Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [77]
Here I am.
Not leaving any more.
Home.
Coda
WHEN I BEGAN this book I had no idea how it would turn out. I was writing in real time. I was writing the past and discovering the future.
I did not know how I would feel about finding my mother. I still don’t. I do know that the TV-style reunions and pink mists of happiness are wrong. We need better stories for the stories around adoption.
Many people who find their birth families are disappointed. Many regret it. Many others do not search because they feel afraid of what they might find. They are afraid of what they might feel – or worse, what they might not feel.
I met Ann again, in Manchester, just the two of us for lunch. I was glad to see her. She has my quick walk and she looks about her the way a dog does, bright, alert, and also watchful. That’s me too.
She told me a bit more about my father. He wanted to keep me. She said, ‘I wouldn’t let him keep you. We were poor but we had floorboards.’
I love that and it makes me laugh.
Then she tells me that she used to work in a factory nearby. It was called Raffles, run by Jews, and it made the overcoats and gaberdines for Marks and Spencer. ‘In those days it was all British-made, and the quality was something.’
She tells me everyone, poor or not, floorboards or not, had made-to-measure clothes, because there were so many sewing shops, and cloth was cheap. Manchester was still King of Cloth.
Her boss, Old Man Raffles, found her the mother and baby home and promised her a job when she came out.
I find that story very curious because I have always felt at home among the Jews and have a lot of Jewish friends.
‘I brought you into Manchester to show you round and have your photo taken when you were three weeks old. That’s the photo I sent you.’
Yes, the baby with the ‘oh no don’t do it’ face.
I don’t remember but in truth we remember everything.
There is a lot Ann can’t remember. Memory loss is one way of coping with damage. Me, I go to sleep. If I am upset I can be asleep in seconds. I must have learned that myself as a Mrs Winterson survival strategy. I know I slept on the doorstep and in the coal-hole. Ann says she has never been a good sleeper.
At the end of lunch I am ready to leave or I will fall asleep right there and then at the table. Not from boredom. On the train I fall asleep at once. So there is a lot going on that I don’t understand yet.
I think Ann finds me hard to read.
I think she would like me to let her be my mother. I think she would like me to be in touch regularly. But whatever adoption is, it isn’t an instant family – not with the adoptive parents, and not with the rediscovered parents.
And I grew up like in all those Dickens novels, where the real families are the pretend ones; the people who become your family through deep bonds of affection and the continuity of time.
She looks at me so closely when we part.
I am warm but I am wary.
What is making me wary? What am I wary of? I don’t know.
There is a big gap between our lives. She is upset about Winterson-world. She blames herself and she blames Mrs Winterson. Yet I would rather be this me – the me that I have become – than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way, including Mrs W. I think I am lucky.
How do you say that without dismissing or undervaluing things for her?
And I don’t know what I feel about her. I panic when my feelings are not clear. It is like staring into a muddy pond, and rather than wait until an ecosystem develops to clear the water, I prefer to drain the pond.
This isn’t a head/heart split or a thinking/feeling split. It is emotional matrix. I can juggle different and opposing ideas and realities easily. But I hate feeling more than one thing at once.
Adoption is so many things at once. And it is everything and nothing. Ann is