Something to think about

Quotes: I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. (Maya Angelou)..The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull. (Eric Berne).. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. (Theodor W. Adorno)

Wednesday 3 June 2015

2 Screaming for attention

I am often left alone during my waking hours. The bevy of nurses coming and caring, caring and going bewilders me. A clock ticks loudly and inevitably, striking the feeding hours and reminding the tardy of the swift passage of time. I miss the warmth of my cocoon and the gentle thud of Mama’s heartbeat. The effort to get into the world may not have been worth it after all. My twin sister, the disembodied one, is now so far out of my reach that I can hardly believe she ever existed at all. My sense of loss is deep, painful, and enduring.
Out in the cold reality of the world, I am frustrated by the loud wails of other new-borns that blot out the whispering spiritual voices. I am dazzled by the bright light and the bleached bed-linen, and homesick for the warm serenity of my recent past.
I scream as loud as I can, so that my voice carries to the far corners of the ward.
Supposing my twin were among those other babies, her spirit born to someone else, and unable to recollect what has happened to her? Who are the others? Where have they come from?
The other new-borns do not react. Their utterances are as incomprehensible to me as mine are to them. We are all trapped in a Tower of Babel. We scream for attention until attended to. We are visited at regimented times by regimented visitors who coo and caw over us like visitors to the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. We are wonders of creation and the source of hope and inspiration in a world of strife. Our purpose in life seems to be tied to the identification parade held by those speculating about whose nose, eyes, ears or chin we have inherited, though at this tiny age we look pretty much the same with our blue eyes, pink skin and stubbed noses, which might explain why we are all carefully labelled. The snippet of pink ribbon tied around my wrist reveals that I am a girl and which of the women gave birth to me, but otherwise there is nothing much remarkable about me, except that I am declared to be the one with the loudest yell ever heard between those walls.
Very few fathers find their way into our nursery, apart from my father, who is excused from fighting because he is hard of hearing and would be the last to detect impending danger and is therefore useless to the universal cause of fighting for peace. Most of them are risking life and limb, fighting against other fathers and sons. They have no choice. Many of them will never see the progeny they have spawned.
Soon, we new-borns will go our separate ways and are unlikely to meet again, though we have spent our first earth-hours together in this no-man’s land, in this microcosm of the unfriendly world outside.
"That child’ll burst a blood vessel", someone says. "See what she wants."
Rough, cold hands snatch me up and glare me into submission, pushing the teat of a feeding bottle between my gasping lips. Thirst suppresses all other sensations. I suckle and try to focus my eyes on the woman in the stained white overall who is pushing the fragrant, warm liquid at me and sniffing because she has a chronic sinus infection. It could be Mama, I suppose. But this woman is not even looking at me while she feeds me. She is comparing notes about last night’s bombing raid. Surely Mama would look at me, even though she would like to forget all about me.

How can I escape, if not by dying?
"Pity about her mother," Sniff remarks.
I stop suckling. If she isn’t Mama, who is? What about Mama? Why isn’t she here to look after me? Where have they taken her?
"The poor soul’ll be all right, though. They usually are, given a bit of peace and quiet."
The poor soul. The poor soul. We are all poor souls in this place. This is a factory for poor souls. I feel guilty about the ordeal I have put Mama through. The poor soul. Giving birth to me has been a terrible ordeal. If there had been two of us, we might both have disappeared into the ether. My twin sister is the clever girl, I am thinking. And I am the stupid one. I recognise the plodding feet and raucous voice of the smelly midwife, whose grasping fingers so recently jettisoned me out of that small, warm prison into this big cold one. She is nothing if not competent, though there is no tenderness in her face or her hands or her voice.
"The hole in that teat is too small. Can’t you see she’s not getting enough?"
She takes a safety-pin from the collar of her blood-stained overall and pushes it through the brownish rubber until the warm, creamy liquid squirts out.
"That’s better...“she says with a satisfied nod. If only all problems were so easy to solve.
Sniff takes up her pet theory again. "The trouble is that these women don’t want babies in the first place. Then, when they arrive they get hysterical and develop convenient symptoms that free them from having to behave like mothers, at least for a time. Some even prefer to die to avoid their responsibilities."
These words carve themselves into my consciousness. My twin sister was right on every count. She couldn’t face being a child of this mother; she had chosen not to, although she risked a worse fate in doing so. You could only make that choice during the first few weeks. After that, your destiny was almost certainly sealed, barring accident or error.
I am weeping now. Different tears. Tears that burn red streaks into my cheeks and make my eyes sting. I am sobbing out my grief and pain and anger and desperation. And I am listening to my own heart-beat pounding away in my own panting breast.
"It’s as if she understands everything we say," Safety-pin remarks.
"Go on. Pull the other one!"
Now Sniff looks at me long and hard, screwing up her eyes and sniffing even harder, as if that could help her to discover something hitherto hidden from human view.
"She can’t be hungry," says Safety-pin. "She drank more than her share a few minutes ago."
Sniff jerks up, and the bottle falls out of her hand. She is indignant. No one shall dare accuse her of not doing her job properly. Before Safety-pin can teach her any more about her job, she tips me up and sniffs vigorously at my rear end.
"And she’s clean and dry, too. I saw to her a minute ago."
The indignity of this treatment causes me to burp loudly.
"Drat it. Now she’s brought it all up again!"
"No wonder,” snorts Safety-pin. "I would, too, if someone chucked me around like a sack of potatoes."
If there had been two of us, we could have united our will and strength. We could have triumphed over all odds. But there is only me. I stayed the course, not wanting to disappoint the gentle man who fathered us. He would want me. He had wanted us. I remembered the day they had been told there were twins. He had been overjoyed and she had been horrified.
"It’s all right for you," she had moaned. "You don’t have to drag them around inside you for nine months."
"But I would, if I could," he had replied. "I’d do anything to relieve you of that burden."
"Well, you can’t, can you?" she had retorted, and the awfulness of her impending motherhood became an obsession with her.
She hated the very idea of having children. She wanted to be childless. She didn’t need anyone else. At long last she had found a soul-mate, and now she would have to share him not just with one, but with two intruders. But most of all, she wanted to forget the pain of her own childhood, the years of suppression, abuse and neglect, all of which she denied in retrospect, but which were nevertheless etched into her frightened blue eyes and confirmed by the nervous little cough which warned us constantly of her impending arrival and whose pitch and tempo reflected her current state of mind.
My twin had hated these negative vibrations. Her soul was stunned. We were like the two sides of a coin. She was the side face down in darkness, and I the one facing the light.
"I’ll be with you in spirit," she had promised. "And one day we shall be reunited. You must believe that."
When, weeks later, our parents were informed that it was only one baby after all, she had rejoiced and he had wept. I had tried to comfort him, to reach out somehow and console him and assure him that I would soon be there to be wanted and loved. But the iron curtain of mother’s cruel triumph was impenetrable.
One day, shortly before I was born, I had the sudden inspiration that my twin was somewhere near.
"I will never be far away," I felt her say.
"Tell me how!" I pleaded, hoping against hope that her presence was not just my imagination.
But before she could answer, the sirens screamed across the countryside, and the air was saturated with the negative energy of enemy planes transporting bombs across Europe to wreak havoc on Liverpool.
A few days after my birth, while the villagers who couldn’t be bothered to hang the blackout curtains over their windows were now counting the bomb craters in their fields and their lucky stars that they still lived to tell the tale, my father fetched me home. He nourished me on boiled cow’s milk and water sweetened with honey and nursed me tenderly, helped by my cousin Jack and a long list of does and don'ts compiled by Aunt Jane, who is Jack's mother and my father's favourite sister.
I can only speculate on where Mama is. Nobody tells me anything. They think I won’t understand.


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