted to pick it up and run away with it. That I wanted to fall to my knees and cuddle it.

But I didn't. I just sat there and cried.

There was no music.
There was the funeral service for a child from the Alternative Service Book.
I didn't say anything.
My husband didn't say anything.

Sometimes I regret Georgina's funeral. I wish she'd had choirs and horses and doves and hundreds of mourners.
I wish her mother had wailed and pulled out her hair and thrown herself on to the coffin.
I wish that there had been somehow . . . more.

Because she lost her life.
Life is a strange state. But it was all I had to offer. It was all I hoped to give her. I don't know anything else.

I sometimes wonder about the process of cremation. I wonder what the inside of the ovens look like. I wish I hadn't left her there, in the chapel. I wish I had walked down to wherever they were taking her, stayed with her.

I have a vision of flames burning my daughter's body away. But I don't suppose it works like that.

Sometimes I think Georgina's funeral was right. In a horrible way. Right.

Sparse, short and sad.

I miss her.
I miss her so very much.
My baby.
Georgina.

Dance

We are at the wedding.
The only wedding we will attend this year.
After last summer's glut, just this one.
Lonesome at the end of the summer.
A day of mourning.
September 11th.

The groom, handsome and kindly.
The bride, radiant.
All is as it should be.

Jessica sleeps through the speeches but wakes in time to snaffle the lion's share of her mother's chocolate fondant pudding and ice cream. Spoon fed to her by a proud and careful eight year old relation. Wary of stains, grass or chocolate. Some kind of cousin one or more times removed. We tried to work it out, her and I, but decided it was too complex and we would just call their relationship 'cousins.'

Later the first dance.
The happy couple have chosen Starship's 'Nothing Gonna Stop Us Now', not the choice I was expecting to be honest. It was released in 1987 when these two can barely have been knee high to a grasshopper.

The lyrics take on a strange poignancy and I'm suddenly whizzed back to my own wedding. In a strange, half light my husband and I dance through the NICU to the sounds of Starship.

They look so happy and brave.
I think to myself . . . nothing?
I hope so. And find I am crying.

The band starts. They are playing 'Johnny B Goode' and red and green lights chase around the floor. Jessica alternates between attempting to capture one for her very own and staring at the band. My husband and I work out, shamefacedly, that is probably the first time she has witnessed anyone playing an instrument.

My aunt and uncle dance close to the front. Proper dancing belonging to their generation. Not the shuffle of the 1980s. Jessica watches. She puts a leg out and up. Then brings it down smack on the floor. And again. Joining in.

I take her hands and we are whirling in the midst of them. And I am happy.

Not the flattish contented feeling I termed happiness before.
Life gave that old thing a good shake and up it popped, into three dimensional solidity.
Happiness sits over my heart, claws extended into my skin. Like a small vicious animal.
So sharp that I can almost feel it, a shard of glass penetrating my skull.
I am suddenly self-conscious. I wonder if anyone else sees me and my happiness and judges.
Look at her dancing over there, her with the dead daughter and all that shiny, spiky mess over her heart.

But nobody is looking.
Their eyes register briefly then slide on.
A sweet toddler in a silk dress. Mistook her for a boy initially, with that short hair, but in a dress?
A woman with hair that is too long for her age. She would have done well to have attempted to squeeze into those Spanx this morning but perhaps she's just the type who lets herself go? That child is too old to still be carrying that baby belly. Don't know who these two belong to, bride or groom?

But I don't care for their thoughts.
If they even pause for long enough to spare us a thought or two.

I feel free.

We whizz around and around. Chasing one another, this way and that. I smile, she smiles.
Everything tumbles into place, just for an instant.
My heart beats. Her heart beats. It is enough.

And on the edges of that splintered, glimmering, glowing mess that is my happiness hovers Georgina.

Three Years

Since the second anniversary of Georgina's death, I feel sad. Very sad. Too sad to feel angry. Too sad to feel anything other than just . . . .  sad. My heart is so heavy.

In that first year, I felt such a strong connection to Georgina, the person. My daughter. A human being who moved and thought and looked about. Inside my womb and outside.

Now I think of her as a spirit or a ghost.
A brief touch on my shoulder, then gone.
A tiny hand in mine, withdrawn.
A few breaths, then no more.

Or as a copy of her sister.
A toddler who has never been, who never will be.

Neither of these incarnations are my Georgina.
That connection that I had, or thought I had, feels so very gone, so absent.
I don't take her photographs out of their box.
I don't take out her ashes in their plastic bag.
I don't take out the only hat she ever wore, that scrap of pink woollen with the ties and the crust of blood on the strings.
I don't cradle it in cupped hands as I used to. Trying to will the former occupant back into some form of existence, even if only to fill it with a memory. A memory of a glimpse of a ghost.
This is the hat, that held the scalp, that held the skull, that held the brain, of the person that was my daughter, Georgina.
Who I miss so terribly.
Or so I claim. I feel I've lost my hold on who she was. That makes me sad.

On the evening of the 29th, I played some music. Loudly. I don't usually play my music that loud although our neighbours in the adjoining house are not likely to complain. Three young guys who like to play their own music loud occasionally and have a few beers out in their back garden from time to time.They won't come round a-grumbling. They are nice neighbours to have and they seem to like Jessica which is the most important thing.

I played Ben Harper, Regina Spektor, The Shins, Nick Cave, Mountain Goats, Bette Midler, Snow Patrol, Peter Mulvey, Pearl Jam, Ryan Adams, Kate Rusby, Florence & The Machine. A jumble of everything. Songs that remind me of my daughters. Songs that I have found here.

I lit some candles. I gazed out of the window in to the darkening evening.
I hoped she knew that I was there. That I remembered.

My husband came downstairs. I went into the front room to speak to him. He went into the kitchen and turned my music off and blew out my candles. I was hurt.

Later he mentioned something about Jessica's 'learning disabilities' and again I was hurt. I felt he had slighted my mothering. I felt he had slighted our daughter.

My husband is a practical man. I often think that he would be a better mother than me.
I'm likely to be looking at Jessica and saying "she looks lonely, do you think she misses Georgina?" and he will bat me out the way saying, "Can't you smell that her nappy needs changing?"

I know that he is not the sort to play music, light candles, gaze out of a window. But it still hurt. It hurt that he didn't know that I needed to do it. Because that is the type of person I am. That is the sort of mourning I do.

We spoke about it later. We both apologized.
We do things differently, we always have. If the knowledge of over a decade has taught us anything it is that we are not the same person. We can think, and act, very differently but that does not necessarily mean that one of us is wrong.
However.
We are both such terrible 'fixers', we both want to make everything perfect.
We look at our broken daughters and want to fix them. To give life. To fix damage.
We look at each other and we see the fractures. We want to fix them.
We look at our marriage and we want to fix that precariously balanced mess too.
But we are not gods. More's the pity. Only mortals. Such gifts are not within our grasp.

We try. But there are things you cannot fix. And some things still work even if they not perfectly intact. Function, not form, is what matters.

After two years, I feel like the slow one.
The child who can't quite grasp it.
Not the joker, occupying the back row with a nonchalant gaze at the teacher. Flicking bits of papers about.
The earnest one.
Right up at the front.
Chin stuck out towards the blackboard.
Tongue poking out in concentration.
All available brain power directed toward unravelling this one thing.

She died.
Your little baby girl died.
She isn't coming back.
Not soon.
Not ever
No matter how much you yearn and love and wish and write and attempt to support and cry and ache and drink and talk and swallow pills and sleep and dream and wake and wish. You can wish your life away on this one.
She died.

When you thought you'd been handed the golden ticket of an instant family. Of more twins joining the family. A grandmother who told her colleagues that it was twins AGAIN. The strange weirdness of those weeks when something almost unbelievable had happened to you. Not only one. But two.

Well, you did have the golden ticket. You had them. Those two daughters. Georgina. Jessica.
If that isn't the golden ticket then I don't know what is.
Even if you had only had them for an instant.
They are the golden ticket.
Even if you had never known that they were there.
The. Golden. Ticket.
Once in a lifetime. Winning lottery numbers. This is my perfect moment. The real deal.
Not the fact that they are arrived together, not their 'twinness' although that was a quiet satisfaction all of its own.
But them. Those particular children.

It wasn't quite the prize you'd been expecting. That's all. Still the prize but . . . .
She died and you have to live.
To live well.
Because there is nothing else you can do.

This is the lesson. My tongue is out, tasting the air. I can hear the words, they make perfect sense. Like a nice neat mathematical equation. My brain nods.

But my heart. . . . my heart is a dunce.

***

In other news . . .

Jessica appears to be saying something other than GUNK! At last!
Thanks for the advice Heather, it was much appreciated and it's helping. She now says . . . .Aaaarrrrrr (Car). . . . D'oh (Dog or Cat or any animal with four legs) . . . . Aaaapppp (Apple) . . . . still GUNK (who knows?) . . . . and Doooooooooorrrrrr (not door, seems to be a catch all for all other words she can't say yet)
She understands so much, I feel awful for her sometimes. It is almost like living with the wise old owl who lived in an oak, who . . . .

The more he heard, the less he spoke. 
The less he spoke, the more he heard. 
Why aren't we all like that wise old bird?

The next lot of tests at the fertility clinic seemed more promising. I saw a different doctor who did a different test. She thinks that the first result was an aberration. Hopefully everything is where it should be and it all appears to be 'doing the do.' Just to no benefit as yet.

Still that has to be a good thing? Right?

***

'Little ghost, little ghost,
One I'm scared of the most
Can you scare me up a little bit of love?
I'm the only one that sees you
And I can't do much to please you'

I am sorry, my love, my own sweet girl. I wish I could please you. I wish I could remember you. I wish I could stay but time does pull at me so.

'When I held her, I was really holding air.'

Inbetween Days

These strange inbetween days.

Yesterday, I took Jessica to nursery for her second visit. She stayed for an hour and a half and I left her there.

With strangers.

On her own.

It is the first time I have left her with anyone outside of the family (and only the second or third time I have left her for any reason other than to go out and earn money). When I left the nursery, I missed my turning. Which necessitated turning around and driving back the same route I had come, past the nursery building.

I knew that the little frame, those bones, that skull with its thin covering of hair and skin that I have pressed my face against so many times, that brain, that sweet face, that child of mine. She was inside that building. And I couldn't see her. A woman who I hardly know was responsible for her.

Would comfort her if she cried.

Or so I hoped.

Every instinct I possess was screaming at me to storm back in there and retrieve my daughter. But I didn't. Because she deserves to have some normality, playing with other children, a break from her overly protective and hovering mother. 

Before I had children, I remember hearing this quote. 

'Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.'

At the time I found it at little . . . hysterical. Kind of over-egging the pudding.

But it isn't. And it is even harder when you make the decision to have your heart go walking around outside your body when it doesn't walk around. When it dies instead. When part of your heart is lost to you forever. When part of your heart is ashes. Momentous indeed.

Georgina rises to the surface of my thoughts during these inbetween days.

Two years ago she was alive. She was alive. She lived. It seems so improbable that she ever did. Those words seem so incongruous even as I type them.

Georgina was alive.

That tiny child.

My daughter with her blue eyes, her tiny hands.
Lived.

I was in the supermarket with Jessica after her nursery visit. The supermarket has just re-opened with the addition of a large clothing section. Supermarket clothing is, generally, very cheap here in England. As the department was new there was a 25% discount on top of the already tempting price. I spotted a duffle coat. Navy blue and cream with a pink stripe and a hood. Large buttons down the front.

I frantically calculated the discount and walked around the shop internally debating whether I really needed another coat (I don't), if the coat was a bargain or not (it was) and how pissed off my husband would be to find another coat in the wardrobe (mildly).

My thoughts were full of this potential purchase.

Then . . . . 

I thought . . 

this time last year she was alive.

And suddenly I wanted to rip that coat up. And the 25% reduction. And myself.

In front of everyone.

I wanted to be mad. Shredding clothes in a surburban supermarket.

Keening in the aisles.

Banging my head on the cold, bland, uncaring shop floor.

Because my daughter died.

A while ago now.

I wanted to burn down every item there.

Because I was so full of rage.

Because my daughter died.

Even after all this time. All these days.

I am still, sometimes, incandescent. 

In my own feeble way. 

But, of course, I did nothing.
I reached a decision.

I paid for the coat. I left.

Because that is all anyone can do.

In the face of this. 
In the face of all those hidden pains that inhabit the discount clothing section of a supermarket.
More than just mine I fear.

Three days.

These inbetween days.

They are simultaneously long and so painfully short.

Three days.

Can pass very quickly. 

Time flies by when you are having fun as they say.

On the other hand, if you are experiencing intolerable pain, I should imagine that the time drags rather.

I wish I knew.

Did it hurt?

Was she in pain?

I hope that the morphine did as they promised me, wrapped her in a comfortable haze. That the pharmaceuticals embraced her body, soothed the pain that her mother could not.

That question will resurface throughout my life.

Did it hurt you my sweet girl?

And I will never, ever know the answer.

I've asked it here before. I know I'll ask it again.

Georgina.

I know that you will never be far from my thoughts.

Birthdays.

Christmas.

Your sister's first day at school.

Your sister losing her first tooth.

Your sister's first . . . well, everything, anything.

Jessica is accompanied by a pale sister, a transparent filigree of a might have been. 

Delicate and gleaming. A glimpse. A ghost. 

A sister forever at an angle, leaning away from us even as I lean towards her. Angled away. That child who escaped me. Who I can never hope to touch.

I drove myself to tears by attempting to imagine how I will feel at Jessica's wedding.

This was when Jessica was still in hospital. Not even three months old.

And already I was conjuring.

As my mom would say, "do not go and fetch the baboons out from behind the hill, they will come anyway."

The English equivalent would be something like "never trouble trouble, until trouble troubles you."

But the loss, the inverse of Georgina will, I think, always be there. I don't have to reach for it, it is already a part of me.

I already imagine how I will feel when I can no longer have any more children. That day may have already come for all I know but when it comes conclusively. How will I feel? To know that I will always be missing one. That my child bearing years started out like this and are now complete. That there will be no more chances.

When my mind starts to falter. When I can no longer remember. Myself. My name. Her father. Her sister. 

Will I remember her still? 

Will I remember my Georgina?

As more than a sister that could have been?

As more than my child that could have been?

More than a twin that wasn’t?

More than a shadow?

As her very own sweet self.

Who was.

Very briefly in this world.

That particular person.

Georgina.

Never again.

But she was.

Georgina.

I miss you.

I love you.

Still.

And I still don't have anything new to say.
But I am so very without you my girl.
Without you.

In these inbetween days.
And those that follow.
And next year.
And the year after. 

Two

It doesn't seem possible that two years ago I was trying to sleep in the same double bed that still stands in this room this evening. That I was curled up on the floor not a few feet away from where I'm typing this. Just hoping that whatever was going awry with my pregnancy would simply stop and go away.

It seems wrong that I still have the bed, the carpet, the house, the computer desk that I sit typing this at, the same books on the shelves. That all these things are still here. Exactly as they were two years ago.
That I can still touch them.
Sometimes I hate them for that. If you can hate a bed, a desk, some books, a shelf. Like they care.
Sometimes I would like to smash them all down for their sheer, implacable continuity.
For their bare faced cheek of continuing to exist when Georgina is dead.
When anyone's child is dead.

Two years ago, Georgina was alive.
Inside this room.
Inside me.

I wish that I could go back.
Not to be that person again.
But to go back as some sort of ghost of childbirth past and advise the old me.
Tell myself to give up and go to the hospital.
That this wasn't going to end here.
That this wasn't going to end as I wanted it to.
That this wasn't, in many ways, going to end well.

That if I thought this was painful, I had another thing coming.
That this puny physical pain wasn't even the half of it.
This was going to get much, much worse before it started getting better.

Part of me wants to go back and put my arms around that stranger of two years ago's shoulders.
Hug her tight.
Hold her hand.
Because what she is about to go through is not going to be easy.
Not how she imagined it.
She doesn't even know what the acronym NICU stands for.
She doesn't yet know the meaning of PDA, CLD, NEC. ROP. But she will.
She is still counting the days until the magical point of viability at 24 weeks gestation.
Her pregnancy isn't going to get that far but one of her babies will die on that awaited date.
That she won't be bringing home the twin daughters that she had led everyone to expect.
That she expected.

I think she could use a friend this evening, 25th of August 2008.

A friend that would tell that one of her children is going to die. Soon.
That time is short.
That one of her children is going to survive this.
Despite a number of moments when that does not seem probable.

That her daughter will grow up to be the child that she already fancies she knows.
That the occasional jabs and hiccups are signals.
That the slight bones and defiant mewling cry that she will hear in just a few hours time are indicators.
That she knew her children before they were born.

The one who dies.
The one who lives.

Similar in their tenacity.
Similar faces.
Yet distinct.

Jessica.
My sweet child.
I am sorry.
That you had to enter this world so unprepared, so unready.
That you had a twin sister who died.
I'm sorry that you were promised a friend and companion.
A sister. Georgina. Only to have her taken away.
I have so many regrets about the beginning of your life.

But I can't regret you.
Or your sister.

When Jessica was still very, very small my sister picked out this song for her.
My sister spent a lot of time with Jessica during the first three days of her life. Just watching her.
As my husband and I hovered on the opposite side of the room as Georgina slowly died.

Although, oddly, I don't think I have met many people as alive as my daughters in those early days. Perhaps because I could see the effort that living cost them, how strenuous and risky the process of living actually is.
To breathe, to digest food, to filter out toxins.
Something that is hidden away in humans in good health.
Work.
So blatantly alive in the face of it all.
Defiantly.
Rebelliously.
My daughters.

The song . . .

The song is called Bright as Yellow.

And you live life with your arms reached out
Eye to eye when speaking
Enter rooms with great joy shouts,
Happy to be meeting.
And bright.
Bright,
bright as yellow
warm as yellow.
And I do not wish to be a rose,
I do not wish to be pale pink
But flowers scarlet, flowers gold
And have no thorns to distance me.

My little girl. My Jessica. Bright as yellow. Scarlet. Gold. Truly.
I love you.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Soothe

Driving home from work, listening to a discussion about infidelity on the radio.

The pundit speaking is a RELATE counsellor, working for a charity providing relationship support.

He says that, in his experience, men and women cheat on their spouses for similar reasons, to help them to get through the complexity of life. He says that, if you watch, when a child falls over and hurts themselves, their mother or father runs over and comforts the child. Because children cannot soothe themselves.

But as an adult there is nobody to soothe your hurts, you have to soothe yourself. As an adult, you have to find a mechanism to cope with the hurts that life inflicts. One of the things that people use to patch themselves up is sex.

I'm not sure if I agree with his theory about infidelity.
That explanation seems a little simplistic to me. Low self-esteem is at the root of most infidelity? Seems almost a little . . . pedestrian, a little dull.
But what would I know?
I've only ever had two relationships. I'm kind of a dunce with these things.

But I was thinking about soothing. The need of the child to be comforted, the need of a parent to soothe. Something deep within the most basic recesses of the brain. Need seems almost too weak a word.
To brush away tears.
To hold those small limbs close to your bones.
To mutter those strange nonsense words, that parental babbling that bestows strange nicknames and sings funny little songs.
To mutter the even more nonsensical, "Mama's here. You're safe. Nothing will happen to you. It's okay now."

The first time I uttered words like that in earnest, it was such a terrible lie. But I wanted it to be true, so badly. And the instinct to tell that lie is a strong one.

I still tell it. To Jessica. Mama is here and she will save you, protect you. Chase the monsters away. I only wish I could. Shut down the noise of traffic whilst she sleeps, dim the sun that shines in her eyes, run my finger over the scars left by the many lines that were plunged into her veins and erase them.

My mind runs riot. A private education. A pony. A castle. A crown. A twin sister.

None of which I can provide. But perhaps the fact that I wish to provide them is more to the point. I don't think anyone wishes ponies and crowns for me. Perhaps my own mother. Still.


I couldn't soothe my daughters after birth. They were thrust out into pain, light and noise before they were ready for even the most delicate touch. Their cries went without response. Their hurts were simply left to ache. Comfortless. I find that very difficult to think about now. Very painful. Their little bodies flinching. Their attempts at cries.

I don't know if my presence helped Georgina at all. Love can do many things. But I don't know that it can overcome pain, I know that it can't overcome illness and death. I did love her. I do love her. In a world that appears to be infinitely more confusing than I suspected that is about the only solid fact I have left.
And I can only hope. That it was a comfort to her, to be held at last. To hear a familiar voice.
As I held on and she let go.
Perhaps it was a relief for both of us.

Being an adult I should have, supposedly, developed the ability to soothe myself. To produce some mental equivalent of sticking my thumb in my mouth.

I suppose I had, to some extent, prior to this.
When I was upset, I had my little surburban dreams to dream, to soothe myself to sleep with.
Of houses I would decorate. What colours the walls would be. The items to be placed neatly on shelves. Stacks of ironed sheets. Cool tiles.
Gardens that I would plant.
Strangely, even children that I would have.
That one is no longer on the soothing dream schedule surprisingly enough.

Sometimes I try and manifest these dreams into physical being. I purchase coordinated bed linen with a matching cushion cover. I buy one of those air fresheners with three separate scents that clicks over over the smell is always noticeable. I plant a pink lavender. But these articles lose their sense of perfection the moment they touch my clammy hands. They know something is wrong in my house.

I don't often dream of children these days. We all know how that one ended up. Nothing soothing to be found there.

Sometimes I imagine that I am a child again. That I can appeal to my own parents. Or to the large fuzzy benevolent God of my childhood. I shrink my limbs. I shut my eyes. I can almost hear my parents putting out the breakfast dishes downstairs. My father's voice reverberating. The kettle boiling. The smell of the early 1980s.

But there is no true comfort there.
Maybe some things simply cannot be soothed. Too painful to patch up with even the most far fetched sticking plaster.

From as early as I can remember, my mother used to sing Leonard Coh.en songs to me.
These songs run through my childhood like a steel wire.
I don't know if it is because they remind me of children or because they remind that I am not on my own.
I always used to play 'Sis.ters of Mercy' to myself. When I was upset.
I don't know what it is about. According to the You Tu.be commentators, possibly nuns? Or prostitutes?

But I think it is about something more graceful than that. More graceful than religion or sex.
I don't think that the mercy he is singing about is something embodied in a profession. Or even in a person.
It would take a great deal to be a true sister of mercy all of the time. But perhaps we all can be, albeit transiently?

I think there are some around these parts.
A comfort.

'Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long.'