June 1, 2006

Abandonment

My father would tell me, "I saved the lives of you and your mother!" He seemed angry; it was because he loved children. I didn't know what he meant when he said that.

I visited a hypnotherapist several years ago and he helped me to regress to my birth. I felt very excited as I was being born: here I come! But then the excitement turned to sadness as I found myself cold and alone; such a deep feeling of abandonment: where is my mother? I could see the gas mantles on the walls and the shadows they cast of the dark figures in the room.

When I was born, my mother put me at the end of the bed and placed a nappy over me. "You were born alone, and you will die alone." She would say. My belly button remembers that tension; that tugging feeling.

I was the seventh of ten, a girl. My parents were Catholics, but that was the only part they practiced. My father came home from sea once a year, for a month or so. Then he was off again, leaving my mother pregnant and looking after all those children. She didn't know how much he earned; he gave her five percent and spent the rest at the pub. She was so angry when she found out.

The midwife was drunk. That's what my mother told me; that she arrived drunk. I was a breach birth, she told me that too. I was two months premature. It was the night after my father left for sea. Those dark figures, that placental tugging.

He came home unexpectedly. I was lying alone at the foot of the bed, my mother bleeding. He called the ambulance. They wrapped me in tin foil. That's what they do when someone has hypothermia. It's no wonder I was cold, in that freezing two bedroom flat in that old tenement building.

He never went back to sea after that night. He stayed at home. He loved children, my dad.

Footnote: The woman about whom this is written has reviewed and approved it. I love this woman very much, and I love her even more after hearing this story. It seems tragic, but it shows me that even though something beautiful can be thrown away by people in pain and confusion, it does not cease to be beautiful.