Beginnings & Endings

By the time I was a few months old, I had already experienced three mothers. Birth, foster and adopted. They had all, in turn, turned their backs on me.

This is the third part of the story which began with ‘On Being Born’ and ‘On My Adoption’.

I am sitting in a hospital room. On the bed the frail shell of an old woman is stretched out; it is covered in a sheet drawn up to the face which barely disguises the bones of the body. I can remember being struck by how different facing the actual death of a body is from the charged experience of the imagination. I had recently visited the Chapel of Sansevero in Naples, where Corradini’s Veiled Christ lies shrouded in the most delicately carved marble. The experience of viewing this ethereal masterpiece leaves you with a sense of the ineffable beauty of life and death. But this bears little resemblance to the unedifying mortal decay before me. From an almost unrecognisable face, its skin thinly hanging from the bones of the skull, comes the uneven rasping sound of dying breath. I had been estranged from Judith, my adoptive mother. It was a shock to see her so diminished.

All the pain and fury that seemed to live in me, fell away at that moment. It is hard to bear resentment towards a dying person. I summoned the power to talk to her knowing that she could not cut me off, harangue or deny me. With no idea if she could hear me I told her what I knew would most stimulate the fading strains of her rampant dominance, that I forgave her. She would hate that from me, always assured by her unforgiving religious zealotry. Now after the indescribable suffering of months of untreated cancer, deserted by her god, she could not shut me down. I could quietly speak my strength.

There was a bible on the bedside table and I read to her from the Psalms, imagining that the incantation of those words might make her journey less painful. But in truth, I wanted to banish the empty hospitalisation of death. And as that last stuttering exhalation of life guttered out of her, there was no visible ascension of the soul. Choirs of angels did not sing. She was gone. And I felt nothing, except that decades of unhappiness and cruelty had ended.

Almost exactly forty years earlier, I was also in a hospital. The woman who gave birth to me had been induced and sedated. Her hands never took hold of my body, she never saw me. A few days later I am wrapped up and bundled between various arrangements for collection and delivery, like an unclaimed parcel. Before finally being assigned to the expectant recipients. But something has happened in the intervening weeks. An internal rewiring. The intended docking, like a space craft to its station, went awry. There was perhaps only a short period of time in which my newborn infant self could have been recoupled successfully with receptive humans. I literally needed to be immediately smothered, wrapped, swaddled in mothering, coaxed back into a state of post-uterine dependency in which to sleep, cry, feed, connect. But that was not the case. There was a mismatch and the first engagement with Judith was too tentative, and unfocused, too noncommittal. The bond was not strong enough. And so my separation with the mothership continued unbreached. I spin off into my own orbit, alone.

By the time I was a few months old, I had already experienced three mothers. Birth, foster and adopted. They had all, in turn, turned their backs on me. Even the foster mother who must have been the only person to whom I might have clung receptively, through no fault of hers, had to let me go. So I suppose I had already retreated far into myself.

Anyone who has known me since, will be surprised to know that when I was eventually dispatched to the new family, my strategy was silence. I did not know who to trust. That instinctive survival again. You will walk away and leave me. Again. So I will not hear you. And because I will not hear them, these new parents assumed there was something wrong with me. That I might be badly wired. It took almost a year for them to sign the completed papers to approve the adoption. Think about it. They did not want a malfunctioning baby and so made no effort to properly connect with me, to fully embrace me. I was kept on hold, on ice, until they knew I was sound of body and mind. But by then, of course, it was too late. So you see. How it goes.

I do not say it is the same for all adopted babies. But it is what happened to me. They had already adopted a baby the year before I came along, one who loved and trusted them wholeheartedly. Not unreasonably, they must have expected the same from me. As a first responder, Judith had already opened up fully to another child and he had fully reached back to her. But having withheld her parenting, I could not trust her. I too had reserved judgement on my circumstances. After a few months, Judith confided with her sister-in-law. She felt no bond. She did not think she could love me.

Towards the end of her life, my aunt wanted me to know that she had pleaded with my mother to give me back, to let them find me a home where I would be loved. But Judith kept me. I suppose she could not bear to be seen to have failed. Instead of trusting her instinct she left me to become lifelong prey to her misgivings. So I grew up under sufferance and she could never quite overcome her resentment towards me for that. For her the insult was too great. Rather than patiently supporting my tentative entrance into the world, she could never endure what she saw as my ingratitude. Of which she never failed to remind me. From then on, it was a daily war of attrition. The trust was broken. I do not say that I deliberately defied her. But every speck of passion and creativity in me, made her recoil. So I chose to live my life despite her. And that made for a long and desperate haul before I was free.

Witness to this are two photographs taken when I was probably a year old. They were taken at exactly the same time in the garden of an officer’s married quarters at some army base where we lived. In one, my adopted brother, only a year older but looking like a little man already, slight and wiry, sits grasping his mother, legs and arms neatly entwined round her. In the other which must have been taken moments later, she is standing, hanging on to me, as if am about to make a dash for freedom. I am a round faced, heavy baby with a half smile, arms and legs limp, searching for something in the camera. Reaching away not towards.

Who knows at just which moment an infant’s mind has sufficient plasticity to start cataloguing the early library of its existence. I do not mean actual thoughts where we are able to make connections between actions and reactions or people and responses. More the contact sheet of images that build up our memory banks. As speechless infants, I suppose one of the first things we do is to simply react to people, to their smiles and sounds. So our first inexorable joys come from recognising faces, they populate the first celluloid rolls of our lives, abundant with bright eyes and human shapes, associating connections. For me, there are no people in those film spools, my early neural imaging software is not programmed to faces or feelings, but to places and objects, to tastes and smells. There are palpable sensations but there are no people there. The same aunt recounted years later that I would often be left out of the way in a corner somewhere in my pram. If she came to see me, my face would light up beaming at her, grasping the opportunity for contact as if I had never seen a face before. I would flirt with the world, she said. I guess I have continued to do so ever since.

Beginnings emerge for me in a small house close to the seafront in Deal on the south coast of England. Just an infant, like most people, there are only a few surviving mental images of that earliest time. Hazy, fragmented, subconscious flashes. When I try to fish them out, a strange catch emerges. Not clear pictures but shadowy images of scenes. The unusual excitement of the adults huddled around a small black and white television watching the Armstrong moon-walk. The damp composty warmth of a potting shed, where mice fled from a swifter than death tabby cat. An irresistible addiction to the smell of camphor mothballs. My first gay shame after being caught playing ‘doctors’ at kindergarten, fleeing into the surrounding streets on a metal tricycle.

Most of what imbues all of my early memories, is a strange sensation of separation, a knowledge of not belonging. As if I walked through a door but nobody had told me that I was in the wrong room. I’m not clear if this was something innate, a preternatural intuition that somehow I was misplaced. Or if it was something I felt in response to what was going on outside me. For whatever reason, I turned away from, not towards, Judith. Was it instinct? Early premonition? An intuitive sense of what was to come?

Today I am on a train back to Deal. To the funeral ceremony for a friend. She was one of those people with a capacity for enveloping everyone in her enthusiasm, just redolent with life. It is hard to write about someone who has been cut off so unmercifully short. The timeline fades like the empty pages of an unfinished biography. The promise of what might have been is incomplete. But I am stunned by the number of people she touched. She had such a gift for friendship, as if she knew she had to give everything in a hurry. To be ahead of time. From her earliest days, people were her touchstone. It is clear to me that a well-lived life is not about what you do, or how much you have achieved, it can only be measured by the people around you, those you have touched; not by the summits of your success but by the number of people’s hearts in which you’ll remain.

There in that hospital with Judith alone, I did grieve. Not for her but for the relationship we might have had, mourning the possibilities for mother and son. Judith considered it a personal slight that I had not worshipped at her altar. She never got past that with me. Instead of understanding that a baby might be cautious, somehow sentient, anxious that he might be rejected again, she took umbrage, like a vengeful goddess. But that was how she lived her life, not just with me. She was a cold woman, and dispensed with people at will. Divisive even in death she left me me unmentioned by name in her will. And honestly, in the final count, four decades after my birth, barely breathing on her deathbed, with the estranged son of whom she was painfully ashamed, reading to her from the Book of Psalms, she had won.

Her legacy, a destitute carelessness for family. A child bereft.