Tag: winter

The skin of words

‘She was born with the winter in her bones.’ Kate Atkinson

Aurelia, thin and angular, pulled her socks to her knees. She wore them over thick stockings for extra warmth under drill trousers. Work ready trousers so she need not worry over unwanted holes in the fabric. 

Her mother had raised her to work, beginning as a four-year-old and first-born girl in a family where babies arrived year after year. She could change a nappy and prop a bottle on her baby brother’s chest as she folded clothes with her spare hand. She learned fast to keep order and during this time came to resent the mess piling around them in this overfull house of babies and neglect. 

Whatever happened to Aurelia when she was ten I cannot say but just like that, her ability to remember stopped one day overnight. One day she was a child who could recite her times tables, wipe bench tops clean, set out knives and forks in correct order, enough for seven, clear dishes, wash and stack them away. The next day she stumbled over every movement. She dropped plates, smashed in pieces on the floor and could not remember where the dustpan and brush lived to sweep up the shards. 

School became a nightmare, a fog of ignorance and the nuns reported Aurelia must be lacking something upstairs. Best she leaves school when she hits fourteen, they said. She could still be useful at home. 

Only Aurelia was no longer useful at home. She was a burden on her parents, a child who weighed them down with her slowness. 

A disease had crept into Aurelia’s bones. Some maladies of mind that left her grasping for ideas. It squashed her memory and the slower she became the more her mother pondered her fate. It was never a matter of love. 

Love was not a commodity within this family of many heads, legs and arms all pistoning in unison to get through the tasks of life, the cooking, the eating, the washing, the cleaning. The walk to school, the books to read, the tasks to be completed outside in the woodshed, the gathering of firewood for the older boys, and stitching of holes in fabric for the girls below Aurelia who had not yet lost their minds. 

Aurelia’s mother feared this might turn out to be the fate of all her daughters. One after the other when they came of age, nine or ten, overnight these girls would shift their weight in the world and disappear.

It had happened to Aurelia’s mother, too, only she managed to hold onto a few shreds of memory, enough to get her past the end of her school days at fourteen, enough to rote learn the rudiments of house care, enough to find a husband. A burly tall man who was not unkind but who did not know any more than Aurelia’s mother that small children need love if they are to burst into bright stars that glow warm. If they are to grow into minds that can think and feel, that can run, hop and skip like John and Betty in the first-grade readers. 

Aurelia’s mother knew there had been other possibilities for her, but once she married and the first seeds of a baby swelled inside, there was no turning back. 

Then there was Aurelia. And her disappearance. 

Her mother then imagined a Hansel and Gretel story for her daughter. She, the wicked stepmother, for no actual mother would abandon her child, however forlorn. And she cajoled her burly husband into taking Aurelia to the government house where cast off children were processed. Leaving her there.

Aurelia in a fog in the great hall at the centre of a crumbling mansion where bureaucrats took details of children lined up like ten pins one after the other ready for life to bowl them over. 

But Aurelia had no details to report. Aurelia could not remember. She was born with the winter already in her bones and although she wore clothes that kept her warm enough, thick stockings, socks to her knees over drill trousers and all under a great coat for the out of doors, her insides were laced over in memory loss. 

Aurelia was the raw forgotten part of her mother’s life. Her mother knew this and tried to rid herself of the unknown and unremembered by casting her daughter aside.

But Aurelia would rise again like the characters in Roman myths who once abandoned on hillsides as babies, refused to die. 

Let us hope Aurelia meets a similar fate. We cannot abandon her to words on the page, to the life of our imaginations, to the skin of words and of language. Aurelia is our memory of all that is forgotten. She needs us to hold her tight. 

You can say goodbye to your dignity here.

I long for this fracture to heal. I long to have my leg back again. Last night as I lay in bed and flexed my good leg up and down, I wondered that I could have ever taken my legs for granted before. How much I need them.

The house is a mess. The carpet needs vacuuming, the sink needs a wipe, the bench is cluttered with things that should long ago have been put away. I wish I were able to rise from this couch and like Mary Poppins snap my fingers and every out of order item would return to its rightful place in cupboards, behind doors, under benches and the room might shine again.

But I cannot. The best I can do at the moment is turn a blind eye. My children, my husband help as much as they are able. Mostly they are gracious in their helpfulness, but from time to time the strain tells on them, too. They get grumpy at all the extras they must do in order to keep this ship afloat.

It is a small thing in the scheme of things, a broken leg, and yet it has derailed my life. Then I am reminded of all those worse ailments and I want to scream for the banality of these thoughts.

My scalp itches for want of a wash. My hair feels drack, the curls on each side cling together and the back of my hair is flattened from lying too much on a pillow. Not that I spend my days in bed now. For the past two days I have taken up residence on the kitchen couch, the one that sits under the bay window and looks out into the garden. It is the place I moved to, almost by instinct, when I first came home and it is where I now choose to sit.

The red bricks in the garden are slick with rain. The pin oak is yet to come into bud. Last year the catkins were already dropping at this time but we have seen a better winter this year; a winter that can be called winter, cold, wet and rainy. A winter that takes away all the delights of summer and replaces them with the cruel necessities of life – the rain water to turn the drought around and relieve us – at least temporarily, of the fear that we here in Australia will eventually run out of water.

This morning I read an article in the New York Times – thank you, Mim – about delirium in the elderly, delirium induced through the experience, not simply of surgery with all its intrusiveness, but in some instances simply on the basis of the hospital experience itself.

My cup of tea this morning is a disappointment, not enough milk in it and I do not want to ask my husband for more. Not used to multi-tasking in the way my daughters are, he tackles one job at a time, and they pile up to the point where he feels persecuted and I become even more so. I become reluctant to ask for all the tiny things that make my incarceration on this couch less unpleasant.

It strikes me from the New York Times article that it is this, this restraint and constraint, the unfamiliarity, the sense of helplessness that must fuel dementia.

I fear I have become an old stick-in-the-mud preferring the quiet of home to the hurley burley of life outside. What it is to be trapped inside a body that refuses to function as it once did?

Apart from the occasional purple iris that stands tall above the otherwise bare shrubs there is not much colour outside. The white arum lilies have popped up in abundance along with a few white magnolias. Arum lilies are funeral flowers. The whiteness adds a touch of austerity. My daughter has thrown out piles of withered flowers, which she took home a week ago from the formal. These are mostly in oranges and yellows, still colourful against the black soil, but they lie inert on the ground and reinforce the sense I have of winter time and of death and decay.

I tell myself every day that this time will pass. This enforced immobilisation and that I should make myself enjoy it. At least I can write. At least I have access to the Internet and to my blog and fellow bloggers. At least I am not alone. I have my family. But I hate the transformation I detect in my own usually confident and competent self. I hate the way I can no longer take charge of a situation and get things rolling. I resent the way I cannot tidy my own house, not that I do so much of that these days, but at least before I broke my leg, if the fancy caught me, I could in fact get up the momentum to wipe the benches and put away dishes and clothes.

My older sister visited yesterday and reminded me of what it was like when we were children. In those days she did all the housework, ostensibly because our mother worked away from home for money, but more so, I think now, because our mother did not like house work herself and her oldest daughter was driven to try to create some sort of order in an otherwise chaotic household.

So my older sister took it upon herself – or was she asked, or required – to do all the washing, the cooking and cleaning, a veritable Cinderella. She took on all my mother’s tasks including my mother’s relationship with my father, but that is another story and one to be glanced over, as it might offend.

I ask myself why it should offend. Why is it possible to write in a blog about all manner of disturbing events in life, and not feel the inhibition that I feel should I mention my older sister’s role in my family as my father’s wife?

It is a secret. Role reversals such as these are kept secret because they are outside of the natural order. My sister told me, as much as she did these things, she did them under duress.

One day my father was home sick in bed. He called for my older sister. He needed her help to get to the toilet.
‘Do not be frightened of my penis,’ he said to her. My sister did not want to look at his penis. She could scarcely bear to touch the body of this six foot three man who leaned on her heavily as she steered him to the toilet.

This memory came to her after I had asked her a series of questions about what it had been like for her when we were children.
‘All the times when our father walked around the house naked’. I remember this too, the sight of his aging, naked body.

Why is it that children find it hard to see their aging parents naked?

In the hospital, as the nurses wheeled Elsie back to bed after a shower on the shower chair, her nightgown hung loosely down across her knees but bunched up around her waist at the back. I watched her stout and naked torso glide past me, stuck like a pink pudding on the base of the wheelchair, mottled with cellulite.

Why should it disturb me so much? Is it because we hide our bodies from one another as we age, such that the sight of the creased and wrinkly skin is reduced to the face, the wrists, the ankles only? When we see the full figure of aged nakedness, is it a reminder of the garden in winter, the bare trees, the sense of death on the horizon.

I do not know. I only know that the sight of Elsie, part naked in her wheel chair, caused me to want to cast my eyes away, just as I wanted to look away as she vomited into the green kidney dish hour after hour. A line of black stuff belched from her mouth and I thought of a film I had seen as a young woman, a film by Federico Fellini, The Satyricon. To me this film is all these human indignities.

‘You can say goodbye to your dignity here,’ Lois said to me when I protested at the possibility of having a young male nurse help me with my shower. No, I was not yet ready for that. As it was, I needed help only to drag the green plastic rubbish bag up the length of my leg and seal it with tape to keep out the water. Once ensconced on the shower chair I could manage the rest by myself. I did not need this bright young man to see me naked, to wash me down, to cause me to feel like an object under his averted gaze.

It is the objectification of one’s self and one’s body that disturbs me. The dehumanisation in medical treatment, as in childhood sexual abuse. The one is designed to help, however much it might fail, the other to exploit.