I think of loss like the weight of a soul. When you dissolve loss into loss, nothing changes. Colour, texture, smell, everything remains the same. There is nothing to feel. No sadness, no grief. Everything is a mirage.
At Bethany, the maternity home where I was born, they took the babies from their single mothers right away. Before their mothers laid eyes on them. Before they understood they could see love made flesh in their child’s eyes. Before they could make a fuss. Or scream down the ward. Although I’m told they often did both as they tried to find their missing babies.
Had my mother died on the day I was born they would have swaddled me in sadness, a child of sorrow and loss. Comforted by shared grief. But stranger adoption denies you that grief. One set of arms is considered as good as another. To the baby, there is no such distinction. To me, my mother died on the day I was born. She came alive again for three short days — phone call to phone call. And then she died again. The opposite of Easter.
But even at that point, grief was denied me. I was not one of those ‘poor girls’. I’d never met her, after all. I had no right to my racing heart or the black-filled sky. There was no acceptable place to take my grief. We were strangers created out of stranger adoption.
I fed Ruth and sat her on a towel in the bathroom. The older girls stood with their backs to the wall, as if lined up for a photo, and watched as I undressed. We hold grief in our lungs. I found I could not breathe. My skin was on fire, and all I wanted was water. I stood under a cold shower. Rachel pulled aside the curtain, her face all concern, then she began to cry.
I dressed and hugged her, and we sat on the bed. Bonnie and Rachel took Ruth’s hands and the three of them jumped. Their laughter caught me and I lay down. It was all the invitation they needed. Rachel burrowed under my arm. Bonnie tried to make the mattress bounce higher. Ruth scaled my hip, her arms aloft, before giggling and falling next to me.
I turned on the radio but missed the news and got the weather report. Showers, briefly heavy in the morning, becoming isolated afternoon and gradually clearing. Gradually clearing. Everything gradually clears.
‘Let’s go out for dinner,’ I said. ‘A special treat.’
They had never been to a restaurant and ran circles with excitement. I watched them dress themselves, fighting over a singlet and the hairbrush.
At the reception desk, the motel woman was reading a newspaper. I asked if there was anything about a plane crash. She shook her head, then remembered. ‘On the radio. In Spain. Something about fog. Lots of survivors though.’ She looked at her watch and turned on the radio. The beeps for the news sounded.
Two Spanish jetliners collided in heavy fog on a take-off runway here this morning, killing about 90 people and injuring more than 30 of the approximately 45 survivors.7
Jeannie was wrong. Surely my mother would have survived. But I knew she was dead. Something had changed. The lulling of a violin string in the moments after the note dies away.
Our bodies are echo chambers. We know things that make no sense. Today the science says we leave tiny pieces of ourselves in each other. Microchimeric cells slip across the placenta during pregnancy. In Greek mythology, a chimera is a shape-shifting creature. Fetal microchimeric cells left in the mother can migrate through her blood. In rat models, they have been seen to change shape as they rush to assist in healing a mother’s injured heart.
None of us is as singular or autonomous as we like to think. My mother had held a filament of me within her body. And now even that tenuous thread was broken.
Today I am comforted and wowed by the science. But back then all I felt was the weight of knowledge. I had wanted this one thing so badly, I had caused a catastrophe.
Mavis calibrated her goodness through phrases and sayings. Uncomfortable questions always elicited the same response: ‘Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, for you’ll only trouble trouble and trouble others too.’
I was always the one who troubled trouble. An actor who breaks through the fourth wall and speaks directly to the camera. I had dared to step out of my assigned role. I had sought Pamela out and now she was dead. I had taken my broken-heartedness and passed it on to others. ‘Those poor girls.’
I stared at the motel woman. ‘Is it worse to lose all hope or never to have had it in the first place?’ I thought I saw a tear forming in her dry eyes.
She frowned. ‘Your children are hungry,’ she replied.
‘I’m on the other side of hope,’ I said, but she had already turned away.
The almost-Italian restaurant was a short walk. Red-checked cloths covered the tables and they served chips with everything. There was a high chair for Ruth and I explained to the girls how to order from a menu. My heart’s desire had grown so vast and fast, its destruction was now too much to contemplate.
I focused on my breathing, on the girls’ chatter, on the drawings they did on the paper the waiter provided. The meal arrived — chips and fish for the girls and a plate of pasta for me. I wondered if they ate pasta in Spain. Who would cook for those poor girls? For them, it was the worst thing that could happen. But for me, it was nothing more than the opening and closing of desire. I cut the girls’ fish into tiny bits and let them use their fingers.
I’d been living on hope for all my life. Consuming it like air. Brittle, shallow, stupid hope. Now we would have to go back. To the cold cottage and
