Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [61]
Occasionally the creature appeared when I was reading, to mock me, to hurt me, but now I could ask her to leave until our meeting the following day and, miraculously, she did.
It was summer. The Battle of the Sun was nearly finished. I was lonely and alone, but I was calm, and I was saner than I have ever been, insomuch as I knew there was a part of me that was in madness.
Symington talks about how the mad part will try to wreck the mind. That had been my experience. Now I could contain it.
A few months later we were having our afternoon walk when I said something about how nobody had cuddled us when we were little. I said ‘us’, not ‘you’. She held my hand. She had never done that before; mainly she walked behind shooting her sentences.
We both sat down and cried.
I said, ‘We will learn how to love.’
13
This Appointment Takes Place In The Past
Dear Madam
With reference to your request regarding the above numbered file.
The District Judge has considered your application and made the following directions:
1. The copy birth certificate is not a copy of the entry in the Adopted Children Register.
2. Part 8B of the Practice Direction Section 1.3 requires the Application and Evidence of Identity ‘must be taken to the Court’, the Court makes a note on the application form. The original evidence of identity must be produced (not a copy).
3. After that a redacted copy of the relevant documents, specified in the practice direction, can be forwarded. The file is not open to inspection as a whole and cannot be sent to the Home Office.
Unfortunately it will therefore be necessary for you to attend personally at the Court and produce original evidence of identity together with a certified copy of the entry in the Register of Adopted Children which relates to you.
IT WAS ONE of many exchanges with the court holding my adoption file.
I am an intelligent woman with plenty of resources but the adoption process skittled me. I did not know what was meant by ‘the entry in the Register of Adopted Children’ – and it took four emails to find out. I did know what ‘redacted’ meant, but I wondered if other people did (can’t you just say ‘the edited version’?), and I wondered what such a cold and formal letter does to people in the heated and upsetting process of looking for your other life.
As far as the court is concerned, adoption records are nothing more than an archive with legal implications, and are attended to in the dead and distant language of the law, obeying protocol that is difficult to follow. That isn’t a good reason to engage a lawyer; it is a good reason to make the process simpler and less insensitive.
I wanted to stop. I wasn’t so sure I had wanted to start.
I was lucky though, because I had fallen in love with Susie Orbach. We were quite new but she wanted me to feel that I was in a safe place with somebody who would give me support and, very simply, be there for me. ‘We are together,’ she said. ‘That means you’ve got rights.’ She laughed her big bold laugh.
I met Susie some time after I failed to interview her for her book Bodies – about the impact of advertising and pornography on women’s bodies and self-image.
My father had died, and all work had to be put aside. Eventually I wrote to Susie, just to say how much I had enjoyed her book – all her books. I had read Fat Is A Feminist Issue when I was nineteen. I had been rereading her Impossibility of Sex, and thinking I would try and write an answer to it – in the broadest sense – called The Possibility of Love.
I am always wondering about love.
Susie invited me to supper. She had been parted from her husband for about two years, after a thirty-four-year marriage. I had been by myself since Deborah and the breakdown. I was beginning to like being by myself again. But the big things in life are never planned. We had a very good evening; food, conversation, the sun setting behind