Adoption is a subject complete with many theories. One of the most established is called ‘the primal wound’. Its central premise is that a child’s relationship with the mother is a symbiosis that begins in the womb and that birth is simply an extension of that physical bond. The wound therefore is the first trauma the child experiences, that of separation, a severing of established dependency, the great abandonment. Adopted children will almost always recognise this sense of loss and desertion as a physical feeling, an emptiness. This is often embodied as a physical pressure in the solar plexus. When someone leaves, rejects or abandons you, it can literally leave you winded. The wound never heals, it can only ever be bandaged.
The physical presence of emptiness makes it hard to build relationships. It’s as if before you can even begin the normal play of emotions with a new person, there is so much space they need to fill with love before you arrive at equal positions. This can be exhausting and being needy isn’t a beautiful thing. Not something people find attractive. It plays havoc with trust and intimacy. It can also have the reverse effect. You end up searching for love and loyalty in the ragged corners of life; sometimes the most dangerous places. It is a failure to see your place in the world objectively.
This failure is a manifestation of the primal wound, it makes you vulnerable before you have even started. And it is triggered even before the abandonment of birth. The problem begins when you are forming as a foetus gestating inside a body that is preparing to reject it. As your primal amoebic self in the limpid warmth of the womb melds from the cells of the mother, the heart pulses and brainwaves of the mother are sending confused signals. And your embryonic self senses from the start that those are awry. As the unfocused, myopic eye scans across the protective arterial gauze, the preternatural you, the yolk floating in fluid, begins to sense that there may be no safety out there for you, no guarantees beyond this state of in vitro. While you are being impeccably auto-generated from the entwining of the DNA of the generations before, the host body is already separating. You are already being marked as surplus to requirements. So even before you emerge from the placenta, you have been fighting against the single most powerful enemy, rejection. Birth then, is the second stage in the inexorable journey to abandonment. From that moment, the mother, the one you must trust most, has deserted you. Nakedly, you are now both outside and outsider.
New born babies have nowhere to turn, they seek warm flesh, mouth against skin, anything soft to familiarise with the world after the comfort of the womb. If that is not there, and the first cries are not answered, those premonitions of abandonment stoked up in the womb are realised. This is the first trauma. You are alone and something instinctive knows it, there is a decision to be made, an intuitive fight for survival. You have to learn quickly without the sense of m/other. Without the pounding bump of heart on heart, no halo of subconscious recognition, there is nothing to comfort you. If you are lucky you fall into the hands of an/other human with an instinct for love, a being who will swaddle you in their heat and hope, to make you theirs.
Daring to go back as far as I can to the beginning, when they fucked. A knee trembler maybe, in the woods behind the house. It is December, mornings are coated in frost. So the path would have been treacherous and mossy stains on their clothes could easily give the game away. But there are other places where they might have disappeared. The garage, a plaid rug laid out on the waxed leather of a car seat or on the long bench in the gardener’s shed, next to an oil-soaked mower parked up for winter. The smell of creosote mingling with ripe apples and old season’s grass cuttings.
Within hours of coitus the chromosomal magic begins. It takes only a few weeks for her body, already familiar with the transformative sensations of fertilisation. He is uncommitted. They are both married. Every chance of an early demise for me. Christmas is an ordeal. But filled with distraction. Children kicking up a fuss, sleepless with excitement. She lies awake for other reasons, sensing something untoward. But she is pretending nothing is wrong. In this case, there is no delight. It would be hard to pull off a pregnancy. What of that tiny object, not yet human, inside her? What signals do the electrical impulses from her brain send to her womb? Molecules bouncing around the metabolism like gossipy rumours. Change is incoming.
The sickness starts early in the new year. Tricky to hide but she hopes nobody notices. Perhaps the housekeeper and the gardener are whispering that she seems a bit off. Nanny however, has an instinct. She knows. But nothing is said. Not now. There are children to dress and feed. Soon enough the formless being begins to have meaning. Cells develop into the semblance of a body with a face. My embryonic features show where they are going to be, though still in a pretty alien form. Little nubs of growth where I am to have a nose, mouth and eyes. Beyond the point of termination. A close run thing.
Things carry on through the cold months of spring. It is possible to check the daily weather reports of the British Meteorological Office quite far back. They are smart, complex and coded, distinguished-looking charts, like freshly demobbed military personnel. Longhand lists, detailed data collected at hundreds of weather stations across the country. This month the county had variable conditions, rainy to start, some cold dips but then sunny days with rising temperatures. She takes trips to the city, absent a little more often than usual. Which helps to avoid scrutiny. She has girlfriends in town with whom she confides, explain her dilemma, weigh up options, maybe have a weep. But she is tough and has been here before. She knows how this goes, how to get through.
I soon have ears, little flappy appendages which I have used so diligently since. There are muffled outer sounds. My liquid confinement penetrated by the most indistinct of waveforms. Like being in a bath with your head beneath the water. She has been writing to him to ask what they should do. Her husband does not know yet and she has no reason to tell him. Though when she does, he will know that the baby is not his. She is still drinking quite often. If I close my eyes and think very hard about womb time, I can sense the swirly headrush of this imbalance. She plays German music - Mahler and Strauss - and sometimes jazz - Billie Holiday and Ella - loudly on a record player. She wears looser dresses and when nobody is around lies on a deckchair in the garden quietly sobbing beneath the sound of birds. I feel this shuddering, like a train being shunted into a sidings.
Eventually when she can hide it no longer, a couple of weeks into the seventh month, she tells her husband. He breaks into a fury. He disappears into his study but not quite disguising his self-reproach. Next morning he takes a train to the city where he finds contingent solace in the company of a young man with whom he has occasional dalliance. A few days later he returns. She will have to find a way to get rid of the child. From insideI want to explain to them that I will be no trouble and fit in easily. She screams the injustice at him, which sends shockwaves into my little submerged lake. He will not be persuaded.
The month before I am born, the voices of children form into clearer sounds, calling out indistinctly, one moment close and then distant again. Nothing definable. These sounds simply bounce around me, hardly penetrating the several walls between us. Sometimes I feel as if I am trying to break through into another world. But I am still locked inside her. She has played this so close to the edge. I am now impatient and pressing against her from the inside. The lover returns. They meet again in the garage. He is angry too, though she reminds him that they both created this child. He cannot leave his family. His arms are around her, trying to give reassurance though he is at a loss. I am stuck between them, between her tremors of fear and his guilt pushing back into me. They must find somewhere for me to go. She will need money. It comes back to me over the years, never quite leaves, that vertiginous feeling of being unanchored, set adrift on rough seas.
There is a visit from a woman. An old, kind voice. They sit in the garden and drink tea. She knows a family who are looking for a baby. It can all be arranged privately. No fuss. She will make immediate arrangements. The coming days are difficult. I am extremely uncomfortable being hauled around, banging at the edges. She and I are driven down to a small town on the coast. It is a great shame, the matron tells her, that neither your husband nor the father of the baby will support you. I hear the fateful words for the first time. She says, I do not wish to see the child. Money is exchanged on arrival so that when I leave, on my own, what I need will be provided for. A barter of some shillings for a new born baby.
It’s here, the day is drawing close. My little limbs are pressing and pounding at the fleshy bag around me, desperate to stretch themselves out into the world. Let me out. I must be on my way as quickly as possible. There is no reason to linger, we must move towards the inevitable. She is put in an upstairs room in a white sandstone villa by the sea. The windows are open and a late summer breeze wafts through the curtains.
She walks down to the beach, sits heavily in the sand, paddling barefoot in the low tide. In her room she paces across the boards, bouncing lightly on her toes, trying to relieve us both from the strain, weighing down on us, as we wait. Then without notice that gossamer film, as strong as spider’s silk, breaks, and my fluid prison empties out of her. I am fast on its tail. We are mounted on the bed now, doctor by her side as I push my way out inch by inch. We pick up pace as the night opens to the early hours. By the time the light comes up, I appear and separation is complete.
At dawn on a Friday in September, we are disconnected.
Devastating. x